The Daily Novel

The county court in Walsall, where my great-grandfather lived in the middle of the nineteenth century, must have been full of suppressed giggles yesterday. Before my learned friends was a family from Sandwell, in the heart of the Black Country, a few miles from Wolverhampton. Allegedly they transformed two adjoining council houses into a nightclub.

They installed a gym, sauna, glitter ball and disco lights. According to the prosecution evidence, 400 people visited within a 36-hour period, paying £2.50 for entrance and £2.50 for a glass of beer. The family are also accused of drug dealing, rent arrears, and of growing cannabis in a bedroom. But according to the family the smell emanated not from the weed but from the feet of the teenage son.

The family deny all the allegations and the case continues. You can read the full story in The Guardian.

In my years in the Black Country, of course, nothing ever happened like this. The workers were far too tired after their day at the blast furnace to trip the light fantastic. And if they wanted any more beer, on top of the two pints supplied free at the workplace, they could buy it at tuppence a pint in one the numerous pubs in the High Street.

City University has just appointed what I believe to be the first openly gay vice chancellor of any British university, Malcolm Gillies.  I was immensely pleased that my own university had done such a thing. But you would not know this if you had not read my blog earlier today. Because the mainstream media has not reported the news.

Why?

Because someone at City University cut it out of the press release.

What my full-time colleagues at City University received was an annoucement that their new vice chancellor was looking forward to coming here in August 2007, and that his partner, David… would be joining him.

This was too much for some minion at City University, who cut it out of the press relaase. Despite the fact, that the full Council of City University had appointed a gay Vice Chancellor, not because he was gay, but because they thought he was the best man (or woman) to run this rather small university, which has done some rather interesting things that Oxbridge has failed to do. Like for instance start a half-way decent Journalism department.

In between resolving a conflict between my dearly beloved grandchildren, Joe and Dulcie, who were interupting my work by attempting to scratch each other’s eyes out, I have been trying to check out this story. Which I have done to the best of my ability as a trained journalist.
It is not as easy as you imagine. Google does not help. But in the telephone calls I have made to people who would know about such things, they have agreed with me. There is no existing university boss who has declared himself as gay.

So I am posting.

But if I have got it wrong. I will correct. Immediately.

I must pass on this gem from Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger’s report on what the world’s greastest good are saying at the Davos summit.

A blogging entrepreneur drew a useful distinction between old mainstream media (MSM) which had attention deficit disorder and the best bloggers, who were obsessive compulsive. Newspapers started out on stories or campaigns and then got bored. Bloggers never got bored of their own subjects.

I plead guilty to being ‘obsessive compulsive’ but don’t agree that it is a disorder. It actually helped my career in the old media. (admittedly wrorking for what Harry Evans used to call the ‘unpopulars’). My obsession with crooked businessmen and the lack of women in top positions in business and media, for instance, got me many good stories.

And, come to think of it, I made my first attack on the attention deficiit tendency of new media, when I spoke in the school debate in 1951 about television. I cannot remember the motion that I spoke to. But it was something sober and moderate like:

This house believes that television will rot the minds of the nation’s children.

I wrote this while my grandson little Joe was watching Ceebeebies. So I hope what I said in 1951 was not one hundred per cent right.

But old journalism and new journalism need obsessive compulsives who will keep at stories like the falling wall which killed a Camden child, until the Council is caused to change its ways. That means keeping on the story for many months while the various inquiries take place.

The debate in Davos should not be about new media versus old.

It should be about what we can do in both new and old media to get more good journalism.

Today’s Camden New Journal splashes on the death of two-year old Saurav Ghai in last Thursday’’s high winds. They report that

Detectives have discussed whether unprecedented manslaghter charges should be brought against Camden Council….

Part of this wall, as readers who read my blog last week will know, had been renewed three years ago after a similar storm three years ago. The section that fell down was adajacent to the renewed part, which was clearly visible from the brick colour when I went round with my camera as soon as I heard about the tragedy. (I hope to post a picture here later if I can sort my technology out).

The Ham & High also covers the story on Page Four. They quote a local bricklayer as saying:

It did not look secure at all for a boundary wall. For a structure that height it should have been nine inches thick not four and a half and it should have been interlocked.

Neither newspaper has yet this week’s story on their web site. So you may well be reading it here first.

As you should, because it might well have been my grand daughter, Dulcie, who walked by the same walk less than an hour before.

It still makes a difference being gay in Britain, 2007. You are in no danger of the police carting you off to Reading Gaol but the emotions that did for Oscar Wilde are still a part of the British psyche today. So once the tabloids get the story (which may not be for a long time because coverage of higher education is not one of their news priorities) you will be known as the gay Vice Chancellor. The tabloids won’t be writing about your Fourth Dimension thinking, that takes more and bigger words than the tabloids like to print.

As you will have read in the press there is quite a battle going on over the gay adoption bill currently before Parliament. The Roman Catholic Church is lobbying vigorously for an exemption to the new law which would require adoption agencies to consider gay couples. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York have come out and declared themselves firmly behind Rome on this issue. The British cabinet is split, with Communities minister Ruth Kelly, who is a Roman Catholic, on their side. She is allegedly supported by the Prime Minister, who is a closet Roman Catholic. (The rumour is that once Tony Blair leaves office and starts writing his memoirs he is going to declare his allegiance to Rome.) . Today’s Guardian, relying on un-named Cabinet sources, asserts that the Prime Minister has now decided to go with the cabinet majority opinion.

So your appointment will greeted with mixed feelings by the faculty of City university, which despite the fact that we have masses of foreign students, is still dominantly British. And we probably have a few Catholics.

You can, however, rely on the support of the journalism department, which is an enthusiastic fighter against discrimination against all minorities. And I can tell you a story which may warm your heart.

Back in 1981, at the end of a long day of interviewing, a young Australian called Martin Portus, walked in to my office. We did our usual thing of making him feel comfortable and getting him to tell us all about himself and why he wanted to become a journalist. Martin told us that he was gay and how important it was for gays to declare themselves and work to reduce the discrimination against gays.

My co-interviewer, Eric Stadlen, could not contain himself. He stopped him in his tracks. And told him that if he had been before a BBC panel he would already have ruled himself out, although he would never be told the real reason. If he wanted to get into journalism he must realise that you should keep such things to yourself.

After Martin left the room Eric and I had a little discussion about whether to take him. Eric, who had spent all his life in the BBC, which all readers of the British tabloids know is full of gays and Marxists, had worked with many gays.. But his own personal position was not too far away from that of the Archbishops. (The Daily Mail was his favourite newspaper.)

The professional question we had to answer was whether the candidate had what it takes to be a good journalist. In Eric’s terms, that meant that you had to be capable of removing yourself from the picture and reporting ‘objectively’ on events. Above all you must not fall in to the trap of voicing your own opinions and feelings.

On most of our interviewing criteria Martin was an above average candidate. So the decision was not that difficult. Most of our best candidates had very strong personal opinions and feelings of their own, which they wanted to voice. Like Martin, they would have to learn that most of their potential employers did not share their hatred of Margaret Thatcher. So we took him. And he did OK. I just looked him up on Google. After several years working for Australian ABC TV, he is now Director of Public Affairs at the National Museum of Australia and a board member of the Sydney Star Observer and Currency Press.

And obviously he did not get where he is today by following my avuncular advice not to tell everyone he was gay the moment he met them. On the contrary he seems to have established himself as a prominent member of down under’s gay community.

In doing my Google search I found a play review by Martin of Singing the Lonely Heart. His first sentence is:

Alana Valentine’s plays strive to deliver some social insight, often with a queer perspective, but also to transport us with something theatrical and magical.

I have not heard that word used in Britain since I was in the school playground.

Perhaps that is one more thing I should tell my new Vice Chancellor, Malcolm Gillies. Gay’s the word. It is only aged oiks from Wolverhampton like myself who still talk about queers.

After all, you could not have Queer Pride, could you?

(Guest blog by Anushka Asthana, education correspondent of The Observer.)

Three thousand young people, packed into an auditorium, jumped to their feet and started cheering and shrieking with joy. It was as if a rock star had stepped on stage.

In fact, this was Barack Obama, a rising star in the Democrat party who the Washington Post had sent me to interview. Next month, the senator from Illinois will take his first step towards becoming the first black president of the United States.
Interviewing Obama was just one highlight in three months packed with once-in-a-lifetime experiences when I was the Laurence Stern fellow, last summer.

Top editors at the Post gave me a huge amount of time and support, and trusted me to write a host of stories.

In the run up to the 2006 mid-terms I was sent to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to cover one of the most hotly contested races for the House of Representatives. I spent time with scores of locals discussing how the Iraq war and domestic issues such as health care and immigration were affecting their vote. When it came to the election it was one of the seats that the Republicans lost.

As well as being an amazing journalistic experience it was also great fun. I was taken on an airboat ride over the Everglades and managed to spend an afternoon in Miami.
UK and US politics are vastly different and spending time in Washington DC in an election year was a huge learning experience. I met senators and representatives, sat in on hearings over the Iraq war and worked alongside some of the country’s most renowned journalists.

I was able to write stories about the president, Congress and federal agencies and also given the freedom to work on issues close to my heart such as race and women in politics.

It was a different world of journalism than that back home and I had to adapt to it. I was amazed that political reporters there rarely even expressed their opinions in the newsrooms - people wrote news or comment, never both. Leonard Downie, the editor, has not voted since he took up post.

There was a different style of reporting, different style of writing and a different set of values - ones that I will let future fellows judge for themselves.

On a personal level, my time in the US also went some way to breaking down stereotypes I had heard about the country. I also met some of the warmest and most welcoming people I have ever come across and in the time that I was given to travel (I chose California) saw some of the most magnificent scenery.

But the thing that caused most excitement among my friends had to be the fact that I twice travelled on Air Force One to report on the president. I was standing close by when George Bush made a speech on the war on terror in Atlanta and watched as he shook the hands of soldiers about to travel to Iraq.

For me, it was just one of many remarkable experiences during my time as the Laurence Stern fellow.

Applications are invited for this year’s Laurence Stern Fellowship which sends a young British journalist to Washington for three months in the summer to work on the national desk of the Washington Post. Past winners include David Leigh, investigations supremo at The Guardian, James Naughtie, now at Radio Four’s Today programme, Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, Sarah Neville, also on The Financial Times, Glenda Cooper of the Daily Mail and last year’s winner, Anushka Asthana of The Observer.

There is a potted history of the Fellowship on another page of this site written in my old journalistic style. This blog attempts to convey the spirit of this unique award, which commemorates two extraordinary men.

One of them is unknown to the general public. He does not even get a mention in Wikipedia. The other, Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee became a legend in his own lifetime. He was immortalised by Jason Robards Junior, who played him in All the President’s Men, the 1986 film which tells the story of the Watergate investigative reporting. That film swelled the recruitment of American journalism schools, with hundreds of youths who wanted to emulate Bob Woodward, played by Robert Redford, and Carl Bernstein, played by Dustin Hoffman.

But Ben was already a legend when he stepped into my office at City University in 1980 to pick the first Stern fellow. He was then, and is now, at 85, a giant of a man with the most booming voice I have ever encountered. I can still remember his first very moving speech at the first Stern party, when he talked about Larry Stern, ‘Struck down in his prime. Stung by a goddam bee.’

Stern, who died in 1979, aged 50, had spent most of his working life at the Washington Post. He had a huge capacity for friendship as well as exceptional journalistic skills. Many British journalists, swanning in and out of Washington had reason to be grateful for his hospitality and guidance.

But the spirit of comradeship, which was honed amongst Bradlee’s team at the Washington Post during the Watergate years, and survives in friendships between the Stern fellows, is rooted in the harsh realities of doing decent journalism. In an age when the power of the presidency and the power of the leaders of major companies is enormous, even in democracies.

The film, good though it is, helps to foster the myth that it was investigative journalism that brought down Nixon. Not so. Ben Bradlee’s autobiography, (Simon & Shuster, 1995) tells it how it was.

The Washington Post got the essence of the story on 17 June 1972, that a burglary of the offices of the Democratic Party in the Watergate building was linked to senior Nixon aides in the White House (particularly ex-CIA man Howard Hunt who has just died, aged 88). But Nixon did not resign until over two years later in August 1974.

The Washington Post, thanks to some valued sources, including Deep Throat was out on its own initially. But on 27 October 1972 the guts of the Washington Post story was reported on the national television show of Walter Cronkite, whom Bradlee calls ‘the most trusted man in America’. Which, of course, all the newspapers reported. Despite that on 7 November Nixon won the Presidential election by one of the biggest margins in history. Presidential spin had triumphed over journalistic truth-telling. Bob Dole, the Republican Party chairman, described the ‘brazen’ attack’ by the Washington Post, as ‘the greatest scandal of the election campaign’. Bradlee was called ‘an old Kennedy coat-holder’ who allowed his newspaper to be used ‘as a political instrument of the McGovernite campaign.’ Bradlee, he said, travelled the country as a ’small-bore McGovern surrogate’.

The story got legs again when the wheels of American justice started to turn via Judge Siricia’s grand jury, which led to the conviction of senior aides in April 1973. Nixon, however, continued to deny his personal involvement. It took another arm of the American system, the Congressional committee led by Senator Ervin, to finally nail him.

Bradlee’s considered view is that Nixon might have survived these constitutional processes, had it not been for the fact that he had taped his own conversations: ‘Nixon – not the Post – got Nixon’. But it was the Post who forced the story on to the national agenda. And, as Bradlee re-iterates again and again, the journalists would have not been able to keep on the story had it not been for the full support of the proprietor, Katharine Graham.

To give you the flavour of those times, here’s how Bradlee starts his chapter on Watergate.

Some stories are hard to see, generally because the clues are hidden or disguised. By accident, or on purpose. Other stories hit you in the face. Like Watergate, for instance.

Five guys in business suits, speaking only Spanish, wearing dark glasses and surgical gloves, with crisp new hundred-dollar bills in their pockets, and carrying tear-gas fountain pens, flashlights, cameras and walkie talkies, just after midnight in the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

The best journalists in the world could be forgiven for not realising that this was the opening act of the scandalous political melodrama – unparalleled in American history – which would end up with the resignation of a disgraced President and the jailing of more than forty people, including the Attorney General of the United States, the White House chief of staff, the White House counsel, and the President’s chief domestic adviser.

Of course, it could never happen again, could it?

This Washington Post article today tells the story of Howard Hunt’s part in Watergate and his other exploits, including the Bay of Pigs attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro.

The idea of a woman and a black man fighting it out for the presidency, or at least for the Democratic nomination for President, seems irresistibly attractive. Sometimes, I find, the question who is more likely to win is asked here in Britain as if it were the surrogate for another: ‘Are Americans — white, male Americans! — more prejudiced against blacks or against women?.

There are in fact excellent reasons for having doubts about how good a president Hillary Clinton would make that have nothing to do with the fact that she is a woman. Something similar applies to the negritude of Senator Obama: the colour of his skin is only one interesting fact about him, and by no means the most interesting.

Indeed it can be seriously argued that he is not a black man in the full sense of what that means in American political terms. Barack Obama is the son of a white mother and an African father: he is not therefore an “African American” in the usual meaning of the words. Specifically, he does not emerge from a black political background, as other African American politicians did who were actual or potential presidential candidates: Martin Luther King,. Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.

The contest between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama is, however, intensely interesting and significant. For one, thing, their candidacies have such intense media appeal that they inevitably lessen interest in other Democratic candidates and possible candidates, and there are plenty of them, some with qualities that would attract a good deal of attention if the two glamorous novelties were not in the race: John Edwards, Al Gore, Bill Richardson (the governor of New Mexico with a Yankee father and a Mexican mother), Tom Vilsack (former governor of Iowa), John Kerry, Joe Biden of Delaware (chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee) and Chris Dodd of Connecticut, a solid mainstream Democrat with a record of legislative commonsense on good Democratic issues like health and jobs.

Still, as of a year before a presidential campaign would traditionally get going, Senator Clinton is way ahead in the polls (47 percent this morning) against 17 percent for Senator Obama, who is running second. Both seem clear of the field for the time being. It is reasonable to ask why.

Senator Clinton is ahead partly because of her name recognition, partly because of her shrewd political management of her own career, and in large measure because she has the combination of celebrity and glamour that impresses the “mentioners”, those politicians and political journalists who collectively decide who will be counted as potential candidates and who therefore will appear in then polls and attract journalistic interest and financial support. .

Everyone has heard of Hillary Clinton, both because of who she is married to, and also because — as First Lady — she not only managed her image with both courage and skill in the most difficult of circumstances, and also because, more than any other President’s wife in history, she made a political contribution of her own. It has to be said that that contribution, her management of the Clinton administration’s health care programme was little short of disastrous. But since she left the White House, she has hardly put a foot wrong, except in one respect, one where she was in good or at least respectable company.

She was easily elected to the Senate from New York, which is still, with the possible exception of California, the best placed home state for a presidential hopeful because the concentration of media and other opinion formers there. She was careful not to seem to be using the Senate as merely as stepping stone to a presidential run. She succeeded — better than many who knew her anticipated — in making few enemies.

She made only one mistake, one that most of her colleagues made with her, and it may yet destroy her hopes of the White House. She voted for the Iraq war. She made the calculation, made also not only by all but a maverick handful of Democrats, but also by the best pressed minds in the punditocracy, of assuming that the national reaction to 9/11 made George Bush’s war politically unassailable. The mid-term elections of 2006 proved that, whatever may have been true in 2004 or 2005, is not true now.

The case of Senator Obama is different. In 1968, when I was travelling with Senator Robert Kennedy in California, I wrote a piece about the pyramids of voters, hanging on his words as he spoke from a flatbed truck, reaching up to him, clutching at his clothing, their faces expressing adoration and trust. If only, I wrote, one could understand what those voters wanted, and why they saw Robert Kennedy as a Messiah, much about America would become clear.

Barack Obama has the Kennedy touch. There is an emotional fervour, a flavour of the Great Awakenings and nineteenth century evangelism, of Moody and Sankey and the Chatauqua tent, about his appearances. His books sell almost as well as the novels of the reverend Tim La Haye about the wrath to come, and they are much better books. He is a serious, a committed, a highly educated man, who worked as an activist with the poor in Chicago, then resisted the golden temptations that lie in the path of a black man who has been the editor of the Harvard Law Review, to commit himself to law teaching and politics.

None of that means, however, that he has the special combination of personal characteristics and political skills that not only took a Lyndon Johnson, say, or a Ronald Reagan to the Oval office and then enabled them to use the power of the office. Obama has everything going for him, including, perhaps for the first time in this generation, the fact that he is of mixed race. For the fact is that, though racial inequality has by no means disappeared in American life, most Americans now are actually pleased to see a Condoleezza Rice, a Tiger Woods, a Colin Powell or an Oprah Winfrey “making it”.

Subtly, it flatters white Americans by feeding an “Americn exceptionalism” of the Left: “Look”, it says, “in this great country of ours there are no barriers blocking the path of an African American!” Ask a Condi Rice or a Colin Powell, deep in private conversation — not that I have ever had the chance to do so — whether they met any barriers, and I will warrant that they will tell you, yes, there were barriers, but we overcame them, and we were allowed to do so.

Which brings me back, by a circuitous but I think necessary route, to the question with which I started. Are Americans more uncomfortable with the idea of a black president, or a female president?

The answer, I believe, is that while the opinions and attitudes of the American people are, as the sands of the sea, innumerable and unknowable, one truth is probably to be relied on. Americans prefer public and political figures who do not appear to be stereotypes or epitomes of a group. They feel more comfortable, to take a perhaps offensive example, with a Jew who is, like Senator Goldwater, an Episcopalian. They prefer an African American, like Colin Powell, who is a Republican. And the first woman president, it has often been said, would have to be someone who does not come on as a feminist.

Now Hillary Clinton would be annoyed to be told that she is not a feminist. Like highly educated women of her generation (and she did almost as well at the Yale law school as senator Obama did at Harvard) she believes that all opportunities ought to be open to women, and the presidency ought to be an equal opportunity employment. She certainly feels, too, that it is time that a woman should prove that by winning.

It is my personal hunch, however, that Hillary Clinton’s success or failure will depend on how she handles a very delicate task of political persuasion. How — to put it crudely — does she persuade women voters that she is a feminist at heart, while at the same time persuading male voters that she isn’t?

Oddly, her task may be trickier than Senator Obama’s. For he is already in a position to have the best of all political worlds. It is plain enough that he is not an ordinary African American. His father was a diplomat, his mother white, from Kansas. He grew up in mult-racial Hawaii and in Indonesia, where his mother moved after marrying an Indonesian. He went to Catholic and also to Muslim schools.

If, as I suspect, Obama is acceptable to mainstream American voters, as an American, not an African American, it may be evidence — not, as American exceptionalists and flag-wavers would have you believe — that racial prejudice is dead. It may be that today, in America, as has long been the case elsewhere, class ultimately trumps race.

If you went to Harvard, that is, are you less black? Ah, but in that case, if you went to the Yale law school, are you less a woman? Does class trump gender?

Godfrey Hodgson is journalist and author mainly on American politics. He helped set up the Laurence Stern Fellowship which sends a young British journalist to Washington to work for three months on the Washington Post. Last year’s winner met Barack Obama when she was there. Anushka Asthana of The Observer is writing about her experience for The Daily Novel. Coming soon.

This blog introduces a series of ten ‘lectures’ to my new boss, an Australian called Malcolm Gillies, who has just been appointed Vice-Chancellor of City University, London. But before I start them I need to explain that I am not going to be telling him things he already knows from his reading and from his meetings with the City top brass during the procedures by which he was appointed. And I need to tell readers of this blog, many of whom may not care a damn about City University, that although I will be writing about a specific case, the isses affect all British universities. And they affect all universities, in that they deal with conflicting demands from, in the current jargon, the stakeholders. Which means the students, the parents who send and quite often support the students, the big companies who employ the students, and the governmenta and communtities which are affected by them.

So although these blogs will be about one of the smallest universities in Britain, situated on one of the least attractive campuses, over-shadowed by lofty council blocks, and with pubs peopled by people who knew the Adams gang who used to terrorise the neighbourhood, what City faces is what most universities face.
But in this introduction I have to let everyone know where I am coming from. These blogs intentionally reveal many of the things I did not write about as a journalist, or as a full-time member of City University’s staff. And, I do have some feelings about Australians.

First impressions have a long life.

My first impressions of Australians, long before I had any close Australian friends, date back to the 1950s. In those days, when you were thrown out of the pub at 11 pm and were still thirsty, the party went on in the house of someone who lived nearby. Some of those parties got out of hand. And I remember one vividly in a not very big house in a not very big bedsit. It suddenly exploded into a punch-up between the Australians and the Irish. A punch-up with weapons. I cannot remember whether it was an Australian or an Irishman who first broke the neck of the bottle and smashed it in an opponent’s face. As soon as the blood began to flow I fled to my own bedsit.

It is entirely possible that many of the Australians and the Irish who needed a drink after closing time, were somewhat oafish. But over the years I did meet other Australians (and also read Patrick White) who changed my first impressions. In the world of journalism I was impressed with both Philip Knightley and Bruce Page, part of the old Sunday Times team in Harry Evans’ day. They were the first two individuals that made me realise that Australians were not all hung up on the open air life and getting to the beach. They had extremely active minds. And not only that they had insights into the way us Brits behaved that we missed.

(Gillies be warned. Once here, they stayed for life. Although Knightley does manage to organise his work life so that he works in Australia for several months of the year.)

My vice-chancellor may be more interested in the Australian academics I have met who are a part of my prejudices about the Aussies. Two pop up in my mind immediately, both of whom I met in my time at the London Business School in the late 1970s.

John Hunt, who came in towards the end of my time there, was not my friend. Not because of his personal qualities, but because of the circumstances of his arrival. That story is one of the many untold scandals of academia, which journalists do not make a priority when deciding what to write about.

My boss at LBS was Innis Macbeath, a former Labour correspondent of The Times, who had been appointed to the new Plowden Chair of Industrial Relations. Macbeath came from a privedged background. His dad was a distinguished Scottish professor of philosophy. But Innis, who was blunt spoken and thickset in build (He looked like a trade union leader) got on better with the trade union leaders of his day, than most of his competitors in Fleet Street. At The Times in the early 1970’s he was an irritation to the management, because the powerful printing unions had elected him Imperial Father of the Federated Chapels. (In plain language the means he was the boss shop steward, a post hithetoo held by one of the printers). In the privacy of Printing House Square he argued their case. In his public writings he put forward the rational case for sorting out the problems of Fleet Street industrial relations by dialogue between the two opposing factions.

For the London Business School, right-wing and close to the big companies of the time, but also founded with several millions of public funds, he was a wonderful catch. The respectable face of the opposition and someone whose views were admired by the Plowden family which funded the chair.

As the 1970s went on, and the country moved rightwards, and the London Business School led the charge towards monetarism, Macbeath was more and more at odds with his bosses. His contract was not renewd and John Hunt was imported to fill the chair. It did not matter that he knew nothing about industrial relations. His specialism, organisational behaviour, could be presented as including industrial relations (it also includes philosophy, economics, psychology and sociology!). The name of the chair was changed retrospectively to the Plowden Chair of Organisational Behaviour, as you will see if you click on this link, because John Hunt is still associated with LBS as an emeritus professor.

The other Australian who sticks out in my mind is Denis Pym, because we shared similar views about the issues in organisations most people were avoiding. I have long since lost touch with him and have no idea where he is now. But if you click on this link you can get hold a book he wrote with colleagues in 1993, called The Theory and Philosophy of Organisations. It deals with understanding how the assumptions which scientists bring to their subject of investigation guide and influence what we do. Clearly it is the Denis Pym I knew. And the subject is even more relevant now than it was then.

I am not suggesting you read the books Macbeath wrote, which are dated. But click on this link. You will learn something about Amazon. You will find that after offering you Cloth Caps and After (1974), which was all based on Macbeath’s dealings with the workers’ leaders like Jack Jones, Arthur Scargill and Hugh Scanlon, Amazon recommends for like minded readers two books about cleaning cloths!

My debt to Innis arises from our personal friendship. He was one of those people who made me realise that my unusual mind (sometimes regarded as mad) had some positive qualities. Innis had an even more unusual mind. He was one of the estimated 1 per cent of human beings who have eidetic memory. If you follow the link to the Wikipedia entry, you will see that some people think eidetic memory is a myth.

I know they are wrong. Innis was an honest man, as well as a professional journalist, and I had no reason to disbelieve him when he told me that he remembered conversations because he saw them written on something like a television screen inside his head. He could remember conversations verbatim years afterwards. Which is one reason those trade union leaders were so enthralled. They had never met anyone like him before.

I had. One journalist whom I interviewed with jointly. He never took a note. He did not need to. Because he remembered all the quotes he needed.

This article has moved somewhat from the beginning. But I can easily connect backwards to my vice-chancellor, because Wikipedia alleges that his beloved Mozart may have had eidetic memory.

So my message is that human beings vary on all sorts of parameters. And they are all important. So, while we Brits have got over the notion that Australia is peopled by the convicts we sent there, and the current population is infected with their DNA, we do think the Aussies are a bit different.

But, because we are British, we never reveal such feelings.

BBC’s Radio Four programme, All in the Mind, raised a really important issue just now. How are the 70 per cent (yes, it is 70 per cent) of mental health patients who smoke going to cope from next July when all mental health units will have to ban smoking. The programme was disappointing. Because it strived for balance, and representing several points of view. But what was needed was a full-half-hour answering a different question.

Why is it that 70 per cent of mental health patients smoke? Why is it that a majority of those who work in mental health wards are against banning patients from smoking and using their valuable time helping them to give up?

The answer is that smoking helps them to deal with their mental health problems. There are several research studies which have shown this. I have read two or three myself in relation to depression. But it is no good me quoting from them because in the current climate, almost no-one wants to know that smoking does have some beneficial effects. And journalists, instead of fighting the corner of this new oppressed minority which is being created, turn away and write about something which is more in tune with the current fashions.

And I can tell you, from my own personal experence, that if the smoking ban had been in force when I was in the Royal Free two years ago, my stay would have cost the national health service (which means you, readers, the taxpayers) at least another full month’s full board and treatment.

I know this because I know the effect on my mental health, of those periods in which I have given up. I also know what happens when I have to go for long periods without cigarettes, on plane journeys, train journeys, etc.

All in the Mind, gave space to a new organisation which is helping mental health patients to give up. What they should be doing is helping them to find ways of carrying on smoking. Smoking is not a symtom of their mental illness. It is a powerful drug, which like the pills which are thrust down their throats, has a chemical effect, which helps them to deal with the minds they were born with.

Of course, cancer may catch up with them one day. But meanwhile they can get by, even work productively, by the drug of their choice.

When people try and convince them that their own choices are ‘wrong’, implicitly ‘mad’, it does not help.

In conclusion, I write this in the awareness that the majority of the readers of my blog may be people who have never smoked. To them I will say that what the research shows is that there is a clear difference between social smokers and those smokers who are addicts. That is why Britain, following America and Australia, has been able to move in the space of a mere fifty years from a society in which almost all men smoked to a society in which most middle class white men mostly do not smoke. Because the social smokers can give up with no more difficulty than abandoning any other ingrained habity The addict smoker, by contrast, faces the same trauma as the heroin addict and the alcholic.

How to dent the conventional wisdom of the times, is not easy, but I have found the url for this film, which I have not seen. But let me quote one sentence of the publicity.

The result is a film that is neither pro- nor anti-tobacco, giving a clear view of spin-happy American society with a wink and a laugh.

Our current smoking policy in Britain and Australia is dictated by the lead given by the Americans. America has been moving resolutely for some years now against smoking, despite the fact that American companies still make a lot of the cigarettes (and in my view the best ones). Marxists and anyone left of centre please note. American politics is not dictated by big business. There are other imperatives. The desire to do good. The Puritanical streak. The spirit which led America to seek to impose abolition of booze, although that also involved a policy hated by the big and powerful companies making their profits from it.

The smoking debate is not only about the civil liberties of the few remaining smokers. It overlaps with the mental health issues. Is our current favoured pill treatment satisfactory, when it is clearly not ‘curing’ mental health patients? Should we not listen to what they have to say? They cost us a lot of money. And current policies are not helping to integrate them into society.