The Daily Novel

I shipped my oar and watched. Mesmerised as the long narrow boat glided by. Four men in a boat not three. Not larking about but working hard, each pulling strongly on his oar.  Four individuals focused on a common aim, moving together in perfect harmony.  A thing of beauty. That is John Keats but I am in Shakespeare country, on the river at Stratford in front of the Memorial Theatre just after lunch on Sunday afternoon, in a rather ugly hired rowing boat, trying not very successfully to get two oars moving together so that I can move in a straight line, albeit backwards. But I don’t have to do anything. I have reached my destination. It is Sunday afternoon and I have driven 105 miles in search of a spot of tranquility. I did not know where I was going when I got up this morning. A short enough journey so that I could get there and back easily in the day. And therefore probably north or west because south or east means driving through half of London. Away from the crowds. Somewhere I could be alone with nature. The Chiltern hills beckoned but I also wanted some water at my destination. I thought maybe I would seek a quiet spot on the banks of the Cherwell but I could not think of one. So I settled for Stratford, guided by memories of tranquility from my boyhood when I used to cycle there from Wolverhampton. After all it is still April so the town should not be too busy.An hour or so ago I thought I had fouled up. The last few miles into Stratford took an age. Everyone seemed to be going to Stratford. The sixth car park had a few spaces and I managed to reverse into one on the sixth level without pranging the car. At ground level we joined with the other day trippers walking down to the river. The Americans were there in force. We bumped into one family eager to be friendly with the natives. So their red-headed daughter, Molly, sang me her favourite song, which turned out to be ‘The bells of St Clemens’.It turned out that today was on Open Day for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre with a series of events in which the actors were doing versions of street theatre in several places around town. We headed for the theatre restaurant overlooking the river. It was closed but we were told that we could still go there and have the café menu. We found one table free and I ordered fish and chips.As we waited I began to enjoy myself. I could see a succession of people tramping across the old bridge, but they were too far away for me to hear the tramp of their feet. Right across from me someone was feeding the swans, which as in my memory, seem to be the biggest and most imposing swans in the world. Then along came the waitress; very sorry, we have run out of food. So we traipsed back to the town, found a pub, and I ordered something called Posh Bacon and Eggs, which turned out to be very good with thick rashers of best bacon.Over lunch I got as far as Page Three of The Observer which is devoted to a book to be published in June by Andrew Keen, a Brit who now lives in California. It is called The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting our Economy. According to The Observer it

Accuses bloggers and other evangelists for the web of destroying culture, ruining livelihoods and threatening to make consumers of new media regress into ‘digital narcissism’.

Keen says that by 2010 there will be 500 million blogs

So dizzyingly infinite that they undermine our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary.

The Keen thesis, apparently, is that knowledge of history is being smothered by an avalanche of blogs from self-obsessed teenagers. He attacks MySpace, the popular social networking site, now owned by Rupert Murdoch.

People of like minds congregate to confirm what they want. MySpace is not a community we should be proud of.

Maybe. But Keen cannot have it both ways. The teenagers on MySpace are talking about themselves, but they are talking to each other and listening to each other. To highlight the case of Kevin Whitrick, the Shropshire man who hanged himself in front of his webcam, as if it indicates a trend is misleading. The majority of content is nothing like this.Keen is on stronger ground when he attacks the way corporate interests are taking over the web. The internet entrepreneurs, of whom apparently Keen is one, devise sites which encourage user content, and their success creates an enormous potential market for the individual teenage blogger. But the reality is that only a minute portion of this vast readership reads most individual offering.Guardian/Observer, as we now know from the new ABC figures is reaching 13 million readers on Web 2.0. That fact surely gives the lie to any notion that the web is dominated by amateurs and that readers have lost their ability to distinguish between amateurs and the informed and professional views of most of the journalists producing this copy. It is perfectly true, as Keen asserts, that in Wikipedia you find a longer entry for Pamela Anderson than Emmeline Pankhurst. But this is nothing to do with the absence of editors at Wikipedia. You only have to look at British newspapers, where editors rule supreme, and where you find much more about Kate Moss and Kate Middleton. They frequently push Tony Blair and Gordon Brown off the front pages.Jeff Jarvis, the New York media academic who moonlights as a blogger and Guardian columnist, gets nearer to the truth about Web 2.0.

Keen sees the means of flattening culture. I see the means of people speaking.

Jarvis thinks that Keen is ‘militantly snobbish’. I agree and I am sure that Shakespeare, were he still around, would have had something pertinent to say about this issue. After lunch we tried to get into an event in a large marquee by the side of the river, where actors were using Shakespearean language to comment on issues of the day. We could not get in because it was full with a queue waiting for the next performance.So we went instead into the next tent, where there was a demonstration of props, including one that captivated all the boys. It was a guillotine with an appropriately bloodstained bucket beneath. The boy lay down, with his head in the hole, and on the count of five by the operator the blade was released with a convincing thud.I could have used this incident to rant on about how modern yoof was obsessed with blood and violence. I could have ranted on about the Shakespearean mugs and tea towells selling in the shops, as evidence of the debasement of the popular culture. But that would have meant ignoring the fact that people were also buying compact texts to read and low-priced volumes of the complete works. Today’s yoof has not entirely given up on reading books, despite the seductive qualities of television and the web. But my own belief is that if Will Shakespeare were alive today he would still be writing plays, but, as well, he would be moonlighting as a blogger.

This week’s Guardian Technology has several letters provoked by Duncan Campbell’s exposure of the flaws in Operation Ore, the massive police operation mounted as a result of the list of several thousand British users of a porno web site passed on by the Americans. The letters, like the comments posted on the blog I wrote about the Campbell article, are either strongly for or strongly against.

The first letter is strongly against.

As a family who have suffered horribly over the lies spun to the public, we are grateful to you for printing more of the truth (Operation Ore flawed by fraud, April 19). We have lost our home (but before we did, we had people throwing eggs at the house and spray painting “paedo” on it; when I complained to the police I was told “not our problem - that’s what you get for being a kiddy fiddler”); our jobs (it is not suitable for a teacher to be living with a man who possibly could have paid to view indecent images); and our savings.

Social Services tried to take our child and forcibly put him up for adoption (they failed) and almost all our friends and much of our family have disowned us. In our case, we proved fraud, but that did not stop the CPS from pursuing the case. Even if you could prove you had never heard of Landslide, that did not stop the local paper reporting about a “disgusting pervert” in the neighbourhood. So thank you.
[name and address withheld]

The second letter puts the opposite point of view.

Let’s get some perspective on what we’re dealing with here, a rising and extremely pernicious crime against children. If the police contact people whose credit card details appeared on Landslide’s list, then let them prove these details were stolen if that is indeed the case. Such “inconvenience” is worth it to clamp down on this horrific crime.
[name and address withheld]

(The same letter appeared in the printed Guardian under the name off Dr Melissa Dearey, lecturer in Criminology, University of Hull, who presumably has made a serious study of the issue.)

All of the comments on my blog were anonymous, which makes it difficult to assess their credibility. (Including the one which accused me of being a member of the Duncan Campbell admiration society). But the first letter quoted in the Guardian contains so much detail that it almost certain to be authentic. And it made be glad that I wrote the blog. It is a travesty of justice when innocent people are hounded in this way, and it is difficult to know just how many such cases there have been, because the victims do not want more publicity, they want to be able to get on with their lives the best they can. Even though they have lost their jobs and in the case of the first writer nearly lost their child.

Dearey’s letter puts the stress on the need prevent the rise in this very nasty crime (and presumably she has the figures to show that it is rising). But whatever the numbers, I share her wish that everything be done to clamp down on this crime. Even if only a few children are violated that is too many. But not at the cost of ruining the lives of innocent adults, which she dismisses as ‘inconvenience’. She does not realise that the damage is done before innocent people can prove their innocence. And in this case many of the people targeted had had their credit card details stolen.

Quite often in these cases the police and sections of the popular press combine to stir up the fears and prejudices of the public. The stereotyping itself is enough to do the damage. And even newspapers like The Guardian only occasionally take up the cudgels on behalf the adults who suffer. Nobody likes to seen as being soft on potential child abusers. And most people don’t want to read about child abuse at the breakfast table.

So all credit to Duncan Campbell for doing this investigative work and to The Guardian for printing it.

His article also highlighted the rise in credit card fraud. I can add a postscript to this courtesy of the Ham and High, which yesterday reported that my nearest petrol station, the BP garage on Haverstock Hill, has become a target for credit card thieves. One reader had £1,700 lifted from his bank account after a visit there. Next time I go, I shall pay cash. But it could happen anywhere. So here is a timely reminder for anyone who banks online. Remember to check your account every day in case your savings are being plundered by the ungodly.

Oven three hundred ex-students of City University’s Department of Journalism now work for the BBC. Although many of them don’t know it, they all have a debt to three BBC veterans, who in their retirement years gave unstintingly of their time for not very much money in the 1980s when the teaching of broadcast journalism was being established on a very limited budget. The first was the late Eric Stadlen, who brought his vast radio journalism experience to the course; Eric was the first producer of the World at One and with William Hardcastle as the main presenter, made it the hallmark of serious political journalism in the middle of the day. Before it started many BBC nobs had said you would only get housewives listening at that time and they would not be interested in politics. Hardcastle and Stadlen proved them wrong and the programme still rates highly under their successors.

The third ex-BBC man was John Dekker who had similar high quality experience in BBC television journalism and ran the first City courses in television journalism.

The second was in some ways the most crucial. He was Arthur Westwood, who I have just learnt died in February. Arthur was a technician and you cannot teach broadcast journalism unless you have the right equipment, and someone to maintain it and teach the students how to use it. Arthur did all those things well but he was also willing to use his skills to do anything that needed doing, liking putting up some shelves in my office. I remember him fondly.

John Dekker writes a more comprehensive appreciation below.

Arthur Westwood was everyone’s idea of a technician, a man of few words who quietly exuded an air of confidence in his ability to fix everything – or nearly everything – for the Broadcast Journalism course at City University, where I first encountered him. A wartime sailor – radar mechanic – who probably kept the Fleet together with the same detached efficiency, Arthur had brought his skills and his dry humour to the BBC, where his capacity for understatement and his genuine modesty undoubtedly deserved greater pecuniary rewards, until his retirement, when he entered a different world and a new challenge..

Like all technicians, Arthur preferred always to determine his own priorities for maintenance of the ageing equipment which he took delight in continually dissecting and reassembling. Soon after my arrival as a Visiting Lecturer Arthur introduced me to a part of the BBC I had never set eyes on, a sort of electronic graveyard in a West London back street some sick humorist had name Power Road. The place resembled the set for Steptoe and Son and the custodian greeted Arthur as a fellow beachcomber might, for he was clearly one of their oldest and most valued customers, but Arthur possessed a discriminating eye for a bargain. Poking about in an untidy pile of junk, he would drag out not one, but a dozen battered old tape recorders of a type known as the ‘Midget’, designed in the Middle Ages by BBC technicians (like Arthur) and described as ‘portable’ in the sense that they were very heavy, but reporters (like me) had grown to love them (and grown long arms).

I can’t remember if in our scavenging we were paid to take away all this rubbish, but Arthur showed every sign of satisfaction, like a dog with a large bone, so we lugged it all back to St John Street, where it was carefully deposited in a small cupboard that some wag had designated as his workshop. Arthur would immure himself therein for several days like some anchorite, emerging at last with quiet satisfaction, bearing the one machine he had cannibalised out of twelve wrecks. An impoverished Third World country would have cherished such skill quite as much as did his penny-pinching employers whose often ill-informed complaints he bore with dignity .

With much ingenuity, patience and self control, he managed to hold the fabric together for successive ‘generations’ of postgraduate broadcast students who have good cause to remember him with affection him even if sometimes their plaintive cry ‘where’s Arthur?’ could be heard almost all the way to the Red Lion, where he liked to show his congenial side. In his private life he experienced tragedy, enduring misfortune with courage, and it is characteristic of him that after his many years of service to broadcast journalism, he devoted himself to charitable activities in his neighbourhood. Arthur died in February, aged eighty-one, after a long illness. We salute him.

Next week’s Radio Times is a disgrace to magazine journalism. The cover story trails the Friday drama on the last years of Robert Maxwell, in which the disgraced tycoon is played by David Suchet and Maxwell’s wife Betty by Patricia Hodge. Meanwhile the Radio Times gives us four pages of the ‘truth’ about Robert Maxwell by ‘the people who knew him’.

The Radio Times chose five people ‘to unravel the mystery the publishing giant’. The only insightful contribution is by Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, who says frankly in his opening paragraph, that he never met Robert Maxwell in person. But he had to face him in court thanks to the previous attacks on him by the former editor, Richard Ingrams.

There are four contributions by former Maxwell underlings, his personal photographer, Mike Moloney, his personal chef, Martin Cheeseman, and one of the last of Maxwell’s many secretaries, Charlotte Thornton. She worked for him for two and a half years. She was aged 19 and it was her first job and she tells us, ‘There is definitely something about Mr Maxwell that you couldn’t help but like.’

The longest contribution is by Peter Jay who quite rightly says that ‘the Mirror offices were like the court of some medieval king’. Jay should know because he was in that time the most highly paid courtier. He was called chief of staff, but to Jay’s former journalistic friends, he was the public relations man whom Maxwell had hired in his bid to rebuild his reputation after his business reputation as a publisher had been so thoroughly exposed by a small number of investigative journalists, of which I was one, and a long and thorough Board of Trade inquiry.

Jay first fell a victim to Maxwell’s flattery in 1967. Maxwell was then an up and coming Labour MP and Jay was being billed by Time Magazine as a future prime minister. He was actually the Economics Editor of The Times with a Sunday job doing the thinking person’s weighty television political programme under his friend John Birt, then a rising young turk at London Weekend Television.

Jay’s career took an odd upward trajectory in 1976 when his father-in-law, James Callaghan became Prime Minister and Jay was appointed Ambassador to the United States. He was not a success in the job and when he returned to London his career was in ruins, not least because he had himself got more column inches in the US press. Not about his ambassdorial advocacy off British foreign policy but because of all the bed hopping that was taking place. While Peter was bestowing his testerone on the nanny his wife fell into the arms of the leading investigative reporter of the Washington Post. Carl Bernstein’s wife, Nora Ephron, wrote a tell-it-all book which Washington found less boring than British foreign policy.

Maxwell’s flattery helped to heal Jay’s bruised ego and his money helped to pay off his debts. But the cost was born by the pensioners of the Daily Mirror whose money Maxwell stole. Jay, was only one of several figures in British public life who gave Maxwell the opportunity to become a bigger and better crook in the 1980s than he had been in the 1960s.

If you really want to unravel the mysteries of Robert Maxwell, read the two books by the two people who knew him best. A Mind of My Own by Elisabeth Maxwell (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1994). Or follow this link to a good review of it in the New York Times. However, Betty does not tell all, and her book was partly motivated by a wish to blame it all on her husband and to help her sons to keep out of jail for their part in the wrongdoing in Maxwell’s businesses.

The other book is by Tom Bower, the most persistent of the hardy band of journalistic followers of Captain Bob. His Maxwell: The Final Verdict is by far the best book about the man and the business activities. If you are hungry for more, this link will give you a run down on nearly everything written about him.

Despite everything I have written here I shall be watching on Friday night. For entertainment rather than for enlightenment. I am pretty bored by now with Suchet’s fussy Belgian detective. But he is a substantial actor and I shall be interested to see whether he gets Maxwell’s mannerisms and his conflicted character. He was, of course, a manic depressive, which is perhaps one reason why I understood him. But to understand is not to condone his quite unscrupulous business behaviour and his frequent bullying of the people who worked for him.

After getting back home from St Marylebone Church I checked my email. My bank tells me that someone has been trying to get unauthorised access to my account. If I want to get the details I must get in touch with postmaster@city.ac.uk. But of course he will have gone home by now.

What on earth can have happened. Does it mean someone in the accounts department of City University has got hold of my bank details and is trying to augment their salary by milking my bank account? If so I must urge them to join the trade union, where they can argue their case for more money.

Or is it yet another scam, like the message from PayPal that a purchaser is claiming that I have not paid his bill. Whereas I have never purchased anything from PayPal. Or like the messages I get from the Halifax and NatWest telling me that someone is trying to access my account, although I have never had an account with them?

All this is worrying. Because internet banking saves me time and the banks money. And my belief is that it is no more, or less subject to fraud, than credit cards or non-internet banking.

But I don’t really know.

But I have checked my bank account and my modest credit balance is as yet undisturbed by any un-authorised transactions.

To the parish church of St Marylebone, a vast building with gilt figures around the dome, right turn from the Outer Circle of Regent’s Park, and over the ever busy Marylebone Road. I am there to go to a memorial service for William Ian McDonald, described by the obituary in The Independent as ‘Ambassador for British neurology’. Maybe the headline writer had a weakness for irony, because Ian was actually a New Zealander, born in Wellington, schooled in Dunedin by the legendary Archie McIntyre. But he spent the biggest part of his life in London, and there did most of his important work as a doctor at the hospital in Queen Square and as a professor of London University.

His particular specialty became the treatment of multiple sclerosis. He devised what became known as the McDonald rules for the treatment of sufferers from that illness in hospices. But the several learned professors who spoke at the service paid tribute to his personal qualities, and particularly his capacity for friendship. This was quite as important to them as his many academic achievements. Unlike many university professors who work for hours on their research, he always found time for his students and his colleagues. He was a true pro at what the current academic jargon calls mentoring.

I can vouch for that because he was one of those rare human beings who actually listened to what I said, even when it was the late evening and I had had rather more drink than the doctors think is good for me. Much of what was said at the memorial service and much of what is written in The Independent was news to me because Ian was a modest man, who did not trumpet his own achievements. And I met him, not as part of my professional duties, but because he was a friend of a close friend of ours.

He was also quite a private man, so that it was something of a shock when I arrived at the church to find it full with several hundred people, who knew him. They were nearly all those, whom from my Stafford Road, Wolverhampton perspective, I consider posh. They wore suits and ties and talked proper English, although some of them, like Ian, were New Zealanders.

The Independent obituary will tell you of his professional achievements. But the speaker who most caught my attention was the last Professor to mount the pulpit. He told an anecdote of how Ian, after dinner with a glass of whisky in his hand, had fallen asleep in the middle of a good story. He woke up a few minutes later and picked up the story at precisely the same point.

Not a standard conformist human being.

The St Marylebone vicar, in his bidding prayer, urged us all to join with Almighty God and ‘rejoice in a live lived abundantly; in a life, like Ian’s, lived to the full. Amen.’

This is Church of England speak for saying he enjoyed sex. ‘And with his partner, Stanley’. Because Ian had realised, as one of the earlier speakers said, that his sexual orientation was different from most of the people in the agrarian town of Dunedin. When he was studying there in the 1950s homosexuality was not only not talked about in Dunedin society but it was illegal. So one of Ian’s heroes was Wolfenden of the Wolfenden report. And it took ten years, as one speaker reminded us, for the Wolfenden report to reach the British statute book.

There were no readings from Wolfenden at the service, but there were two from Proust, whose writings helped Ian to understand himself. The final one I will quote in full.

We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time; it does not occur to us that it can have any connection with the day that has already dawned and can mean that death may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon whose timetable, hour by hour, has been settled in advance. One insists on one’s daily outing, so that in a month’s time one will have had the necessary ration of fresh air; one has hesitated over which coat to take, which cabman to call; one is in the cab, the whole day lies before one, short because one must be back home early, as a friend is come to see one; one hopes it will be as fine again tomorrow; and has no suspicion that death, which has been advancing within one on another plane, has chosen precisely this particular day to make its appearance in a few minutes’ time…

Ian would have enjoyed that.

While browsing the Wolverhampton Express & Star I came across this story by their blogger Andy Toft about getting through those days when no-one wants to talk with you. He reports on a visit to Walsall where he wanted local people to tell them the best places to visit in town. Not exactly the kind of threatening questions which causes people to clam up. But, as Andy says, sometimes it happens. The journalist has to learn to go on.

The key thing is to realise that it is usually nothing personal. The journalist may not be doing anything wrong. The bigger the story the more difficult it is because you are competing with hundreds of journalists who want to get quotes. And when you need a quote from a leading figure you have to pick up the phone yet again as the deadline approaches, even though you have left four messages for him to call you back.

On such days, you think, there must be much easier ways to earn a living.

So now I know where all the football hooligans are; in Wolverhampton, where I used to stand on the terraces alongside 70,000 others. Browsing the Express & Star just now, I came across this description of what happened after the Wolves lost 3-2 to local rivals Birmingham. Despite a huge police presence the ‘biggest and best regional newspaper online’ tells us in the headline that hooligans went on the rampage.

What actually happened, you discover as you read down, was that police came under fire from missiles at the coach park. Police in full riot gear then surrounded a 50-strong group of yobs, while the other fans dispersed. And then we are told, ‘One man, his hand covered in blood, sat on the payment.’

It all sounds pretty tame to me. So I am not going to rant about the noble game of my youth has been spoilt. I must report that in the good old days you were well advised to avoid certain pubs in town whenever the Wolves lost, particularly when they lost in a local derby. These fights were never reported in the local paper. What would have been news then, would have been no fights erupting anywhere in town after the Wolves lost. And particularly to Birmingham. There must be quite a few fans left in Wolverhampton who started their football spectating when Birmingham were in the second divistion and the Wolves were vying for top place in the first division, with only Aston Villa worthy of challenging them.

I must here correct my Sunday blog. My ignorance of Football 2007 is such that I wrote then that Wolves were playing their last game of the season last Saturday. In fact they have two more to play. There is at one at Molyneux this Saturday. Maybe I shall go up myself and do a bit of first hand reporting.

To the Six Bells by the side of the green in Warborough, Oxfordshire for Sunday lunch.  Television addicts of Midsomer Murders will be familiar with this green because many of the outside shots for this popular serial were filmed there. The pub is also popular with the locals and with the Sunday crowd. There were five MGs parked outside when we arrived. We have a table for eight booked in the garden.The sky is an unbroken grey in contrast to the string of sunny days this week but there are splashes of colour in the garden. Though the daffodils are past their best, mostly lying on the ground, and the forsythia is starting to turn green, the scene is dominated by the cherry blossom tree now at full flower. There is a laburnum tree in the corner. The border is spotted with light blue, either bluebells or forget-me-nots. Against the shed there are two old pub signs. One for The Quill Inn, illustrated by a quill pen. One for The Luck in the World with a picture of two gaily coloured court jesters. As it happens I saw Midsomer Murders on Friday night. There were two splendid murders. In the first a grumpy old man was first drugged and then led on to his own lawn, where he was nailed down in an horizontal cross-like pose. Then the villain loaded a medieval launching weapon, which conveniently happened to be there as a garden ornament, with his thousand pound a bottle claret and fired a succession of salvoes until he finally hit the target.  All the time his long-suffering wife Annette Crosbie, whose wheelchair had been pushed to an upstairs window so that she had a grandstand view, was resisting his cries for help. Her face was a picture of suppressed glee.The second murder was equally credible. Another man was slowly drowned in wine. As the level slowly rose above his mouth he drowned, hopefully in an alcoholic cloud. By this time the intrepid Barnaby (John Nettles) had discovered that there were several villains in Midsomer involved together in a highly profitable scam. For some years they had been selling plonk with Chateau labels. Until they fell out with each other.Next Friday there will be more atrocities. But this Sunday the forces of law and order have ensured that this very traditional English village is delivering the traditional peaceful English Sunday afternoon. The green is surrounded by a mix of stone thatched cottages and 1930s red brick. The cricket season has not yet started. One man is playing football with his son and daughter, who is showing more talent for the game than the males. There are two courting couples but no football hooligans.The food is equally traditional. The choice is roast pork, roast beef or roast lamb. You cannot be sure what you are getting because they are all concealed beneath two enormous Yorkshire puddings. We are here to celebrate brother-in-law’s birthday, which falls on the same day as that of Adolf Hitler, and one day before that of Queen Elizabeth II. Roger came here 32 years ago to take up a job looking after some of the local pigs. He liked it so much that he stayed on long after he had retired. By now he is accepted as one of the locals and had been given the plum local job of looking after the cricket pavilion.Had it not been for this celebration I would have been in Wolverhampton where the Wolves were playing their last match of the season. If they win they will be in the play-offs with a chance of returning to the Premier League. Even as I write now I have not dared to look up the result on the web. In case they have screwed it up yet again. Today I am not going to let anything disturb my good mood.

So now we know from the man himself. David Miliband, the environment secretary, is not going to stand against Gordon Brown for the Labour Party leadership. He announces his decision in an ‘exclusive’ article in this morning’s Observer newspaper. All the efforts of the Blairites to draft in one of the next generation to revitalise Labour have now failed.

But would it have made any difference? In his article Miliband writes about what Labour needs:

First, the vision thing, ideas that can excite people about where we want to take the country over 10 years.

I read the article twice in an effort to find something exciting. I failed. Judged from this article he is certainly the equal of David Cameron when it comes to blandness and mouthing politically correct platitudes. He says that Labour must admit its mistakes. Take this example.

Teacher recruitment has been genuinely transformed, so too school buildings, but school is still boring for too many pupils who become statistics of underachievement.

Implication. It’s the teachers who have failed Labour.

Nothing about issues that people are really protesting about. Like the slavish bowing down to George Bush oven the Iraq war which both Blair and Brown have been guilty of.

To be fair to Miliband I searched his blog. I perked up when I found an item entitled.

US generals shift to new war footing

At last he is going to challenge the might is right line, I thought. I was wrong. Read it for yourself.

It is remarkable that the UN security council should never have debated climate change, and extremely positive that today it will do so under the chairmanship and prompting of my predecessor and current foreign secretary Margaret Beckett. As I tried to say in my speech to the WWF last month, climate is a security issue. Today there is stronger endorsement from 11 retired US Generals who as far as I know previously had no record of interest in environmental issues but have now joined the ranks of “green hawks”. The very strong statement of the Generals that “the US must commit to a stronger national and international role to help stabilise climate change at levels that will avoid significant disruption to global security and stability.”. It was good in this context to hear a rep of the UK’s Royal United Services Institute say on the Today programme that he saw real change in the engagement on this issue.

posted by David Miliband on 17 Apr 07 with 4 Comments (view/add) | Permalink

But perhaps it is all our fault. Perhaps we want bland politicians.

Take this item.

Country Life (part 2)

I understand that an earlier entry was construed by some people as party political. For the avoidance of doubt, the entry now contains no reference to political parties and simply reproduces an interesting/suggestiv/thoughtful, perhaps even visionary - and certainly not otherwaise - quotation from Aneurin Bevan (In Place of Fear, chapter three)

“Where the countryside is neglected it always takes its revenge. Unless county and town march together is reciprocal activity, civilisation will limp on one foot.”

posted by David Miliband on 22 Mar 07 with 3 Comments (view/add) | Permalink

Apparently readers thought Miliband was entering into party political controversy with this quotation from a politician who did have fire in his belly. But calling for the countryside to march together is not exactly the most revolutionary of Nye Bevan’s utterances.

So this teacher’s verdict on these efforts by Miliband must be:

‘Could do better. 0 votes from me.’