Imagine sitting in a meeting room trying to make sense of that lot. Imagine them collectively giving you policy advice over a tea urn and a platter of sandwiches. Andy darkly gruffing and grumping and breaking off every few minutes to check the Guardian homepage on his iPhone. Gideon wondering how many coins there are in a pound then snorting through his nose as he draws a penis murdering a tramp on his satchel. Steve idly tossing a Hacky Sack around and suggesting the next Cabinet meeting should be held in a birthing pool. Talk about conflicting approaches. The cognitive dissonance would grow so loud you’d turn olive and giddy. And then you wouldn’t know which one to vomit over first. (Although since you’re David Cameron, the correct answer is ‘yourself’.)
Andy and Gideon we’re familiar with, of course. Andy is the sinister man in the slow-mo shots on the news, and Gideon is the naughty boy who’s broken the economy. But Steve is more of a mystery. I’ve only ever glimpsed him in still photographs and a bit of news archive of him sitting on a bench somewhere.
Last week, the aura of mystery was punctured somewhat after the Financial Times printed a leaked list of some of his bluer ‘blue-sky’ ideas, such as the abolition of maternity leave and the closure of Job Centres. Ministers were quick to point out none of this was going to become official policy – rather, this was all a bit of amusing crazy talk designed to kick-start internal discussions. You know, an icebreaker – like opening a meeting by suggesting everyone follows you down to the local duck pond to watch you chop the head off a swan with some shears. It gets people talking. The swan’s head stays on – the swan was never in danger – but some truly ground-breaking concepts might spin out of the ensuing debate. Only by thinking the unthinkable can we define what’s thinkable. The swan has to die in our heads to survive in our hearts. Or something.
Previously, such out-there thought-riffing led Hilton to suggest the use of nascent ‘cloudbusting’ technology to create longer summers – no, really – and more famously, to dream up the ‘big society’. Frustratingly for Hilton’s critics, who like to paint him as a sort of misguided guff engine, the big society has been a resounding, concrete success. From the weeniest village to the hugest metropolis, there’s a solar-powered big society community hugspace on every corner, staffed by volunteers in unicorn costumes. I can’t recall the last time an authentic grass-roots movement captured the public imagination on such a grand scale, apart perhaps from T-Mobile’s 2009 ‘Josh’s band’ advertising campaign, which culminated in a feelgood hit single that stayed at number one for seventy-nine consecutive weeks, IN T-MOBILE’S MAD MIND.
Anyway, most of the focus thus far has been on Hilton’s laid-back dress sense and the Professor Branestawm wackiness of his ideas, which started out funny but seem less tittersome the more extreme they become. But what sticks in my craw is the sheer stinking, blunted crapness of them.
‘Nudge unit’. ‘Big society’. ‘Hug a hoodie’. They sound like the titles of nauseating business-psychobabble books: the sort of timewasting Who Moved My Cheese? groovy CEO bullshit routinely found cluttering the shelves of every airport bookshop in the world. As well as being a pallid substitute for actual creativity – a device for making grey business wonks mistake themselves for David Bowie at his experimental peak – these books are the direct suit-and-tie office-dick equivalent of those embarrassing motivational self-help tomes that prey on the insecure, promising to turn their life around before dissolving into a blancmange of ‘strategies’ and ‘systems’ and above all excruciating metaphors.
Be honest. We’ve all read at least one of these personal empowerment classics. Or at least riffled through it in a bookshop. Any idiot could churn one out. In fact, let’s write one now.
We’ll call it Break in Your Lifehorse. Chapter 1: imagine your hopes and dreams are a galloping stallion, wild and untamed. Chapter 2: now picture yourself throwing a glowing lasso of light around its neck. Chapter 3: the dream stallion tries to jerk away from you, but if you dig in your heels and whisper at it, it will eventually calm down. Chapter 4: while it grazes, unsuspecting – leap on and saddle up! Chapter 5: ride it through the canyons of doubt and over the horizon of fear. Congratulations! You’re achieve-anating! That’ll be £10.99 thanks. Don’t forget to visit our website to buy the official Lifehorse Grooming Kit containing exclusive workcharts and a guide to customising your saddle. Coming soon: Break in Your Lovehorse (relationship healage for the recently bewildered), and Break in Your Lifepony (successanising strategies for the under-twelves.)
There you go. Beam an e-copy of that to Hilton’s Kindle, and I guarantee there’ll be a Lifehorse in every nudge unit by 2013. Unless he’s imagineered his way to having us all diced up and fed to the swans by big society shock troopers as part of some Rainbownomics initiative by then. Which is inevitable. Inevitable.
Kill them all
07/08/2011
The death penalty debate refuses to die – a bit like seventeen-year-old Willie Francis, who in 1946 was strapped into a chair at Louisiana State Penitentiary and electrocuted, only to wind up screaming for mercy from within his leather hood, selfishly upsetting several onlookers in the process.
The United Kingdom hasn’t hanged anyone since 1964, when Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans were simultaneously sent to the gallows, in an audacious end-of-season finale. In the intervening years, the capital punishment argument has resurfaced now and then, usually in the wake of an especially harrowing murder trial, when the mob’s a bit twitchy. But it has always been a bit of a non-debate.
Proponents of the death penalty – ‘nooselovers’ or ‘danglefans’, as they like to be known – often come across as a bit old-fashioned, as though they’re opposed to progress in all its forms, and might as well be arguing in favour of fewer crisp flavours and slower Wi-Fi. This fusty impression isn’t helped when every news article about hanging is illustrated with vintage black and white photographs of Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis, as if tying a rope around someone’s neck and dropping them through a trapdoor in the hope of causing a fatal bilateral fracture of the C2 vertebra is the kind of behaviour that belongs in the past.
But now the debate has returned with an exciting new technological twist: thanks to the government’s exciting e-petition initiative in which any motion attracting over 100,000 signatories becomes eligible for debate in the House of Commons, the danglefans are suddenly on the cutting edge of populist online activism. Or rather they would be, if they were proposing a suitably cutting-edge method of execution. Instead, it’s just a load of vague blah about reinstating ‘the death penalty’.
What sort of death penalty? The gallows? The chair? The gas chamber? Come on, this is the internet. The least you could do is rustle up a Flash animation depicting precisely how you want these people to be killed. You could even make it interactive: maybe have a fun preamble in which we shake the prisoner’s hand in order to guess his weight and adjust the length of the rope accordingly. Or a bit where we get to pull a leather hood over the screaming head of a petrified teenager with learning difficulties, then pull the switch and hear his kidneys boil.
Of course, anyone proposing the use of the noose or the chair is guilty of moral cowardice anyway. Capital punishment is supposed to act as a deterrent, but it doesn’t seem to have much effect on crime statistics. This is because most current executions a) employ methods that are as quick and efficient as possible and b) take place behind closed doors – almost as though the people doing it are ashamed of themselves.
What sort of half-arsed half-measure is that? Cold logic dictates that the only way to turn capital punishment into an effective deterrent is to make each killing as drawn-out and public as possible. Maximum agony, maximum publicity. Anything less is a cop-out – and death penalty supporters should have the stones to say so. Stop this placatory talk about breaking people’s necks gently with rope. Go the whole hog.
Don’t campaign to bring back the gallows – campaign to bring back the saw. The medieval saw. Raise the prisoner by his feet a
nd then saw through him vertically, starting at his arsecrack and ending at his scalp. Suspending him upside down ensures a constant supply of blood to his brain, so he’ll remain conscious throughout and provide all manner of usefully lurid screams. In fact with any luck he’ll carry on screaming even as his throat is sawn in half, thereby creating a pleasing stereo effect for viewers with home cinema systems. Did I mention the viewers? This is all broadcast live on television, in HD (and even 3D) where available. Maximum agony, maximum publicity.
Not that the broadcast should pander to ghoulish onlookers. It should pander to ghoulish participants. This is the twenty-first century: public executions can and should be as interactive as possible. So this death-by-vertical-sawing isn’t just broadcast live, but broadcast live from the perspective of a camera with a crossbow attached. Viewers at home control the gunsights by tweeting directions such as ‘Left’, ‘Right’, ‘Up a bit’, ‘Fire’, and so on – a bit like ye olde gameshow The Golden Shot, but with approximately 100 per cent more footage of shrieking bisected carcass being shot in the eye with a bolt smeared with excrement. A shot in the eye, incidentally, will win you 5,000 Nectar points and a congratulatory tweet from Paddy McGuinness.
Obviously, not everyone would voluntarily tune in to watch a broadcast that graphic, which is why highlights of each execution would be randomly spliced into other popular programmes – everything from Top Gear to Rastamouse. It would also be compulsory viewing at every school in the land. And children who try to evade its salutary message by closing their eyes will have still images of the precise moment of death beamed directly into their mind’s eye using Apple’s AirPlay system, as soon as we can establish some means of doing that.
Maximum agony, maximum publicity. It’s the only way. It’s saw or nothing.
The self-inflicted horror show
14/08/2011
Like almost anyone who wasn’t outside running around with a scarf over their face, I sat at home last week gawping at my TV screen in horror as English cities, including the one I live in, came under attack from their own citizens. It was a self-inflicted horror show, like watching a man repeatedly smack himself in the teeth with a breezeblock. But not as funny.
Since I write for a newspaper, I’m now legally required to write an agonised hand-wringing article in which I attempt to explain why the riots happened. Which is tricky because I don’t have a clue. Some blame the parents. Or the education system. Or the economy. Or our unequal society. Or just the rioters themselves. I’d guess at some soupy combination of all the above.
Aside from the sheer mindless ferocity and violence, one of the most depressing aspects of the protracted smashup was the nature of the looting: time and again, shops selling trainers or gadgets were targeted first. Fancy shoes and electric widgets mark the peak of ambition. Every looter was effectively a child chanting ‘Give me my toys; I want more toys.’
Look at the prick captured on video mugging the injured Malaysian student. Watch his unearned swagger as he walks away; the size of a man, yet he overdoes that swagger like a performing toddler. That’s an idiot who never grew up.
Why the obsession with trainers? Trainers are shit. You stick them on your feet and walk around for a while ’til they go out of fashion. Whoopie doo. Yes, I know they’re also status symbols, but anyone who tries to impress others with their shoe choice is a dismally pathetic character indeed – and anyone genuinely impressed by said footwear has all the soaring spirit of a punnet of moss. There’s no life to be found in ‘look at my shoes’. There just isn’t.
In the smouldering aftermath, some politicians, keen to shift the focus from social inequality, have muttered darkly about the role of BlackBerry Messenger, Twitter and Facebook – frightening new technologies that, like the pen and the human mouth, allow citizens to swap messages with one another. Some have even called for the likes of Twitter to be temporarily suspended in times of great national crisis. That’d be reassuring – like the scene at the start of a zombie movie where the news bulletin is suddenly replaced by a whistling tone and a stark caption reading PLEASE STAND BY. The last thing we need in an emergency is the ability to share information. Perhaps the government could also issue us with gags we could slip over our mouths the moment the sirens start wailing? Hey, we could still communicate if we really had to. Provided we’ve learned semaphore.
If preventing further looting is our aim, then as well as addressing the gulf between the haves and the have-nots, I’d take a long hard look at MTV Cribs and similar TV shows that routinely confuse human achievement with the mindless acquisition of gaudy bling bullshit. The media heaves with propaganda promoting sensation and consumption above all else.
Back in the eighties the pioneering aspirational soap opera Dallas dangled an unattainable billionaire lifestyle in front of millions, but at least had the nous to make the Ewing family miserable and consumed with self-loathing. At the same time, shows aimed at kids were full of presenters cheerfully making puppets out of old yoghurt pots, while shows aimed at teens largely depicted cheeky urchins copping off with each other in the dole queue.
Today, whenever my world-weary eyes alight on a ‘youth show’ it merely resembles a glossily edited advert for celebrity lifestyles, co-starring a jet-ski and a tower of gold. And regardless of the time slot, every other commercial shrieks that I deserve the best of everything. Me and me only. I’d gladly introduce a law requiring broadcasters to show five minutes of footage of a rich man dying alone for every ten minutes of fevered avarice. It’d be worth it just to see the presenters trying to introduce ironically it on T4.
If we deleted all aspirational programming altogether, the schedules might feel a bit empty, so I’d fill the void with footage of a well-stocked Foot Locker window, thereby tricking any idiots tuning in on a recently looted television into smashing the screen in an attempt to grab the coveted trainers within.
Speaking of stolen shoes, if I were the CEO of Nike (which at the time of writing I’m not), I’d encourage Foot Locker to open special ‘decoy’ branches near looting hotspots – unattended stores stocked full of trainers with soft sponge heels. Anyone pinching a pair of these would find it almost impossible to hoof in a window ever again. You’d be kicking fruitlessly at the glass for fifteen years, making it less an act of spontaneous violence and more a powerful visual metaphor for your misguided existence.
But perhaps it’s better to nip future trouble in the bud with the use of deterrents. Obviously a small percentage of the rioters are sociopaths, and you’ll never make any kind of impression on their psyche without a cranial drill. But the majority should be susceptible to threats. Not violent ones – we’re not animals – but creatively unpleasant ones. Forget the water cannon. Unleash the slurry cannon. That kind of thing.
Greater Manchester Police has attracted attention by using Twitter as a substitute for the ‘perp walk’: naming-and-shaming rioters by tweeting their personal details as they leave court. Not bad, but maybe not humiliating enough.
Personally, I’d seal them inside a Perspex box glued to a billboard overlooking a main plaza for a week, where people can turn up and jeer at them. It’s not totally inhumane: they’d be fed through a tube in the top – but crucially, they’d be fed nothing but cabbage, asparagus and figs, and since they wouldn’t be allowed out for toilet breaks, it’d get pretty unpleasant in there after forty-eight hours. And it’d be a cheery pick-me-up for passersby.
My gluttering academic career
21/08/2011
This one’s for underperforming students, and anyone who got rubbish exam results. The rest of you can walk away. Go on. Shoo.
Gone? Right. Last week was A-level judgment week, which, as per tradition, gave newspapers a brilliant excuse to run photos of attractive teenage girls leaping with delight as they receive their results, a phenomenon that has become such a cliché that pointing out its existence has become another cliché in its own right.
And the schools themselves aren’t shy of
using it as a PR opportunity. According to Chris Cook of the Financial Times, a press liaison officer from Badminton school in Bristol once left him an unsolicited voicemail alerting his paper to the existence of some particularly ‘beyootiful’ girls who were due to do a bit of impromptu delighted leaping on results day, in case any of his newspaper’s photographers fancied popping along for an ogle.
According to the Mirror, Badminton school responded to criticism by saying: ‘We always do this and, to be honest, most girls are attractive at eighteen.’ So that’s a school, then, talking like a dirty dad. It probably rubbed its hands on its thighs as it said it.
Actually, they’re missing a trick by restricting themselves to one news story per year. The school could raise its profile yet further by pimping those ‘beyootiful’ students out for other news stories. Certainly the coverage of the shooting of Osama bin Laden could’ve done with more images of delighted teenage girls jumping for joy as they heard the news.
The day I got my own A-level results, the only thing leaping was the pit of my gut, as I realised I hadn’t got the grades I needed. No surprise: I was lazy and easily distracted in school. I didn’t read half the books I was supposed to digest for my English literature course, for instance, and instead relied on Brodie’s Notes.
Today I can’t even remember precisely which texts I was bluffing about; I definitely read Othello, but never finished Antony and Cleopatra (or was it Hamlet?). I think I might’ve pretended to read a Thomas Hardy novel too. But then English lit. was easy to pass: it was a bullshitting exam in which you simply wrote what the examiner wanted to read and got away with it. A-level art – that’s where I messed up my grades. You can’t fake an ability to draw, and some of the work I submitted wouldn’t even pass muster on moonpig.com.
I can make you hate Page 27