Though I don’t doubt the sincerity of his passion for Beckett, Clegg is not what you would call an intellectual. No more than is – or maybe just a little bit more than is – Cameron. We wouldn’t want it otherwise. In this country the intellectual life and the political life are inimical. We don’t do philosopher or poet leaders. That keeps us tepid but it also keeps us safe. Clegg admits himself ‘unsettled’ by Beckett’s idea that ‘life is just a series of motions devoid of meaning’. A little flirtation with emptiness in the front row of the orchestra stalls is one thing, but we would rather our politicians didn’t embrace nihilism.
It doesn’t, however, have to be a choice between being an intellectual or being a dickhead – the choice Old Labour made when it came up with John Prescott, as did New Labour when it came up with Ed ‘Give ’Em a Laptop’ Balls. Seeing both of them popping up in news programmes as power changed hands last week was like watching a person age before one’s eyes. The world was new and they weren’t. The thing they vowed to go on fighting for nobody any longer wanted – not in those terms anyway. The new language being spoken belonged to men – neither dickheads nor intellectuals – whose time we thought had passed but who suddenly were here again: public-school boys unabashed by the privileges education had conferred on them, unapologetic, burnished by advantages of birth and money. That such an old reality could present itself as a new one has been the most fascinating aspect of this election. What are they still doing here, such men? They were supposed to have been superseded long ago. We thought we had cleared the way for people of another sort entirely.
Noting its predominantly private-school make-up, Lee Elliot Major of the Sutton Trust – a charity whose aim is to promote social mobility through education – expresses concern that the Liberal Conservative Cabinet ‘is highly unrepresentative’. So whose fault is that? Ought the Tories to be less representative of themselves? Are the Lib Dems now shown to be as self-serving as their new partners? Or are we to blame – still servile in our souls, still doffing our caps to gentlefolk?
Or – and this is the explanation I favour – isn’t their reappearance the final proof of a self-defeating contradiction at the heart of socialism itself? After thirteen years of Labour, and many more years of grievously misguided tampering, not only with grammar schools but with the very principles of a humane education, relativising knowledge for fear of privileging truth, denying children an education in the name of not imposing one on them, have we not simply left the field open for Clegg and Cameron’s return? They are not in power because they are monsters of deviance – the attacks on Clegg for acting politically this last week have been as absurd as anything in Beckett – nor are they in power because they are throwbacks for whom we entertain a sentimental hierarchical regard; they are in power because we have not come up with a sufficient number of people educationally equipped to seize it from them.
Social mobility through education is a wonderful ideal; but first we have to provide the education.
The irony is that the Tories, with or without the Liberal Democrats, are far more likely to facilitate this mobility through education than Labour in any of its guises. Michael Gove is the new Education Secretary. I confess to a liking for Michael Gove. He is a cultivated man and looks the way a cultivated man should look – always just a touch unkempt, cross-toothed and with a bit of a headache (I’m talking of impression, not fact), ironical, intellectually impatient, not quite inhabiting the space, as the two Cs occupy space, carved out for him by privilege. He is also, against all the prevailing orthodoxies, Arnoldian.
Education, he said recently, is about ‘introducing young people to the best that has been thought and written’. And you can’t get much more Arnoldian than that.
Think of it – ‘the best’. And no ‘Who are you to be telling me what’s best, sunshine?’ To which the answer should always have been: ‘Your teacher, you little bastard, so sit down and listen.’ The fear of teaching ‘the best’ because it is an expression of canonical authoritarianism that will ultimately stultify pupils is rooted neither in reason nor experience; the history of educated man shows that it does the very opposite, equipping the well taught to disagree, to resist, even to overthrow, from a position of independence and strength. Myself, I hold the root-and-branch changes in educational thinking promised by Michael Gove to be every bit as as important, in the long run, as bringing down the deficit. Make of Clegg and Cameron what you will, but they persist against the odds because they are in possession of a culture which is no more theirs than ours, but which, thanks to a wicked ideology of principled self-disinheritance, we have ceded to them. Whoever would empower the disadvantaged must give them back ‘the best’. Only then will we see men and women who don’t look quite so archaically deserving in power.
Glue Sticks and Human Rights
Let’s be clear: I didn’t vote tactically the other day to keep Labour in by voting Liberal Democrat to keep the Tories out which was itself a ploy to get Labour out by voting Liberal Democrat to put the Tories in, on the off chance that we’d get a Liberal Conservative coalition which would collapse so quickly that the Tories would have to form a second coalition with Labour which would strengthen the Liberal Democrats, thereby ultimately keeping both the Tories and Labour out – reader, I didn’t tie myself in these electoral knots just to wake up two weeks later to hear that al-Qaeda operatives are alive and well and being looked after in the country they can’t wait to blow apart, or to hear Nick Clegg assert that ‘The law is very clear, that it is wrong to deport people for whom there is serious concern that they could be seriously mistreated, or tortured or indeed killed’.
Groundhog Day. The same what’s right and what’s wrong and what the law is clear about, as though the law was ever clear about anything, the same giving largesse with one hand while taking with the other, the same claptrap of hand-me-down compassion we’ve been hearing for the past thirteen years of unexamined holier-than-thou human rights assumptiousness.
What I want to wake up and hear from a new government is that the law is an ass and we intend to change it.
Whatever Cameron’s thinking, Clegg is thinking same old same old. ‘We, like any civilised nation, abide by the very highest standards of human rights,’ he continues, but we will stop him there. We cannot argue with someone who asserts what he’s offering to prove. You don’t defend human rights legislation by invoking it. For it is not evident beyond disputation that we have a duty to worry what happens to those we send back to their own countries, when they only left their own countries to destroy ours. Nor is it evident beyond disputation that to show such concern for those who show none for us is the mark of a civilised nation. Loving our neighbours certainly belongs to civilisation, but loving our neighbours more than we love ourselves belongs to pathology. As for loving our neighbours more than we love ourselves when those neighbours’ idea of neighbourliness is a kiss with a stick of explosives, I’m not sure that the psychology of human self-destructiveness can supply a word that does justice to its derangement.
Nor do I know many people who see the matter differently. You may think this merely shows I hang around with right-wing thugs, but I ask you to try this test with your nearest and dearest: sit them down somewhere convivial, look them in the eyes, and ask them whether, in the great spirit of human consciousness, man and woman speaking to man and woman, honestly now, in that non-ideological part of themselves where justice and humanity reside, they give a shit what happens to a deported terrorist.
Two things, in my experience, will now happen. Firstly, they will leap at the opportunity to say what at other times they feel they cannot, which is that they couldn’t care less, absolutely couldn’t give a monkey’s – an expression of indifference which only a fool or a knave would condemn, for indifference is to humane concern what hate is to love: you need to feel the one to feel the other. Secondly, they will revel in the delicious irony of sending back to where they learned their violence those who would bring their violence
here. Not only, in other words, are they indifferent to the suffering to which the would-be bomber might be subject, they long for it in their souls.
And if you don’t believe this will be the response, again I urge you, try it. But be prepared for a fun night. The genie of mischief, long bottled-up but at last released, is a great lightener of spirits.
There is, I concede, an argument to be made against following the dictates of our heart. Ideally, the law exists to express our best selves, free of partisanship, passion and self-interest. It is impersonal because we cannot be. But it’s a hair-trigger negotiation: now the law is too like us, now it is too little, now too much the brute, now too much the angel. So we dare never let it out of our sight. Least of all human rights law whose justification, paradoxically, is that it is removed entirely from the experience of being human – humans being punitive, vengeful, mischievous and on the whole against it.
This much we know: that society is a rough-and-tumble affair, and that whatever legislation would, in the ether of high-minded abstraction, make the person inviolable in all circumstances, is legislation that cannot work.
Lynda May, the art teacher charged with assaulting a pupil with a glue stick, has just been cleared. Three cheers for that. But why was the case ever brought? Why was she charged by the police? Why was a prosecution allowed to proceed to the level of the High Court? Why did the pupil, whose finger bled a bit, think he’d been hard done by? Why was he encouraged to pursue his nothing grievance by whoever it was at home that should have given him an Elastoplast and locked him in his room?
Human rights, that’s why. The culture of the inviolability of the individual which has permeated society and found a particularly congenial, not to say opportunistic, resting place in our schools. Schoolchildren now think they have a human right. Here’s your big chance, Mr Clegg – tell them they don’t. By every account, the boy whose thumbnail Mrs May was alleged to have assaulted had a mouth so foul he spat asterisks. ‘F*** off,’ he told Mrs May when she welcomed him to class. And this was art class. You could understand had it been geography or gym. I wish I’d said ‘F*** off, Hargreaves’ fifty years ago when he tried to hang me upside down from a wall bar after a lunch of braised tongue and sago pudding. But art class!
‘F*** off’, anyway, was what the boy said to Lynda May, for which vileness she would have been within her human rights to glue his lips together with a Pritt Stick and then send him somewhere he was certain to be tortured.
Only in heaven is there inviolability of person. Only in heaven do we enjoy the human right of not suffering the cruel consequence of cruel action, and that’s because in heaven we have ceased to be human.
Dad Skills
According to James May, a person who drives fast cars on television, men are not what they once were. Myself – though I am definitely not what I once was – I never trust anyone who puts the word car and the word man in the same sentence. I just have, I know, but only in reference to James May. We have lost our ‘dad skills’, he’s been telling us. That’s three, no, four words I don’t care to see in the same sentence: man, car, dad and skills.
In support of his thesis, a poll has been conducted in which men who want a quiet life admit to not being able to bleed a radiator, unblock a sink, change a fuse or hang a picture. I suspect most men can do all these things well enough, but in their own time. If there is one essential difference between men and women it is that women cannot live for more than five minutes with a blocked sink whereas a man can survive a lifetime indifferent to it. He just runs the taps less often. Doesn’t notice the smell (only women notice smells). And tackles the problem of washing-up by not doing any. This is a skill I learned from my dad.
His laissez-faire attitude to blockages apart, my father was a man of the sort James May laments. He could paint, he could wire, he could seal, he could grout, he could tile, he could install concealed lighting – to this day my mother is still looking for some of the concealed lighting he installed – he could wallpaper, he could lay carpets, he could fit a lock, but most of all he could make a hatch. Hatches were my father’s passion.
That there must be some psychological explanation for my father’s love of hatches I don’t doubt. Always look for the pun, Lacanians tell us. Knowing to look for the pun is as far as I’ve got with Lacan, but it could be far enough in this instance. To hatch is to bring forth from the egg by incubation. My father was hatched as a twin. His twin survived the hatching but died tragically a few years later. Could it be that my father went on ‘re-hatching’ into adulthood, making holes in walls in the unconscious hope of ‘breaking through’ and finding his lost self on the other side?
We were the beneficiaries, anyway. No sooner did we move into a new house than my father began knocking through from the dining room into the kitchen. No other job came first. The windows might be broken, the walls might be damp, gas might be coming in through the plug sockets, but still the hatch had precedence. I say we were the beneficiaries, but the benefits were not always immediately apparent.
‘Remind me why we need this,’ my mother felt it behoved her to ask before the first brick was removed. My father would laugh away her puzzlement. ‘We need it to make life easier for you – so that when we’re sitting in the dining room you don’t have to carry food in from the kitchen.’
‘Max, we don’t sit in the dining room. We’ve never sat in the dining room. We don’t have a dining room.’
‘So what’s this room for?’
‘It’s where you will fall asleep in front of the television.’
‘And where are we supposed to dine?’
‘Dine? Since when did we dine? We eat in the kitchen.’
He would turn from the wall with his club hammer in one hand and his stonemason’s chisel in another and throw us all a look of supreme triumph. ‘Precisely. That’s why we need a hatch.’
Though it began quickly, the hatch usually slowed down sometime towards the end of the third week. It wasn’t that he would lose interest – though it’s true his passion for knocking through cooled a little the minute he saw into the other room and presumably had to face the fact that yet again he had not found the missing half of his divided self – but little niggling problems would arise and put a dent in his fervour. The wall would start to crumble, necessitating a bigger beam than he’d anticipated. The house would turn out to have been built on a slant or a mudslide, so that while the hatch was at an ideal height in the dining room, it was either too low or too high in the kitchen. (‘Should have used a theodolite,’ he admitted once.) And on one occasion he knocked through only to discover that he’d come out over the cooker. ‘That will save you even more carrying,’ he tried to persuade my mother, but conceded that a hatch you could reach only at the risk of going up in flames had a serious design fault.
‘Snagging,’ was how he described these problems. From which we were to assume that they would soon be fixed. But no hatch was ever finished or put to use. Unless you call having a shelf on which you could pile magazines from either room useful. Eventually, as the magazines and unread mail accumulated, the hatch vanished altogether and was never referred to again until we moved house and his enthusiasm to knock out another revived.
I see now that we should have been more grateful to him. Whatever the initial psychological compulsion, he was only trying to make our lives more comfortable and sophisticated. But in this he suffered as many men have suffered before and since. Though a woman claims she wants a man around the house who can ‘do’ around the house, the truth of it is she will deride him for half the work he does, and not notice the rest. An old girlfriend of mine sent me spiteful letters after we broke up, complaining that the bookcase I’d built when we were together was so flimsy it fell down the minute her new boyfriend rested his aftershave on it. Another wrote letters no less unpleasant cursing me for putting up a bookcase that was so sturdy it could not be dismantled without the wall it was on having to be demolished.
This is why m
en eventually stop trying. I, for example, can lay new floorboards, retile a roof and plaster any surface. But I’m damned if I will. The floor has only to subside, the roof let in rain, the plastering look as though a bear on heat has rubbed up against it when it was damp, and there’s hell to pay. Better to affect a practical incompetence and let the women call in James May.
Man Booker
I am in the garden of a house in far, far north London. So far north London that it might as well be Manchester. It has been a day of immense sadness. We are just back from a burial. My wife’s uncle Gerry died three days ago. He was ninety-two and so there has not been that sense of tearing tragedy that makes the burial of a young person unbearable. But he was greatly loved. And precisely because he has been in people’s lives for so long, it is already hard to imagine life without him.
On the way to the grave the black-hatted official leading the mourners stopped intermittently and held us up. This is a Jewish custom. It denotes our unwillingness to part with a person we have cared for. We would rather stop for eternity, but of course we don’t have eternity on our hands.
Back in the house people are drinking tea and eating bagels filled with smoked salmon. Call that stereotyping, but what am I to do? They truly are drinking tea and eating bagels filled with smoked salmon. Jews don’t throw down alcohol on such occasions. And they like food that tastes soft. In another column we might put our minds to why.
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