Columns

I had a sort of Tottenham High Street moment just after lunch on Tuesday. I was passing a sandwich shop near the Spectator offices and happened to see the slogan beneath its name: ‘Live your life, love our food.’ The urge came, right there and then, to torch the place and maybe rough up the counter staff but — maybe this is an age thing — the feeling quickly passed. It was the impudence of the imperative that most annoyed me, although the general fatuity of it grated too. Why would I not live my life? What’s the alternative? And what has it got to do with your food, you presumptuous idiots?

It feels odd to start a column having failed to persuade oneself that what one proposes is sensible. My problem is this: whenever I put the thoughts that follow to friends whose judgment I respect, they talk me out of my conclusion. Convinced by their counter-arguments, I banish the idea. Then I wake up in the small hours — and the idea’s back.

So appalled and incensed am I at the killing of gentle, loving family man Mark Duggan last Thursday that I feel only the immediate illegal acquisition of an expensive consumer durable, preferably a top end watch, will assuage my righteous wrath and lessen my grief. A Rolex should do the job, or at least something with a bit of bling about it. If possible, the watch should be liberated by myself and my homeys, my bluds, from an agent of oppression, such as a local watch shop owned by someone who isn’t me and most likely from a different race, maybe white or Asian.

I’m not expecting sympathy. Really, I’m not. But there was a time, and really not so long ago, when you knew where you were with news. Day one, thing happens. Day two, thing gets in the papers. Then, on day three, the parasites like me weigh in. That’s how it worked back in the distant time of, say, February. Since then, though, that tried and tested old model seems to have gone out the window. And it’s not simply that old media can’t cope, because new media copes even worse. BBC news hacks used to joke that their rivals at Sky ought to have the motto ‘never wrong for long’, but even that is an aspiration too far for the sprawling chaos of internet punditry. On Twitter, for example, you can be wrong for ever.

By the time you read this I’ll be in the place that makes me happier than anywhere else in the world: a section of the Wye valley in beautiful mid-Wales, where I’ll spend every day paddling in streams and plunging in mill ponds and playing cockie-ollie in the bracken and wandering across the sunlit uplands, drinking in perhaps the finest view God ever created — the one across the Golden Valley towards the Black Mountains, and beyond that to the Brecon Beacons.

It isn’t often that political commentary presents us with a perfect portrait — a neat and simple miniature in oils — of where a faction is going wrong. It isn’t often that political commentary presents us with a perfect portrait — a neat and simple miniature in oils — of where a faction is going wrong. Just such a picture, however, was painted unwittingly for us by Tim Montgomerie in the Telegraph last Sunday. Tim Montgomerie is an admirable and capable figure, and co-editor of ConservativeHome. Without him the world of political commentary would lose one of its most interesting and significant voices on the right. Never unheeding, never unthinking and never unarmed, he’s a formidable protagonist.

‘Dad, later, shall we go and see the Vaccines?’ says Boy. ‘Dad, later, shall we go and see the Vaccines?’ says Boy. ‘Yeah, er, sure,’ I say, trying not to sound as enthusiastic I feel. It’s not the Vaccines I’m interested in; all their songs sound the same, a louder variant on the three chords which open Blondie’s ‘Denis’ (Denee). Rather it’s the joy of realising that, at 12, Boy is still young enough — just — not to feel totally embarrassed at being seen to enjoy rock music in the company of his lame old dad. We’ve come to the Latitude Festival at Henham Park in Suffolk, me, the Fawn, Boy, Girl and a whole posse of friends, and it’s a very exciting moment for all of us.