Conrad Black, late of this parish of course, describes his daily routine after his first year in prison: I get up just after 7 except on the weekends and holidays when it is possible to sleep in. I eat some granola and go to my workplace where I tutor high school-leaving candidates, one-on-one, though sometimes I have to deal with up to four at a time, around my desk, and talk with fellow tutors and other convivial people.
The White House could easily have granted the press conference Gordon Brown so clearly craved. Though there was something a little craven, a touch humiliating about much of the build-up to this week's Prime Ministerial visit to Washington, it's reasonable to suppose that, in this instance at least, Brown may have been treated a little shabbily. The kindest way to view this is that the White House is so focused on economic fire-fighting that it has little time for diplomatic niceties; alternatively it sends a tough reminder as to who wears the trousers in this relationship partnership. There'll be none of this Athens to Rome nonsense, Mister Brown. (Was it just a coincidence that the BBC went big on Macmillan visiting JFK in their footage last night?
Steve Coll, late of the Washington Post and now ensconsed at the New Yorker and the New America Foundation, is a brave, brave man. He's actually going to read the stimulus bill Barack Obama signed into law. All 407 pages of it. And then he's going to blog about it. I suppose someone in "traditional" media might have read the whole thing and written an account of the actual bill, but this seems another area in which the format and style and rythmn of blogging is better suited to the task of revealing what's actually in the legislation than anything likely to be provided by more traditional publishing platforms.
Sometimes it's the seemingly minor events - minor, that is, in the grand scheme of matters, not necessarily small or insignificant at the moment they occur - that can carry more weight than more obviously important or telling developments. Lord knows, there's been no end of troubling news from Pakistan in recent years. But, silly as it may seem, there's something especially terrible about today's attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team which killed at least six policemen and injured five members of the Sri Lankan team. (See Cricinfo's rolling updates for the latest news.) Political assassinations, for instance, are hardly unknown in Pakistan (or elsewhere on the subcontinent) and so it's easy - perhaps too easy - to file them in a drawer marked Terrible Stuff That Sometimes Happens.
Poor Gordon Brown. Yes, really. The expectations for his visit to Washington this week could not have been framed more unkindly. It's as though the Prime Minister has been set up to fail. His enemies in the press will not mind this, but his friends' talk has not helped either. The less hype this visit, and this speech to Congress, received, the better it would have been for Brown. Then he might have been able to surprise everyone. Instead, there's been all this nonsense about Brown being, in a BBC News reporter's phrase, "sprinkled" with Obama's "rhetorical stardust". Yes really to that too. Normal people hear this sort of guff and think "who do you think you are kidding?". Then again, they can't help it, can they?
I sometimes wonder about pollsters and political consultants. That is, I wonder if they are rather like the financial Masters of the Universe whose mastery turns out, it seems, to have been somewhat exaggerated. That's not say there aren't differences between well-run campaigns (Barack Obama) and lousy, ill-focused, foolish ones (Hillary Clinton), rather that the benefits of good political advice aren't nearly so great as the damage caused by poor advice and ill-conceived strategy. Hindsight is always useful, of course, but imagine how different the race for the Democratic party's presidential nomination might have been had the Clinton campaign remembered that it might be useful to compete seriously in caucus states.
There's a reason Rahm Emanuel is happy to agree with Rush Limbaugh's assertion that he, the Great Rushbo, is the de facto leader of the Republican opposition: Limbaugh turns off middle-class, middle of the road voters. An Obama vs Limbaugh battle is not one the White House is going to lose. Indeed it's hard to think of a better way for the Republican party to marginalise itself and reinforce the impression, held by many voters, that it's little more than a rump of pop-eyed angry white men. This impression may be inaccurate but there you have it. David Frum is, as you might expect, depressed by this: Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant.
It can be dangerous to be more catholic than the Pope. That was my immediate reaction to John O'Sullivan's piece on David Cameron in the latest issue of National Review. O'Sullivan dismisses the notion that there's anything the Republican party can, let alone should, learn from the Cameronian Makeover. O'Sullivan is hardly alone in thinking this. That is, British conservatives exiled in Washington tend to disdain Toryism. From their comfortable berths at Heritage, AEI or National Review they tend to think British conservatism is fatally muddied by compromise and lacking the appealing clarity of the dominant strands in American conservatism.
Harriet Harman's proposal for legislation designed to target a single person - Sir Fred Goodwin - who, whatever his other failings, has not yet been charged wth any crime, seem even more extraordinary today than they did yesterday. Daniel Hannan puts the matter into some historical context: Harriet Harman is proposing that a law be introduced aimed at a specific individual, retrospectively to criminalise something that was legal at the time. Such laws were known mediaevally as Acts of Attainder: they declared someone guilty after the event, and with no trial. Attainder Bills were introduced very rarely, usually following a gross abuse of ministerial power or an open insurrection.
Peter may well be right to argue that it's hard to see how Gordon Brown can sack Harriet Harman. But let's just say that she's not really helping the government these days. Take her performance this morning, for example: "Sir Fred Goodwin should not count on being £650,000 a year better off because it is not going to happen," she told BBC One's Andrew Marr show...And it might be enforceable in a court of law, this contract, but it is not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that is where the government steps in." This is the sort of talk that only comes from a government in terminal decline. The sooner it's put out of its misery the better.
Another Saturday, another trip to Murrayfield. Frank Hadden is not a lucky coach; the Scotland front five was supposed to be the team's strength but Nathan Hines will miss the entire championship, while Euan Murray's rib injjury has kept him out until this afternoon's must-win match against Italy. Murray's an unusal rugby player. Not only is he a qualified veterinary surgeon, he's a born-again Christian. This would scarcely be worth mentioning if he were American (many NFL locker rooms, for instance, are well stocked with religious fervour and team prayers and prayer meetings are common) but in British rugby it's something rather different. You get a flavour of this from an interview Murray gave Scotland on Sunday's Tom English earlier this season: The seizure, he's spoken about.
Competition is pretty tough, but Fox's Glenn Beck may actually be too dumb for cable news. And if Beck is a libertarian, I'm an Eskimo.
Everyone is supposed to hate Ryanair, right? It's the compay that takes the frills out of no-frills and that, increasingly, seems to relish treating its customers with a degree of contempt. Despite this, I think it a splendid airline. That's not just because it can fly one to interesting places for tiny prices (though obviously that's a large part of its appeal) but because Ryanair strips the nature of the deal back to its essence: who really needs assigned seating or terrible in-flight food? No, Ryanair is basically a taxi: nothing more, nothing less. And, frankly, there's also something amusing about its shameless hucksterism and Michael O'Leary's insatiable desire to cut costs.
Avigdor Lieberman - Israel's new kingmaker and, according to no less a hawk than Marty Peretz, a "neo-fascist" - says his ideas on citizenship really aren't any different from those espoused by Gordon Brown's government. Elsewhere, regardless of whether or not Fred Goodwin "deserves" a £650,000 pension is becomes abundantly clear that, despite this still being Hang-a-Banker season, the government's descent into idiotic, populist pandering should also be resisted. Goodwin's pension may indeed be excessive, but John Prescott will receive £60,000 a year from the public purse which seems equally generous or, if you prefer, scandalous. Thirdly, it turns out that Jack Straw has a rather strained relationship with the truth. Who knew? The sooner there's an election the better.
How do you know the Obama administration isn't "soft" on Israel? John Bolton says it is. To wit, Bolton was asked at CPAC today if Obama would defend Israel "when" the "Arab nations" attack it and here's what he said: BOLTON: I would certainly hope they would come to Israel’s assistance, but I think there’s no guarantee of it. I think the more likely response is to appoint a special envoy and try to negotiate an end the hostilities. Q: Your short answer then would be “no”. BOLTON: I very much fear that’s right. Bolton is an engaging fellow who is always good copy (apart from anything else he is very diligent about returning reporters' phone calls) and sure this is just CPAC and all that, but still, this is, in a word, nuts.
Golly. The Daily Mail seems to have a very narrow, dangerous view of who is, and who isn't, British: However although the figures from the Government's Office for National Statistics show an increase in numbers of foreign born people they still fail to record the true impact of immigration because they record their children as British rather than second or third generation immigrants. How - what's the word? - charming.
Fraser's article on the Californification of the Tory party is a splendid piece of work and highly recommended. I enjoyed it very much. And yet, the more one thinks about it, the more problematic, and perhaps even contradicory, some parts of this vision of a Tory future seemed to be. For one thing, it seems as though the California the Tories hope to learn from is actually a pretty small and exceedingly wealthy corner of a large and complicated state. That is, there's rather more to California than Cupertino and Palo Alto. The Bay Area is a lovely, lovely part of the world but it's hardly representative of its own state, let alone an obviously replicable vehicle for economic and - as the modern Tories might put it - "lifestyle" growth.
Gene Healy, author of The Cult of the Presidency (highly recommended, incidentally), resurrects one of my favourite Never-Gonna-Happen-Ploys: the President should make fewer speeches and deliver the State of the Union address in writing, not in person: The "permanent campaign" that dominates modern presidential politics would have appalled our forefathers. Accepting the 1844 Democratic nomination, James K. Polk described the custom of the time: "the office of president of the United States should neither be sought nor declined." When 19th-century candidates spoke publicly, they sometimes felt compelled to apologize, as 1872 Democratic contender Horace Greeley did, for breaking "the unwritten law of our country that a candidate for President may not make speeches.
Via Terry Teachout, the Elegant Variation republishes a list of books written between 1945 and 1985 that James Wood recommends you read. What's notable is not so much the list itself as the extent to which it contradicts the view that Wood takes a particularly docrtinaire view of fiction. True, he may be most famous for his critique of "hysterical-realism" but there's more to him than that and, as the list makes clear, there are some novelists after Flaubert and James that he likes. Wood's detractors - of whom there are many - might be surprised to find Pynchon, Vonnegut, Rushdie et al on the list. For that matter, I'm surprised to see The Satanic Verses make the cut...
I don't know why Bobby Jindal, the Republican party's Great Brown Hope, agreed to give the GOP response to Obama's speech last night. Supposedly a privilege, this more often turns out to be a fools errand. Indeed, the only successful opposition response I can recall in recent years was given by Senator Jim Webb. Generally, however, the poor sap offered the chance to go up against the President is on a hiding to nothing: the man in charge has the full majesty of his office behind him; the opposition spokesman sits in a wee room on their own waiting for their chance to give a speech no-one is very interested in anyway... Even allowing for that, however, the reviews for Jindal are in and, eh, they're not so good. Brutal in fact.