The Spectator

Wednesday

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Oklahoma!

A work of meticulous scholarship has appeared entirely devoted to the 1943 musical and it sets new standards of accuracy in what has been a gossipy milieu. From the distinguished publishers Yale, it is written by Tim Carter who is David G. Frey Distinguished Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department, University of North Carolina; among his previous works is Monteverdi's Musical Theatre and he is not messing about. He tells you all you could possibly want to know and perhaps a bit more about who contributed what to which song, why it was dropped before the opening night, indeed exactly what did happen in New Haven.

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A good old tell-all

Those disappointed that the initial instalments of the Campbell memoirs won’t be dishing up the good stuff might like to turn their attention to those of Bob Shrum, the veteran US political consultant who effectively ran the Gore and Kerry campaigns and is now close to Gordon Brown. His autobiography No Excuses is designed to wound two of the Democratic front-runners, Clinton and Edwards. Shrum launches a no-holes-barred assault on Edwards accusing him of being unready for prime time, devious and prepared to crassly exploit his son’s death for political purposes. On Clinton, he charges that Bill wanted Kerry to endorse Bush’s Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

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Ranking the deputies

The race to be the next John Prescott is getting serious with the six contenders debtaing on Newsnight last night, watch it here. So, who won? Here is Martin Vander Weyer's ranking of the form, let us know what you think in the comments.

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The world’s new banker

Bob Zoellick, George W. Bush’s pick to replace Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank, is a safe choice. Zoellick was long regarded as one of the few safe pairs of hands in the Bush administration and having served at both Treasury, State and as US Trade Representative he’s got an ideal resume for the Bank. Many thought Zoellick would be the US nominee last time round. Word has it that Zoellick was so convinced he was getting the jobnot Wolfowitz that he had already started reading  himself inbefore Bush sent him to be Condi’s deputy at State. The one person in DC who'll be sad to see Zoellick going to the Bank is John McCain, who was using Zoellick's not inconsiderable brain to pull together his policy platform.

Tuesday

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Watching with auntie

Though I cannot in all honesty pretend that I shall be staying in to watch this televisual feast, the BBC is surely on to something in its celebration of  the children’s television it has offered over the decades. There is something quintessentially British about what we offer our kids on telly – as any parent will tell you, CBeebies is very different to all the US channels you get on satellite. It is something to do with the indomitability of the educational, Reithian impulse. BBC children’s presenters all seem to suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder and St Vitas Dance these days, and to wear day-glo everything. But their traditional role – as Enid Blyton era teachers – hasn’t changed at all. And who needs Al Gore when you can have the Wombles?

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Royal Reality TV

If the rumours are to be believed, Sarah Ferguson will be a judge on the next series of the US reality TV show Project Runway. Maybe, Rod was right: Kate was just too posh for the Windsors.

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Dressing the part

What a difference deportation makes. On the right is a picture of Sheik el-Faisal, the Islamofascist who was finally sent back to his native Jamaica last weekend after serving time in Britain. Here, he dressed in a Muslim skullcap and robe – but as soon as he stepped off the plane in his native Jamaica, he was down to tracksuit bottoms and a shirt. Why? Because his real name is Trevor Forrest, and people like him seldom get away with their mad mullah act in their native countries. As Olivier Roy explains in his superb Globalised Islam, the jihadi menace is spread when crackpots like Forrest go abroad, don a skullcap and are treated with reverence they’d never achieve back home.

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Spinning a yarn

Entertaining to read in today’s Standard more details of the row between Alastair Campbell and Cherie Blair over the forthcoming Campbell Diaries. This relationship has had its ups and downs in the past – most spectacularly over Cherie’s connection with Carole Caplin and Peter Foster. But Alastair, I imagine, will be delighted. It was becoming dangerously orthodox that he had cut a deal with Gordon to keep the really good stuff out of his memoirs, due out in July, days after Brown takes over. Boring political books sell no copies. The spat with Cherie at least encourages the impression that Volume One will be juicy after all. Or is that just more spin?

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G

When Günter Grass confessed last year that he had been in the Waffen SS it took everyone by surprise. It seemed like a cynically timed admission coming after he had won the Nobel prize for literature and before his autobiography came out. That slightly odd feeling isn’t shaken by this long essay in the New Yorker in which Grass explains how he ended up in the SS and stresses that he never actually fired a shot.

Monday

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Cameron creates a meritocratic martyr

No question about it: when a frontbencher breaks ranks flagrantly, a party leader who hopes to be seen as strong must sack him. Many people agreed with Howard Flight's remarks about tax cuts in 2005, but Michael Howard had no option but to fire him. So it was only a matter of time before the bell tolled for Graham Brady, the Tory Europe spokesman, who has rebelled passionately against David Cameron's line on grammar schools. Mr Brady was breaking every rule of party discipline. He was also, as it happens, completely in the right. So Mr Cameron has shown he means business. But he has upped the ante spectacularly and made Mr Brady the martyr of meritocracy. Who would say with any confidence now that the war of the grammar schools is over?

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An American Tragedy

It's Memorial Day in the United States today, the official beginning of summer. Fierce Americans mark the day by beating their war drums; gentle Americans by beating their breasts. The newspapers, as usual, are full of improving homilies and exhortations. But this year there is something different, something inspiring and humbling. In the Washington Post the anti-war conservative Andrew J. Bacevich has marked Memorial Day with a tribute to his son, who died earlier this month in Iraq. Bacevich teaches history and international relations at Boston University and is the author, most recently, of The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War.

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Where does Brown stand on FOI?

The media section of today’s Guardian has a very telling piece on how the PM in waiting’s closest allies are at the heart of various efforts to dampen down the effects of freedom of information act. Yet, at the Hay on Wye festival Brown promised that the bill to exempt MPs from Freedom of Information legislation “will be corrected.” It’ll be interesting to see if this shift in attitude extends to the spirit of the legislation as well as the letter of it or whether it is a purely cosmetic response to popular outrage.

Sunday

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Not going quietly

Tony Blair’s piece in the Sunday Times echoes some familiar themes of his. But the language seems blunter than usual, perhaps because it is not broken up by the Prime Minister’s verbal mannerisms. He pronounces that, “We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first.I happen to believe this is misguided and wrong.” Yet it is when he gets on to the question of Muslim grievances and terrorism that he really lets rip:“tell me exactly what they feel angry about. We remove two utterly brutal and dictatorial regimes; we replace them with a United Nations-supervised democratic process and the Muslims in both countries get the chance to vote, which incidentally they take in very large numbers.

Saturday

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Letters to the Editor | 26 May 2007

From our US edition

Is it right to aspire? Sir: According to your leading article, ‘The Tory party is a party of aspiration or it is nothing’ (19 May). If this means that the Tory party is a party in the interest primarily of that ambitious minority which wants to rise in the world, then I should like to disagree, if only because the great majority of the nation, thank God, are not social climbers. By which I do not mean that the great majority of the nation do not have aspirations — to lead good and decent lives, for example — only that they do not necessarily have aspirations to join the rat race, believing that they can lead good and decent lives quite satisfactorily on the level of society into which they were born.

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Why Gordon will go soft

This review of Gordon Brown’s book on Courage from Blair’s pollster Philip Gould is absolutely fascinating. This is his take on Brown’s chapter on Bobby Kennedy’s career: “its fascination for Brown, is Kennedy's metamorphosis from "hard" to "soft" courage in the course of his later life, moving from tough-guy enforcer to open, empowering and empathetic politician. Brown sees Kennedy as a prototypical New Labour politician rejecting old left bureaucratic, top-down welfare solutions to poverty in favour of empowerment, the dignity of work and the potential of education. But it is clear Brown also sees Kennedy as a model of how it is possible to be renewed as a person and as a politician.

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Don’t cede ground to the far right

It's Saturday afternoon, and I can't quite shake the chill that came over me when watching Friday's Newsnight. They were still on how Margaret Hodge suggested giving Brits priority over immigrants for council houses. They had Keith Vaz MP attacking her - and for the defence, Nick Griffin, head of the BNP, debating like a presidential candidate. I’ve never seen him before being interviewed as a serious commentator on an issue of national debate: it represented a new, ominous level of respectability. He was there because no Westminster party is willing to back Ms Hodge. Proof that a vast tract of political territory has been ceded to the far-right. The same Newsnight interviewed a bunch of Labour-voting, elderly ramblers and asked what concerned them.

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Punk, it’s over

When I became Editor of the Spec, I mentioned to one interviewer that “Pretty Vacant” by the Sex Pistols was my favourite pop record. This, most entertainingly, was declared by some in the blogosphere to mark, definitively, the death of punk. Last night’s Ten O’Clock News included an item on punk’s 30th anniversary, including an interview with a very cuddly Johnny Rotten looking back on the mayhem he caused in the late Seventies with wry amusement. These days, he’s a prosperous property developer and quite likes the Queen. Fiona Bruce’s indulgent smile at the end of the item said it all: if there was any life left in punk, Fiona finished it off with her trademark arched eyebrow.

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Delusions of grandeur

Here is what Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, told a Fabian Society and Progress debate for the Labour deputy leadership contenders on 16 May: ‘For our party audience, if you said, yes, we will ban those grammar schools where they exist at the moment, it would get a round of applause. The reason why the [Labour] National Policy Forum who discussed this at length have not gone to that step is quite simple: we would lose Gloucester, we would lose Slough. The people who are telling us that are MPs in those areas who fiercely oppose selective education, so this is the real cardinal point, if we want to carry out our policies, we have to be in power, and we have to be aware in deciding our policies what that will do for our chances of being elected to government. Realpolitik.

Friday