Does no one blame Gary Speed? Then we’ve found our humanity

The football manager Gary Speed was 42 when he killed himself last week, leaving behind a widow and two children. My father was 43 when he killed himself many years ago, leaving behind a widow, three children under five and one soon to be born.

Apart from that, the two men could hardly have been more different. My father was an eye surgeon and an American living in 1950s California. Speed was a Welshman living in contemporary Britain and one of football’s lesser gods. Yet there is a terrible, incomprehensible similarity between them.

What haunts Speed’s family and friends and his countless fans, and what torments anyone trying to come to terms with a suicide, is always the question why. In Speed’s case it is particularly hard to imagine why he became so desperate. Those close to him say he’d never been depressed and had seemed as cheerful and normal as ever only hours before his death. And it is obvious that he had, apparently, everything to live for: a lovely wife and children, great talent, huge success, wonderful prospects and many friends.

My father’s case is equally difficult for me to understand, although for an entirely different reason. No one talked about it at the time and no one talked about it later. His suicide in America was kept secret when our English mother came back to Britain. It wasn’t until I was 17 that I discovered by accident from a French girl in Paris that there was something wrong about his death. How I discovered shows exactly why in those days people close to suicide didn’t talk about it.

My French friend knew some of my mother’s acquaintances in England, so she must at some point have learnt from local gossip in this country something I knew nothing about. After spending the night in her family’s flat in Paris, en route to a gap-year destination, I asked her if her parents, who were strict Roman Catholics, would allow me to stay for an extra night. She asked them and they said they would: they didn’t hold my father’s death against me. After all, I was not to blame, my friend assured me.

Furtiveness and shame make things worse, at least for the victims of a suicide who can have had nothing to do with it: the young children At first I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. She explained it was because of my father’s suicide, a new idea to me. And although her parents believed suicide was a terrible crime against the Holy Spirit and a mortal sin, they were inclined to consider me innocent and only slightly tainted by it. That was in 1967. The next year saw the évènements of 1968 in Paris, but things were clearly still rather medieval in that part of the Faubourg St-Honoré.

This attitude, I soon learnt, was only an exaggerated form of what most people felt, religious or not. Suicide was a disgrace, something unmentionable and something that would reflect badly on the family and children: mental illness was something to avoid and deny.

My mother certainly felt that and so do other members of my family, even now. For a long time they were probably right, I think, much though I resented their attitude. After all, suicide was still a criminal offence in this country until 1961, which was several years after my father’s death. The living victims of suicide were driven for generations into a furtive, uncomprehending solitude of guilt and shame, even into the late 20th century.

Once I had learnt that my father had killed himself, I began as anyone would to question what had brought him to do something so terrible — something so extremely brave, lonely, desperate and unforgivable. To abandon a wife and small children, causing the last one to be born very prematurely, and leaving a legacy of elaborate damage over many decades, is something that takes a bit of explaining: any would-be suicide, however desperate, must be able to foresee such things.

There seemed to be no answer. The evidence I got bit by bit over many years from people who didn’t want to talk about it did not add up. His own sister, to whom I spoke in her old age, had a romantic notion of self-sacrifice in the face of a brain tumour, but that was nonsense. He had, apparently, been depressed at various times but I found it increasingly difficult to rely on anything anyone said. My (now late) mother could barely speak of it and after a while it seemed wrong to question her.

So I shall never understand, and perhaps it is better that way. The truth is occasionally harder to bear than uncertainty. What I do know is that furtiveness and shame make things worse, at least for the victims of a suicide who can have had nothing to do with it: the young children. The adults around a suicide may have played a part in some way, but that cannot be said of the children.

It is sad to live for many, many years with such unanswered and unmentionable questions and, despite my determination not to accept it, with a vague sense of taint. Luckily my mother brought back to Britain many of my father’s medical books and several of them were about psychiatry and psychoanalysis. So from an early age I had some awareness of the mysteriousness of the mind and the many forms of mental disorder.

Later I began to read other books and gradually learnt to understand and to forgive my unhappy father, in general if not in particular. I began to realise how totally overwhelming some periods of mental illness can be and how wrong it is to hold someone responsible for what he may do when out of his right mind.

I also began to understand this from personal experience: depression (a bad term) is now called bipolar or mood disorder (also bad terms) and it is strongly heritable. I’ve always felt lucky I’ve been only touched by it and never struck down; I’m glad, too, that it has forced me to learn true sympathy for people in the grip of a mental illness, as well as for their families.

To come back from all this to the tragic death last week of a hero of our time, I feel overwhelmingly glad that attitudes to suicide have changed out of all recognition in my adult life. Speed’s relations have felt able to be very open about his death, knowing that so far from facing disapproval and incomprehension, they can rely instead on the sympathy of all his countless friends and admirers and even — astonishingly enough — the support of the media.

What’s entirely missing, quite rightly, is any hint anywhere in the media of the old sense of shame and blame. In that sense my father’s case is entirely different from Speed’s and his children’s case from my father’s children’s. In these dark times that is a blessing worth counting.

Bolt the door, granny, before they grab your spare room

What a drag it is getting old, as the Rolling Stones sang long ago. Getting old in Britain today means fear for most people — fear of terrible treatment in hospitals and care homes, fear of rising bills, fear of having pensions driven down by high charges and fear of seeing any savings eroded by inflation and negligible interest rates. Old people are openly described as bed-blockers, a growing public nuisance.

Now, as of last Wednesday, the elderly are being described as “bedroom-blockers” in their own homes. They are “house-hoarders”, practically spivs.

These nasty ideas were put forward last week by an obscure leftie charity called the Intergenerational Foundation, which launched a report in the House of Commons, sponsored by Tessa Jowell. It argued that people in their sixties whose children have left home are taking up too much room: their children’s empty bedrooms (and their own) ought to be freed up for young families. These sad old bedroom-blockers should be “nudged” or taxed into “downsizing” to something much smaller and more suitable to their advanced years.

Incredible though it sounds, people over 60 now stand directly accused of wasting space in the houses they own. Wasting space. It doesn’t seem much of a leap of the fearful imagination from wasting space to being a waste of space. The message is getting clearer: as King Lear said bitterly, age is unnecessary. His daughters wanted to make him downsize, too. They bullied him to cut back his retinue of knights and servants to almost nothing. “What need one?” says the heartless Regan. “O, reason not the need!” cries out Lear.

I was reminded of Regan by Jowell last week, but in fact she has been misrepresented in the media. She did not fully endorse the report; nor does she think pressure should be put on old people to leave their homes, although she does welcome debate about housing. All the same, the viperish spirit of Regan and Goneril is evident in the Intergenerational Foundation. Who is it — or anyone — to tell homeowners what they “need” and to suggest that by “clinging” to their homes they are contributing selfishly to the housing crisis and causing profound social problems?

The Intergenerational Foundation exists supposedly to “promote fairness between generations” but it looks to me as though it is, willy-nilly, promoting resentment between the generations in an egalitarian and punishing spirit. One can almost hear the rattle of far-off tumbrils. I was reminded, too, of Omar Sharif in the film of Dr Zhivago, coming back to his huge house after the Russian revolution to find it had been filled with strangers, by government order: he was then forced by an official to pretend that he was delighted. Several commentators have suggested that this country is now in a pre-revolutionary mood, given the anger and fear so widely felt about the likelihood of a double-dip recession. Certainly the generation wars seem to be gathering force.

Perhaps even the most modest of elderly homeowners will find they are now enemies of the peopleEveryone agrees it is frighteningly difficult for young people to find somewhere affordable to live. Rents have rocketed and buying a property is becoming impossible for most young people. Bedroom-blockers are all too aware of it — these young people are their sons and daughters and grandchildren. But it is not the fault of the over–60s. It is just as hateful to blame older people for the housing crisis as it is to blame them for getting old. They are innocent: they didn’t wish for it either. They did not cause the property crisis and the shocking rise in house rental prices. It was caused by stupid and irresponsible government policies over many decades. Now it seems that baby boomers are to be monstered and punished for crimes they did not commit.

Of the many explanations for the housing crisis, the most obvious is the criminal failure of many succeeding governments to build houses, particularly affordable family houses and flats. Shortage breeds high prices. Less often mentioned is the disgraceful failure of the Labour government (and earlier governments) to control immigration, so that several million more people need housing than in 1997.

Another explanation is the willingness over many years of local authorities to give young people subsidised single-person accommodation, particularly single mothers, thus hugely inflating demand. Yet another has been the general failure to sell valuable social housing in prime locations to create much more social housing elsewhere. All this — along with other bad policies and incompetent government — has put extreme pressure on ordinary young families with jobs and children. The answer, however, is not to be mean to granny and grandpa.

An Englishman’s home … or rather, since clichés must move with the times, a British person’s home has traditionally been his or her castle: when the drawbridge is up, the occupants are supposedly free from the attentions of nosy parkers and interventionists. But it hasn’t been so for years. Few of us perhaps know that since 2003 there has been a government “bedroom standard”. Under its calculations a dwelling is deemed officially underoccupied if it has at least two bedrooms more than it “requires”. This would mean there are about 18m “surplus” bedrooms here at the moment.

How the blood pressure rises. It may be necessary to make such measurements in public or subsidised housing, but to suggest that arbitrary notions of “requirement” and “surplus” should be applied by anyone — least of all government — to privately owned houses and flats strikes me as apparatchik speak of the more aggressively socialist sort.

Those surplus rooms may be used for all kinds of good purposes, such as havens for friends and family. Even if they are used for bad purposes — meetings of hellfire clubs or groups devoted to sticking pins into Gordon Brown — it is an outrage for the government or any freedom-loving analyst to suggest it is anyone else’s business why anyone wants “surplus” rooms or what they use them for.

Nor is it any of their business what prudent financial reasons older people may have for “clinging” on to their family homes, such as hedging against an uncertain future. Government and sensible theorists should turn their attention instead to providing lots of new housing and thus bringing prices down fast at the same time.

Hard times make for hard feelings. Perhaps the noise of the tumbrils really is getting louder and even the most modest of elderly homeowners will find they are enemies of the people. What a drag it is growing old.

Brown betrays us all to deliver his Diana moment

The trouble with selling your soul is that you get so little for it. Gordon Brown may be about to discover this. The prime minister will be baring his soul on television tonight and — so close to a general election — talking tearfully about the death of his baby daughter and the disability of his younger son. This cannot amount to anything other than selling his soul. Of course, many politicians do it. Politics can be a dirty trade and shroud-waving and chasing the sympathy vote are common enough.

The difference with Brown, and what makes this carefully orchestrated show of manly suffering and husbandly love so shameful, is that he is a man who has prided himself on his integrity. He has boasted of it. He has taken the trouble to inform us of his honesty, his discretion and his Christian convictions — in short, of his much-vaunted moral compass. Privacy and the sanctity of family life were non-negotiable, he claimed, and he has congratulated himself on this point in public.

No one asked him to be so buttoned up, so much the notorious “grumpy robot”. Other respectable politicians, such as David Cameron, have taken a more relaxed line about family privacy — but Brown insisted. In 2008 he announced, in his peculiar tone of dour sanctimony: “Some people have been asking why I haven’t served my children up for spreads in the papers. And my answer is simple. My children aren’t props; they’re people.” Oh dear. They’ve been well and truly served up now. And the disabled son may grow up to hear that his parents asked themselves: “Why, why, why, why us?”

Brown’s moral compass seems to have lost its bearings; instead of pointing true north, it now seems to be jittering in the direction of ravening ambition. I wonder how he will be able to live with it in time to come and whether he will think his honour well sold. A little upward blip in the opinion polls is not much, after all.

I do not doubt that Gordon and Sarah Brown are as grief-stricken as any of us would be at the loss of their daughter and the illness of their son. No one can fail to sympathise with them. That is not the point. The point is that the voters are being practised upon in a shameless way by a politician who, until now, has claimed to be morally above such stratagems.

Now, suddenly, Brown and his team — and, quite obviously, his wife as well — appear to believe they can “reintroduce” the man to the public after all these years in office. They are betting that arousing our sympathy, and allowing intrusive questions about how he proposed and whether he has joined the mile-high club, will make him seem human enough to vote for. And he is clearly prepared to abandon pride and principle in this last-ditch makeover. He and his team are prepared to dump “moral” — his former unique selling point — in favour of “vulnerable” and “authentic”. That means welling up with tears and sharing your most intimate moments on telly.

They are all at it now. It’s almost funny. Only days ago the steely Alastair Campbell astonished anyone interested by choking, apparently, over his powerful feelings about Tony Blair and the Iraq war in an interview with Andrew Marr. Campbell is back in Downing Street to try with his dark arts to turn Brown from frog to psephological prince: perhaps he was giving Brown a little demonstration of how “vulnerable” should be done on television in a brave, manly way.

Then Campbell appeared in another interview, defending Brown’s television performance tonight. As a defence it was not only shameless; it was oddly inept. Apart from a reference to the importance of “authenticity” in modern communications — the usual use of a word to mean its opposite — he avoided the central moral questions of whether the prime minister ought to be going on prime-time television at all, crying about a personal matter, or whether the public longs for more reticence.

Instead Campbell talked about the importance of getting politicians onto programmes such as the Piers Morgan show, about how Blair got lots of viewers when he appeared on the Des O’Connor show and about “presentational issues”. And he remarked: “I think the point is that ultimately you’re in an election year.” Indeed. With such defenders of his “authenticity”, Brown hardly needs detractors.

We have reached an extremely depressing low in contemporary politics. The prime minister is so desperate with ambition that he will sink to depths he despises to cling to power, even though he must know that most people are sick of him. His wife is unscrupulous enough to urge him and to help him to do so. His advisers, such as Campbell, are cynical enough to give it a go even though they know the chances of Gordon getting it right are not good, given his extraordinary lack of emotional intelligence.

At the same time, Campbell and the team despise the voters so heartily that they scarcely bother to disguise what they are doing. Morgan, who will be Brown’s television interviewer tonight, is a known Labour supporter and the interview was given to him to be certain of the best possible result. Campbell’s defence of Brown’s interview was, in its indifference or blindness to the intelligence of the viewer, worthy of Brown himself. He dared to speak of “authenticity”.

It is also depressing that we are getting a deliberate return to the emotional incontinence of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Blair — the constant exploitation of supposedly personal suffering for personal gain, a constant dramatic representation of authenticity, rather than the thing itself.

Diana’s rolling eyes, Tony’s trembling lips and Cherie’s swollen eyes were the most obvious signs of a widespread sentimentalisation of culture. For a while, in recent years, perhaps since the departure of Blair, none of that has seemed quite so excessive. But now it’s back, or at least the people around Brown are trying to bring it back. Make Gordon more like Tony.

The question is how far they will succeed and whether, if they do succeed, that will do Brown any good in the polls anyway. You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, and it must be admitted that it is not wise to overestimate the electorate. I wonder which way it will go. It is a depressing question but, whichever way it goes for the country, the results aren’t likely to amount to much for Gordon Brown.