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Bonfire of a presposterous man's vanities
Vanity is no respecter of persons. The deputy prime minister, when asked on radio only a couple of weeks ago which actor he would like to star as John Prescott in a film of his life, chose Marlon Brando. You have to laugh. The thought that jowly Two Jags harbours an idea of himself incarnate as one of the most beautiful men and most celebrated serious actors of the 20th century is just too good to be true. He went on to say in the same interview: “I like to come out walking like John Wayne.”
What a difference a few days make. Somehow I do not think that Prescott is going to come walking out of the lurid revelations of last week like John Wayne, that epitome of the strong, spare, quiet and righteous hero of western morality tales. On the contrary, Two Jags staggers out of last week’s news like a vain, fat stumblebum, a sexually incontinent slob, tolerated by his peers only for political advantage, as a token old-leftist. Perhaps that is a role that Brando might have wished to play; I rather doubt it. It lacks redeeming features, other than the loyalty of a tolerant wife.
However, it has been wonderful low comedy; I have howled with laughter at the photographs in the tabloids of Prescott’s clumsy canoodlings with a civil servant, the allegedly insatiable 43-year-old assistant private secretary, Tracey Temple. On Wednesday Prescott confessed to an affair with her, during which he had used his elegant official residences (Three Pads) for “trysts”, one of those words like “denizens” that only appear in the tabloids when they are tut-tutting. Then it emerged that Tracey had gone to that awesome scourge of the famous, Max Clifford, to sell her story.
The voyeurs among us have been able to feast our eyes on photographs of Prescott at an office Christmas party, employees and underlings around him, beaming at the camera and holding his mistress up in the air with one of her solid legs round his very solid neck, or of treacherous Tracey unbuttoning his shirt while he gazes squiffily at the camera, or of the pair of them apparently grappling each other to the ground. There were others, too, of the lovers publicly attending a national memorial service together, and of Tracey solemnly escorting Prezza’s wife to the opening of parliament.
Two Jags is the man, let’s not forget, who hurled stones of righteous anger at John Major’s government. “The most desperate, despicable, seedy, grubby, hopeless, lying, hideously incompetent bunch of third rate, double-dealing disasters this great nation has ever seen,” he raged in 1994, with most uncharacteristic articulacy. “For too many Tories, morality means not getting caught,” he intoned in 1996. “Morality is measured in more than just money. It’s about right and wrong. We are a party of principle . . . we’ve had enough lies, enough sleaze.” Oh dear.
However, hilarious this may be, I would normally feel obliged to say that it is a private matter. We shouldn’t really be reading about it. What people do in private should remain private. Privacy matters, not least for people in public life. This is the line the prime minister has taken. So has Gordon Brown. And the first response of the BBC, The Guardian and most Conservatives, was primly to underplay the story.
This was also the view the Cambridge Union came to last Thursday. I had been invited to defend the motion that “this house believes that those in the public eye deserve a private life”. Despite a little quibbling about the word “deserve”, since most of us were doubtful that politicians and footballers are necessarily very deserving, our side won comfortably. This was despite the fact that the obvious arguments for extreme freedom of the press were well put for the opposition by a photojournalist and an American investigative reporter.
One of the only good reasons, I believe, for violating a person’s privacy is that what he does in private might suggest that he is unfit for public office. If so, he loses his claims to privacy. Otherwise, what he or she does only concerns those most intimately involved; and we hardly need any squalid revelations about Prescott’s grace-and-favour rumpy-pumpy to know that he is unfit for his office — incompetent, incoherent and emotionally incontinent, a bluffing, blustering, bullying thug. We knew that anyway. This scandal demonstrates little that wasn’t public knowledge.
Adultery is so common among public people that it is almost normal. If extramarital sex were a disqualification, the numbers of people in public life would dwindle almost to nothing. Politicians, for some reason, seem to be rather oversexed.
Besides, it has never been clear to me that committing adultery is proof in itself that the adulterer is unfit for office, or indeed unfit for marriage. Jack Kennedy, idolised by millions, made Bill Clinton look like a homebody by comparison; JFK felt, apparently, that he needed sex three times a day, otherwise he got a headache. These are murky waters. People’s sex drive varies; people’s marriages and private compromises vary. For all I know, Mrs Prescott may have known about her husband’s goatish disposition and decided to put up with it.
However, there is something different about the question of Prescott’s privacy in this scandal: he violated it himself repeatedly. Thereby he lost any right to it. Prescott flaunted his mistress, publicly, in the most vulgar and intrusive way, in front of people over whom he had power, happily posing for photographs.
No discreet secret love nest for Prezza. He was showing off shamelessly and in the process he abused his staff and his civil servants, indifferent to their moral feelings and embarrassing them with his wife by making them complicit in his behaviour.
He abused the privileges of office by taking his mistress to his official residences and he abused the dignity of his office by behaving like a geriatric lout. It may be that in his entanglements with treacherous Tracey he has broken some civil service rules; but in any case, by his coarse disrespect for public propriety and public manners, and his total indifference to the boundaries between public and private, he has brought his office and his government into disrepute.
Prescott has forfeited any right to privacy and he has invited disgrace and dismissal — and all because he couldn’t help showing off. Vanity is no respecter of persons.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 30, 2006 | Comments (0)
Adultery is inevitable, but divorce is not
Marriage, as my ferocious mother-in-law always used to say, gazing balefully about her, is not a love affair. I always used to find that rather discouraging, especially when I was first married to her son. However, I do know what she meant. Marriage isn’t only a love affair, though ideally it begins with one.
Marriage is, most importantly, a social contract, the most important social contract there is in a civil society. I think it should be seen as a contract. No one should be allowed to break it with impunity. The odd thing is that people often do break up their marriages with impunity, without any sense of one party being more to blame than the other.
That sort of perverse moral equivalence seems to be a tendency of the time. There are always two sides to a story; one side is just as responsible as the other; it’s impossible to judge — those are the things people nearly always say when their friends separate. Fifty-fifty is the outward and visible sign in the law courts of this attitude. The number of divorces where the family wealth is split equally between husband and wife has been growing. The figure more than doubled between 2004 and 2005, when it applied to 63% of cases, according to a survey published by Grant Thornton, the chartered accountants.
That may be right in some cases, but it is clearly wrong in others. If a wife gets bored with her perfectly reasonable husband and runs away with her well-toned personal trainer, it is wrong that she should be able to take the family home, children, maintenance and pension rights with her, totalling at least 50% of what the poor man has. Similarly if a husband abandons his perfectly reasonable wife and family for the office vamp, his spouse ought not to be the one that suffers more, financially; he should. If marriage is not a love affair, falling in love with someone else is not a good enough reason to end it without impunity. Nor is being bored.
This all might sound harsh. Of course I understand that life is complex, especially married life. All the same I have come across many cases of clear injustice when someone is not only abandoned, but impoverished, in someone else’s unreliable pursuit of happiness.
So I felt, I admit, a sneaking pleasure in a headline last week that said adulterers may pay the price for their marriage break-up. Why not, I thought. Bring back blame. Since marriage is a contract, blame can usually best be expressed contractually, ie, financially.
By that I don’t mean adulterers should necessarily be named, shamed and blamed. On the contrary, I am a bit of an apologist for adultery. It seems largely inevitable for many people. What I am against is divorce. People who break up their marriages simply because one person has fallen in love with someone else should usually accept the greater share of blame.
This may now be about to happen. It will all depend on the determination in the House of Lords in a few weeks’ time on the appeal of Alan Miller. Miller is a very rich fund manager, worth anything up to £20m. He had been married for less than three years to Melissa when he decided to opt out and upon divorce he was ordered to pay her about £5m, which strikes him and probably quite a few other people as a bit much.
This would be of little interest, except that when Miller went to the Court of Appeal to overturn the settlement, Lord Justice Thorpe commented, in upholding it, that responsibility must be ascribed in part to the husband’s decision to end the marriage, and he was partly to blame for the end of the relationship. In other words conduct matters, even in a very brief, childless marriage.
If, in a few weeks, the law lords also reject Miller’s appeal, they too will in effect be saying that conduct matters in divorce settlement. They will be sending out the message that judges should take into account both parties’ behaviour during the marriage. Errant husbands and errant wives should be punished for their misdemeanours in the courts. This could make very big waves indeed in the murky backwaters of divorce. As Andrea McLaren, a divorce specialist at Grant Thornton, said last week: “Out of all the reasons for divorce, in theory at least half of them could be highlighted as serious conduct flaws within a marriage, potentially making the divorces of the future far more contested than they are today.”
That sounds like more argument, more pain, more lying and concealment and more private detectives. However, 96% of the lawyers in the Grant Thornton survey believe that conduct should not be taken to account in financial settlements. There is always a great temptation to take the opposite view from the lawyers. Conduct does matter. Circumstances do matter. Justice, like the devil, lies in the details.
There is a rather weaselly counter argument, that bringing back blame in divorce would only make marriage even less popular than it is already. Fewer and fewer people would take up the chains of marriage.
That is a fair point, but there is another weaselly counter argument. Many people who are in effect married, but have avoided a marriage certificate, are now claiming the privileges of marriage, and have been gradually getting them in law, so that there will soon come a point when there is effectively no difference between marriage and cohabitation. I have always thought that approach daft; if you want the legal and financial privileges of marriage why not visit the register office and sign the form? But now that the two states are almost the same, the same sanctions and protections could apply to separation as to divorce, as some already do; you will not be able to abuse and abandon someone with impunity just because you didn’t sign a bit of paper.
I often wonder now, looking back, what my mother-in-law would have said if I had dared to ask her what marriage is, as opposed to what it’s not. My father-in-law, who was fond of quoting Milton, might have said “durance vile”, except that he was too discreet. What strikes me now is that people still don’t really talk about it. They talk ceaselessly about relationships and fulfilment and parenting but they don’t actually say much about the wider meaning, demands and necessary conventions of marriage or of partnership. As my mother-in-law said, it certainly isn’t just a love affair.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 23, 2006 | Comments (0)
Forgiveness is an inhuman quality
‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.” In the most important prayer in Christendom, the Lord’s Prayer, there are only seven requests and that is one of them. Forgiveness is central to Christianity (it is important in other faiths, too). Christians are taught that Christ sacrificed himself on the cross on Good Friday so that they might be forgiven for their sins and that they in turn, in the imitation of Christ, must forgive others. I was taught this myself as a child and I always found it incomprehensible.
I could imagine, just about, that God in his mysterious way, if he existed, could forgive whatever he chose, but I could not understand the meaning of human forgiveness, at least not in extreme cases. Forgiveness may be divine but I don’t think it is human. To me it seems either pointless or meaningless.
Holy Week is a time when traditionally the Christian world, and even heathen Anglicans like me, reflect on forgiveness. But it has been a bad week for it this year. The trial of terrorist conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui in Virginia has reminded everyone of the deliberate, orchestrated atrocities of September 11, 2001; the recording of the last minutes of the victims of flight 93 was played in court last week and must have sickened anyone who heard it or read the transcripts.
Equally disturbing is Moussaoui’s cold, contemptuous lack of remorse. “We want to inflict pain on your country,” he told the American court. “You are the head of the snake for me. If we want to destroy the Jewish state of Palestine, we have to destroy you first.” What can forgiveness mean here?
A member of one of the bereaved American families was interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme and tried valiantly not to express his personal feelings about what should happen to Moussaoui, but in the end he could not restrain himself. He admitted that he would love to have some time alone in a room with Moussaoui; forgiveness was not apparently foremost in his mind.
Also last week an English woman vicar, whose daughter Jenny was killed in the London massacres of July 7 last year, spoke about her inability to forgive her child’s murderers. In fact, the Rev Julie Nicholson recently relinquished her parish duties in Bristol because she cannot reconcile her feelings with central Christian teachings on forgiveness. She cannot forgive the killers, nor does she want to.
She spoke of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan says, “I do not want the mother to embrace the torturer who tore her son to pieces with dogs! Let her not dare to forgive him! If she wants, she may forgive him on her account . . . for her limitless maternal suffering; but as for the suffering of her dismembered child, those she has no right to forgive, she dare not forgive his torturer, even if her child himself forgave him.” There are some acts, Julie Nicholson said, “which are humanly unforgivable, and rightly so”. I feel the same.
If someone dashed my baby’s brains against the wall, laughing, or cut my children’s arms off, I would think my forgiveness completely irrelevant. I might come to understand why it happened, I might come to terms with it somehow, I might put aside any feelings of vengeance. But either the wrongdoers could not really help what they were doing — they were themselves the victims of terror, superstition, abuse or madness and were not fully responsible for their actions — or else they were fully responsible and did it anyway. Forgiveness doesn’t seem to me to apply.
If somebody is not fully responsible for his actions, then by definition he is not fully answerable for what he does. And then also by definition he can never truly be either blamed or forgiven. That’s why in English law there is an idea of diminished responsibility, usually because of mental illness. In such cases the wrongdoer pleads not guilty, though admitting his actions; it follows that if he is not “guilty”, he can hardly be forgiven. You might as well forgive a cat for idly tormenting a bird. As Jesus said at his crucifixion, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” Presumably, though no doubt theologians will disagree, this means that if they had known what they were doing Jesus would not have prayed for them to be forgiven.
There is a curious quirk in contemporary thinking about such things, with people supposed to have personality disorders. They are more likely than others to do things which are mad or bad or dangerous, but they are not considered mad because they are not considered treatable. Many, many people in prison fall into this category and they are at high risk of committing serious crimes.
He does what he does, tragically, because of the way he is. And that, equally tragically, is true of the rest of us to some degree. In western culture we start from a belief that we are all equally morally responsible, but while that might be a noble and useful idea it is not, unfortunately, true. We are not. It’s obvious from looking no further than one’s own extended family that some people are pretty much in the driving seat of their lives; others much less so and some hardly at all.
We are all formed by complex interactions of nature and nurture, which science is only barely beginning to understand; our aptitudes are inherited, our infant brains are rewired by our experiences, particularly traumatic ones, our behaviour is moulded by culture and habit, good and bad. This view is often ridiculed as crude determinism, but I think it is neither crude nor easy to refute.
Forgiveness has always been seen in our culture as a most noble, generous-hearted virtue and I don’t underestimate the courage and magnanimity of those who are able to forgive others for terrible wrongs. And I can understand forgiveness as a social construct; personal vengeance and vendetta cannot be allowed in a civilised society and forgiveness has no doubt developed as an antidote to the toxins of revenge.
But withholding forgiveness is not necessarily the same as demanding revenge. I do not think Moussaoui should be mistreated or executed, because I think both are wrong and bad for the executioners. But I do not think it is for me or for anyone else on earth to forgive him.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 16, 2006 | Comments (1)
Up on a charge for being a typical child
There can be no point whatsoever in taking a little boy to court for calling another little boy names in the playground. It is insane. That ought to be glaringly obvious. Unfortunately it isn’t. Last week a 10-year-old boy found himself before a district court judge in Salford being prosecuted for allegedly calling an 11-year-old “Paki”, “Bin Laden” and “nigger”.
This was considered by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to be “a racially aggravated public order offence”. The boy denied the charge and claimed that the other boy had called him “white trash”. In any event, the boys are good friends now and play in each other’s houses, and the whole thing would have blown over long ago had not the forces of political correctness overcome common sense.
Fortunately there was one person in this astonishing story who did retain his common sense. Judge Jonathon Finestein angrily made the obvious point that this case was “political correctness gone mad”. He urged the CPS to reconsider its decision to prosecute and has adjourned the case until mid-April so that it can do so.
“This is how stupid the whole system is getting,” he remarked. “I was repeatedly called fat at school. Does this amount to a criminal offence? It’s crazy.”
In the past, he said, a head teacher would have dealt with this. “There are major crimes out there,” he continued, “and the police don’t bother to prosecute. If you get your car stolen it doesn’t matter, but you get two kids falling out over racist comments — this is nonsense.” This is so clearly true — given police failures to deal with much more serious crime — that you might have thought there was nothing more to say, other than bravo to Judge Finestein. But not so.
Almost immediately, teaching unions rose up to denounce him. Judith Elderkin, a member of the national executive of the National Union of Teachers, said she thought he was “a bit out of date on the way issues are handled in schools”. Schools have to report any racist abuse, she explained. “They don’t have any choice. It’s a legal requirement. The judge needs telling that it’s no longer within the control of the school to handle incidents of racial bullying. The CPS is abiding by guidelines.”
Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, spoke even more alarmingly. She accused Finestein of feeding “the pernicious agenda of the far right, who are fielding candidates in many local elections”. Presumably, she meant his comments could help parties such as the BNP in next month’s council elections. She accused him of trivialising racist taunts and abuse.
We have become so used to public officials talking irresponsible nonsense that we are suffering from shock fatigue. But this is truly shocking. The judge did not trivialise racist insults; he went out of his way not to do so. He merely said they should be dealt with in school, in the case of young children, not in court. This onslaught must have been particularly irritating for him, as he is Jewish.
If this kind of sanctimonious silliness exists at the top of the teachers’ unions, what hope is there for education in this country? In this one case is demonstrated the institutionalised folly of most of Britain’s public bodies and the law on such matters. Greater Manchester police, for instance, have nothing more useful to say about this ridiculous case than that the force takes all crimes seriously and is totally opposed to any racism.
Of course racism is bad. Of course schoolchildren should be punished for insulting each other, racially or otherwise. In my youth, rather as in the judge’s, this kind of behaviour was severely dealt with at once in the school. When I was about nine, I had my mouth washed out with soap and water — a surprisingly nasty ordeal — by the headmistress for insulting another girl unforgivably, even though she had insulted me first, almost as nastily. Despite its injustice, it was a good lesson.
Today teachers and head teachers have no such authority; either they have let it go or it has been taken from them. “It’s no longer within the control of the school”, as Elderkin so chillingly said last week. That is one of the many things wrong with schools.
All this new Labour talk of localisation and empowerment for schools is simply hot air. Head teachers cannot usually rely on the law to protect them from children who do really very bad things, such as attacking others or taking or dealing in drugs. It’s almost impossible even to exclude them. Countless destructive children in every city get away, unprosecuted and unsupervised, despite committing many serious crimes — mugging younger children, “steaming” in shops, joyriding and vandalising.
Probation for convicted young criminals is in crisis. Yet when a young child makes a racist remark, the full weight of the criminal justice system descends upon him, defended by the teaching unions. This is a double standard of the worst kind.
The only good news in this sorry story is that the Muslim Council of Britain has taken a wise and adult line, sensitive though Muslims are to racism. It has supported the judge in his comments. “I would not criticise,” said Tahir Alam, chairman of the council’s education committee and a teacher himself. “We need to be sensible in relation to 10-year-old children. It does not seem eminently sensible, therefore, for this to go to court . . . The issue of racism is of course very serious but we should educate them, not take them to court.”
No doubt the CPS and the police, like the school, were abiding by anti-racism guidelines. What that means is that their discretion, their ability to judge individual cases with as much common sense as they can muster, has been taken away from them. What’s more, their common sense and adult discretion have been undermined by the regulations and culture of anti-racism.
Racism is, of course, a real evil but the current guilt-ridden obsession with it, so clearly expressed in this case, only serves to inflame it and actually to further the cause of racist politics — the reverse of what the politically correct protagonists intended. This entire episode has a faint whiff of the Soviet show trials or the Salem witch-hunts about it, a kind of public hysteria. Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 09, 2006 | Comments (1)
You care for the old: the taxman doesn’t
Elder abuse is a clumsy American expression meaning hurting old people, physically and emotionally. It is chilling to think this is so common that people in the social care business need a snappy name for it. It’s also chilling to think that political correctness has made such a ridiculous effort to avoid the dread word “old”, as if it were a kind of obscenity. “Elder” indeed.
This past week has dispelled any fading doubts I might have had that wilfully abusing old people was common. We seem to have moved quickly from a society where ties between generations were strong to a culture of institutionalised elder abuse.
Last Monday the Healthcare Commission, the Audit Commission and the Commission for Social Care Inspection jointly published a report that said old people were being failed by the NHS and other public services, which were riddled with “ageism” — another nasty new word for a real evil.
According to this report, old people are subject to “patronising and thoughtless attitudes” from some doctors and carers. In hospital they are moved from one place to another, their meals are whisked away uneaten for lack of help, and despite the government’s promise of long ago to end mixed sex wards, old men and women are thrown in together to suffer indignity and shame as well as all their other problems. The care they receive after leaving hospital is erratic and inadequate.
One hardly needs a report to be convinced of that. It is pretty much what happened to my mother, not long before her death. It is what all too often is done to old people.
Two days after this depressing survey, another even more depressing report emerged. The King’s Fund published a review of England’s social care by Sir Derek Wanless. This demonstrates clearly what most people know: social care for old people in England, like healthcare, is miserably patchy, often miserable and often unavailable. Wanless said the system of means-tested personal care is a postcode lottery causing “anger and distress” to millions of old people. Home help goes only to the most needy; many who need just a little help in the home get no assistance from social services and many of those who qualify for services cannot afford the charges. The quality of these is variable and sometimes “unacceptably low”.
In an injustice that is bitterly resented, people with savings or homes worth more than £20,500 have to use them to pay for residential care, which — by contrast — is free for anyone with no assets. It does not pay to be prudent. Saving has become senseless. And Wanless finds that some social services departments force old people who don’t need residential care to go into homes so the council can seize the value of their property. About 70,000 people a year have to sell their houses and go into an old people’s home.
In short the system is “unsatisfactory”, with “serious shortcomings” and prevents old people from “thriving”. But we knew this too. I cannot count the readers’ letters I’ve had on such matters over the past 15 years. The real question is why everyone has tolerated this elder abuse for so long.
The answer is money: everyone senses how expensive proper care for the old would be. Wanless makes many worthy recommendations; he sets out a new system to help people live independently for as long as possible, and which avoids means testing. Every old person who needs help would get a generous personal care package, and the state would pay five-sixths of it. The elderly person would pay the rest, unless unable to do so — only then would means testing be used. This sounds wonderful, utopian and impossibly expensive.
The present inadequate deal costs £10 billion a year and the proportion of old and very old people is growing fast. The number of old people with high social care needs will increase by more than half by 2026. Wanless suggests that the sum should triple to £30 billion a year by then. But even such a huge increase does not seem likely to be nearly enough to meet the real need.
Personal care is eked out in hours — a visit here and there, once or twice a day. Each hour costs the council, in real terms, anywhere between £10 and £20, including administration, travel and high agency fees. But what a frail old lady needs is not just a rushed 45 minutes bathing and dressing. She needs company, attention, amusement — and increasingly the old and very old live alone. She needs someone around.
Traditionally families provided this and millions still do. This represents a huge saving to the taxpayer, yet such a carer’s allowance is only £45.70 a week. That is for 35 hours of caring, and can easily be cut off under complex rules and regulations. It will be stopped, for instance, if the carer earns more than £82 per week, or if he or she receives a state pension worth more than that. Without getting into the complexity of the carer premium, compare £45.70 for a 35-hour week of personal care from a family member or friend, with £48 for only four hours per week of professional personal care from social services, in a typical case reported last week. Startling isn’t it? It almost amounts to carer abuse.
Under the Wanless suggestions old people would get much more paid professional care and it would be heavily subsidised. But the point still stands out. It is hugely cheaper, and no doubt usually much better, if family carers look after old people. But the disincentives are extreme.
First there’s the opportunity cost. Caring means forgoing a job (above £82 per week), and so probably being unable to contribute to a mortgage or to save for old age — a nasty irony. Then there is tax. It seems both unjust and stupid to tax people who care for the sick and disabled as heavily as those who don’t. They are saving public money at the cost of their own financial security, yet they get no tax breaks for doing so.
Abolishing inheritance tax on legacies to family carers would be an obvious start; in that way the family home would indeed pay for the care of the old, within the family. Giving long tax holidays to family carers would be another sensible move. So would paying cash to those carers for whom a tax holiday would be insignificant. Tax relief would help foster family responsibility, but the current financial incentives are to neglect the old, consigning them to abuse.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 02, 2006 | Comments (1)
