British Politics

Quiet on here today

 

Hahaha!!! Bonehead chosen as Operation Mop Up's mouthpiece, Bad choice.

 

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Blame Christopher Hitchens for growth of the online rant

Ten years after his death the polemical journalist’s lasting legacy is a hate-filled style of debate
James Marriott

Wednesday December 08 2021, 9.00pm, The Times
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The remarkably unsubtle debating style of the late journalist Christopher Hitchens does not need to be seen to be understood. It can be inferred from the titles of the videos his fans have uploaded to YouTube: “Hitchens Owns Fascist Crackpot”, “Hitchens Slams Mother Theresa”, “Christopher Hitchens Ripping Islam Apart”. And so on.

Many of these videos have been viewed millions of times. I recall that “Hitchens Owns Fascist Crackpot” was particularly treasured by my university contemporaries for the commanding tone in which Hitchens chants the phrase “Fascist crackpot! Fascist crackpot!” at an audience member who is attempting to ask him a question — an almost virtuosically antagonistic performance that was regarded by a certain sort of politics-obsessive with the kind of awe other people reserve for inspired jazz solos.

At that time the casual denunciation of one’s antagonists as fascists was still an eccentric rhetorical strategy. Indeed, Hitchens, with his glowering pudding of a face and air of dissipated patrician righteousness, was an eccentric, even old-fashioned candidate for internet celebrity. But it is a celebrity that has lasted. The tenth anniversary of his death falls next week and, strangely for a journalist, he is remembered. New YouTube videos are uploaded almost weekly (Hitchens demolishes . . . Hitchens annihilates . . . Hitchens vaporises . . .) and his publisher has recently reissued no fewer than 12 of his books.

At a distance of ten years, it seems clear to me that he was not an old-fashioned figure but a futuristic one. His career and personal style were prophetic of the present collapse of intelligent public discourse. For Hitchens stood between two worlds: the old world in which serious political and cultural debate was conducted at length and in print, and our new world in which it is conducted glibly and furiously on screens.

Hitchens was perhaps the only “serious” journalist of his generation to successfully clamber from the old world to the new. And certainly the first to contrive, through the famously anarchic performances on American cable TV, to lower himself to the standard of the shock jocks and televangelists whose outraged style would soon become ubiquitous on social media.

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Once, a reputation as a public intellectual rested on the production of books and essays. Today it is just as likely to be built online, on Twitter and YouTube. Hitchens, a culturally transitional figure, worked in the analogue and digital worlds. In my opinion, the analogue stuff is overvalued. To be enjoyed, Hitchens’s prose must be read in his voice. If you lose the drawling Hitchens cadences, the windy orotundities and vacuous meanderings become harder to tolerate. The essays on literature especially are reminiscent of a fluent but badly briefed government minister trying to talk down the clock.

Almost all journalism of this kind — opinionated, essayistic — is to some degree a confidence trick. The writer must stage a performance of cleverness to convince readers. Hitchens at his worst is all trick and no substance. A magician so charming and talkative you never notice he has failed to produce the promised white rabbit from his hat. This hardly mattered, because what he did far more successfully was to build a brand that encompassed, just as a modern publicist would advise, multiple “platforms”: books, essays, radio, online video, TV.

The central feature of the Hitchens brand was the succession of pointless moral crusades, which he had an unusual genius for manufacturing. Most prominent among them was his bizarrely infuriated campaign against religion which, according to the intemperate subtitle of his polemic God is Not Great, “poisons everything”. At the time that book was published, religion was steeply declining in the West and had become an issue on which most of Hitchens’s educated readers were already in bland agreement. The war on God was an empty cause and Hitchens went into battle under the banner of his career.

Such empty causes proliferate more freely than ever on social media, where journalists and politicians have become used to embracing whatever positions, controversial or crowd-pleasing, will help them to public prominence. Many of them have also adopted Hitchens’s hair-trigger readiness to escalate the terms of a debate by introducing words like “fascist”. Reductio ad Hitler is the most ubiquitous rhetorical strategy on the internet.



His much celebrated habit of “destroying”, “owning” and “slamming” the witless audience members who dared to ask questions, such as the importunate crackpot mentioned above (who in fairness to Hitchens seems to have been a deranged conspiracy theorist), was a real-world precursor of the tedious social media tactic of ostentatiously denouncing one’s most crazed anonymous trolls to appear an intelligent and righteous hero standing nobly against the swarming armies of the stupid and deranged. It’s amusing, even exhilarating to watch but it does not constitute serious debate.

Hitchens, it should be said, had no reason to guess in quite what dark directions all of this was tending. It’s also pointless to deny that he was one of the most charismatic speakers of his age, and the author of some good essays (nobody should miss his account of being waterboarded). But he was in the vanguard of those responsible for blurring the line between serious political discourse and entertainment. One Christopher Hitchens ebulliently denouncing a conspiracy theorist as a fascist may be regarded as an amusement. Millions of members of the public denouncing each other as fascists may turn out to be an intellectual tragedy.

 

I wonder if Archie was ever a baby at some point in time?

Or perhaps he was created?

 

Why it ended in tears for Allegra Stratton, the PM’s star hire

She’s taken the fall for the No 10 party after she was meant to usher in a new, ‘more principled’ era for Boris Johnson’s government. How did it come to this, asks Helen Rumbelow

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Allegra Stratton, then Downing Street press secretary, last year
TOBY MELVILLE/REUTERS
Helen Rumbelow

Thursday December 09 2021, 12.01am, The Times
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On the now infamous video inside the Downing Street television briefing room, on a stage set that has never been used for its purpose, we watch a highly paid woman, whose job never materialised, perform a mock briefing that was never meant for broadcast, struggling to answer a question that seemed to call for an unbelievable lie. What about a party at Downing Street held during lockdown?

“Hold on, hold on . . .” says Allegra Stratton, the new Downing Street press secretary at the time, in December 2020, flicking her eyes to the ceiling to think, “Um, er, ahh.” She drops her eyes again, the consummate broadcaster has come up with nothing to say. Previously the atmosphere had been light, now her eyes are sad and her mouth flat: it looks as though what is caught on camera is not a lie but an epiphany about moral compromise. “What is the answer?” Stratton then asks by way of reply, because the question seems to be a different one: how far do you lie for your boss and to the nation?

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Stratton in the mock briefing video
By the end of yesterday it was clear. A second video was now top of the headlines: a red-eyed Stratton making her resignation speech outside her north London home, tearful with regret about the destruction of relationships and reputation. Notably, her resignation was worded in highly moral terms: principles that are not usually associated with the administration she served. Her boss, Boris Johnson, had turned on Stratton hours earlier at prime minister’s questions, saying that she made him “furious” and her behaviour had “sickened him”. For Johnson that mismatch between him and what some told me was Stratton’s “compulsive truth-telling” was a problem while she served in his administration, and it may yet prove more of a problem out of it.

“Working in government is an immense privilege,” Stratton said on her doorstep yesterday. “I tried to do right by you all, to behave with civility and decency and up to the high standards you expect of No 10.”

The ironic thing in all of this is that Stratton likes to tell the truth, as even those who disagree with her attest. Or, in her words, “I don’t do spin”, uttered while still a journalist at the BBC and four short years before becoming a spin doctor. Not for her Johnson’s barefaced tactics when faced with a painful fact; for example, the prime minister said about one of his later-proven affairs: “It is complete balderdash. It is an inverted pyramid of piffle.” No, watching the mock briefing video, as one of her former journalist colleagues observed, she is not quickfire with denials like some in government: “She’s not laughing for fun. It’s unbelievably awkward. She is morally embarrassed”.

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Stratton’s friends say that her straight-talking comes from her underlying decency. Enemies say that it speaks of arrogance and artlessness. Her departure marks the end of an experiment that was set in train 18 months ago, during a dinner with Johnson and his then-fiancée, Carrie Symonds, at Chequers in July 2020. Stratton set out her stall: establishing a more mature relationship with the public, telling the truth in all its difficulty and nuance. Johnson hired her that night. Stratton would herald Boris “2.0”, she was employed to prevail over Dominic Cummings and his ruthless approach to power.

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Stratton announcing her resignation yesterday
JONATHAN BRADY/PA WIRE
Many thought that the “good guys” had won. Stratton, supported at first by Carrie, would mark the start of an era that would be softer, greener, less macho, more principled. Last night that era came to an end with Johnson cutting adrift the woman who was not only paying the price for her own remarks, but had become a lightning rod for mendaciousness in government and the prime minister in particular. Where Johnson had stood by Cummings and his trips to test his eyes at Barnard Castle longer than anyone believed possible, he swiftly cut loose Stratton. He had hired her at a salary of £125,000 to sort out rather than cause these kinds of headlines.

Just a few short months after Stratton was hired as press secretary, to give American-style television briefings in the manner of CJ in The West Wing, the job vanished before a single briefing was publicly aired. It was clear from rehearsals that Stratton was uncontrollably frank, or as one political journalist said, “The best possible person we could want for that job: she told the truth and what that meant was a series of own goals.” It was a bizarre problem: Stratton was playing Mr Smith Goes to Washington in an environment more akin to The Thick of It.

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Stratton worked as spokesperson for the COP26 climate conference
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLE
She was shifted hurriedly to be Cop26 spokeswoman, and again was naively honest about driving a diesel car, or how to save the world by not rinsing plates before using the dishwasher. In June Stratton snapped her achilles tendon playing tennis and, just as that foot had healed a few weeks ago, she fell over and injured the other one. Over the summer Stratton said that this forced her to “dial into the PM’s office meeting from my kitchen chair while the PM whistles through things he wants sorting”. This week she catapulted herself to the top of that list. Now Cop26 was fading from view, she was without a viable job and various self-inflicted injuries, it seemed as though she was left without a leg to stand on.



Everyone I spoke to about Stratton extolled her friendliness and her intelligence, she is “straight” and perceptive, never dealing in dirty tricks. When asked for her best piece of advice in journalism, Stratton said: “It’s as important to be good as to get a good story.” However, what was most puzzling was not her move from journalism to politics, but her move from working for Rishi Sunak, the “acceptable face” of Conservatism among her Islington neighbours and former Guardian colleagues, to the far more divisive Johnson.

The clues lie in her upbringing, which seemed to destine her for public life: a mix of bohemian and principled. Her father was a translator, her mother a librarian turned textile artist. Stratton and her three siblings were educated bookishly in west London through a combination of homeschooling, state education and a private sixth form at Latymer Upper, which catapulted her to Cambridge . She was named after Byron’s daughter who died of typhus aged five. “I was told the story growing up,” Stratton recalled about her childish guilelessness. “I remember feeling trepidatious as my fifth birthday approached in case I would die.”

Her parents divorced when Stratton was young and her mother remarried a vicar, in keeping with the family’s rectitude. Stratton was, in adulthood, able to make light of her alarming earnestness when young, but it casts a line towards her 41-year-old self.

“I remember once as a child we were all out on a boat mackerel fishing and we hadn’t caught anything,” she recalled in an interview in The Daily Telegraph. “I stood up and declaimed, ‘Is it the fault of the nation, in that we have overfished these waters?’ Even then I just couldn’t help posing questions.”

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Stratton with Baroness Warsi, Boris Johnson, Robert Peston and Ed Balls on Peston on Sunday
KEVIN MCKAY/REX FEATURES
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In a profile on BBC Radio 4, Jane Mills, Stratton’s PE teacher at her state secondary school in Chiswick, remembered her as the child chosen to “take the lead in setting the right behaviour . . . she was very confident and also very determined. She was very ambitious.”

In her twenties Stratton’s politics were a kind of “centre mush”; she worked stints at Newsnight and the political beat at The Guardian. Flatmates said that she argued the unfashionable Blairite case for war in Iraq, and stuck to her guns even when she was among friends a “lone voice”, prepared to stand up for what she believed in. She was then most aligned with the politics of Labour’s Miliband brothers, Ed and David. In 2010 she signed up with the publisher Simon & Schuster to write a book about them.

Around this time she met James Forsyth, the political editor of The Spectator and later a Times columnist, and she dropped the Miliband book as her politics shifted. Their English country wedding in 2011 was also a kind of a marriage between journalism and politics, stuffed with “the whole of the British political class, politicians from all sides”, as an old Guardian colleague told Radio 4. Matt Hancock was a guest, as was Ed Miliband, who, when the seating plan was lost, was the last person to find his place at a table, nervously inserting himself among so many Tories. The pièce de résistance was the best man speech from Sunak, Forsyth’s childhood friend from their time at Winchester College.

Forsyth and Sunak’s connection runs deep: they are godparents to each other’s children and when Sunak returned to Britain from a stint working in America he is reported as saying, “I only knew James”, who helped him to establish his political career.

Parenthood — the couple have two young children, Vaughn and Xanthe — did not dim Stratton’s ambition. When Stratton returned to work as ITV national editor six weeks after Xanthe’s arrival, producers gave her and the baby ITV’s star dressing room. She was working pretty much seven days a week: weekdays at ITV news, working hard on social issues, such as drug dealing across county lines, then in a weekend role on Peston On Sunday, which she described as “sidekick” and which she left in 2018.

“Recently I’ve been trying to close the front door every Sunday morning at 6am and not wake both kids,” she told the Evening Standard. “But they are now always waking.”

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Stratton marked the start of an era at Number 10 that was meant to be softer, greener, less macho, more principled
CAMERA PRESS
She said that Forsyth was “150 per cent supportive”, but when she told him she would cut back “he was visibly relieved”.

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Then came the switch: in April last year she quit broadcasting to become director of strategic communications at the Treasury under Sunak, the chancellor. This made total sense: Sunak was practically family. What surprised many was how she was tempted into Johnson’s operation next door, abandoning Sunak.

“It was very odd,” says one journalist close to her. “She would justify it to herself by saying that she was going to Johnson to focus on the social issues that she had fought for travelling around the country at ITV, that she was going to be part of an exciting new era after the toxic ‘Vote Leave’ brothers. But as a journalist she should have seen it was a disaster of a job, it felt like she was naive.”

When she left the Peston programme she noted a highlight was an on-air stunt when she sliced and served a real cake to Johnson, as a sign of him — as he once said — being inclined not to stake out one moral position, but to “have his cake and eat it”. Now we wait to see whether revenge is, like a cake, best served cold.

 

Speaking of disgusting genetically modified lumps of fat and cells the Israelis are selling lab grown steaks now .

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...gest-lab-grown-steak-unveiled-by-israeli-firm

 

Jesus Christ, Johhny Bag Seven One Barmy is one seriously tedious ****wit.

****ing hell, too much time on his hands.

 

It looks like a ****ing slug

 

Strangely, I had a steak last night. Not lab grown, well I don't think so anyway.

Difficult to know what's going on these days.

 

The Grauniad

Give it a few years and these "lab rat steaks" will be linked with aneurysms no doubt

 

I think it's some sort of one man Bobby Sands style dirty protest, he's just sitting alone throwing his own mess at the walls in a desperate attempt to be noticed.

I rarely resort to putting people on ignore but that's what it's designed for .

Thank heavens we have a dedicated staff member on 24/7 call now .



The idiot is clearly suffering some sort of brain injury , no doubt from lack of oxygen from scousers standing on him in the 80s .

He has a "crush" on Saxton

 

Yum, I like mine with a fried egg on it South America style

 

I just had it with mushrooms and mustard. Bloody lovely it was.

I don't eat much red meat but I do enjoy it once in a blue (steak) moon.

 

If you don't want to eat a steak , just don't eat a steak these revolting abominations are just designed to rip off Toby types.

Cows fart and will destroy the World etc

 

https://m.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ne...gO7E-oFgOyxLn-jCSRiRDS_JGVbyXcemHwk2z_Xrs5YgA

Derry not good enough

Bet they have family in Blighty