Washington Side Story

As he left the stage at the end of his mid-week press conference, having talked cautiously out of the corner of his mouth for half-an-hour – because ‘sly old fox’ is a description he prob’ly wouldn’t object to, just as he was passing in front of the Stars and Stripes, the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Bank, a cerebral banker and Princeton academic by the name of Ben Bernanke, did a little skip.

Ben Bernan-ke, who announced that the Bank would continue subsidising the US economy to the tune of $85 billion dollars a month, prompted the markets to tick up-ke.

Let us now praise Uncle Ben, they said, for his unexpectedly good Offices.

By the end of the week, however, the House of Representatives was threatening to vote down further government borrowing. This would send the American economy into a ‘tailspin’, warned President Obama; his smooth tenor voice shrilled to sandpaper as he said it.

Wall Street duly dipped.

Without reaching another crisis like the 'credit crunch' – no flick knives in the alley nor blood on the boardroom floor, the up-ticks and downbeats of the American economy look set to singalong indefinitely.

(Apologies to Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim for faint echoes of their West Side Story.)

Cast In An Evil Role

Free at last, actor Michael Le Vell walks down the steps outside Manchester Crown Court. Left hand in trouser pocket, which says, only a little too loudly: I’m a cool kinda guy. Legs a little further apart than strictly necessary, which says: my balls are big so they do need more room. Acquitted on all 19 counts of child sex abuse, after two years of ‘hell’ who can blame Le Vell for strutting his stuff? Still less for going down the scally pub as soon as he scally could.

Le Vell now lives in Hale (the posh end of Greater Manchester), but hails from Newton Heath, a couple of miles north of Manchester city centre. The area was first industrialised as far back as the 1820s. It would be a hundred years, and more, before L.S. Lowry depicted Le Vell’s recent forebears as matchstick men (going to their wartime work in the Mather Platt factory). 

For 30 years Le Vell himself has painted a picture of working class manhood, playing the part of car mechanic Kevin Webster (avec moustache = gay icon) in the longest-running British TV soap opera, Coronation Street. He says he doesn’t let his children watch the show if Kevin is caught up in a racy scene, in case they become confused about who their father is. But after 30 years in character he too must have difficulty distinguishing himself from....himself.  

On trial, a.k.a. on stage in a Manchester courtroom, once again Le Vell became two personae in one person: the guilty man and the innocent party. Only the jury had the power to tell them apart. After his acquittal, we all know which of these was real. But there is something about the wider situation today which means that the doppelganger never altogether disappears.

Those now facing sexual abuse charges are drawn from all walks of public life – MPs (thin ones, fat ones); various actors; a host of radio hosts, starting with Jimmy Savile, anti-Christ. Odds are not all of these are guilty men; but it’s a dead cert that we’re all now involved. Even if each of us were to stand trial and be acquitted of anything-you-like, in today’s climate we are liable to remain the man who beat the charges and dodged the accusations – till next time.

Le Vell’s acquittal suggests that Operation Yewtree should be cut down to actual size; or we’ll all be miscast as our own evil counterpart.

Everywhere

At the TUC conference, earlier today. On stage behind Labour leader Ed Miliband, even the hand-picked phalanx of ‘ordinary people’ found it hard to focus on his speech. Young woman of colour, top-right, wore the same expression as my students: I’d-rather-be-texting. White man, front row, gurning on camera. Really! Meanwhile Mr Miliband said his set piece, reciting lines rehearsed too often; making robust gestures – hey, look at my robust gesture – which were mannered and effete.

Westminster, a day earlier. Margaret Hodge MP, chair of the public accounts committee, grilled BBC Trusties and ex-executives about excessive redundancy payments. Already in the pink (living well at public expense must be patterned on Lord Patten), they wriggled and turned red-in-the-face. Hodge herself seemed to be tinted yellow: her skin toned in with her purple top for maximum day glow effect.

On different days in different places, it varies from lacklustre to lurid; but the slow liquidation of British institutions is everywhere irreversible. 

Which Side Are They On?

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Left: eyes on sentry-duty, asking ‘who goes there?’ Right: same guarded look; of course the same piping on the tunic and the same cap, oddly-oversized.

Bus conductor? Russian admiral? No, it’s Thomas Highgate of the Royal West Kent Regiment, first British ‘deserter’ to face a First World War firing squad, 99 years before last night’s Last Night of the Proms.

When they sing ‘Rule Britannia’, Tommy, do you turn in your unmarked grave?

It’s the mouth that’s different. Though in both instances, Highgate's lips are slightly apart, in the left-hand picture the former farm labourer’s mouth is ‘set on’, as employers and foremen used to say of their underlings: expectant, alert; ready to do his bit. Yet on the right the same mouth seems to be slackening, slackened, slack.

(Looking at these pictures online, I first thought that they were one and the same; only the sepia tint had made them seem different. On closer inspection, I noticed that in one picture alone the hat is higher than the slatted background; but I don’t know whether these two shots were taken in quick succession or on separate occasions.)

In the eyes of the officer class, the face on the left could still be trusted to join in with William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, inspired – it is said – by the Kent landscape which Private Highgate grew up in.

If you’d made it home, Tommy, you would have seen the Battle of Britain in the skies above Shoreham. It could have been you in the Home Guard in 1940, rounding up the crew of a German bomber shot down over Castle Farm; giving them a tot of brandy before handing them over to the Army.

Face on the right: no harmony here, no possibility of returning to Sunday matins or Promenade concerts at the Queen’s Hall; any sound emitted will only be the shriek of a Schoenberg.

Agonising for the other men, sir!

Faced with Highgate's two faces, uncertain which would be the winning side amongst their own side, the officers of the court martial opted to close his mouth permanently.

Quick trial, quick march, quickly shot. But make sure there are plenty of witnesses from neighbouring regiments, understood?  

Vladimir To His Mother

" ‘Liar.’ Regretted it as soon as I said it. Losing control like that, sounding off about the American Secretary of State over Syria – amateurish, childish. All those years of self-discipline, my lips becoming more bloodless with every step up the career ladder; and I’m still a big mouth boy to be kept out of the Pioneers?

"Mother, it cannot be.

" ‘President Obama didn’t get elected….to be nice to Russia’ – that’s me speaking; that’s how I talk. Sardonic, drier than the martini I don’t allow myself to drink. But wherever possible I am courteous, courtly, hospitable. Thus, draping a coat over Frau Merkel’s shoulders as if she were the most beautiful woman in the world as well as the most powerful.

"Is my hair too square? Do my thousand-dollar suits declare their luxury instead of partially disguising it. But who cares what those Little Islanders think?

"At the Peterhof on Friday evening, with all the world’s leaders in attendance, I was the chivalry of Imperial Russia and the intelligence of the KGB.

"Only I can represent my country in this way. Mother Russia needs her son Putin."