Sleeping with the enemy
So I bought the Sunday Times this week. It's a paper I started taking (love that pompous phrase) when I was a student, for reasons which were less to do with politics and more for the value for money it offered due to its sheer bulk. Plus the sad truth was that my student days were not spent in a 24-7 haze of sex'n'drugs'rock'n'roll, and therefore I had plenty of time on my hands at the weekends. (They certainly weren't filled with actual work either).
My limp-wristed, muesli and knitted sweater-y, Guardian-reading habit was not yet fully-formed then, although it had been the paper of choice during free periods in the sixth form when we were stuck in the library but didn't fancy doing any actual work (spotting a pattern here?). And it was the Sunday Times that first made me question whether the Grauniad had been right about everything, thanks to a certain Mr AA Gill.
Gill is one of my absolute favourite writers, and I immediately fell in love with his intimidatingly great wordsmithery. (The worst thing is that, being dyslexic, he technically doesn't even write his columns at all as he dictates them to an editor instead - how bloody clever clever is that?) I didn't come to his work fresh though, as I knew his name from the almighty pops the Guardian had regularly taken at him, especially around the time of the publication of his novel Sap Rising (most of the criticisms of which seemed to be that it was relentlessly sex-obsessed, but look at that title - you can't say you're not warned).
So here was a man whose work I looked forward to reading every week, even though I'd previously been reliably informed that it was, in fact, shit. And thus dawned my first realisation that maybe the world wasn't so straightforwardly divided into black or white, left or right.
Sadly, AA's restaurant review column this week was rather disappointing, doubly so since following the great paywall erection I very rarely get to read his stuff anymore. The pissy little explanation of why he wouldn't be pursuing compensation over his phone being hacked - basically because Rebekah Brooks is his mate - was faintly depressing. I don't generally go snooping around into my friends' private communications but hey, whatever floats your boat I guess.
Still, such are the disappointments you face when someone who you admire in many ways lets slip opinions which utterly contradict your own. Which sort of leads me onto the most interesting article in this Sunday's rag, and the one that inspired me to knock this post up. Inspired itself by the false allegations about Lord MacAlpine which were bandied about the internet following that fateful edition of Newsnight in which the programme may yet have signed its own death warrant, and more specifically the gleeful relish with which some imparted said news, Dominic Lawson's column ends up attacking The Left for, well, the way they themselves attack The Right with such vituperation.
In Lawson's view, the left can't settle for merely disagreeing with Conservatives politically, they have to demonize them personally too. He makes many good points - for example, many of us would consider the Thatcher premiership as massively damaging to the country, but does that really make her the epitome of evil that some left-wingers would suggest? The Guardian can be as guilty of this sort of thing as anyone, and it's something I've not always been comfortable with. The vitriol is not normally so blatant, but it's implied in the ultra-zealous writings of your Polly Toynbees and George Monbiots, the subtext of which is always that they can't believe that anybody with an ounce of sense could possibly disagree with them.
Lawson is of course being more than a little disingenuous in his piece, and there is plenty of guff there too - not least his defence of one politician who suggested that socialism "destroys moral responsibility" (yeah - how DARE you try to look out for your fellow man!). There is also an attempt to paint the Labour party as the only true political embezzlers - although however repugnant this is, it does bring to mind the old maxim that Tories are usually done in by sex scandals and Labourites by financial ones, which arguably does carry some truth.
You might very well be coming to the end of this post thinking "Has he written all this just to make a tired old point about shades of grey in politics?", to which accusation I would have to hold my hands up and apologise. But there's also another point hovering around somewhere about the usefulness of reading things which one doesn't agree with, rather than stuff for which you are part of the choir being preached to. It won't necessarily change your mind about the evil enemy, but you might at least feel a bit guilty about referring to them as such and feel able to concede that, just maybe, they aren't wrong about everything.
In the same even-handed handed vein, I will also mention the Times's coverage of Sir David Bell, the subject of a huge Daily Mail expose earlier in the week on the basis that he is at the head of a shadowy unelected left-wing cabal who are hell-bent on destroying the freedoms of the press via the medium of the Leveson Inqury.
The accusations, critically considered in the Times but by no means dismissed, seem at first glance to be both tedious and nonsensical. You might think it somewhat rich for huge right-wing media conglomerates with fingers in all sorts of pies to complain about supposed left-wing power-grabbing, but think about it - the whole Murdoch/Cameron/Brooks/Clarkson axis is all out in the open now, and Rupes has even sort of apologised for some of the stuff he's done (well, a little bit of it), whereas Bell and his buddies are trying to operate IN SECRET, so that must mean the former lot are in the right and their accusations therefore entirely non-hypocritical. Phew, glad we've cleared that up.
My limp-wristed, muesli and knitted sweater-y, Guardian-reading habit was not yet fully-formed then, although it had been the paper of choice during free periods in the sixth form when we were stuck in the library but didn't fancy doing any actual work (spotting a pattern here?). And it was the Sunday Times that first made me question whether the Grauniad had been right about everything, thanks to a certain Mr AA Gill.
Gill is one of my absolute favourite writers, and I immediately fell in love with his intimidatingly great wordsmithery. (The worst thing is that, being dyslexic, he technically doesn't even write his columns at all as he dictates them to an editor instead - how bloody clever clever is that?) I didn't come to his work fresh though, as I knew his name from the almighty pops the Guardian had regularly taken at him, especially around the time of the publication of his novel Sap Rising (most of the criticisms of which seemed to be that it was relentlessly sex-obsessed, but look at that title - you can't say you're not warned).
So here was a man whose work I looked forward to reading every week, even though I'd previously been reliably informed that it was, in fact, shit. And thus dawned my first realisation that maybe the world wasn't so straightforwardly divided into black or white, left or right.
Sadly, AA's restaurant review column this week was rather disappointing, doubly so since following the great paywall erection I very rarely get to read his stuff anymore. The pissy little explanation of why he wouldn't be pursuing compensation over his phone being hacked - basically because Rebekah Brooks is his mate - was faintly depressing. I don't generally go snooping around into my friends' private communications but hey, whatever floats your boat I guess.
Still, such are the disappointments you face when someone who you admire in many ways lets slip opinions which utterly contradict your own. Which sort of leads me onto the most interesting article in this Sunday's rag, and the one that inspired me to knock this post up. Inspired itself by the false allegations about Lord MacAlpine which were bandied about the internet following that fateful edition of Newsnight in which the programme may yet have signed its own death warrant, and more specifically the gleeful relish with which some imparted said news, Dominic Lawson's column ends up attacking The Left for, well, the way they themselves attack The Right with such vituperation.
In Lawson's view, the left can't settle for merely disagreeing with Conservatives politically, they have to demonize them personally too. He makes many good points - for example, many of us would consider the Thatcher premiership as massively damaging to the country, but does that really make her the epitome of evil that some left-wingers would suggest? The Guardian can be as guilty of this sort of thing as anyone, and it's something I've not always been comfortable with. The vitriol is not normally so blatant, but it's implied in the ultra-zealous writings of your Polly Toynbees and George Monbiots, the subtext of which is always that they can't believe that anybody with an ounce of sense could possibly disagree with them.
Lawson is of course being more than a little disingenuous in his piece, and there is plenty of guff there too - not least his defence of one politician who suggested that socialism "destroys moral responsibility" (yeah - how DARE you try to look out for your fellow man!). There is also an attempt to paint the Labour party as the only true political embezzlers - although however repugnant this is, it does bring to mind the old maxim that Tories are usually done in by sex scandals and Labourites by financial ones, which arguably does carry some truth.
You might very well be coming to the end of this post thinking "Has he written all this just to make a tired old point about shades of grey in politics?", to which accusation I would have to hold my hands up and apologise. But there's also another point hovering around somewhere about the usefulness of reading things which one doesn't agree with, rather than stuff for which you are part of the choir being preached to. It won't necessarily change your mind about the evil enemy, but you might at least feel a bit guilty about referring to them as such and feel able to concede that, just maybe, they aren't wrong about everything.
In the same even-handed handed vein, I will also mention the Times's coverage of Sir David Bell, the subject of a huge Daily Mail expose earlier in the week on the basis that he is at the head of a shadowy unelected left-wing cabal who are hell-bent on destroying the freedoms of the press via the medium of the Leveson Inqury.
The accusations, critically considered in the Times but by no means dismissed, seem at first glance to be both tedious and nonsensical. You might think it somewhat rich for huge right-wing media conglomerates with fingers in all sorts of pies to complain about supposed left-wing power-grabbing, but think about it - the whole Murdoch/Cameron/Brooks/Clarkson axis is all out in the open now, and Rupes has even sort of apologised for some of the stuff he's done (well, a little bit of it), whereas Bell and his buddies are trying to operate IN SECRET, so that must mean the former lot are in the right and their accusations therefore entirely non-hypocritical. Phew, glad we've cleared that up.
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