Tramp the dirt down

Today, Bastille Day, is forever associated in my mind with the beheading of Margaret Thatcher. For it was on this day in 1989 that my aunt, who is French, set up a giant guillotine at the front of her house in Southampton to mark the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. I’m not sure what the neighbours made of the tricolour flying in southern England. But they came to the party, some of them got very drunk on French wine, and some of them joined in when the family (or at least those parts of it who didn't secretly vote for her; the rest sat quietly with their knitting) carried out a ritual beheading of the then prime minister.

That was the same year that Elvis Costello released Spike, which I still think is possibly his best album and certainly contains some of his best and most varied songwriting. As well as the spine-tingling anti-capital punishment ballad about Derek Bentley, ‘Let Him Dangle’, there’s ‘Veronica’, ‘Coal Train Robberies’ and ‘Any King’s Shilling’, to name but five songs that still have the power to move me today.

And then there’s ‘Tramp the Dirt Down’ (‘When England was the whore of the world Margaret was her madam / And the future looked as bright and as clear as the black tarmacadam’) with its chilling refrain:

Oh I'll be a good boy, I'm trying so hard to behave

Because there’s one thing I know I'd like to live long enough to savour

That's when they finally put you in the ground

I'll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down

People who weren’t adults at the time sometimes find it hard to believe the extent to which Thatcher divided Britain (and families, including mine). I won’t tramp the dirt down on her, or anyone else’s, grave. But the optimist in me still hopes that I’ll live long enough to see, one day, her social and political legacy well and truly buried.

Smoking the celestial dream

Jimmy Cliff is playing in Finsbury Park later this afternoon as part of the Greater London Authority's Rise festival. One of Boris Johnson's first acts as mayor was to strip the free event of its anti-racist theme, a decision that led to the withdrawal of £60,000 in trade union sponsorship but was greeted with delight by the new BNP London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook.

Of course any multicultural event still carries an implicit anti-racist message and Bojo hasn't invited the BNP to set up a stall - yet - so it's still worth trying to get along. Jimmy Cliff did as much as anyone to bring ska and reggae to an international audience, starring in Perry Henzell's iconic film The Harder They Come, currently revived as a stage musical at the Playhouse Theatre; and there's a huge range of other acts, all free.

I reviewed The Harder They Come before its West End transfer in a piece called 'Guns and Ganja', which you can read here. And if you want to read even more from me about the blessed 'erb, my article 'Smoking the Celestial Dream', from the June/July issue of Red Pepper, is now available in full on their website,

Haltemprice and Howden: a failure for the Greens?

No surprises in the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, then, which may not quite have managed to put civil liberties on the political map to the extent that some would have hoped but has at least introduced the political commentariat to two previously unknown towns near Hull.

David Davis has got his expected walkover on a low turnout, with two out of three registered voters staying at home. He can now savour what must be the biggest majority (in percentage terms) in the country, albeit one that guarantees a huge swing against him at the general election. None of the loonies managed to save their deposits, although Miss Great Britain on 521 votes (5.21 per cent) must be mightily pleased at beating anti-rape campaigner Jill Saward on 492 votes (2.07 per cent) and the Official Monster Raving Loony candidate, Mad-Cow Girl on 412 (1.73 per cent).

The most disappointed candidate, however – apart from independents Tony Farnon and Norman Scarth, who couldn’t even get all of the ten people who nominated them to cast their votes in their favour – must be the English Democrat, Joanne Robinson. She called for a recount after losing second place to the Greens by just 44 votes.

The Green Party candidate, Shan Oakes, polled 1,758 votes (7.40 per cent, which the party is claiming as a by-election record). In any normal by-election in England, fighting candidates from all three major parties, that would have been a creditable result. In Haltemprice and Howden, it’s a poor performance – barely beating a fringe nationalist group and doing no better than the combined vote of the various loony candidates.

In the absence of the major parties, but with the presence of the national media, all desperate for a fresh and different angle on the campaign, this was an unparallelled opportunity to present the Greens as 'the real civil liberties candidate', as the party's slogan had it. That opportunity was missed.

I wrote last month that ‘anything less than several thousand votes and second place will have to be marked down as a failure’ for the Greens. I see no reason to change that assessment now.

Ban the Board of Film Censors

I see the hackers have got at the British Board of Film Classification's paid-for google listing. They've done so, though, in a year that is probably going to see the smallest number of cuts made to films screened in the UK since records began. Only one film (out of 352 so far) has been cut on the BBFC's say-so in 2008. That's down from 240, more than a third of the total, in 1974, when cinema soft porn was in its heyday, and compares with between five and 20 per year over the past decade.

So which film do you suppose got the chop? Zombie Strippers maybe or El Bano de Papa (The Pope's Toilet)? Nothing so exciting: rather, it was Peter Cattaneo's The Rocker, and then only because the distributor wanted it to get a 12A certificate. Any film censorship these days takes place long before a film gets to the BBFC.

How to make £10,000 by this time tomorrow

Got a spare million? Want to make a quick £10,000 by this time tomorrow? Betfair.com, which describes itself as ‘the world’s biggest betting community’ with 15 million bets placed daily, is offering odds of 1/100 on David Davis winning the Haltemprice and Howden by-election. Since Davis is as near as you get to a dead cert winner (in fact he’d still win if he was dead), that’s got to be worth a flutter. It’s certainly better than the miserable 14/1 that Paddy Power quoted on a Green Party victory, which is about as likely as Port Vale winning the 2009 FA Cup, for which SkyBet is currently offering 3000/1.

Note to the kind of people who are taken in by ‘get-rich-quick’ email scams, chain letters and that sort of thing: There is a catch to this scheme. First, you need a million quid to bet with. And second, Betfair uses a ‘matching-bet’ system, which means you’d only win the full whack if enough people bet against Davis winning. Still, the world is full of fools, so who knows, your luck could be in.

First they came for the Roma . . .

An email arrives from Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP, Liberal Democrat European justice spokeswoman, ahead of a vote by MEPs on a resolution condemning plans by the Italian government to count and fingerprint all Roma gypsies, including children. I’ll let the baroness speak for herself:

‘Singling out Roma people for a census and fingerprinting is illegal discrimination contrary to European law, which was passed precisely to stop Nazi and fascist racial persecution. It beggars belief that the government of Silvio Berlusconi can be so dismissive of history as to launch this misguided plan.

‘It is a disgrace that the EU’s other 26 member states are keeping their silence, and that Italy’s foreign minister, until recently the EU justice commissioner, has endorsed the human rights abusing scheme. The fingerprinting of children is particularly abhorrent.

‘There needs to be a European Roma strategy with funds attached to improve the status, education and integration of Roma people, rather than marginalising and stigmatising them.’

Venus, he purrs

The Wimbledon coverage (Radio 5 Live, on a loop) continued to perk me up to the end, particularly with regard to any swooning over Venus Williams, for years round at mine known as Little Vixen Rising. ‘A lot of people fancy Venus, full stop,’ said one commentator to another at the start of the final with her sister Serena.

‘So, how’s she looking?’ said the first commentator. ‘She’s looking pretty sharp,’ replied the second with the reliable tone of an Old Speckled Hen drinker. ‘She’s unbelievably fit. She’s in a piratical outfit and her tanned and muscular arms are revealed by a sleeveless vest. Seeing her in the flesh is some sight.’ (Hmm, best switch on the telly to check this out, I thought, but keep the commentary going . . .)

‘Her hair’s still wet,’ the first commentator noted, fascinated. ‘She’s obviously just stepped out of the shower and then tied that bandanna around it.’

‘She’s kicking her heels behind her. She’s crouching, she’s crouching, she’s crouching. She’s out there and she’s running and hopping from foot to foot and shadow boxing and there’s a lot of physical domination going on.’

‘She’s well pumped up!’ burst the first commentator, suddenly reckless. ‘The world’s number seven is just dancing around! This is simply great tennis!’

‘Iveta Benesova,’ said the second commentator, suddenly serious. ‘Fourth in the world. Kind of gawky-looking, I’d say. Big strong legs, but – nothing much on top. Unlike Venus!’

A couple of days later, I shuffled into the kitchen at night only to find Boris Becker in the corner on 5 Live Extra, riffing away, rapt. ‘You know, people are always talking about Venus’s boobs like it’s a kind of pose, but she's just naturally like that. She’s always been like that. She’s always been big. I saw her when whe was just 15 and I’m telling you – it’s simply the way she is.’

Okay it was Rafael Nadal rather than Venus Williams and it was his biceps rather than her boobs that the commentators were getting all excited about. And I suppose I should say that it was the New Statesman's radio columnist Antonia Quirke and not me who authored the above piece (about Rafa not Venus, of course) – just in case you were wondering.

Central London shop for sale, under £27,000

How much do you reckon you’d pay for a shop in St John Street, Finsbury, a stone’s throw from London’s Barbican centre, the City and some of the highest-value real estate in the land? Okay, it was only a dry cleaning business, albeit one that brought 24 years of customer goodwill along with the deal. But it was the freehold that was up for sale, allowing you to do whatever you wanted with the property, subject to planning consent. And it is in one of the few parts of the country where property prices have still been rising despite the recent credit crunch.

How does £26,809 sound? Done!

The lucky buyer was the property investor Structadene, who snapped it up as part of a £69.5 million portfolio of 222 shops and other commercial premises sold off to the company by Islington Council. The council originally claimed to have sold it for £260,809 and it took campaigners and the local press a month to get it to admit to the real figure. It wasn’t a cover-up but a ‘clerical error’, according to the council – presumably by a council officer who couldn’t believe that the £26,809 figure could possibly be correct.

De Profundis: the gods are strange

Actor Corin Redgrave has appeared only rarely on a public stage since suffering a major heart attack while speaking at a rally in support of travellers in Basildon three years ago last month. So the chance to witness his reprise reading of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis at the National on Tuesday (he first did it at the same venue, as well as in a special recording made from Wilde’s former prison cell at Reading jail, to mark the centenary of Wilde’s death) was too good to miss.

Redgrave’s physique – at 68 he still holds himself with the same thickset, chunky strength he brought to many of his characters – belied a frailty that only became apparent when he stood to take his thunderous applause. Assisted from his chair by a stagehand, I thought at first he was acting out Wilde’s own broken health, just as he had done Wilde’s broken spirit in this 60-minute monologue from the famous letter Wilde wrote from jail to Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘Bosie’, the architect of his downfall. Sadly, it wasn’t acting.

Nor, you felt, was the passion that Redgrave brought to this reading. In a short, moving article distributed to accompany the performance, he writes, with the same sort of impassioned commitment that took him into radical politics as well as the acting profession: ‘Visiting De Profundis a hundred years later is like gazing at the Elgin marbles. One is at one and the same time awestruck by their beauty and troubled by the collective shame of England’s cultural vandalism. An English court and English prisons silenced a great Irish heretic almost as effectively as English crusaders under Simon de Montfort had cut out the tongues of the Cathars in Minerve seven centuries ago.’

They could not have done so, of course, without Wilde’s own misguided passion – his weakness for the hateful, self-centred and utterly selfish Bosie, who first pushed him into taking the libel action that led to his arrest and imprisonment and then persuaded him, when he still had the chance to withdraw the action and flee, that to do so would somehow be a betrayal of his love for Bosie.

There is a line in De Profundis in which Wilde writes that ‘the gods are strange, and punish us for what is good and humane in us as much as for what is evil and perverse’. A contributing factor to Redgrave’s heart attack in June 2005 was the stress induced by his (good and humane) concern over the treatment of the traveller community. ‘He got so angry when he was talking because he had heard people telling lies about us,’ said Kathleen McCarthy, from the local travellers’ site, who accompanied him to the hospital.

‘We are all feeling it. He is like a member of our family. He is such a nice man. If he goes we will all grieve for him like one of our own,’ she told the Independent at the time. I do hope that’s not for a long time yet.

Gordon Banks, Pelé, Desmond Tutu and me (2)

It looks as though the chance to play in that Gordon Banks XI v Pelé XI celebrity charity football game at the Britannia Stadium, Stoke, on 12 July (complete with half-time team talk by Archbishop Desmond Tutu), has gone to a dealer. The one consolation in not being able to afford the winning bid of £3,101 was that someone who’d really appreciate it would get the chance to turn out at the Britannia and the three grand would be going to a good cause.

The nominated charities will still get the money, but almost certainly not out of the pocket of ebay member dave100166, who placed the winning bid. Dave is an autograph dealer and since his bid also entitles him to keep the match ball, signed by Banks, Pelé and Tutu, plus a full kit and all sorts of other memorabilia (which he’ll probably also get signed by the stars of the occasion), he stands to make what could eventually be a tidy profit on it all.

I’d like to suggest that the organisers of the event now invest in a couple of hundred footballs and get Banks, Pelé and Tutu to sign them all. It would raise a few extra thousand for charity and undercut Dave’s profiteering at a stroke.