Tendring Topics......on Line
'Just good Friends!'
The
Leveson enquiry rumbles on. On Tuesday
evening (12th June), as I write this, we have just heard the report
of Sir John Major’s appearance at the enquiry.
His evidence had the ring of truth and sincerity about it. He recorded relevant events (and the result
of offending the ruler of the Murdoch Empire) as he recalled them, without
hesitation or prevarication. He told us
that for days after incurring the Murdoch displeasure, he had read in the press every day, things that he had not done and things that he had never said
Let
me now write a word or two in defence of Rupert Murdoch! His statement, under oath, that he had never
asked any Prime Minister to do anything, is said to have been contradicted by
Sir John’s statement that he had wanted the government to change its
policy toward Europe . The two statements are surely not
contradictory. Mr Murdoch didn’t ask the Prime Minister to change his
attitude towards Europe – he simply told him that
unless the government changed its policy, the newspapers under his control
would switch their support from his party to their opponents. The government didn’t change its policy – and the
support of the Murdoch press did change
from Conservative to New Labour. Mr
Murdoch keeps his promises.
No-one seems to have commented on
the impertinence of a foreign media
tycoon attempting to persuade a British Prime Minister to change British foreign policy. Imagine the outrage
there would have been in Mr Murdoch’s flagship newspaper the Sun if such an attempt had been made by
a Russian oligarch or an oil-rich Middle Eastern Sheikh rather than an American multimillionaire!
Everybody
concerned goes to great lengths to deny that there had been any sort of
conspiracy or agreement to grant favours to the Murdoch Empire in exchange for
press support. I don’t suppose for a
moment that there has been. All that happened
was that Rupert Murdoch, his family and his senior managers went out of their
way to make friends with our Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer and
other leading members of the government.
It helped, of course, that Mrs Rebekah Brooks News Corporation’s Chief
Executive and her husband, were actually neighbours of the Prime Minister. He and his wife, together with other top
politicians, were invited to a Christmas Party and to other social events. The
Prime Minister was encouraged to practise his equestrian skills on Mrs Brooks’
horse – which turned out to be ‘on loan’ from the Metropolitan Police! The Prime Minister and members of the Murdoch
inner circle became good friends. That was all there was to it. But, of course, one of the characteristics of
good friends is the way in which (without
having to be asked) they help each other in every way that they can. I don't imagine that media millionaires and top politicians have much difficulty in finding ways of demonstrating their loyal friendship. ‘If
you sup with the devil you need a long spoon’, says the proverb. At neither 10, nor 11 Downing Street , nor at Chequers were
any of the spoons nearly long enough!
14.6.12 The evidence given today
by David Cameron to the Leveson Enquiry confirms the accuracy of my conjectures
above – except that the friendship between the PM and Mrs Brooks was rather
closer than I had imagined.
What
goes around, comes around
It isn’t very often
that I find myself in complete agreement with a pronouncement of a member of
the government. Whether, had I been a
teacher and facing yet another change of official policy, I’d have felt exactly
the same is doubtful. However, as I am
just a more-or-less disinterested by-stander I warm to the idea that children
in primary schools should be taught more things ‘by rote’ and that teachers
should pay more attention to grammar and spelling. That’s how it was done in my day!
+1930s.jpg)
A class of 8/9 year olds in 1930 at the Ipswich primary school where I learned ‘my tables’. I am
the anxious little boy with glasses at the headmaster’s right knee.
Arithmetic, the foundation stone of
Mathematics, was never my best or favourite subject at school. Yet to this day if someone says to me ‘what’s seven times eight’ or ‘nine times
six?’ the answers (56 and 54 respectively) come unbidden to my tongue. This facility comes from my chanting, over
and over again, with a whole class of some 40 eight year olds, the ‘times tables’.
It is an ability that has been useful on occasion. Even more importantly,
chanting those tables provided a learning discipline – the realisation that
before learning can become enjoyable, there is hard and boring work to be done
in establishing its foundation.
Similarly
History (to choose a subject at which I was good and in which I am still
interested) is often said to have been ‘in
the bad old days’ (my schooldays!) just a case of learning by rote a list
of dates and notable events. There was a
lot more to it than that. The fact remains though that until you have at least a
rough idea of the sequence of events in British and world history you can’t
hope to see the way in which, over the centuries, one event has led to the next. Unless you know that the Roman invaders, about 2,000
years ago were followed by the Anglo Saxons and the Vikings and, about 1,000
years ago, by the Normans, followed by the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance; the
Protestant Reformation, Thomas Cranmer, Shakespeare, Milton, Christopher Wren,
and Isaac Newton (Oh yes and, really
much less importantly, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Cromwell and so on) you’ll
never understand how today’s political and economic world evolved – and is still
evolving. Once you have acquired – by
rote, by constant repetition and by boring hard work – that skeleton of events,
you can start putting the flesh on it and begin to enjoy reading history.
Being
encouraged to learn poetry ‘by heart’ (rather
than by rote!) in my primary school
years, gave me the ability to store in my head a very considerable collection
of poetry, ranging from extracts from the King James Bible, through some of of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the work of the
great poets of the 18th and 19th Centuries, and more
recent ones like Houseman, Belloc, Kipling and Betjeman, to modern less-than-prim-and-proper limericks.
This mental anthology has been a source of immense pleasure and satisfaction to me in the
past and (though I may nowadays forget what happened yesterday – or an hour
ago!) it remains in my memory and continues to give me pleasure and satisfaction today.
I
remember being told at school that although we had special English classes, every lesson was in fact an English
lesson. No matter how thoroughly a pupil
may have mastered, for instance, a Chemical, Physical or Biological principle,
that knowledge is incomplete unless it is accompanied by the ability to pass it on
to someone else in clear and lucid English.
That means in grammatically correct and correctly spelled English prose,
and legible handwriting. In those days,
that was what teachers and examiners demanded, not because they were fussy and
pedantic, but because in later life it would be what other people including employers, would expect
One proposed alteration to the curriculum that is definitely an improvement on that of my childhood and youth is compulsory introduction to a foreign language at primary school. I had no acquaintance whatsoever with a foreign language until I was introduced to French at the age of ten at my secondary school. That, I think, was much too late. I was taught French for six years and still only managed to scrape a ‘pass’ mark in the school leaving exam. Where a school is really determined that its pupils will emerge from their education with a thorough command of a language (Welsh in all schools in the Principality and Hebrew in Jewish schools for instance) that language is taught from ‘infants’ level.
I
wish the Education Secretary success with his proposed reforms. It remains to be seen whether or not he’ll be
able to introduce them without the firm discipline that was enforced in schools
in my day*, and the then taken-for-granted co-operation and compliance of most
parents.
*Take another look at that picture from
my childhood. It’s clear that, especially in the presence of the headmaster,
not one of us dared to step an inch out of line!
A timely reminder
A timely reminder
that it isn’t only the present Prime Minister and top members of the Conservative Party
who stand accused of inappropriate fraternisation with Rupert Murdoch and his
entourage, has come with the publication of an autobiographical record based on the
diaries of Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s chief spin-doctor. This reveals the
closeness of Tony Blair to Rupert Murdoch, ruler of News International, the international news media empire.
Mr
Campbell reveals that in the week prior to Britain ’s declaration of support
for the American-led invasion of Iraq Rupert Murdoch phoned Tony Blair on three
occasions to urge him to declare his support without delay. How extraordinary that an American
multimillionaire and newspaper tycoon, owing no loyalty whatsoever to our Queen
and Country, should have immediate access to a British Prime Minister in order
to exert influence on a matter of foreign policy! This was the Prime Minister who allowed parliament
to be deceived about Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’* and about the
presence and influence of Al Qaeda in that country; the same Prime Minister who
ignored the million British citizens who marched through London registering
their strong opposition to the invasion of Iraq and the further millions who
supported them
Perhaps we
need an enquiry into the behaviour of top politicians quite as much as we
needed an enquiry into the behaviour of the press!
*It should be noted that Alistair Campbell,
whose autobiographical publication has revealed these phone calls, was himself
complicit in the compilation of the ‘Dodgy Dossier’ on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass
Destruction that contributed to the
deception of parliament and of many members of the public.
Those WMDs!
Writing the above
reminded me that it was several days – perhaps several weeks – before Iraq was
invaded that I realized it was most unlikely that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of
Mass Destruction (even ‘battlefield’ ones) at his disposal, and equally unlikely
that Tony Blair and George Bush were unaware of this.
I
am not a great admirer of either of those gentlemen. I can’t believe though
that they were so stupid or so irresponsible as to order the inevitably rather
slow build-up of invasion forces in Kuwait just across Iraq’s border, if they had thought there was the slightest possibility of their being destroyed when, just
before the invasion was launched, Saddam Hussein ‘pressed the button’ and
unleashed his Weapons of Mass Destruction upon them.
It
really didn’t take either ‘rocket science’ or secret sources of information to
work that out!
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