Clive Davis

MR CHURCHILL GOES TO WASHINGTON

Trying to ward off a nasty bout of insomnia, I've taken to reading the Alanbrooke war diaries last thing at night. Not because they're boring - they're not - but because the mandarin prose is so soothing. And the account of all his back-breaking hours of committee work and endless flying from front to front, conference to conference, makes my fretting about deadlines, etc, seem reassuringly trivial.

The entry for 24 June '42 proves, I suppose, that Alistair Campbell and Bernard Ingham weren't the first Downing Street insiders to be experts on image management. On this occasion, the prime ministerial butler (who apparently had a taste for, um, "refreshments") had the final say:

Here Sawyers again distinguished himself. Winston had changed into his Zip suit on the plane and put on his Panama hat for his arrival. The brim of his Panama was turned all the way round and he looked just like a small boy in a suit of romper going down to the beach to dig in the sand! Sawyers took up a position in the middle of the plane and refused to let him pass. Winston asked him: "What's wrong, Sawyers? Why are you getting in my way?" In a very thick voice Sawyers replied "The brim of your hat is turned up, does not look well, turn it down, turn it down!" This was accompanied by a waving gesturing of his hand. Winston, rather red and looking angry, turned the brim down. Thereupon Sawyers stood to one side, muttering to himself "That's much, much better, much better."

BOOSTING BREMNER

Rory Bremner, that right-thinking scourge of the political classes, is one of the smuggest men in Britain, so I hope Iain Dale doesn't encourage him by running the Beckett tape on 18 Doughty Street.

ONE-SIDED

I don't know what effect it had on other people, but the more I watched of Michael Cockerell's relentlessly negative TV portrayal of the Blair years, the more sympathy I began to feel for the man in Number 10. Cockerell's films normally aim for a rounded portrait; this was closer to live-action Spitting Image.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft's hostile new polemic, Yo Blair, seems to have aroused a similar reaction in Dennis MacShane:

In 1995, the foreign secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, made a statement in the Commons washing his hands of any involvement in combating the crimes in Srebrenica. I sat in the Commons that afternoon, unable to believe my ears. My country was prepared to walk on the other side of the street as 8,000 Europeans two hours' flying time away were taken out and shot in cold blood.

Reading Wheatcroft's book, I now understand better the mentality of the Rifkinds, and of the 1930s foreign-policy realists who opposed intervention in Spain because it would make matters worse. Wheatcroft generously writes that "Blair is no totalitarian" and "Blair is no fascist", but we are also told that Labour is run by a "politburo", and he protests about "the Blair junta methods".

...  And, of course, Iraqis do not exist in this book. Hundreds of thousands were murdered by Saddam and, equally tragically, many are dying today. All the fault of Blair? If only history and the world were so simple.

IKEA DAY

Practically a whole day lost to that most basic of domestic chores - assembling a Swedish wardrobe. And I still haven't got the door handles on yet. Maddening.

Something tells me tomorrow will be a quiet day for posts as well.

AN ART CRITIC SPEAKS THE TRUTH ABOUT GILBERT & GEORGE

Not something that happens all that often. One of the most tedious experiences of my life was visiting G&G's acclaimed Nineties exhibition,The Naked Shit Pictures.  Since then the artists have grown and grown, commercially speaking, that is. The New Statesman's Sue Hubbard visited the new Tate Modern extravaganza, and yawned:

To an extent, they are the Joe Ortons of the art world, only without Orton's wit. In works such as "Shitty Naked Human World" (1994), with its crucifix of four brown turds, and "Spit Law" (1997), which shows them bent over, baggy Y-fronts crumpled around their ankles to expose their bum holes, the artists are reminiscent of small boys behind the bike shed who think they are being ever so smutty when, in fact, they are simply being boring...

Gilbert and George's work is not objectionable because it is crude, raw, or in-your-face: many paintings by Picasso are cruel and ugly, and surrealism relished the profane and degraded. But with this pair, there is the suspicion that their fat bank accounts and international reputations are supported by the sycophancy of much of the art world. There is nothing real behind these works - no vituperative anger, no despair, no existential doubt, no love or passion - nothing, in fact, that makes art a meaningful and important human activity. That we accept it as great work worthy of such huge space at Tate Modern shows how lacking in confidence we have become about insisting that art should actually show what is painful, true and meaningful.

JUKEBOX - "AS PRAIAS DESERTAS"

It's been carnival week in Rio, as you can see from this stunning slideshow in the Guardian. Now that the revellers have packed away their costumes, here's another restful number by that poised chamber group, Morelenbaum² / Sakamoto. This one is among Tom Jobim's finest, As Praias Desertas (The Empty Beach).

MY GUILTY PAST

Danny Finkelstein has outed me as a member of a secret society of resentful losers:

Members of the ChipOx club are everywhere. Who are they? Chippy people who went to Oxford, had an argument with a drunk aristocrat in the Balliol bar and supported the wrong candidate for Chief Breadstick in Michaelmas term. Years later, they are still struggling to get over the humiliation.

Quite a way off the mark, really, although I suppose I could invent a scene or two for my memoirs one day. I'm not chippy about Oxford. I do admit to finding the gilded Oxford media set boring and self-absorbed and rather glib, but that's another matter. (The notion that there just might be another world beyond NW1 really is hard for them to absorb.) And I do think there's an interesting conversation to be had about how Oxbridge networks proliferate in the press and elsewhere. But as I've said a few times before, it's just about impossible to do that without sounding chippy. As for David Cameron, I think it's definitely of interest that he's the product of a particularly exclusive set of institutions. Seems to me he may possibly have outgrown them, but I can't say for certain. He's an ex-PR man, after all.

Incidentally, Times commenter Peter Nolan has picked up a point in Cristina Odone's hostile column about the Bullingdon Club: "...No grammar school or state school boys, no Jews were allowed (though a rather dashing Iranian did squeak through the election process in my time)."

Meanwhile, James Delingpole, a one-time Buller wannabe, says that spending all that dosh on luxury dining togs was really all about attracting GURLS. [You have to be a Spectator subscriber to read his full confession.]

What you have to remember is that back in the late Eighties class at Oxford counted for so much more than it does nowadays... It was wholly natural in such a climate that the Buller should be the apogee of one’s social aspirations. Not only was it more famously decadent than any other society (apart from the Piers Gaveston, but that seemed to involve too much buggery), but it also had by far the most splendid uniform.

You could wear this at the Buller’s secret, ritualised dining, drinking and puking sessions but also more publicly at the Bullingdon point-to-point and at any ball where the dress code was White Tie.  Possibly girls are no longer stupid enough to sleep with a man on the basis of whether or not his tailcoat is blue, buff and cream as opposed to plain black. But in those days, some of them were. A Bullingdon tailcoat might cost a grand to have made, but it was worth it because it got you laid.

Last word goes to Rowan Pelling, a chapette who never quite got the joke:

As someone who's been castigated for having a posh voice, I'm the first to agree that inverted snobbery is as insidious and hurtful as the straightforward snooty kind. Until you look at that Bullingdon photo. There's a difference between discriminating against someone because of their accent and origins and being prejudiced because a person chooses of his own free volition to don "royal blue tailcoats with ivory lapels" and behave like a congenital moron...

Arrested development is a pitifully inadequate term to cover the antics of the Bullingdon boys. And I suspect any ire roused in female breasts by the photo stem from a fairly widespread experience ofencountering this brand of emotionally stunted ex-public-schoolboy. Chaps whose interest in womankind was largely confined to whether you were called Topaz and had been to Benenden. The worst offenders were often Old Etonians. This sounds chippy, but you'd be chippy if you walked past some OE fogey in an Oxford college's grounds of a February night and heard him mutter: "Horrible women, they are melting the snow." If you were told that current Etonian slang for ugly girls was: "She mings for Greater Manchester".

Careful, Rowan, you're in danger of becoming the honorary president of ChipOx. Perhaps we should all get together and smash up a restaurant.

UPDATE: I'm glad to find that Chris Dillow agrees with me.  But then he's an oik, of course.

WHAT'S HAPPENING IN IRAQ?

Gerard Baker puts a positive gloss on Tony Blair's announcement of troop withdrawals. On the ground in Baghdad, FT reporter Steve Negus follows the progress of an American unit's efforts to bring some sort of order to a lawless suburb:

A nearby vacant lot on the edge of the city partly explains the insurgents’ hold on South Ghazaliya. Nicknamed the "G-spot" by Delta company, it is used as an execution ground. The Americans say they have found 75 bodies there, including those of teenage boys and a 15-year-old girl. Two days before the ambush, they discovered what appeared to be an Iraqi soldier in camouflage pants, his legs bound in tape and his severed head propped on his back. The Americans suspect that many of the victims are brought in from elsewhere to be killed there, so as to send southern Ghazaliya a message.

... If the goal were to end violence, "the easiest way would be to give Ghazaliya to the Shia", [platoon commander Lieutenant Matthew Holtzendorff] says. "They wouldn’t kill everyone right way – they’d give them a warning to evacuate,48 hours, then come in . . . The downside of doing it the easy way is that it goes against everything we stand for. We always believe in the underdog, we always believe in helping the helpless: for that reason it makes sense to stay here and help."

It's worth digesting the whole article just to get a measure of what the troops are up against.

HALF MAN, HALF SIDEWALK

I find it hard to believe there was a time when I used to peer out of my East Village bedroom window and marvel at the traffic rattling down Second Avenue. Today, just the thought of all that New York mayhem makes me feel faintly depressed. But for a moment on Sunday, when I heard the cabaret singer-pianist Steve Ross perform "What More Do I Need?", I remembered how it used to be. This Manhattan blogger and Sondheim fan has the lyrics:

A wall of rain as it turns to sleet,
The lack of sun on a one-way street,
I love the grime all the time.
And what more do I need?

NOTEBOOK

Nietzsche as a television pundit? You can't imagine it! But perhaps you can. With the right coaching - could you be more obviously sincere, a little less peremptory, smile from time to time - it would have done him a power of good. Steadied his mind, tempered his extravagances, alerted him to the virtues of the man (and the woman) in the street, and bred a firmer sense of responsibility towards his (much enlarged) public. Before long he'd have been co-opted onto influential EC committees, drafting new legislation, helping to eradicate blond beasts and firebrands, invited to deliver the Reith lectures, given an honorary knighthood by Britain ("Sir Freddie"), appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur, awarded the Order of the Chrysanthemum for Excellence in Prose Poems, and asked to open innumerable fêtes.

D.J. Enright, Interplay.