Earning One's Stipend

There was a time when the poet laureate was paid a stipend of a pipe of port (48 cases) and required to bash out a stanza for royal hatches, matches and dispatches; also for military victories and matters of great public interest.

Nowadays, poets laureate are not donnish port-drinkers, but modern, happening, right-on types. Probably drink Mexican beer with a piece of lime stuffed in the neck of the bottle. Or at least that's what I imagined Andrew Motion doing, despite being an Oxford chap. So they get bunged £5750 instead. Motion was a pretty hopeless poet laureate, though I did think his "Regime Change" read quite well, notwithstanding the lefty angle.

Now we have Carol Ann Duffy, who I fear would have added lemon to the splendid Taylor or Fonseca port that came with the job. Not the shy or retiring type, Carol Ann. She described her appointment as "a historic day for women". Charles Moore reports that "she says she wants 300 years of female poet laureates to balance the past three centuries of males".

Oh dear. I think she may be missing the point. Good poetry is what we want, not affirmative action. Moore continues:

She has lots of ideas about ‘the vocation of poetry’, and wants to use the laureateship to get her fellow poets into schools, preach about how homosexuality (she is a lesbian) is ‘a lovely, ordinary thing’ etc. I fear that the post may suffer from what economists call ‘producer capture’. Miss Duffy says that in her conversations with ministers and with Buckingham Palace, ‘I was told there was no expectation that I would write royal poetry.’

I would have thought that our Parliament sinking to its nadir of dishonour would be a good time for the old wordsmith to rustle up a cheery sonnet. Betjeman would have known what to do.

Luckily, we have our own Betjeman of the Blog, a modern Wikipling, if you like: Nick Drew, you cheer us up! http://cityunslicker.blogspot.com/2009/05/very-very-odd.html for his latest offering. He'd get a bottle of Taylor 83 opened for him in this house were he ever to visit it. And not a sniff of lemon.

Idle's Sunday Sermon

Let He Who is Without Sin Cast the First Stone (John, ch 8 v 7)

Brown hasn't fired the cheating cow who claimed the dry rot treatment on her holiday home, 110 miles from both Westminster AND her constituency.

But we were hardly expecting him to, were we? After all Jacqui Smith remains not just a government minister, but Home Secretary. Brown doesn't believe in sacking people, as he thinks it weakens him. (No, you great greasy numpty, not sacking them makes you look weak!)

And Cameron has not, so far, removed the whip from James Gray, who gets all of us to pay for his Remembrance Day wreaths, while he gets the kudos of placing them in front of his local dignitaries. Worse still he whined that he had "got away with it in the past" when the fees office refused to pay the last claim. Where does this leave Cameron? I notice Liam Fox was warning folk not to overreact about this expenses thing on the telly this morning.

Truly, we appear to be in a situation where no one will cast a stone because they are all, to a man, up to their oxters in it.

I fear that, because they are ALL at it, to some extent if not to the limit, that no-one will hang for this. Safety in numbers and all that; if there was only one of them, HE'D have a problem, but because there are 650 of the cheating swine, plus selected noble lords, WE'VE got a problem.

Bastards.

The Expenses Row Made Easy

1. 1992-97 John Major's government obtains a reputation for 'sleaze'. This largely rests on Aitken's perjury (proven), Hamilton's cash-for-questions (unproven) and David Mellor's sexual shenanigans.

2. May 1997 Blair: "We must be whiter than white"

3. October 1997: Blair meets Bernie Ecclestone. All pretence at honesty and integrity ends.

4. 2001: Blair is uneasy about having his MPs scrutinised. Sacks Elizabeth Filkin, Commons Satandards Commissioner.

5. 2001-2009: Most MPs abuse the system big time. Most MPs play the property market for personal gain with taxpayer assistance.

6. Today. Harriet Harman: “I know it looks bad, I know people are angry about it”.....

...... “ but in our system we do not have the level of corruption that remains in many other systems"

PHEW. That's alright then.

Play Up, Play Up!

There's a breathless hush in the Close tonight -
Ten to make and the match to win -
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
Sir Henry Newbolt Vitaï Lampada (extract)

It's a bit bloody early in the season to be heading off to Lord's - I've not even taken delivery of the rosé yet, but needs must when the devil rides.

The reason for this early start is that the Twenty20 World Cup has to be fitted in next month. Twenty20 is a vulgar and idiotic form of the game invented by greedy Indian businessmen and television executives. The Indian Premier League, in its second year, has had to be transferred to South Africa because of the behaviour of murderous gangsters and lunatics in Bombay and Lahore last winter. It is making cricketers very rich, but peversely less good at cricket. A better name for them is the Dumbslog Millionaires. When they have finished playing this form of baseball, they all move to England for the World Cup; if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, reckoned the international cricket honchos. Even Lord's is hosting some games. Terrible, terrible. The only reason I'll be attending them is to entertain my godsons, you understand.

Anyway, that's why we are starting a proper test match today with the Windies, who unaccountably beat us this winter in the Caribbean. Look out for me on the telly. I might be sinking a glass with Farqs and Alceste of this manor. I promise not to run onto the pitch; only people who have never read Sir Henry Newbolt do that sort of thing.

Heroic Woman

I hope you know about Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Idle has been a big fan for ages and swooned when meeting her last autumn. This brave and thoughtful woman has so many fatwas against her, she can barely breathe. She talks more sense about Islam within Western Europe than anyone. She's one of very few who know what they are talking about and can do so without be branded a racist.

In 2006, I had a debate with Tariq Ramadan, the author of Western Muslims and the future of Islam. In the hypothetical event of a war between Egypt and Switzerland, for which community would he be prepared to die, I asked him.
Mr Ramadan has dual citizenship. He's an Egyptian by birth and a Swiss by naturalisation. His response was one of rage on different levels. Above all I think he was outraged that one should ask such a question. He refused to answer.
Mr Ramadan, like many other Muslims, may have two or more citizenships. From all that he expresses both in person and on paper, it is clear that his loyalty, above all, is to Islam. I do not doubt that he would die for Islam, like most Muslims, and that's his prerogative. But what European countries have done is give citizenship to individuals who feel no obligation to share in their societies for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer and in the event of a catastrophe, sacrifice themselves.

Full article at The First Post.

Today Midhurst, Tomorrow the World!

I often thought that Iain Dale followed leads from the idle blog, and now I know.

http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2009/05/ten-new-blogs-part-46.html#links

Thirty Years On

Mrs Thatcher privatised British Telecom, British Airways, British Leyland. But we still have a nationalised British political culture - the reflexive gripe that, if something's wrong with your local hospital or your local school, it ought to be fixed by some secretary of state in a Whitehall department. It never will be. But the way to get some dynamism and creativity into the system is to denationalise the problems, and make them local issues to be solved locally, in a thousand different ways. That's even more important in the present circumstances. As Mrs Thatcher recognised, the British are an inventive people. Unfortunately, though she freed them to apply that inventiveness to their economic endeavors, they are increasingly prevented from applying it to any other aspect of life. And which of today's leaders would ever trust them as Thatcher did?

Mark Steyn, The Unfinished Revolution