Brian Barder's blog

No apologies for plugging a wonderful exhibition of cartoons of Tony Blair (details below) just because its curator is one of my oldest friends, Alan Mumford, not only the management training guru de ses jours but also an established connoisseur, historian and collector of political cartoons and author-editor of delicious books of cartoons. (Have a look at some of the links in that last sentence!) The Blair cartoons at the current exhibition, tooth-achingly entitled ‘Grin and Blair It’, show in chronological order the progression from the gentle caricatures of a doe-eyed Bambi to the much later savage lampooning of (for example) Martin Rowson and Steve Bell. As Michael White, prince of political commentators, wrote in his Guardian review of the exhibition on 28 October, "It is Bell’s demented larger-than-real left eye which defines Blair, surely nullifying his belief that biometric passports containing all our irises will do any good."

"Grin and Blair it" cartoon exhibition catalogue

The exhibition catalogue, with its wonderful cover cartoon specially drawn and painted by Steve Bell (above), is remarkable among such publications for (1) including highly readable and informative text which rivals the cartoons themselves for interest, (2) being expertly indexed, a considerable aid to browsing in it, and (3) being eminently affordable. It also admirably illustrates the point made by Alan Mumford at the opening of the exhibition on 27 October that so many of these cartoons are beautifully drawn and painted, worth looking at as works of art in their own right as well as being sharp commentaries on the political personalities and issues which prompt them. Go soon to the exhibition and get a copy of the catalogue while there is still time, just in case it isn’t published later as a stand-alone book. Anyway, many of the cartoons deserve to be seen in the flesh, full size: shrunken reproductions don’t always do them justice.

‘Grin and Blair It’ is at the Mall Gallery, London, a few yards from Trafalgar Square in the Mall, until November 8 and thereafter at the Cartoon Art Trust Museum in Bloomsbury (7-13 The Brunswick Centre, Bernard Street, London WC1N 1AF) until 18 December 2004

Brian
29 October 2004
http://www.barder.com/brian/

It seems to me absurd for governments or individuals to issue apologies for offences they have not themselves committed, and most absurd of all to apologise now for something that happened before anyone now alive was born (such as slavery). Often, of course, what those demanding apologies from the innocent really want is not apologies but lucrative compensation, which is even more unattractive than it is absurd. It’s a measure of the triumph of political correctness over common sense that those on the receiving end of these ludicrous demands — for apologies and money-money — so rarely respond by telling these aggrieved characters to stop being so silly and to shut up.

It’s anyway almost a contradiction in terms to demand an apology from a government, even — or especially — for something that the government in question has actually done, since if a government has committed a sufficiently grave offence to require a public apology, it ought to resign, not just apologise. Hence of course Blair’s refusal to apologise for taking us to war on what is now almost technically known as a false prospectus. There’s no way of knowing whether Blair has privately deluded himself into believing, passionately or otherwise, that he didn’t deliberately or negligently mislead parliament, the public and the rest of the world over what was really known or not known about Saddam’s WMD: what is absolutely clear, though, is that if he were to admit to having done so by apologising for it, he would have to resign (and it may now have dawned on his ministerial colleagues that if the prime minister goes, the whole government goes!). I have a rather large reservation about this whole argument, though, because it implies that if the intelligence had been as Blair and Co. described it, and if large stockpiles of WMD had been found by the coalition forces in Iraq on their arrival, that would have meant that the war was legal: whereas it wasn’t, WMD or no WMD. No longer an easy point to get across.

And we now have the repulsive spectacle of the leader of the Conservative Party issuing instructions to the editor of the Spectator on what he may or may not publish in his magazine (which depends for its appeal on its liveliness, irreverence and apparent independence) and instructing him to go and make a grovelling apology to a whole city. It’s not hard to imagine what Iain Macleod, when he was editor of the Spectator, would have said and done if Sir A. Douglas Home or Edward Heath had tried to humiliate him and destroy his independence like that. I had thought and hoped that the amusing Boris Johnson, who much enlivens our otherwise pretty dreary political landscape, was made of sterner, or at any rate of chirpier, stuff. It would be a real pity if Michael Howard’s indefensible intervention were to establish the impossibility of a vigorous and independent-minded politician combining a front bench appointment with the editorship of a political weekly, at any rate while his or her party is in opposition. The editorial in question, after all, made a serious and valid point: whether in doing so it incidentally strayed across the boundaries of good taste, who is to say? De gustibus non disputandum. And the idea of apologising to a whole city is inherently comic.

However, for evidence of Boris Johnson’s essential decency and spirit we need go no further than his sad and funny reflections on the whole tragicomic Liverpool ‘penitential pilgrimage’ (his own description) in the current issue of his splendid, disgraceful magazine.

Brian
25 October 2004
http://www.barder.com/brian/

Greg Dyke, Director-General of the BBC until dismissed by the BBC governors in the wake of the Hutton report and the death of Dr David Kelly, delivered the annual James Cameron Memorial Lecture at the City University on 18 October 2004 at a packed gathering which included a representative sample of the usual suspects: Richard Ingram and Ian Hislop, Melvyn Bragg, Peter Hennessy, John Cole, Brian and Ann Lapping, Sandy Gall, Peter Jay, Alan Rusbridger, Paul Foot’s son John, even a frail but cheerful looking Michael Foot – and those were just the ones we recognised. Most of what Dyke had to say was familiar from his and his many supporters’ utterances since the publication of the Hutton and (especially) Butler reports, including Greg Dyke’s own book ‘Inside Story‘, and he said it with both humour and passionate indignation, at length (at such length indeed that there was no time for questions afterwards, which was a pity).

I was struck though by Dyke’s comparison of the bitter argument over Iraq between Blair and Alastair Campbell on the one hand, and the BBC on the other, with the strikingly similar conflict between Anthony Eden (despite the leftish views of his press secretary* at No. 10) and the BBC over the Suez affair in 1956, a British diplomatic and military disaster famously comparable with the blunders and misrepresentations over Iraq today. Eden was outraged by the BBC’s decision to allow Gaitskell, then leader of the Labour Party opposition, the right of reply to Eden’s television and radio address to the nation setting out the case for going to war at Suez, a case subsequently revealed of course to have been founded on a huge conspiracy and a pack of lies. Dyke recalled Eden’s complaint that the BBC was failing to reflect the government’s case, as he thought its role as the national broadcaster required it to do, instead giving equal time to the opponents of the war and critics of the government’s actions. Eden even at one time considered having the government take over control of the BBC to put an end to this pernicious even-handedness, as he saw it, which would have been an even more extreme step than anything that Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell ever, so far as we know, contemplated doing even at the height of their campaign against the BBC over Iraq and the Gilligan broadcast. Dyke quoted the formidable Grace Wyndham Goldie, the first Head of BBC Television News and Current Affairs, as having acknowledged in her memoirs that all governments tried to exert pressure on the BBC to present a more favourable picture of government policy than it was willing to do, and that it was the BBC’s duty to give a properly balanced account of current issues: it was vital to recognise that the aims of government and BBC were not the same, and the BBC always had to fight to defend its independence, something the BBC governors (said Dyke, as he would, wouldn’t he?) had signally failed to do after Gavyn Davies’s resignation as Chairman of the Governors and Dyke’s own dismissal by them.

Some commentators have questioned the common description (e.g. by Robin Cook and many others, including me) of the Iraq war as the biggest disaster for British foreign policy and diplomacy since Suez, pointing out that the Iraq war has caused many more deaths and casualties, and wreaked much greater destruction and instability, than the Suez adventure. In terms of the consequences, this is certainly true, especially as the Iraq casualty figures, already far exceeding those at Suez, continue to mount. But there’s a good case, I think, for arguing that the misrepresentations and suppressions of the truth, and the murky dissemblings over the true purposes of the Iraq war, barely approach the scale of the conspiracy and lying that surrounded Suez, with its cynical misrepresentation of the real intentions of Britain and France in pretending to go to war to ‘separate the combatants’ in a conflict which they themselves had conspired with Israel to arrange. There’s a melancholy irony in the fact that at Suez it was the United States under Eisenhower which put a stop to our and France’s ill-conceived adventure, and rescued us from the worst consequences of our folly: whereas over Iraq it was the United States and Britain that launched the ill-fated attack on Iraq under a false prospectus and with concealed motives, while it was France, among others, which tried, this time unsuccessfully, to restrain us. From the Suez fiasco successive British leaders drew the conclusion that we should never again allow ourselves to be detached on a major issue of war and peace from the Americans, while the French drew the opposite conclusion – that the Europeans should develop sufficient unity, power and influence to be able to restrain the Americans from acting contrary to European and global interests (a point for which I am indebted to my good e-friend Peter Harvey).

*William Clark was Eden’s press secretary until his resignation in November 1956 over his opposition to Suez and the way it was being presented; subsequently Alfred Richardson (November 1956). Richardson was replaced, after Harold Macmillan came to office in January 1957 following Eden’s resignation on account of his health, by the celebrated Harold Evans, later one of the most distinguished of British newspaper editors at the Sunday Times. William Clark had been "diplomatic correspondent of the Observer and, to this day, the only press secretary with significant experience of political television, of which he was a pioneerâ€? — Memorandum to the Select Committee on Public Administration by Colin Seymour-Ure, Professor of Government, University of Kent at Canterbury.

Brian
20 October 2004
http://www.barder.com/brian/