Spin: the right's good at it. But the left's not bad either

What’s in a word? Or, for that matter, a number?

Well, they’re invaluable if you want to communicate information. Or, for that matter, disinformation. The latter even requires a little ingenuity.

For example, when UK Prime Minister Theresa May formally told the EU that Britain would be leaving, she expressed the hope that a mutually beneficial new relationship could be established but warned that, in the event it could not, “in security terms, a failure to reach agreement would mean our cooperation in the fight against crime and terrorism would be weakened”.

The EU reacted with some heat to what it saw as an attempt at blackmail: give us a good deal or we stop cooperating on security and crime. May was shocked and pointed out that she intended no blackmail. Despite her denial, however, the threat is not out there – and won’t be forgotten.

What she forgot to mention in her letter was the status of Gibraltar. So the EU had its own surprise for Britain: arrangements for the rock have to be agreed with Spain. This is a horrific notion to true Brits: how does the obvious geographic fact that Gib is part of Spain trump Britain’s right of conquest?

Fortunately, former Conservative leader Michael Howard set the record straight.

“35 years ago this week,” he announced, “another woman Prime Minister sent a task force half way across the world to defend the freedom of another small group of British people, against another Spanish-speaking country. And I’m absolutely certain that our current Prime Minister will show the same resolve in standing by the people of Gibraltar.”

Some misguided observers, including me, took this parallel as suggesting a parallelism in planned action too. Was war with Spain imminent? Oh, no, Howard quickly assured us, nothing could be further from his mind. The Prime Minister herself laughed at the idea.

Again, though, it’s out there.

This smart use of ambiguous or imprecise language is an aspect of spin, and the Tories are good at it. But, it turns out, it’s not a monopoly of the right wing. The left uses the same methods. In Britain, the Labour Party is dominated by a left-wing trend that backs the current leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Under his leadership, Labour has reached a low-point in the polls which suggests it is heading for its most calamitous defeat for 80 years.

Among his supporters, however, none of this is attributable to him. For instance, a recent Corbynista blog post I read included this table:

Numbers: they’re so reliable.
Except when they aren’t. And words are still worse

That use of the word ‘coup’ is smart. A coup is the kind of thing that was attempted against Turkish President Erdogan. It involves threatened or actual violence; it is illegal and extra-constitutional, its methods sanctioned by no law or agreement. 

The Labour Party ‘coup’ was a vote of no-confidence by Corbyn’s colleagues in parliament. He lost it massively – 80% voted against him. He had to stand again for the leadership. None of this is extra-constitutional: on the contrary, it followed procedures specified by the Labour rulebook.

It’s arguable that the decision to precipitate a new leadership election was unwise politically, since Corbyn won it with a large majority. That, however, is a political view. It does not make the move against him a coup. But calling it one neatly intensifies the opprobrium against his opponents: a coup is illegitimate, treacherous, despicable.

There is, however, an opposite political view, to which I personally subscribe. If his fellow MPs felt Corbyn was leading the party to defeat, they had not merely the right, but the obligation to act against him. My feeling is that nothing we have seen since does anything but confirm the fears of his opponents: the decline is spectacular and there is no sign of its ending.

What about the numbers in the table? The “pre-coup” figures showed Labour ahead in one poll in April. The message seems compelling: look how the plotters spoiled things!

The broader picture.
Gives a better view. Unless that’s just what you’re trying to avoid
Source: UK Polling Report

But set the figures in context and a different picture emerges. The graph shows that at the time of Corbyn’s ascension to the leadership, the Conservative poll lead was somewhere in the 5-10% range. This was desperately bad, because to win an election, an opposition needs to be well ahead a year or so into a parliament. For a brief period, from about March to June 2016, the position became a little less dire with Labour trailing by between 0 and 5 points. Not too much importance should be assigned to the few polls that went so far as to show a Labour lead: occasional extreme findings are bound to happen by pure chance. The overall picture is of a general Conservative lead, though a smaller one than in the autumn.

Since then the position has steadily worsened. Long after the “coup”, Corbyn’s reaffirmed leadership has failed to turn the tide: in the polls, it continues to flow strongly against him. Again, ignoring occasional extreme results, the deficit seems to be of about 15 points, with an underlying trend against and not for Labour.

Whatever certain Labourites may have done against him, Corbyn is clearly proving unable to do anything for the party. Not, at least, as far as staunching the wound through which our electoral life blood is flowing.

That’s a painful message for his supporters. It’s not one they want to mention or even think about. It’s much more comforting to spin it with references to coups and one or two spurious poll results.

Well, who can blame them? The Tories have shown the technique works. Just don’t claim it’s left-wing.

Or particularly honest.

Political deviousness and claustrophobic killings with subtitles, and making the news without

The French president has been assassinated. His body has barely grown cold before potential successors are jockeying to replace him. That’s the starting point of Spin, or Les hommes de l’ombre, as it was known in its original French.

Spin: French answer to Borgen and just as good

If the president was a man of the moderate right, his Prime Minister Philippe Deleuvre, is far more harshly conservative. Indeed, though they ended up in the same government, Deleuvre was the President’s sworn enemy. Now Deleuvre launches a harshly repressive response to what he represents as an act of terrorism. Security measures are stepped up, and a climate of fear generated across the nation, a climate from which he believes he is most likely to benefit.

But he has calculated without taking into account Simon Kapita, spin Doctor extraordinaire and the man who was key to the election of the now-murdered President. Although Kapita had been living in New York, and indeed about to take a senior position with the UN, he can’t help being drawn into the campaign. Especially against a political enemy like Deleuvre. Even more so when he receives increasingly convincing evidence that there was no terrorist element to the murder, an aspect of the affair that his estranged wife, a journalist, goes to great lengths and even personal risk to investigate.

So Kapita sets out to find an alternative candidate for the right. He lights on Anne Visage, far more liberal than Deleuvre, and far more to his taste. But her own past isn’t free of difficult truths, and all his skills as a master of the trade are called into action. Especially as he finds himself up against a former colleague and friend, indeed his previous business partner, Ludovic Desmeuze, who has decided to work for Deleuvre.

The result of this mix is as gripping as the Danish political drama Borgen, made even sharper by some of the edgy, violent atmosphere of the excellent French thriller series, Engrenages or Spiral as it was known in English (incidentally, Kapita’s rival Desmeuze is played by Grégory Fitoussi who was so good in Spiral).

One of my favourite moments from the first season? When Kapita gives Visage a file before she goes into a TV debate. On the outside is a word referring to a scandal of the campaign which might destabilise her opponent if the contents came out (though, as it happens, it would cause her pain too). When she asks what’s inside, he says “nothing” – it was merely a trick used in the 1981 campaign by Mitterand, who would glance at it whenever he felt his opponent Giscard d'Estaing was getting too aggressive.

“That’s really twisted,” she says, though she takes the file with her, ready to make use of it, dirty or not. Until, that is, her opponent shows up on stage – with a far fatter file with exactly the same word on the cover…

Trapped in a storm-isolated town: the killer must be among us...

Just as gripping, in the present crop of subtitled TV series, was Trapped. This is the latest piece of Nordic Noir, but not from Scandinavia proper this time. Trapped is set in Iceland, in a small harbour town on the East Coast, miles from anywhere, which is one of the main plot devices: the weather has turned vile (even for Icelandic winter) cutting off the town. So when a dismembered body is found in the waters of the port, there’s no way police from Reykjavik can show up to help the investigation. Or rather take it over – the officer that would head the Reykjavik team is a bitter opponent of the local chief of police, the extraordinary, bear-like figure of Andri, magnificently played by Ólafur Darri Olafsson, of whom we’ve certainly not heard the last. His estranged wife is in town, with her new boyfriend. They’re there to pick up her and Andri’s daughters, and move them to Reykjavik. Just to intensify the ambivalence, the boyfriend is rather likeable.

Ilmur Kristjánsdóttir is outstanding as Hinrika, a policewoman with brilliant use of facial expression and body language, avoiding the need for much in the way of words. The result is a great mix of the personal drama and the public, as the bodies pile up, and we work our way slowly forward among these people trapped in a town cut off by the elements, towards finding the truth about the murders and the link they may or may not have with the tragic events seven years earlier and shown in the opening sequence: the death of a young girl (coincidentally Andri’s sister-in-law) when a deserted factory goes up in flame.

And finally, a series we abandoned when we first started watching it a couple of years ago, and now wonder why we didn’t keep going with, having enjoyed all three seasons so much: The News Room. This is great work by one of the finest scriptwriters of our time, Aaron Sorkin, and as usual it’s high-paced, just avoiding the frenetic by a whisker. In principle, unlike the other two this is a series that doesn’t need subtitles for English speakers, but we kept them on if only not to miss any of the quickfire dialogue. You don’t want to lose any of the repartee, a hallmark of Sorkin’s writing.

Another hallmark, fully on show in this series, is his range of believable, highly watchable characters; virtually none of them is entirely unlikeable, and none of them is without serious faults. Nor are they above making errors. On the contrary, as they work against the clock to prepare and broadcast and hour-long TV news programme each day, they frequently screw up, often monumentally – in their personal lives but often in the programme itself. The mix makes for compelling viewing.

The Newsroom: brilliant characters and quickfire dialogue

A favourite moment? Near the beginning (but there are plenty of others later) when the leading character is asked in a public meeting, “can you say why America is the greatest country in the world?” He replies, “It's not the greatest country in the world... That's my answer. It sure used to be. We stood up for what was right. We fought for moral reasons. We passed laws, struck down laws – for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not on poor people… America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.”

That was true when the series first emerged, back in 2012. It’s even truer today, in the age of Trump. Good for Sorkin for getting that right.

Thank you for the irony, Daily Mail

It’s not often that the British Daily Mail makes me smile, but it did today.

It was the headline that got me going: “WHO WILL SPEAK FOR ENGLAND?” it demanded to be told.

Usually I’m put off by what is, after all, the paper that lines the sewers of British journalism. It could have been for the Mail that the celebrated ditty was written:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
thank God!
the British journalist.

But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed,
there's no occasion to.

In this case, however, my reaction was that of a lover of irony. There were, after all, simply too many layers of irony in that headline for them not to be appreciated.

The article is about what the Mail sees as a battle between Britain and the EU, currently being waged without much conviction by David Cameron’s government. From the perspective of the Mail and others that share its political outlook, this is a battle for the very soul of Britain, threatened today by all those nasty foreigners across the Channel.

The reference in the headline is to one of the most poignant moments in the history of the House of Commons. I’ve mentioned it more than once before, but it was an inspiring event so I make no apology for talking about it again.

The then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had just flown home from a meeting with Hitler, in which he’d been joined by the French Prime Minister Daladier. On arrival back home, he had waved an agreement that, he claimed, guaranteed “peace for our time.” It gave Hitler a free hand to dismember Czechoslovakia, in return for his not threatening any French or British vital interests.

Hitler ignored the agreement and within a year, we were at war with Nazi Germany.

The time of the agreement was perhaps one of the most humiliating in Britain’s long and colourful career. A great many people felt that way, even then. When Chamberlain made a statement on his meeting to the House of Commons it was greeted by silence – shamed silence. And when the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Arthur Greenwood, stood to reply for the Opposition, a voice called out from the other side of the house – the Conservative, Government side – “speak for England, Arthur.”

So that was irony number 1. It was a Tory, Leo Amery, who called on a Labourite to speak against the Tory Prime Minister.

Irony number 2 is that he made that call in the name of England. But the whole of Britain was affected. Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish would share in the ignominy, as they would share in the sacrifices that the war would entail.

Irony number 3 is that the Mail claims to be speaking for Britain, and also referred only to England.

Irony number 4 is that Leo Amery was speaking out against Nazi Germany. The Mail is railing against a bunch of politicians, no better or worse than others, but as committed to democracy as any current member of the British Parliament.

The Mail says in its article that it’s drawing no parallel between the EU and Nazi Germany. But have you been watching the excellent French series on TV at the moment, Spin (Les hommes de l’ombre)? There’s a moment in it in which the protagonist refers to her adversary as “disloyal” and immediately corrects herself to “loyal”. It’s deliberate: her correction is designed to free her from attack for her insult, but the insult is out there.

The Mail’s use of that headline draws the parallel, even if the body of the article denies it.

Finally, and funniest of all, the Mail is the newspaper which, back in the 1930s, supported Hitler and his British (indeed, English) opposite number, Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. How wonderful that it should now quote the great anti-appeasement Tory Amery to lambast David Cameron over his support for the EU…

Glorious stuff, isn’t it? Well worth a smile. And I suspect there’ll be plenty more such irony before we get our referendum on continued British membership of the EU.

That’s British membership including the English, by the way.

Thoughts spun, words mangled

It’s wonderful how the human mind can twist its thoughts to meet its wishes.

My wife has just finished her first week in a new post. Interestingly, she’s taken a job in the same line as our eldest son, neatly reversing the tradition of children following parents into their chosen professions. 

The stress of taking up a new position makes it perfectly comprehensible that this morning, a Saturday, she slept in a little.

But me? I had no such excuse.

The result of waking late was that, when I decided that the minor badminton injury I’m still carrying meant I shouldn’t play today, and that we could go for a swim instead, it was perilously close to the 10:00 end of the session at our local pool. In the end, we had only 25 minutes in the water, an embarrassingly short swim.

“Ah well,” I said to myself, “it’s best to start gently again after a week off for an injury. Gradually ramp back up.”

Now I know that’s just a variant on the sour grapes story: presenting the effects of laziness as an apparent instance of judicious thinking on my part.

Still, in the French version of the Fox and the Grapes story, La Fontaine finishes by asking whether the disappointed animal didn’t do better by writing off the unreachable grapes as undesirable, rather than living with his regret. “Didn’t he do better than to complain?” the poet asks.

The Fox and the Grapes:
La Fontaine gave a new twist to Aesop's fable

I think my gentle – how shall I put this? – readjustment of the reasons for the shortness of the swim, admirably fits that approach to life. It’s spin, of course, a key tool of us marketing types, and boy, is it useful. As any politician or other advertiser can testify.

The visit to the pool provided other lessons too. The Brits complain of the Germans’ devious use of beach towels to book sun loungers by hotel swimming pools, or deck chairs on the beach (odd term that, isn’t it? What deck are they on?) This is something my compatriots consider both deplorable and risible.

So it was amusing to find that a lot of the swimmers this morning had left their outdoor clothes and other kit in the changing cubicles, thereby booking them for their own private use. 

A secondary effect is that it avoids them the expenditure of 20 pence on a locker. There must be things you can still buy for 20p, but I can’t think of an example off hand. And certainly nothing particularly desirable. Many of these cubicle occupiers are children on swimming courses that cost their parents significant sums; it’s hard to imagine that 20p more would make much of a difference.

The habit’s particularly irritating when sheer numbers of people mean there are no other cubicles free, as was the case today. The solution was obvious, and we adopted it: we used the cubicles anyway. Telling kids frantically knocking on the door that the cubicles weren’t theirs to book was as satisfying as piling a bunch of beach towels onto one deck chair, to use the others.

Private booking of public amenities
Irritating but by no means confined to the Germans

Not that the kids will have learnt anything. Words are far less powerful than one likes to believe. But then, we misuse them so often. I recently reminded a colleague that others were waiting for him to complete a task, and he replied:

“Ah, yes, sorry, that still requires an action on my behalf.”

My view was that the only action required on his behalf was a well-placed but metaphorical boot up the backside. That might get him to do what was needed on his part.

But perhaps I’m being unfair, inferring more from his statement than he was implying. Or, as he would no doubt express it, the other way round.

Ah, words, words. How we misuse them. Back in the pool, I got to thinking about the word “cool”. I suppose its positive connotation comes from a certain ideal of calm and self-control. There are, however, plenty of things it’s not particularly cool to have cool: a bath, a coffee, a reception.

Come to that, the pool’s pretty cool. Which is one of the least cool things about it.