Civilisation

Back in 1986, Levan Merritt, then only 5, fell into the gorilla enclosure at Jersey Zoo. Falling onto concrete, he was left with a cracked skull and broken arm and unconscious for several minutes. The horrified witnesses, including his parents, watched as an adult male silverback, Jambo, lumbered over to the prostate boy. But instead of tearing the child apart, Jambo took a protective posture alongside him keeping the other gorillas away and even, at one point, stroking him.

Jambo's arm reaches out to sroke unconscious Levan

A few weeks ago I saw TV film of what I consider one of the more moving finds in archaeology, a withered bone from the right arm of a male Neanderthal. Why is it moving? Because he survived many years after his crippling injury, meaning that his community nursed him and then fed him – he certainly can’t have been up to much as a hunter in later life.

Withered and healthy bones of our Neanderthal
- and the skull wan't in good shape either

Several times a week I’m reminded of the confrontation that took place earlier this summer between our cat Misty and the crows from across the road. He seized one of their young that had fallen from its nest but before he could dispatch it he found himself under violent attack from the beaks and talons of the parents. Although equipped with deadly claws and teeth himself, he couldn’t fight off birds so committed that they'd run mortal danger themselves to save their young, and indeed he’s learned real respect for them: whenever they see him now they caw, and when he hears them cawing, he runs for home.

Since I work in the healthcare world, I often think of Mary Seacole. She was a Jamaican born in the time of slavery in the nineteenth century. She turned herself into something of a cross between a nurse and a doctor. Florence Nightingale, who made her name nursing soldiers during the Crimean War, refused Seacole the right to join her, as did the rest of the British establishment, no doubt convinced that no-one with skin that dark could be trusted to care for the sick and injured. Seacole travelled to the Crimea independently and set up a hotel and supplies operation for the troops, enabling her to tend to the ill and wounded. She realised her ambition to be the first woman into Sebastopol after the city fell, and nursed many Russian soldiers as well as others from the Allied side there. She struggled back to England, again at her own expense, and was declared bankrupt soon after her return. She was only freed from destitution by friends running fund-raising events in her support.

Mary Seacole at the time of the Crimean War

What do all these stories have in common?

They’re all about individuals making sacrifices to help others, to alleviate distress. In the case of the crows and the Neanderthals, the sacrifice is for kin, but Mary Seacole and, indeed, Florence Nightingale cared for strangers. And Jambo came to the rescue of an individual who wasn’t even of the same species.

It seems to be something of an instinct, to bring help where it’s needed.

And yet – all the world’s major religions include injunctions to help each other in this way, which rather suggests that while we think it’s admirable, we do need to be reminded. And when we look around at other aspects of human behaviour, it’s fairly clear why the reminder is needed.

Over the last few years we’ve been repeatedly assured by leaders claiming to represent civilised values, that it is permissible to torture those we suspect of threatening us. In Britain, it seems that according to its own own studies, the government’s policies will make 40,000 additional families homeless and Ministers preferred to try (unsuccessfully) to conceal the studies rather than change the policies. And in the name of human rights, the great Democracies of the West are engaged in three wars which have led to countless civilian deaths – literally countless in the case of Iraq, with General Tommy Franks telling us ‘we don’t do body counts’ .

So remember the Neanderthal, remember Misty’s crows, remember the Jersey gorilla, remember Mary Seacole. And then remember that they represent an aspiration not an achievement. Why hasn't the one turned into the other? I think we're back to my favourite quotation from Konrad Lorenz, about having discovered the missing link between apes and civilised man: it's us.

Feels like  it may be a while before we cross that link.

Murdoch: time to cut him some slack

Hasn’t Rupert Murdoch suffered enough? Is it time to show some compassion?

Everyone seems to have a knife into the poor fellow these days (you understand that I’m using the word ‘poor’ in a purely metaphorical sense)

My view: it’s time to stop. He’s had to withdraw his bid to buy the whole of satellite broadcaster BSkyB and with it his ambition to go from being a baleful influence in British broadcasting to becoming a veritable Sauron (OK, OK, Voldemort for the younger generation). That’s a hell of a blow and I say it’s time for decent Englishmen to stop kicking him. We just don’t do that sort of thing to a man who’s down.

Instead we should be offering him encouragement.  

Personally, I’d like to encourage him to enjoy the extended rest his long labours have surely earned him. Yes, Rupe, it’s time to get on with your retirement. In fact, why not see if you can’t share it with the only other man who can hold a light to you when it comes to lifetime achievement, that other great media mogul and present Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi?

You should retire together. Why, that would mean that a stroke you'd be immeasurably benefitting not just one counrty but two. At least.

Perfect company for each other and ripe for retirement

You could while away the lengthening evenings over a good bottle or two and have a laugh about all the people who made the mistake of trying to get in your way. I see the two of you doing that in some idyllic setting – I understand that Silvio has a lovely place, just right for the purpose, on the island of Sardinia. And it’s not just the spot that’s superb, I’m told that he’s a dab hand at making sure the entertainment leaves nothing to be desired. Or to the imagination.

What’s more, if a few Italian magistrates have their way, Silvio may not be needing to provide his own accommodation for too much longer. In that case, Rupe could have it to himself.

Of course, it’s true that Murdoch has his own minor issues to sort out with the law. But hey, let’s take these things one step at a time. Tomorrow can look after tomorrow’s problems – you know, sufficient unto the day and all that stuff.

I shouldn’t let the prospect of a judicial enquiry in Britain put you off at all from getting on with your retirement. My advice to you is get on with it just as soon as you can - it can't come a moment too soon.

Better to be a fool than a knave in a World deprived of its News

So, it seems I won’t be reading the News of the World next Sunday.

In itself that won’t represent a huge change: not reading the News of the World has been a settled part of my Sunday morning routine for a great many years. The only real difference is that I wouldn’t be able to buy a copy even if I wanted to, since Rupert Murdoch’s News International corporation has decided to bring an end to that particular scandal sheet’s 168-year history.

The last front page

For those who may not have been following the recent enthralling developments in the NoW saga, this is the culmination of a decade-long controversy of which, for once, the paper was not the purveyor but the subject.

In their commitment to investigative journalism, some people on the paper (I’m picking my words with care: nothing has been proved against those who edited the paper at the time and they deny knowledge of any wrongdoing) had employed the services of a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, now in prison, to hack into the voicemail of celebrities’ mobiles. The more was dug up, the longer the list of hacking victims became, until it recently reached 4000, extending far beyond actual celebrities to include the parents of child murder victims, the relatives of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, even and most notoriously a murdered schoolgirl, whose voicemail messages the fearless investigators deleted so more could be left for them to listen to. The deletion of the messages gave the parents the hope that their daughter was still alive some time after she had in fact already been murdered.

What of the know-nothing editors? One was Andy Coulson who later headed Conservative Party leader David Cameron’s communications unit. After his boss took office as Prime Minister, Coulson became Director of Communications at 10 Downing Street on a publicly-funded salary. Eventually, in the face of the growing scandal, he resigned in January of this year. However, he continues to maintain that he knew nothing of hacking during his editorship and, since he’s a PR man, why should we question his credibility?

Come to think of it, Cameron too cut his teeth in PR, and I’ve always found him just as trustworthy as Coulson.

The other editor was Rebekah Brooks. She’s had a personal history that would make her a perfectly appropriate subject for some lurid column inches in the paper she ran. The youngest ever editor of a British national newspaper, she’s now Chief Executive of News International in this country. All this suggests that she’s outstandingly able, although she denies it: she claims to have been completely unaware of what NoW staff were doing while she was editor.

Rebekah Brooks: picture of innocence

Fortunately, there is more than one way of getting to the top of an organisation and indeed of staying there, and some only require skills that are generally available throughout the population. The belief that she rose to prominence by such means is certainly preferable to the alternative, which would be that she actively colluded in reprehensible and possibly illegal behaviour by her staff. If that were the case it would reflect unfavourably not just on her but on the News International corporation and even its top figure, Rupert Murdoch. And who of us living in Britain would want to accept that such a huge proportion of our communications media was in the control of a man without principle and with such scant respect for civilised standards?

Being thought a fool isn’t good, but probably better than being shown to have been a knave. Especially if the knavery may have strayed into criminality.

In any case, whatever else Brooks didn’t know, it's clear that she was aware of one of the most interesting operations run by staff at the NoW on her watch. The Guardian has stated, and she hasn’t denied, that she was informed by no  less an authority than Scotland Yard that the paper’s staff and resources were being used to target a senior Detective, David Cook, on behalf of two murder suspects he was investigating. Such was their commitment to investigative journalism that these people dug out personal information about Cook and his wife in their efforts to support the suspects.

I’m no lawyer so I don’t know if this was actually illegal, but I suppose I have the same grasp of basic morality as most people, and I have to say that this feels like something that is at best in a bit of a grey area. Ethically speaking.

And Brooks’ response when she was told that this was happening? That it was basic investigative journalism: they were checking out allegations that Cook had been having an affair with a presenter of the BBC Crimewatch programme, Jacqui Hames.

Now, it is certainly reprehensible for a married man to have an affair with a married woman, and that’s just the kind of thing the NoW liked to expose. However, when the man and woman are married to each other, as Hames and Cook were, surely it’s not quite as questionable? This is probably a piece of information that a fastidious observer might regard as relevant to such a line of enquiry. And without wanting to be hypercritical, I can’t help feeling that an organisation that prides itself on its investigative reporting might have been expected to discover it.

Thinking about that kind of incident makes it less difficult to believe Brooks’s protestations of incompetence.

It also makes it a lot easier to come to terms with the idea that I’m going to have to do without the News of the World next week.

No worries, if you follow my pet philosophy

I worry about the collapsing economy, I worry about global warming, I worry about pitiless financiers.

I worry about my pension, I worry about my house, I worry about my kids.

I worry about the decisions I take, I worry about whether I have the authority to take them, I worry about the decisions that others take if I don’t.

I worry about upsetting my wife, about irritating my friends, about being taken for an insensitive fool instead of a wit with a ready word of banter.

I worry about the way I look, I worry about the way I work, I worry about the way I talk (or at least about how much).

Sometimes I worry about why I worry so much.

And yet right in my own household I have an object lesson in not worrying. Two object lessons in fact, since one is being taught to me with a feline flavour by Misty, the other in a more canine style by Janka. Different in their origins, the lessons are nonetheless strangely similar in their message.

Summertime and the living is easy

cats are slumping

and the sleeping dogs lie

What are they telling me? Chill out. Relax. None of these things matter. Lie back and enjoy the summer. And throw dignity to the winds as you do so.

That being said, it's not much of a summer at the moment, as Janka and I discovered this morning running in comradely solidarity through the sheeting rain. Still, not even that seems to worry her. Or Misty either, who merely demanded his breakfast on our return.

Life would be so much easier if I could be a little more like them. I need to learn to live more in the present. I need to learn to enjoy it while I can. But sometimes that seems to be beyond me.

Which is quite worrying.

Giving an outstanding figure the credit due to him

Popped down to Grosvenor Square this lunchtime, to admire the latest fine piece of statuary to adorn the streets of our great capital.

The Great Communicator and his smile, bringing comfort to us all

Yes, it’s a that fine figure of a man, Ronald Reagan, late President of the United States, smiling benignly on the world. That’s what he did so well in his time – smile benignly, possibly because he wasn't too sure just what was going on, but was basically a likeable old fellow so he would smile to cheer us all up. I’ll bet he was just as amiable to his good friends in Hollywood in the fifties, when he was spying on them during the McCarthy witch hunts.

Anyway, there he is, not a stone’s throw from the US embassy. Though I’d never want to test the distance in quite so rash a way: throwing anything in the direction of that Embassy would be distinctly career-limiting. I’ve never seen such a concentration of armed British police. I asked one of them where the statue was – it’s well hidden by trees – and the glower he gave me made my blood run cold. Fortunately, he realised I wasn’t making a subversive suggestion – to read the Koran, say, or endorse something dangerously radical such as an environmental movement – but merely wanted to admire the statue of Thatcher’s great friend, at which point he became all sweetness and light. It was with a face wreathed in smiles that he pointed me in the right direction.

Thatcher certainly thought the earth of Reagan. The man who won the cold war without firing a shot, she reckoned, and her judgement in these matters was generally pretty sound – after all, though many who were less loyal and less resolute abandoned him, she remained staunch in her support for the man who restored order in Chile, Augusto Pinochet, and she must have been among the last to give up the courageous view that the ANC in South Africa and its leader Nelson Mandela were a bunch of terrorists.

In any case, no-one can deny that Reagan never fired a shot in the Cold War. Of course in 1984, he did announce ‘my fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes’ but he didn’t actually drop any bombs. It was just one of those endearing bits of Reagan humour and, hey, if you can't take a joke, you shouldn’t be in politics. Even in Moscow.

And the Cold War certainly ended while he was President. So he must have won it, right?

Come to think of it, the sun rose 2922 times during his reign – sorry, period in office – and that too was of immeasurable benefit to mankind. Is this another area, I wonder, where we haven’t sufficiently acknowledged his contribution to the wellbeing of his fellow creatures?

Who needs the NHS when you've got prison?

Time to shine a little light into some obscurity. Deserved obscurity, perhaps, in at least one case, but that’s no reason not to illuminate it a little.

Ever heard of Daniel Hannan? Well, why should you. He’s a British Conservative Member of the European Parliament. Being an MEP wonderfully illustrates how you can hold a prominent position without leaving a trace in the public consciousness.

Hannan did, however, have a moment of fame, if that’s the word, back in 2009 when he intervened in the US debate over healthcare. He assured Americans that he would not wish the NHS on anyone and described it as a ‘sixty-year mistake’. All this was part of a campaign against ‘socialised medicine’, apparently the thin of the wedge leading to the overthrow of all we hold dear.

Now Hannan isn’t totally wrong in all things. He’s a great admirer of the Singapore healthcare system, which costs about half of Britain’s as a proportion of national income, and delivers results which, according to some authorities, are at least as good. There really may be something worth looking into there.

Nor can anyone seriously claim that the NHS is without blemishes. The sixty-year history of the institution is littered with horror stories of patients allowed to suffer or even die through neglect, of the wrong leg being amputated, even of the wrong kidney being cut out (the patient in that case, left with only his failing kidney, paid for the surgeons’ error with his life). But I don’t know of a healthcare system anywhere that doesn’t have its tales of incompetence to make your blood run cold, and generally the NHS is at least pretty good at being there when you need it and doing a reasonable job, all things considered, at getting you better.

While the NHS may cost twice as much as Singapore’s healthcare system, it costs around two-thirds of Germany’s or France’s and little over half the US’s. Since it does actually guarantee care of some kind to anybody who needs it, it strikes me as inappropriate to describe it as a ‘sixty-year failure’ in the US, which spends so much and famously fails to meet that standard.

The other relatively obscure individual who caught my attention recently is James Verone. Not heard of him either? He’s a 59-year old with a string of ailments which may or may not be serious – he doesn’t know because he can’t get them diagnosed, let alone treated. A couple of weeks ago, he went into a bank in the North Carolina town of Gastonia and pushed a note across the counter instructing the teller to hand over exactly one dollar. He then went and sat quietly to await the arrival of the police.

James Verone:
exploring novel ways of accessing healthcare

His calculation? If he could pick up a jail sentence, he would get healthcare while inside and, if the sentence lasted at least three years, he would have cover after his release too.

His biggest problem? Because he took so little and didn’t use a weapon, he may not get anything like the sentence he needs. In the meantime, he’s been very happy to refuse bail because, while he’s on remand awaiting trial, he’ll get medical treatment.

The comments on Versone’s case are so obvious that it’s superfluous to make them.

Daniel Hannan’s view, on the other hand, might be amusing to read.

Haggling over the price

The best jokes are the ones that provide an insight into some real-life problem. It may not be immediately obvious how the one below does that, but bear with me – it makes a really good point about one of the more attractive aspects of business life.

A man approaches a woman at a party.

‘Would you spend the night with me for £10,000?’ he asks.

‘£10,000?’ she says, reflectively, ‘yes, I think I would.’

‘Good,’ he says, ‘and would you spend the night with me for £10?’

‘£10?’ she cries, shocked, ‘what sort of woman do you think I am?’

‘We’ve established that,’ he replies, ‘now we’re just negotiating the price.’

Yes, bells can start ringing when the only thing left is to negotiate the price. This week at work, we took a new order. That is a matter of celebration in itself – I know from depressing personal experience what it’s like to work in a company where it’s a rare event. But I was pleased rather than delighted, because the real celebration came two weeks ago when the customer told us ‘we can’t pay that much.’

That was it. They were negotiating the price. We didn’t have to sell them the product any more, we didn’t have to persuade them of the advantage of taking ours rather than a competitor’s, we didn’t even have to persuade them that they had nothing to gain by putting off the decision for another few months (believe me, in the NHS, that’s not at all unusual). All that was left was to agree a figure. And when you’ve got that far, why, you’re practically home.


And as a postscript, more on humour and insight, the Pratchett way

At his best

Have you read Terry Pratchett’s I shall wear midnight? A real jewel for Pratchett fans. In my opinion one of his best.

(Which reminds me: why do people say ‘in my humble opinion’? Is anyone ever likely to say ‘in my arrogant opinion’? Or is it just that by passing it off as humble, they reckon they can get an arrogant one past their listeners?)

When we get going on an important job but haven't completed it yet, we all sometimes say that we’ve taken a good first step. In this novel, Pratchett asks what comes next – and answers, not a second step but another first step.

That’s so right. If you want to do a job well, make each step on the way a first step. Second steps are about as much use as second chances – and if you need a second chance, you’re in bad shape already.

And I've got the scars to prove that one too.