Toffee's diary: getting settled in

Luci says she won’t write my diary entries any more. Spoilsport. She thinks she’s so superior. But I’m getting my own back. I’m going to write my own.

So there. Nya, nya, nya, nyaaa, nya. I may be a puppy but I'm mature now.

Things are working out pretty well here. There seems to be lots of food, which is my best thing. The humans say I’m like a magnet, whatever that is. It seems to mean that when I get my nose into a bowl they can’t get it out any more. But why should they get it out? Once I’ve started eating, what would be the point in stopping?

There’s another thing I don’t really understand. The humans seem to get terribly upset when I carefully use the carpet as my toilet. I don’t get it. I mean, they always go in afterwards and clean it up, so where’s the problem? They leave it nice and clean-smelling, ready for my next time.

Humans aren’t good at simple logic, are they?

The best thing of all, though, is the cat. He’s called Misty. He’s HUGE! Lots of times bigger than me. But he’s just so interesting. He keeps running away from me, but I chase him, I chase him. After all, he’s a strange grey thing with an interesting smell – I’ve just got to get close to him to find out what he’s all about. I like to curl up to him, which he seems OK with, but I have to admit that when I’m really close, I have to start chewing bits of him. His tail. His ears. His neck. It’s stronger than me. Which is bad, because he’s a lot stronger than me.

Misty: frighteningly huge and strong but so fascinating

I mean, it’s all well-meant. All friendly. Affectionate really, but he doesn’t see things that way. He has a go at me with his claws, and he’s got lots. Well, probably no more than I have, but it feels like lots. And when he bites my neck, it isn’t affectionate at all, I can tell you. You really know about it when he gets those teeth going on you. I yelp and he stops but it still hurts.

I’m not giving up, though. I know some day he’ll learn how loveable I am. So I keep going back and being loveable to him. Even if that does involve me using my teeth just the tiniest bit and him using his back, rather a lot. Some day he’ll see I’m fun to have around.

And then there’s walks. They’re quite fun. We go with Luci. Poor thing, she has to walk the whole way, but I get carried to the park and sometimes part of the way even in the park.

“What’s the point of being carried?” she says. “If you’re out for a walk, you ought to be walking.”

Well, yes, sure. Maybe. But when you can sit nice and warm inside a jacket instead?

Still, I don’t say anything. She’s trying to put a brave face on her bad luck and I don’t want to rub it in or anything.

We chase each other around a bit in the park and that’s fun. It’s just like when we’re back at home in the sitting room, but bigger. And we don’t get humans complaining about paw marks on the sofa and things like that. 

Park walk with Luci: she’s happy to have me along

There’s lots of other people in the park, including some humans. It’s fun following them around. I like pretending I’m going off with them, because it’s fun to see my humans running that fast to catch up.

We usually get food, too, after a walk, which makes it really special. They try to get me out in the garden afterwards, because when you’ve eaten, well, there are certain things you just have to do, aren’t there? Still, if I’m quick enough, I can usually get to the carpet before they grab me.

Oh… oh… oh… I may have to stop writing… Oh, yes, I must go, I must go, I must go… It’s the cat, it’s the cat, it’s the cat.

It’s so exciting.

A helpful new lexicon for Corbyn times

The shots in the British Labour Party are today being called by our blessed leader Jeremy Corbyn and his fan base, the faction known as Momentum. 

Sorry, not a faction but a movement. Or rather, sorry, not a movement but a loose collection of like-minded individuals who take their support of the Party to a level beyond the comprehension of us mere mortals.

Dedicated as I am to public service, it struck me that it might be useful to provide some insights into the new terms, or old terms with new meanings, now being used within the Party. This should aid understanding between the truly enlightened (the above mentioned Jeremy and his Momentum brethren) and us, the poor benighted, striving to improve ourselves.

Corbyn 

A ‘corbyn’ is a dead end, but the term has the implication that those who went down it did so deliberately and were labouring under the belief that it led to a wonderful new land where peace and plenty abound. 

Revered leader or dead end?

Blairite 

1. In common usage: a supporter of former PM Tony Blair still not reconciled to the notion that several hundred thousand Iraqi lives and a huge increase in international terrorism was rather too high a price for small steps forward in a vaguely social-democratic direction  
2. In the mouths of people stuck in a corbyn: anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to avoid getting stuck in a corbyn 

Red Tory 

1. In common usage: a member of the Labour Party who only joined because the Tories wouldn’t give him a safe seat (viz. John Stonehouse) (and if you don’t know who John Stonehouse was, just be grateful)  
2. At the far end of a corbyn: anyone who thinks that winning is a lot more useful, when it comes to actually getting things done, than hanging out with your mates at the far end of a corbyn. 

Plotter 

1. In common usage: someone organising an underhand, clandestine and treacherous movement against a much-loved individual to whom we owe a duty of loyalty.  
2. Bottled up at the bottom of a corbyn: a Labour MP who thinks their first duty is to their voters and, if the leader is going down a dead end inhabited only by his mates, he ought to be moved aside and replaced by someone who knows what she or he is doing

Leader  

1. in common usage: someone who leads the way forwards 
2. for the inhabitants of a corbyn: a revered individual of semi-divine character who takes his acolytes into a comforting dead end where they can full express their admiration of him 

Mandate 

A ‘Mandate’ (always capitalised, sometimes ‘the Mandate’) is the authority granted to a hermetically isolated group backed by a self-selected electorate convinced that, in politics, self-righteousness is an excellent substitute for effectiveness. 

Success 

The preservation of a purity that surpasseth mere human understanding, and a self-righteousness that approacheth saintliness, even at the cost of coming fifth in a four-horse race.

The Prerogative of the Harlot

“Power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot through the ages”.

Ringing words from Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in 1931 (though they were written by his cousin, Rudyard Kipling). He was denouncing the Press Barons, influencers of events answerable to no one for the consequences. However, the denunciation applies with equal force to a great many others.

Baldwin (right) said it
Kipling (his cousin) wrote it

Take, for instance, a former boss of mine.

He’d founded the company I joined, basing himself on one brilliant product idea. It was, indeed, that brilliance which drew me in. It didn’t take long to discover, however, that the brilliance had stopped with the initial idea. There had been a short period of growth of the business, but then the company had stagnated, and now it was well into the inevitable next phase, decline.

That meant that radical change was needed. That’s what I thought I’d been brought in to undertake. Within a year, it became clear I was doomed to fail.

Nothing happened in the company without my boss’s say-so: no modification of the product, no phase of development work, no sales decision, no sales presentation even. Indeed, his domination of every aspect of the company was such that a naïve observer might have supposed any failure was down to him.

Not so. I was assured on the best of authorities, indeed the only authority that mattered at all in that business, that my boss knew exactly what needed to be done and was straining every sinew to make it happen. Sadly, he was surrounded by people of crass incompetence. Worse than incompetence. Some of the errors were so flagrant that they seemed deliberate, positive and treacherous against the business. Software developers who took unforgivable shortcuts or simply made elementary errors. Sales staff who demanded information and shared it with potential customers even though that could only put them off ordering from us. People like me who had the gall to question his every move and prevented him achieving the progress his efforts merited.

In fact, he exercised autocratic authority, but the responsibility for any failure was down to anyone but him. Power without responsibility. It was a harlotry I couldn’t bear and I left. Though, to be fair, had I not jumped I would certainly have been pushed soon after.

This was all petty stuff. A few people were inconvenienced in their careers. An insignificant company faded towards well-deserved oblivion. A man prey to an authoritarian streak was presiding over the collapse of unearned ambitions.

Now, though, consider a much more substantial backdrop for such behaviour.

A by-election in a massively safe Conservative seat, Sleaford and North Hykeham, has just elected another Conservative. No surprise there. What is more concerning is that Labour, which came second in the General Election eighteen months ago, came fourth this time around. Vernon Coaker, a Labour MP, commented that in the by-election, “everything was about Brexit”.

Indeed. In another by-election, in Richmond a week earlier, the Liberal Democrats had overturned a huge Conservative majority by firmly opposing Brexit. It is the issue of the day. But Labour, sadly, has no coherent position on it. At best, it criticises the government’s handling of the Brexit process. But it seems to have no clear position on the substantive issue: are we for or against Brexit? Will we only accept a soft Brexit – in which we stay in the Single Market or at least the Customs Union – or a hard Brexit in which we cut all such ties?

No one knows because no one in the leadership is saying.

So we drift from catastrophe to catastrophe. The Sleaford result was completely in line with national polls, which put the Conservatives well up on their General Election result and Labour well down.

Now it’s possible to be as naïve as I was about my boss. Some of us might conclude that if Labour is unable to develop any kind of leadership over the one great question that is agitating the minds of voters, then that’s down to the leadership. Or, more to the point, its lack of leadership.

Again, though, that view turns out to be wrong. The backers of the present leader, Jeremy Corbyn, never tire of telling us that he’s outstanding. The problem is he’s let down by those, like the Parliamentary Labour Party, or others who have no confidence in him and who are therefore ‘red Tories’ or ‘Blairites’. On their shoulders and their shoulders alone lies the blame for Labour’s parlous position.

Corbyn and his circle of admirers insist that they have a mandate from the membership. That allows them to dictate our way forward while we just have to swallow our objections and get on with helping them achieve a glorious future for the country. If glory escapes them, however, be sure that it isn’t down to them. They have power within the Labour Party, you see, but no responsibility.

The prerogative of the harlot through the ages.

The words to say it. Though they sometimes don't

Today I had some grapes that, unlike most of those sold these days, weren’t seedless. I wondered what to call them. Seeded? Hardly. Seedful? I’m not sure there’s such a word. Or ought to be. Seedy? Seems unfair. They were rather good.

Words aren’t always there when you need them. Expressions, too, can be slippery. The elephant in the room? Who has rooms that big? 

OK, some people do have rooms big enough~
but most of them, I suspect, are short of pachyderms

I always love “at the end of the day”. The one thing you can be sure of at the end of the day is that it gets dark. And don’t you admire people who say “if I’m completely honest”? Does that mean anything they tell you without that preface isn’t to be believed?

I once worked with colleagues who used to tell me, when they wanted a report or some other material written, “it doesn’t have to be War and Peace.”

Just as well. I’m not sure if I could bring the Battle of Borodino to life like Tolstoy. And in any case I suspect most of my colleagues would have found one of the films or TV series far more up their street than any War and Peace presentation I could have produced.

Then there’s an expression I use a lot. It helps me get started on jobs that are going to take a long time, and any job that’s tedious is long. I say, sometimes to myself, “I’ll just break the back of it.”

Gratuitously cruel, isn’t it? I mean, breaking a back? It’s a horrible thought.

But just think if the job’s particularly hard. If it’s back-breaking, say. Then I’d be breaking the back of a job’s that’s breaking mine. Where does that get any of us? You remember Gandhi? “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” Breaking the back of the back breaking only leaves more of us crippled.

Like I said. Slippery things, words. And expressions.

An anniversary. With a message for today

Seventy-five years ago today, a powerful military nation made a fatal military error.

Instead of swinging northwards from its conquered territories in China and tackling the Soviet Union, then gripped by a life and death struggle against Nazi Germany, the Empire of Japan chose to go South and attack the Far Eastern possessions of Holland and Britain. If it had done only that, it might have achieved its aims: its forces on both land and sea quickly overcame the British and the Dutch. But they weren’t satisfied with so much and overreached, attacking the United States too.

Had Japan taken on the Soviet Union, the world might have been a profoundly different place. The Soviets might have had to divert forces from the Western Front and weaken the fight against Hitler. The United States might have felt it impossible to join the war at that stage. The outcome might have been a great deal less favourable to the Western powers.

It didn’t happen. Admiral Yamamoto had opposed the Southern strategy but, bowing to the orders he was given, decided the only way to make a success of it was to launch an attack on the US so powerful that it would knock them out in one strike. He combined careful planning with intensive training of both naval and air forces, and finally a brilliantly executed attempt to destroy US naval power in the Pacific with a single blow against Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese embassy in Washington had trouble translating and typing its government's warning to the US, with the result that the attack occurred before the the message was delivered. That led Franklin Roosevelt to describe 7 December 1941 as a day that would “live in infamy”.

More to the point, it was an attack that looked like a victory – it wreaked huge damage on the US Pacific fleet – but it failed to deliver the knockout blow Yamamoto sought. Instead, it led to a war that would ultimately cost Japan as many as three million dead, culminating in the double atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the end of the expansionist dream of the Japanese Empire. Instead, the United States emerged as the major power in the Pacific.

Pearl Harbor: it looked like a victory for Japan
but it ultimately ensured the Empire's defeat

That’s a position the US has held on to, sometimes grimly, ever since. It’s flexed its military muscle, not always with success – viz. Vietnam – but it has relied above all on its huge economic and commercial strength. The greatest challenge in recent decades has come from a new source, China. That was a threat that Obama spent a great deal of time and effort countering. Notably, he negotiated the Trans Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement between twelve nations not including China.

The election of Donald Trump, however, killed the deal. He made it clear that he would drop it on his first day in office. That was a piece of news that must have been received with celebrations in Beijing: it marks a withdrawal by the US leaving the field open to China.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was a triumph of wishful thinking over good sense. By overreaching, Japan ensured the victory of its enemy. Ideology led to a reckless military act that rebounded catastrophically on its perpetrator.

It’s a lesson Trump could do with learning. Governed by his ideological concerns, he too has behaved recklessly, in the commercial rather than the military field, and with a withdrawal rather than an advance, but, in all likelihood, with the same drastic effects. A decision his compatriots could well come to regret.

Especially if he persists with his apparent addiction to picking fights with China.

The noir in the next field's darker

Nurtured as we have been for some years on the TV genre known as ‘Nordic Noir’, no Englishman could be blamed for feeling a slight tingle at the idea of visiting one of the Nordic countries. Dangerous places, it would appear. Why, there’s even an apparently pleasant little market town called Ystad down in the south of Sweden where for a long time there was a new serial killer at work every week for a great deal of the year.

You understand that I’m not talking about a mere murder a week. No, I mean a series of murders a week.

Fortunately, they were blessed with a local police detective of almost superhuman ability, Kurt Wallander, who week after week identified the perpetrator and arrested him, often in spectacular fashion. Oddly, for a small seaside town, there always seemed to be a camera crew standing by to record the event. Not that I’m complaining: how would we have been able to enjoy it if they hadn’t been there?

One of the obstacles to Wallander’s success was, as so often in TV views of police work, his own hierarchy which never seemed to believe in him. Of course, I sympathised with him, but I have to admit that I can’t help wondering whether his superiors didn’t have a bit of a case: after all, just how useful is it to solve this week’s serial killings if it doesn’t deter next week’s?

Wallander: gets it solved but can’t stop it happening again

Still, I shouldn’t be too harsh. Swedish detective work is clearly recognised as outstanding even in other nations. Why, the Metropolitan Police in London seems to have appointed a Swede, John River, as a Detective Inspector, and ensured his doings (rather ghostly doings, considering the state of animation of his partner) are faithfully recorded in the aptly named River.

If things were so awful in Ystad, you can imagine how much worse they must be in the capital, Stockholm. It seems that this city is the hunting ground of an absolutely weird woman you really don’t want to cross. She’ll hack your computer and your phone, find out where you are, track you down and exact harsh, not to say bloodthirsty, revenge for any offence you may have caused her.

You can imagine how careful I was in Stockholm when I was there myself last week. I tried to work out whether any woman I saw might have a dragon tattoo on her shoulder but, hey, it was winter time and everyone was wearing coats, so how could I have known? For safety’s sake, I just kept out of the way of any of them.

I didn’t really feel safe until I got to the meeting for which I’d flown to this bleak and forbidding capital (which, to be fair, turned out to be neither). It was with a group of librarians, and it’s hard to imagine a less threatening profession (even if Professor Plum did get scragged in a library with a candlestick).

There’s that moment at the start of a meeting which pretty much decides whether it’s going to be a success or not. It’s when people are taking off their coats and getting out their notepads, deciding whether they want tea or coffee and whether they want a biscuit with it or not, and above all making small talk.

It struck me that I might start by mentioning how keen an admirer I am of the Nordic Noir genre. So I told them that I had enjoyed Broen/Bron, the series whose double name reflects its mixed Swedish/Danish origins. They all looked at me blankly, until the penny dropped with one of them.

“Oh, you mean The Bridge?” she said. It may not have helped that I had called the series ‘Broen’, or possibly ‘Bron’ (my pronunciation is far from reliable), which may have been the wrong language, or possibly neither. Anyway, The Bridge was indeed what I meant. They told me they’d liked it, but without the slightest trace of enthusiasm, like someone drinking your home-made wine who has decided not to offend you.

Warmth improved when one of them said, “I liked The Killing”, which they all seemed to have done. So had I, but I hadn’t mentioned it since it’s Danish rather than Swedish.

Then she added a comment which really surprised me. “I watched the American version too. And it was much better.”

What? The remake was better than the original? What world was I living in?

Finally, the truly astonishing revelation came out.

“I’m watching Line of Duty now,” another one of the librarians told me.

Now they were all enthusiastic.

“Oh, yes,” said another, “that’s a really great programme. We’re on season 3 now. It’s great.”

Line of Duty? That’s an English police series. I enjoyed it too. But it had none of the exotic content, the originality, the innovative viewpoint of Nordic Noir.

But then I suppose Nordic isn’t exotic to Nordics.

Or could it be that my first impression was right? That those Nordic series are only Noir to us? That to people on the ground they’re just a rather pedestrian description of everyday life?

A triumph for the LibDems. A defeat for the Tories. A warning for Labour

It’s always satisfying to see a Tory government being given a bloody nose. 

It’s even more satisfying when it’s a victory for those who don’t accept the Brexit verdict as irrevocable. 

And it’s best of all when it’s administered to an unpleasant individual of thoroughly toxic views.

All that happened this week.

Zac Goldsmith ran an unpleasant Tory campaign to be Mayor of London last year, calling on racist and Islamophobic notions to try – and, fortunately, fail – to beat Labour’s candidate, Sadiq Khan, whose name is probably enough to explain the racism and Islamophobia. Not to justify them, of course, but certainly to explain why an unprincipled candidate would resort to them. 

This year, he resigned from the Conservative Party and from Parliament to precipitate a by-election in his constituency of Richmond Park, where he ran as an independent against the government’s decision to build a new runway at nearby Heathrow airport.

The Liberal Democratic candidate, Sarah Olney, a strong supporter of continued membership of the EU, chose not to campaign on the airport but to focus on Brexit instead. To widespread surprise (including my own), she snatched the seat from Goldsmith, converting his majority of 23,000 votes into her own of nearly 1900.

An excellent result.

The defeated candidate (for local MP and London Mayor)
and the victorious LibDem

If I have a quibble it’s that we had to depend on the Liberal Democrats to win this victory. The main party in opposition to the Tories is my own, Labour. It should be the one challenging the government, and all the more so since the Liberal Democrats were in coalition with the Tories between 2010 and 2015. That was both a betrayal of principle and counter-productive: it reduced the party’s presence in Parliament from 62 to eight. The Richmond Park result may suggest that things are turning around for the LibDems (though one win doesn’t make a resurrection), but it certainly reflects a Labour failure.

Why do I say that?

If Sarah Olney’s win owed a great deal to the LibDems’ position against Brexit, undoubtedly the biggest question for the vast majority of voters, her party was able to make it their own because Labour’s silence on the subject has been deafening. 

Why is it so quiet? Silence is always hard to interpret, but occasionally it gets broken. John McDonnell, a close ally of the party’s leader Jeremy Corbyn, recently described Brexit as an “enormous opportunity”. This seemed to confirm a suspicion many of us felt that the Labour leadership wasn’t particularly comfortable with the party’s official policy of backing continued EU membership. 

Meanwhile, siren voices on the right of the Labour Party are calling on us to address anxieties over immigration in Labour’s traditional voter base. Again, this provokes suspicion, in this case that we are being urged to move rightwards, to counter the challenge presented by the extreme anti-EU and xenophobic United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP. As another of Corbyn’s allies, Diane Abbott, recently pointed out – correctly – Labour can’t win by being UKIP-lite. If people want UKIP policies, they’ll vote UKIP. Labour doesn’t beat them by accommodating them, but by explaining that turning against foreigners won’t address any of the real problems affecting our supporters, which are poverty, insecurity and joblessness. Instead, we need to tackle the causes of economic decline – not least of which is the decision to leave the EU.

That’s hard to do if you’re not too sure about the EU yourself. Hence the silence.

The problem is that silence isn’t leadership and leadership is what voters are crying out for. Labour isn’t doing leadership right now. There was recently a Parliamentary vote, on a motion advanced by the Scottish National Party, to investigate Tony Blair’s role over the Iraq War and his possible misleading of Parliament at the time.

There are two positions one can legitimately take on the issue. 

The SNP’s would be that Blair behaved unconscionably and needs to be held to account by Parliament. 

The majority Labour position, with which I agree, isn’t simply one of “hands off our former leader” but rather argues that the problem was that Blair had far too much authority, allowing him to commit the country against its will. So it was an institutional issue, not a personal one, and it needs to be tackled at that level. That ties in, for instance, with the calls for Parliament and not just the present Prime Minister to have the final say over Brexit.

A third position is illegitimate. That’s to have nothing to say on the matter. It’s striking that all three of Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott stayed away from Parliament at the time of the debate.

Silence, like over the EU.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Similarly, voters abhor silence. While it stays quiet and on the fence, refusing to lead, the group that technically controls the Labour leadership leaves the Party vulnerable to attack by those who flow in to fill the political vacuum – whether from UKIP or from the LibDems.

So the Richmond result isn’t just a victory for the LibDems. It isn’t just a black eye for the Tories. It’s also a serious wake-up call to Labour.

The leadership needs to make up its mind: start leading, on the issues that matter to the electorate, or see our support continue to erode. Otherwise – please just stand aside and let someone else take over. 

Someone who has something to say. 

Someone who’s prepared to get out in front and lead.
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