Imagine this. You are standing at a bar having a quiet drink with a friend when suddenly, from the other side, an arm flails around and knocks the pint out of your hand. As you mop the beer from your trousers, you turn around to confront your assailant and, of course, acquire from him an apology, and maybe a compensatory pint. Unexpectedly, the man standing before you, looking horribly sincere, is Tony Blair.
“Look, I’m a pretty straight kinda guy,” he says, his facial features transforming before your eyes into that of a grinning weasel.
“You what? Just say sorry, mate,” you demand, a little icily.
“Look, clearly a mistake was made. But, you know, in my line of work decisions have to be made about where to put my arm, almost every day. Someone’s got to make that decision about my arm. And, y’know, I can’t stand here and tell you that I regret moving my arm in a rapid sideways swipe. I had to make that decision and at the time, you know, it was the right thing to do. It’s all very well to look back with hindsight and, you know . . .”
After you have made your way home, still soaked through, you congratulate yourself upon having received a personalised Tony Blair non-apology apology. They’re famous, something to be cherished.
The prime minister has just non-apologised for the war in Iraq. During an interview with Sir David Frost Blair admitted that Iraq was a “disaster”. But did he at any point accept any responsibility for that disaster? Did he regret having jointly instigated the disaster? Nope, not a bit of it. All the fault of insurgents, you see. Who let the insurgents in? Other people. Clearly, y’know, mistakes have been made.
The odd thing is that Blair is extraordinarily good at saying sorry when he is not remotely to blame. He is terribly sorry about the slave trade despite the fact that he has never, to my knowledge, owned an African slave, nor traded in them. (Peter Mandelson may have done, I suppose). He has apologised to the Irish for the potato famine, for which he bears no guilt, and to the Guildford Four, who were wrongly imprisoned on someone else’s watch. He even helped the Queen draft a letter of apology to the Pope for crimes perpetrated in the name of the Church of England — the burning of Catholics, and the like. But he has never set fire to a Catholic, so far as I am aware.
He will be profuse, sincere and grovelling in his abasement when required to apologise for the crimes of someone else. And he will wriggle like a maggot on a hook when an apology is required of him for his own epic misjudgments.
There was a beautiful non-apology apology for the absence of WMD in Iraq. Not my fault, guv, other people’s faulty information, no intention to mislead, look I’m a pretty straight kinda guy.
Never stand next to him in a pub.
- A middle-aged woman in Lancashire awakes to discover that during the night a poisonous asp had been gnawing on her leg. There is a vulture with an 8ft wingspan hovering balefully over Croydon.
A man called Jason, from Dorchester, has been hospitalised after an attack by a poisonous false widow spider. (I am not sure what the word “false” refers to in this sense. Does it mean the spider assures friends it’s a widow when, actually, its husband is alive and well?)
A little earlier this year, a woman riding in the New Forest was savaged by a slavering, enraged pig. Badgers are on the march, their yellow teeth bared, ready for action. It seems that everywhere you look in Britain, the animals have had enough and are fighting back, adopting an aggressive, adversarial stance towards humankind. What is going on?
It is almost impossible to escape the conclusion that they are incensed by the presence of Patricia Hewitt in an important government post. I can think of no other reason for their recent bad behaviour. If this woman is not sacked, we will see more of the same — usually amenable porpoises bounding out of the Thames to butt passers-by, fundamentalist suicide squadrons of stoats maiming hundreds of people in our suburbs, polecats launching chemical attacks with their redoubtable anal glands. We should heed the warning, quickly.
Please please me, suckers
Ah, just what the world needed: a “new” Beatles album, consisting of all the favourite songs remixed so that they sound a bit different — ie, not as good. “All you need is money” seems to have been the noble inspiration behind the release of Love, a 26-track album released in time for Christmas; a chance to milk dry the Beatles-obsessed public by flogging them songs they already have but with which someone has tinkered at the controls. Shifted a few knobs and levers, that sort of thing.
The Beatles anoraks will love it, I suppose. Rock journalist Mark Ellen enthused: “The detail is astonishing: you hear Lennon’s backing vocal isolated on Come Together, with its eerie interjections — ‘monkey finger’, ‘walrus gumboot’, ‘spinal cracker’ . . .”
Terrific. Problem is, I do not wish to hear Lennon’s background vocal isolated; if I want to hear it at all I would like it to be in the background, where it was presumably intended to remain, as a complement to the main vocal part. And I can probably struggle through the rest of my life without hearing Lennon say, with typical scouse wit, “walrus gumboot”. Next: the Beatles remixed with all the instruments and voices taken out. Get your orders in now, suckers.
Rumbling egoes down in the jungle
Even The Times covers the comings and goings of the awful non-celebs, post-celebs and quasi-celebs on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here every day — though it does so with a curl of the lip as if to insist that it is not really covering it at all. But it is. And we know it is.
I was asked on to the programme for a fee my agent said would be in excess of £150,000. Many have publicised their high-minded refusals. But in the end, we are all whores, of one kind or another, are we not? Three weeks’ work for no great effort. I wrestled with my dilemma. My girlfriend said she’d leave me, middle-class friends were appalled. My working-class friends said they’d kick my head in, you mug, if I didn’t do it.
After weeks of indecision, calls from the producers dried up. Time often sorts out our most pressing moral dilemmas. Also, for every self-important twit seen swallowing witchetty grubs there are 10 beyond the camera who have said “no” to the series through an even more inflated sense of their importance.
Should Britain’s criminally inclined skagheads be entitled to taxpayers’ money as compensation for the discomfort they suffer when banged up for robbery, rape, etc and thus deprived of their beloved heroin? My guess is that outside of Britain’s skaghead community, as the BBC might call it, there are about 19 people who would agree with this — most of them working for one or another of the publicly funded and expensive skaghead reclamation schemes. The rest of us simply shake our heads in disbelief. Even the relevant minister, Tony McNulty agreed on Question Time. Yet the government did not fight the case, knowing the skagheads, and their lawyers, would win. How did we get here?
Should Britain’s criminally inclined skagheads be entitled to taxpayers’ money as compensation for the discomfort they suffer when banged up for robbery, rape, etc and thus deprived of their beloved heroin?
My guess is that outside of Britain’s skaghead community, as the BBC might call it, there are about 19 people who would agree with this — most of them working for one or another of the publicly funded and expensive skaghead reclamation schemes. The rest of us simply shake our heads in disbelief.
Even the relevant minister, Tony McNulty agreed on Question Time. Yet the government did not fight the case, knowing the skagheads, and their lawyers, would win. How did we get here?
