We really need to talk about Quentin Letts

I enjoyed a recent 'takedown' by Guardian journalist Adrian Short of Quentin Letts.

Punchable?  Moi?

Letts is a puffy-faced middle brow wag you sometimes see doing the newspaper review on rolling news stations. It's worth reading but take out the Mail Guardian rivalry and there's not much substantial in his attack.  Short's dislike for Letts and The Daily Mail are just as sniffy in essence as that of his subject for left-leaning, ordinary-shaped women in public sector jobs. 

But while Letts is on the ground being kicked I would like to take the opportunity to stamp on his specs.  I'd like to question the pathetic humourless humour that he and other sketch writers generate.   The smugness of tone is one thing.  The Sarah Kennedyness of what goes on in his brain,  all 'our coloured brethren' and  'his nibs',  is another.

The smug-yet-wise sketch writer tone is actually an anachronism. The deployment of an arch comment after a quote from a politician, or a set of quotation marks used to suggest raised eyebrows is not necessary today.  They belong to an age of deference.  These days you can rip into the substance and style of any politician directly.   You're not going to get beheaded.  You're limited only by your slimy aspirations to not miss out on an invite to drinks.   But if you're not even 'speaking truth unto power',  just slagging someone off for the sake of it, this way of writing is pointless.

But apart from the misanthropy, smugness and sniveling solipsism, the thing that gets me is sloppiness.  It's not the victimization of perfectly normal people, it's the lack of time he takes to do it, the slovenly approach to his chosen profession.    Here's a selection of the column dissected by Adrian Short.  Where he critiqued the smug content, I just want to pick out the jokes. 

"A Whitehall official has been Tweeting about her drunkenness, boasting about how pointless she thinks some of her work is and how much she dislikes the Government’s deficit reduction."

(NO JOKES YET) 

"When I rang her department yesterday to tell them, there was a cold pause before someone promised
to ‘get back’ to me. He never did."

 (INVERTED COMMAS - DENOTING JOKE ABOUT THE FACT THAT SOMEONE SAID THEY'D GET BACK TO 
 HIM)

"Civil servants used to try to be impartial and discreet. Not so Sarah Baskerville, ‘Team Leader in Corporate Finance Systems and Reporting Solutions’ (what a title!) at the Department of Transport.
Ms Baskerville, aka ‘Baskers’, is an incorrigible contributor to the internet. She belongs to numerous networking sites."

(TWO JOKES -BRACKETS AND INVERTED COMMAS BOTH USED TO TURN CONTENT INTO COMMENT ABOUT THE DETERIORATING STANDARDS OF THE WORLD WE LIVE IN)

"In the middle of a management course — paid for by us taxpayers to help her do her job better — she posted a Tweet promoting a Labour MP’s attack on Downing Street ‘spin’. She later described the person who was taking the course as ‘mental’.Charming."

(FOUR JOKES.
1. HYPHENATED  CLAUSE MAKES JOKE ABOUT TAXPAYERS MONEY BEING WASTED IN IRONIC FASHION ON TRAINING.  ALTHOUGH ON EXAMINATION NO MONEY APPEARS  TO HAVE BEEN WASTED UNLESS THE WOMAN CONCERNED WAS
ALREADY PERFECT. WHICH WOULD UNDERMINE HIS OVERALL THESIS.
2 and 3:  INVERTED COMMAS  USED TO TURN CONTENT INTO COMMENT ABOUT THE DETERIORATING STANDARDS OF THE WORLD WE LIVE IN
4. JOKE.  THE HUMOROUS REACTION - ' CHARMING' - AFTER SUBJECT CALLED PERSON MENTAL.)



Just on that last joke. While we should be grateful that he actually moves beyond snide punctuation to deliver his humorist punchlines,  saying 'Charming' after someone's opinion is not very funny.  Not really.  Not for a humorist.  Imagine saying 'Excuse me' to James Thurber and being asked  'Why what have you done?'  Even if he had said it, he wouldn't write it up.  Not as a humorous anecdote.  Not to millions of people. 

Who cares? Letts admits to being a hack.  And he has an excuse. He writes four columns a day, political sketches and theatre reviews.  He writes so much because he wants the money, has a family, needs to keep the wolf from the door. All fine, if he wasn't moaning through his sloppy, regurgitated style, the decline in standards.

Quentin, see, believes in elites. "If people have no sense of what is best, how can they improve themselves?" he writes, in the introduction to one of his quickly expectorated works of non-fiction.    His latest book is actually called Bog Standard Britain. How Mediocrity ruined this great nation.
He says 'I'm shouting out for elitism and public duty' and 'Traditional ideas of honour have been dumped'.

If he wrote brilliantly on any subject, he'd have my vote.  I read the Spectator for many years, even though I frequently found its politics nauseating, simply because many of the contributors really could write.  The doctor (Theodore Dalrymple?)who used a column to slag off his poor, feckless patients?  Despicable, but nicely done.  (I stopped reading The Spectator when Boris Johnson took over as editor and it became overtly braying.)

Quentin Letts, unlike Theodore Dalrymple, let alone James Thurber,  often restricts his satire to mocking someone's appearance to save time researching matters. Like the left-leaning, ordinary-shaped woman that he mocked for wearing a silly hat, not realizing she was suffering from cancer and her hair had fallen out.  (She died a few days later.) Surely he would agree that these are not great British standards to uphold.

Lazy, pointless, sloppy, ingratiating, nasty.  It seems Letts is everything  he himself hates.

Dude Huge and the gift of violence

Two things to weigh up if you're considering getting your kids Call of Duty Black Ops for Christmas.

Supemax prisons.  Banned in Britain for their cruelty, they are a type of high security jail designed to control the most inhumanly violent prisoners in US and Australia. They have as their most extreme sanction solitary confinement with guards only permitted to communicate via gesture.  Prisoners who are released from such jails frequently find conversation painfully difficult and find it difficult to cope with large crowds.

The design director of Epic Games, who make Gears of War is a very engaging man called Cliff Bleszinski. He has  been referred to as Dude Huge, perhaps by friends.   He said in an interview last week that visceral violence is important to the satisfaction levels of game play, in particular, the gory afters of an assault.   Teenagers need heads to explode like watermelons after they have thwacked them because they crave a response.  It's evidence that contact has been made.  He made similar reference to the powerful fascination of guns. Making contact so forcibly is rewarded by a death, a jolt,  a spent  cartridge or perhaps the societal acknowledgement of a punishment. 

Withdrawal of communication is violence, violence is a form of communication.  

So I probably will be getting a violent xbox game for my son, if only because it will give us something to talk about. 

Remarks aren't literature

Gertrude Stein once said ‘remarks aren’t literature’.  But then she lived in a world before twitter.  There is some kind of art to the perfect tweet, from ‘Lif is too short’ (Peter Serafinawicz) to This is the very tits by Graham Linnehan in a set up to a link, I’m sort of getting into the brevity/wit/soul thing.  A powerful production controller who used to work at Saatchi and Saatchi was once set up by an creative team into believing that a TV company wanted to make a documentary about him called 30 second man.  He fell for it because he believed that someone could take anything so short seriously.  But working in advertising, I am made all too aware that some people do sometimes achieve amazingly powerful feats of chimerically short communication, because they win awards.  The economist posters were for a decade or so perennial winners with such lines as Blunt, yet sharp. Then there are the most expensive three words in a screenplay, ‘The fleets meet.’  But jokes, observations and selling copy aren’t yet literature, Stein would say.  A haiku maybe gets there, with 17 syllables.  Trouble is most of them are shit.

From Mandocracy to Mendocracy

'Bernard Ingham?  I shit Bernard facking Ingham.'

Mendocracy. Not my term but one I read on a left-wing political blog.  It is suggesting that our dear government is based on lies.  I took it as the reappearance of Spartist vernacular from the 'Fatcher' years.   But over the months I noticed instances of a peculiar new kind of mendacity in news stories. The straight lie, as opposed to spin.  This is interesting because in public life, lies and truth are supposed to be relative.

Forget about truth for the moment, let's not get religious.  Consider the kaleidoscope of refracted deviosity that 'lies' throws up when put under the light of scrutiny. Remember economical with the truth, spin, dark arts and weasel words?  Course you do.   That was the Peter Mandleson's contribution to the taxonomy of the politically expedient inaccuracy, an unscrolling list of dodgy terminology as suspicious as an expanding wallet full of credit cards.

I first heard the 'spin doctor' term in the UK when it was applied to Bernard Ingham, 'Fatcher's' press secretary. (Like fridges, the US seem to have had  it decades earlier.)   Ingham's technique was a simple one.  He would go on the Today programme saying 'Well, no,  the Poll tax is actually a very good thing and here's why...'   Ingham lied in a cuddly way.  He'd find an excuse to thump working class people behind your ear and produce it with a twinkle.  You'd leave the room like a molested public schoolboy, uncertain as whether something good or bad had just happened.

From 1997, spin became a richer concept, one that incorporated such variables as timing, i.e.  slipping out news of a cow dying of foot and mouth in Argyleshire while the world was distracted by planes hitting the World Trade Centre. Then the, I think, the brilliant distinction of 'I misspoke' arrived, a joyously 'get-out-of-jail free'  invention to cover the publicly-proven wrongism. The best recent example was Cameron's bland assertion that Iran has nuclear weapons shortly after becoming PM.  Instead of the world rounding on the callow toff with an almighty snort of derision it was blaffed away with a Maggie Smith facial expression that implied a slight yet understandable inexactitude of word order cause by a earwig or something on the microphone stand.

Yet that's not a lie, that's ignorance.  Ignorance isn't lying, even when it helps your argument to deny the facts.  For example, Michael Gove chiding Andy Burnham for saying 'a third less' rather than 'a third fewer'  to roars of supremacy from his own coterie in parliament.  Judging by his crowing manner he was probably ignorant of, rather than ignoring, the fact that 'less' is correct when talking of fractions, which Burnham clearly knew from his bellowed classist insults across the Commons chamber.

But what about Eric Pickles stating that the Audit commission wasted public money by spending a day at the races.  The impression was that the body responsible for careful use of taxpayers money was gambling it away wearing top hats.  The solid unmovable fact that the facilities were used on non race days had only two possible interpretations.  Either the Audit Commission top brass were pretending to ride horses round the track while others played betters and punters, or they were innocently using the conference facilities in the same way as Prontaprint,  CarpetMaster and Dolly's 50th birthday party organisers, as a way to cheaply accommodate a large number of people.

How Eric Pickles jumped to the wrong conclusion is unimaginable, unless he was looking to gain acceptance for his plan to close the Audit Commission.  I prefer the more obvious explanation.  His face looks like a pie so I'm going to go ahead and assume his brain is actually cooked entrails.

But lie?  Never.

Who are the police batting for?

'Where's yer canary, mining scum?'

As a kid watching the miner's strike unfold, I wasn't especially informed about the issues.  Coal mining looked a pretty mucky job and you're probably better off out of it, working in a velcro factory or something, or being unemployed and watching sport. But I do remember the shudder on seeing the friendly British bobby with his comedy hat out of Trumpton, and genial way of riding on the footplate of your car singing,  fighting burglars merely by tooting a whistle and having rosy cheeks like an embarrassed puffin, suddenly turn into one of many mutton-faced shock troops stomping down working class northerners like the rotters in Battleship Potemkin.  The flashback was caused by a small detail in the recently resurfaced News of the World bugging affair.  This is from page 5 of 8 in the recent New York Times article on the subject online.

"In addition to the royal household, Scotland Yard alerted five other victims whose names would appear in the indictment of Mulcaire. Of the remaining hundreds who potentially had their phones broken into, the police said they notified only select individuals with national-security concerns: members of the government, the police and the military."


Hang on.  The police?  Did the News of the World have dirt on the cops?  Could that account for Scotland Yard's reluctance to investigate such a major offence as a foreign-owned company bugging government and military sources?


As in the miners strike the police have transmogrified into an alien beast working for bad people. They've become the police in South Africa during apartheid, or in New Orleans during a hurricane. The bluebottles, bobbies and old time coppers of my Norman Wisdom tainted youth have turned.  


Imagine whatever brand of plod forms your own memory of the typical policeman.  Imagine him patting his head with a hanky as he looks down the list in the Cheam home of the News International private investigator.    


'Blimey Sarge, T'aint only dolly birds what they got on this 'ere list, they's got rozzers an' all.  Top Brass and no mistake.'  'Give me that list you flatfoot' reply the clipped tones of the Sergeant.   'I think Chief SuperIntendent will be interested in this.'  'Cor Stone me', replies the sweating Constable, scratching on his mildewed neck creases,   'Hope they ain't rumbled his dalliance with Trixie Flanders, the cheeky prostitute.'   


Ripple dissolve.  


EL POSHO'S RESTAURANT, FLEET STREET.  INT. NIGHT   


Chief Superintendent bows low and when told to get up glistens with slime as he explains that he will have to investigate some - well, a few, I mean very very few - alright, just 5 of the cases  of the hundreds of hacked MPs, military, police, sports and showbiz people.  Otherwise some might suggest the Met is in the pay of foreign news organisations.  


'Perish the thought' says Andy Coulson, a smile spreading across his face like a tumour.    


Meanwhile a policewoman dances onto a small stage nearby dressed only in feather boa and Coulson puts a pale finger to his lips.  'The entertainment has started'. 


In the blue flashing strobe light the Chief SuperIntendent can't help seeing in his master's chubby features a resemblance to those of Edgar Hoover.  Now there was a dirty digger.