The Joy of Six 1481

"Other guests at the party included Mandelson’s good friend Nathaniel (Nat) Rothschild, a financier and heir to the Rothschild fortune (Mandelson often stayed at his villa in Corfu), and Rothschild’s old schoolmate, the then shadow chancellor George Osborne." Tamsin Shaw looks back to the Yachtgate scandal of 2008 and argues that we misread it at the time.

"Across the country, thousands of children are quietly lingering in ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] facilities, unable to reunite with parents or relatives because of new Trump administration policies limiting who can sponsor them. According to a class action lawsuit filed by immigration advocacy groups last week, children are 'being separated from their loving families, while the government denies their release, unnecessarily prolonging their detention'." Julia Lurie on the cruelty of the Trump regime.

Tanya Park believes Liberals should care about the collapse of serious Conservative journalism: "Not because the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph were ever friends to progressive politics (they weren't), but because a functioning liberal democracy depends on a press that engages honestly with reality across the political spectrum."

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols predicts that general-purpose AI will poison itself: "We're going to invest more and more in AI, right up to the point that model collapse hits hard and AI answers are so bad even a brain-dead CEO can't ignore it."

"Alcohol has its many downsides as I can attest having a childhood punctuated by my father’s alcoholism, but it lowers people’s inhibitions making them willing to talk. It’s why you’re more likely to spark up a conversation over an interesting cask beer instead of waxing lyrical to the person next to you about the smooth flavour of an Arabica coffee bean." When it comes to social cohesion, beer beats coffee, says David Jesudason.

Ian Jones reminds us that Kenneth Williams was never off the television: "Yet over the next two decades he failed repeatedly to be – in one of his catchphrases from the BBC radio show Round The Horne – 'properly serviced' by the small screen. Despite all that graft on stage, he never landed a leading role in a TV drama series. For all the comic virtuosity that poured out of him in the Carry On films and his radio series with Tony Hancock and Kenneth Horne, he not once played lead in a TV sitcom." 

Generate your own Allister Heath headlines with one click!

The absurd headlines it gives to Alister Heath's opinion pieces are one of the most florid symptoms of the Telegraph's sad descent into madness.

Now, thanks to The New World, you can generate Alister Heath headlines yourself.

But be warned: it's hard to replicate the craziness of the originals.

The England cricketer Peter Richardson used to fill the Telegraph with hoax reports of private-school cricket

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Remember that absurd Telegraph story about the investment banker his and wife who have a joint salary of £345,000 but are no longer able to take five holidays a year because of VAT on school fees?

As everyone suspected it was phoney, and PressGazette blames a finance industry PR for pitching it.

My own view is that even if every word were true, it would still have made most people cheer the idea of VAT on school fees. So I blame the news editor for putting in the paper at all.

But then the Telegraph has always been susceptible to this sort of thing. Here's Ian Wooldridge writing in the Daily Mail in 2002:

For several years the late E.W. 'Jim' Swanton, cricket writer emeritus, published a Monday morning column in The Daily Telegraph extolling the outstanding feats of obscure players, mostly pupils of lesser-known, fee-paying preparatory or public schools.

Thus Robin Fortescue-Smythe (Jim did love double-barrelled names) took all 10 for next to nothing for St Swithin's bowling offspin against St Agnew's the previous week.

It transpired that many of these entries were fraudulent, the work of that incorrigible hoaxer, Peter Richardson, the former Kent and England opening batsman. Peter used to appropriate headed notepaper from minor seats of learning and bombard Swanton with hilarious and utterly spurious information.

Peter Richardson made five centuries for England.

The UAE buying the Telegraph would be better for the Tories than Paul Marshall buying it

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The Conservative opponents of the bid to buy the Telegraph and Spectator backed by the United Arab Emirates got their way. An amendment to the Enterprise Act 2002, which could be law within weeks, will ban foreign states or government officials from holding direct stakes in British newspapers.

Yet it would have been better for the Conservative Party if the UAE bid had succeeded.

Because the media expertise in the consortium behind that bid was provided by the former president of CNN Worldwide Jeff Zucker. And his ambition was to make the Telegraph a centre-right counterweight in the US to liberal newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post.

And at some point a new Tory leader is going to have to drag the party back from the Trumpian right towards just such a centre-right position. Having two major right-wing British publications there already would certainly have been a help.

By contrast, the UAE's rival bidder Paul Marshall, as a major investor in GB News, offers more of the same. More alternative facts, more conspiracy theories, more attempts to remake the Conservative Party on the model of the US Christian Right.

That's a recipe for continued irrelevance if you are a Tory.

I've been thinking about Paul Marshall and decided that those who say he has made a long journey from the Liberal Democrats to his current position may be a little wide of the mark.

Because if you take the Orange Book as representative of his views in his Lib Dem days, then there is a consistent strand in Marshall's thought. It has always been about setting money free rather than setting people free.

Boris Johnson will destroy the Conservative Party if he doesn't destroy the country first

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I came across two article today which argue that Boris Johnson's adoption of populism may in the long run prove disastrous for the Conservative Party.

On The Conversation, Andy Knott notes how the approach for Johnson's government marks a complete break with traditional Conservatism:

For conservatism, protecting “what is” (in other words, the institutions that have been handed down to us) is a joint project between conservative politicians and the people, their constituents. Together they have been engaged in this project for centuries. 

This means there is a seamless bond between the people and the elite (or establishment, or government, or parliament, or judiciary), which enables them to rule and the people to view the Conservatives as the natural party of government and their proper representatives. 

Populism, in stark contrast, operates by breaking that bond. It decrees that the elite has abandoned the people, and acts against their interests.

Johnson may think he can control the definition of the elite - judges, civil servants urban liberals - but sooner or later the people will notice that he is supported by the super-rich and adopt their own definition.

Once they do he will be finished and the tissue of interests the Conservative Party represents ripped to shreds.

Over to the Guardian, where William Davies argues that this Conservative ideology has long been in decline for 30 years:

There was one force in Britain’s public life that never gave up on the Tories: the press. All those resentments that took the place of conservative ideology – the loathing of multiculturalism, Brussels, Blairism, immigration, and the vast riches being made in London – were given a safe space in the pages of the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph. 

With their constant attacks on all symptoms of liberal globalisation, these papers provided the incubator for the rage currently sweeping British politics, during the long years when national borders and rural England were out of political fashion.

The result is that those newspapers now have one of their own as prime minister.

And the Conservatives?

The current poll lead feels precarious; 59 per cent of Tory members have already voted for the Brexit party once (in the European parliament elections), and many could well do so in future. The Conservatives are now to the Brexit party what cocaine is to crack: more acceptable in polite company, but ultimately made of the same stuff.

Davies reaches a similar conclusion to Andy Knott:

The forces behind Brexit will need new scapegoats soon – and Johnson, Cummings and the Conservative party could be next in line.

All very encouraging if you wish to see the Tories destroyed, but the worry must be that they will destroy the country before that stage is reached.

Patrick Macnee and the Sixties

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Despite all that has happened at the Telegraph, its obituaries are still the best.

Here it is on Patrick Macnee's childhood:

His father was a racehorse trainer, a diminutive man known as “Shrimp” Macnee whose dapper wardrobe his son later recreated for Steed. He had a taste for gin and enlivened his dinner parties by levelling a shotgun at those guests he suspected of pacifist tendencies. 

Macnee’s mother took refuge in a circle of friends that included Tallulah Bankhead and the madam Mrs Meyrick, before absconding with a wealthy lesbian, Evelyn. Young Patrick was brought up by the pair and was instructed to call Evelyn “Uncle”. He managed to resist their efforts to dress him as a girl, wearing a kilt as a compromise. His father fled to India, from where he was later expelled for urinating off a balcony on to the heads of the Raj’s elite, gathered below for a race-meeting. 

Evelyn financed Macnee’s education, at Summer Fields — where he first acted, playing opposite Christopher Lee — and then Eton. His corruption began when he was introduced to whisky by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cardiff, who had escaped into the garden with a bottle when brought in to consecrate Evelyn’s private chapel. Macnee was then expelled from Eton for running a pornography and bookmaking empire.

All of which made Matthew Sweet suggest:

Maybe explains why Steed's gentlemanly response to 60s feminism: grateful, exhilarated, conspiratorial, slightly turned-on?

— Matthew Sweet (@DrMatthewSweet) June 26, 2015

That seems exactly right to me.

Six of the Best 495

Eric Avebury, the Liberal Democrat peer, writes movingly on the campaign to legalise assisted dying and his very personal interest in the subject.

The Telegraph has a chief executive, but what it needed was an editor, says Peter Preston.

"A recent panel for Smith College alumnae aimed at 'challenging the ideological echo chamber' elicited this ominous 'trigger/content warning” when a transcript appeared in the campus newspaper: 'Racism/racial slurs, ableist slurs, antisemitic language, anti-Muslim/Islamophobic language, anti-immigrant language, sexist/misogynistic slurs, references to race-based violence, references to antisemitic violence.'" Wendy Kaminer on the progressive ideas behind the lack of free speech on American campuses.

Good sense on cycling safety from Scotland: "My name is Alexander and I am 10 years old. I live in the countryside and the roads around my home are single track with passing places. I would like something to slow cars down because when I go on my bike and I hear cars coming they don’t slow down even though there is not much room. I usually stop and get off my bike and stand on the grass verge but they still don’t slow down."

Ian Sample fears noise pollution is making us oblivious to the sound of nature.

"If London’s roads had been 'futureproofed' in the 1970s to cope with anticipated demand today, some of the capital’s most popular neighbourhoods simply wouldn't exist today." 853 on the campaign against the Silvertown Tunnel.

Good news for Tim Montgomerie, but perhaps not David Cameron

The news broke today that Tim Montgomerie, the editor of Conservative Home, is to become the new comment editor of The Times. Congratulations to him, and it is always good to see someone from the blogosphere get on in the mainstream media.

But I wonder if it is such good news for David Cameron.

Montgomerie is one of the more eloquent holders of the view that the way for the Conservatives to gain a majority is to move to the right and concentrate on issues like spending cuts, immigration and Europe.

It is not for nothing that Conservative Home is known to some as the Continuity IDS.

If Montgomerie's appointment is a sign The Times is to embrace this agenda more tightly then that is bad news for David Cameron.

Because Cameron has grasped that the way for the Conservatives to win that majority is for them at least to appear more moderate than they did in the decade after John Major's premiership. And if another newspaper is pushing him in the opposite direction then his task will become that much harder.

I am reminded of a story in one of Simon Walters' books. It is to the effect that Charles Moore reflected ruefully when he left the Daily Telegraph in 2003 that, throughout the eight years of his editorship, the Conservative Party had been unelectable. Walters remarks that it did not occur to him that his editorial policies may have been one of the reasons for that unelectability.

David Cameron must hope that no one finds it necessary to make the same remark on the day, far distant, when Tim Montgomerie leaves The Times.