Hugo Rifkind
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Coolio on Celebrity Big Brother, he could fess. ‘Yo, Ulrika, I need to fess up about drinking the milk,’ sort of thing. It’s not just because he’s a rapper. Almost anybody on Celebrity Big Brother could fess. Even, at a push, Tommy Sheridan. Some of the younger ones would fess without even thinking about it. Such is the pervasive nature of hip-hopism. You have to talk like that on Celebrity Big Brother, otherwise people think you are aloof. Or worse, some sort of toffee-nosed posh snob, like that Page 3 girl from the Daily Star that they kicked out in the first week because she wouldn’t get them out for the TV cameras. I don’t think she even said ‘yo’. These days, even white, middle-aged Presidents are allowed to say ‘yo’. They probably feel it shows that they are down with it. They may also use phrases like ‘down with it’.
Among grown-ups, a ‘fess up’ is even worse than a ‘yo’. If you say ‘fess up’, you may think you are showing informality. You are actually just showing that you are not as sorry as you would be if you were speaking properly. Unless you are an actual black American. Which Stephen Hester isn’t.
Anyway, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that it wasn’t the ‘fess’ principally which bothered me. Even though I would rather our bankers spoke more like hero airline pilots, and less like they were about to affectionately call me ‘bitch’. It wasn’t that. It was the whole thing. It was the spectacle of a banker very nearly saying sorry.
Well, not that nearly. There was the whole ‘fess’ thing, about which I have probably said enough, and there was also the way he resolutely didn’t say ‘for me to fess up’ or even ‘for us to fess up’. Indeed, he even went on to say that it was very important that people didn’t demonise bankers, because bankers hadn’t really, probably, done anything wrong. But still, it was there. Just a flicker. Just for a moment. An actual banker, an actual representative of the men who broke the world, very, very nearly expressing actual contrition.
It hasn’t happened before. Indeed, it hasn’t even quite happened now. But it almost did, and much to my surprise it brought a great, sweeping sense of loss. Yes, I want bankers to be sorry. But I don’t want them to say they are sorry. I thought I did, but I was wrong. You can’t have a villain who is sorry. You can’t hate somebody when they are on their knees. If the bankers start saying sorry now, then before long we’ll have to forgive them. It’s way too soon.
We know you’ve trashed our pensions, destroyed our equity and laid waste to our dreams of a future, but we haven’t even worked up a proper fury yet. We’ve been busy trying to understand it all. You can’t say sorry yet. We’re still in shock. You have to be there, still being hateful, when we’re finally ready to hate. As Coolio or George Bush or the new chief executive of RBS might put it, y’all need to stand tall.
Here’s an odd one. Harry Nicolaides, an Australian writer and teacher, has been sentenced to three years in a Thai jail for insulting the Thai royal family. Four years ago he wrote an apparently rubbish novel called Verisimilitude, which included one short passage which said something rude about a fictional crown prince. This was a self-published novel and it’s not entirely clear how many copies he sold, although the BBC put the figure at seven. This has been reported around the world, and everybody agrees that it is an appallingly silly situation.
And yet the story has a big black hole in the middle of it, because despite being appalled, nobody, anywhere, will tell you what he actually wrote. I’ve been Googling like a fiend and, although I have now learned that the offence takes place on page 115, I haven’t been able to discover much more.
Inasmuch as I can establish, there is a fictional King who had a fictional son who had lots of fictional wives. In this passage, he is the subject of a vicious fictional rumour. Out in the real world, nobody seems to be suggesting that this fictional rumour is anything like a real rumour. You’re just not allowed to be rude about the monarchy in Thailand, and that’s what poor Nicolaides has apparently done. He’s now hoping for a royal pardon.
Three years over a fictional rumour, and no publication across the globe will tell you what this fictional rumour was. CNN wouldn’t broadcast it. The BBC kept it vague. Somebody must know. The seventh and final copy of Verisimilitude, I gather, is still on a shelf in the Thai National Library. Couldn’t somebody go and look it up?
When the Ayatollah issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses, at least it was possible to find out what his problem was. The situation seems more reminiscent of the fuss about those Danish cartoons of Mohammed a few years ago. Only I’m pretty sure that newspapers would not be targeted by mobs of suicidally angry Thai monarchists. So? Are networks and newspapers worried that their Thai correspondents will be jailed? Is there some sort of plush media convention on in Bangkok this summer? Or is it simply that the book is so bad that nobody can get beyond page 114? I really want to know.
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