Hugo Rifkind
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It must be such an exhausting way to live. The most shocking thing about last weekend’s brouhaha, I reckon, was the revelation that McBride is only 34. That’s only two years older than me. We may have been contemporaries at Cambridge. From the photos, I’d always assumed the poor bloke was half a generation away. All pies and suits and gut and booze and disasters waiting to happen behind the rib cage. His master’s voice and his master’s body, too. That’s what New Labour looks like these days. That’s what happens if you don’t trust anybody with anything. You go to seed.
Paul Staines, the pseudonymous blogger who brought down McBride, is essentially a cheerfully obsessive right-wing iconoclast who has a great political radar and gets a lot of emails. And yet ask around, and even plenty of left-leaning political journalists are genuinely convinced that he must be the frontman for some shadowy Tory conspiracy. On TV the other day, McBride’s friend Derek Draper suggested something similar. The paranoia speaks volumes. Whether it’s giving targets to hospitals, or getting a policeman to make the case for 42 days’ detention without charge, this is a regime used to being in control. If they’re not in control, they automatically assume somebody else is. They confuse iconoclasm with nihilism, because they don’t really understand either. However much they might attack in one direction, they’ll always be blindly loyal in the other. Like sheepdogs, I suppose. This is precisely why all of their blogs are rubbish.
Late last year, evidently, somebody in Downing Street started worrying about this. ‘There are no independent pro-government voices in the blogosphere!’ they will have trilled. ‘Quick! Let’s establish a few from here, and then tell them exactly what to say!’ And they did. Thousands of them. Labourthis and Labourthat, all blending together in a morass of turgid, loyalist arse-covering drear. Six months on, and the only bits worth reading are the blogs of John Prescott and, occasionally, Alastair Campbell. This, I suspect, is because both secretly hate the Brownites almost as much as they hate the Tories. It gives them each a sort of liberated objectivity. I would call them little enchanted fauns, taking baby steps out into a bright adult world. Only that might get confusing, zoologically speaking.
The idea of setting up an anti-establishment, irreverent gossip blog from the heart of government, anyway, is not just moronic but also oxymoronic. This is precisely what McBride and Draper wanted to do. And not, I think, because they are usually sinister or evil people. There are scores of blogs out there that do the same or worse, including the one that brought them down. If they’d emailed their made-up stories directly to Staines six months ago, I reckon they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble.
No, where McBride went wrong was in considering all this to be the business of government. And he did that because the current government can barely conceive of things that aren’t. That’s why it is exhausted and bloated and coming apart. For New Labour believes we are all sheep, who need to be driven. As opposed to goats, who need to be led.
Yeah, that worked out OK, analogy-wise. I think.
I’m deeply torn about The Boat That Rocked, Richard Curtis’s new film about Radio Caroline, which pretends to be about a station called Radio Rock, presumably in case Americans don’t understand the word ‘Caroline’. I don’t know whether to see it. I just can’t decide.
Obviously, it’s not any good. Deborah Ross eviscerated it beautifully in these pages, and Kevin Maher did the same in the Times, and even if they hadn’t, well, I’d have had my doubts. He’s a mystery, that Curtis. There’s such a wonderful talent there (has anything ever been better than Blackadder?) but it plainly went badly awry some years ago. I once interviewed Mrs Curtis (Emma Freud) and she told me that her husband had told her that he didn’t really laugh any more — he just recognised humour when it came along. ‘Richard reckons that he hasn’t laughed properly since 1982,’ were her exact words, and I thought of Love, Actually and I said, ‘Hmmm’.
And yet, I’m very glad I saw Love, Actually. I wouldn’t see it again, not at gunpoint, but it has become one of those landmarks by which I now navigate personalities. I remember a friend who split up with a boyfriend, nice chap, whom we all liked. ‘But why?’ I said. ‘His favourite film was Love, Actually,’ she said. ‘Oh,’ I said, understanding everything.
Without Love, Actually she would have been at a loss. Without Love, Actually it would be so hard to say what is so terribly wrong with the souls of most idiots, some women and many Americans. Because you can always just ask them, ‘what did you think of Love, Actually?’ And then you know.
According to some, The Boat That Rocked is even worse. It could be an essential life tool. Again, hmmm.
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