Life must be filled up

I certainly didn’t stay up to watch the results come in but I did glance at the exit polls before going to bed. They suggested that the Liberal Democrats were likely to win seats where they were second to the Conservatives, especially those which they lost in 2015. That’s exactly what has happened here. Annette Brooke was our Lib Dem MP for fourteen years until she retired and was made a dame. In 2015, the Conservative candidate won the seat. Now, he’s out and the Lib Dems are back. This is not at all surprising; it’s part of a long, long tradition of Liberalism (sic) in the South West of England.

I saw this book advertised in Private Eye, promoted as ‘by a Private Eye hack’ and immediately wanted to read it. It’s a cracking read (if you look on Amazon’s page you will find Tom Robinson using a rather different adjective); fiction which is based on real events.

It’s 1970s London and homosexuality has already been legalised. But the protagonist, who calls himself Tom Wildeblood, is an under-age former runaway and has already had several run-ins with the police while he was working as a ‘Dilly boy’. He’s given that up, is homeless and finding it hard to make a living. By chance, he hears of the death of a boy dragged from Hampstead Heath pond and agrees to investigate it. Just another example of gay-bashing or something more sinister? There was no proper post mortem and the body was cremated with unseemly haste. Through his many contacts in Soho, Tom tries to find out what really happened and as a result, is hunted down by unknown assailants. He has got himself mixed up in the Jeremy Thorpe scandal, which I’ve written something about here. Tom searches in vain for Norman Scott because this is an alternative version of history in which it is Scott, not his dog Rinka, who is killed.

Those of us who remember the seventies will find Macqueen’s reporting very accurate (nothing like my blameless life at the time, I hasten to add), and will have our memories jogged by many names of people then famous but now dead; people from what seems another world. As reviewers have said, the book is a real page turner, with many twists which keep you reading ‘just another chapter’ as you ask yourself, ‘How will he get out of *this*?’ Tom does find answers but not the ones he was expecting, which makes for a surprising and shocking ending. I raced through this ‘what if’ thriller, enjoying it very much but after I’d finished, I felt angry. Angry about the exploitation of young boys by both thugs and what Tom calls ‘officer class’. Angry about police corruption, about government cover-ups and what seems to be a quite illegal use of the Secret Service for purely political ends. As if I weren’t paranoid enough already!

I'm fed up with Dreamwidth failing to crosspost!

Photo BBC

The BBC’s new series, A Very English Scandal is good; very good. An hour’s viewing passed by in a flash, always a good sign. As I’ve written before, I’m old enough to remember the unfolding of the Thorpe scandal and have also read John Preston’s book, on which this series is based. I don’t really want to write about the drama so much as about Hugh Grant. I’m rather sick of reading, from both professional critics and bloggers, that Grant’s performance is ‘surprising’ or ‘revelatory’ because the writer had previously thought of him as ‘just’ a romcom actor. Just? Since when did comic acting become easier than any other kind? Don’t you think that a lot of hard work and serious craft goes into playing a romantic lead? Take Cary Grant, the absolute master of the genre. Did he make it to the top without hard work and artistry? Hugh Grant is a very good actor and, IMO, plays Thorpe very well indeed, capturing the charm and glamour of the man but also his recklessness and his ruthless streak. He’s totally believable, which is the more remarkable in that he’s playing a man who was thirty years his junior at the time of these events.

I've just received a message from Dorset police about the terror threat. Here's part of it:
'“Armed officers will be doing overt foot patrols, carrying a long-armed firearm, which is the first time this has happened in our area.

“This is not based on any change in intelligence or threat for the South West, but the decision has been taken, whilst we are at a critical threat level, to make firearms officers more deployable and visible to our communities. We think this is what the public would expect at this time.

“Our priority is to provide as much reassurance to communities as possible but we do recognise that some may feel anxious. The firearms officers will be engaging and talking with people and we would actively encourage you to approach the officers and ask any questions you may have.'

Personally, I feel *more* alarmed by the presence of armed police on English streets.

The death of Jeremy Thorpe will fill many column inches in the papers over the next few days. I'm old enough to remember his glory days and to have followed the scandal and prosecution which ruined him very closely. Out of this came one of my comic hero Peter Cook's best ever sketches. As I understand it, after the first performance of that year's Secret Policeman's Ball, there was criticism that it wasn't satirical enough. Stung by this, Cook went home and overnight produced this brilliant version of the judge's summing up of the case.

Melanie Phillips has become a hate figure, a person whose very name will get a cheap laugh on the increasingly smug News Quiz. Why do people dislike her so much? For some, she’s an apostate who’s moved from left to right. Some criticism is frankly anti-Semitic. I also suspect misogyny; after all, the late Christopher Hitchens expressed many non-PC opinions, yet was widely respected. Because they disagree with what she says, people call her ‘mad’, which is no argument at all, simply abuse. Looking for a wider audience for her views, Ms Phillips has now launched emBooks as a further outlet. This is what she says about the books.

“Melanie Phillips Electric Media LLC is Melanie's new media company. Its e-books division, emBooks LLC, publishes extraordinarily good e-books that can be enjoyed on fixed screens and mobile devices.”

"By publishing books about the ideas that matter to me, I hope that emBooks will please and delight passionate readers everywhere - and become a source of writing that they can trust."

She talks about emBooks here. Thanks to the nice people at NetGalley I’ve now read two of them: Guardian Angel, a political autobiography, and Islamophilia by Douglas Murray.
( the books )