Nick Cohen: Writing from London

If you wanted to see why Tony Blair is finished as a force for good in politics, you should have been at the discreet, if extortionately expensive, Haymarket hotel, off Trafalgar Square. Portland Communications, publicists for what it calls “the government of Russia” and everyone else calls “that thieving bastard Putin”, was holding a dinner for journalists and politicians.
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A s we prepare to celebrate 60 glorious years of a woman who has done little worth noting, ghoulish questions nag at the back of the mind. When, for instance, will the Queen die? Elections remove presidents in democratic republics. When your country is governed by the hereditary principle, however, only abdication or death can dispense with the sovereign. As Elizabeth II is 86, and has shown no desire to abdicate, we must wonder when the grim reaper, who scythes down royal and commoner alike, will bring us a change.

The first question raises a second. Will the leaders of the British state allow the succession to pass to Charles Windsor, a man whose ill-formed and incontinent mind renders him unfit for the role of constitutional
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For a moment at the Oslo Freedom Forum, it was possible to believe that Pyotr Verzilov was the coolest guy on the planet. Breathless and unshaven, the young performance artist arrived in Norway from the street protests in Moscow. With the élan of an exultant radical, he explained the personal and political reasons for taking on Putin’s kleptocracy.
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When all else fails, greed and fear explain otherwise inexplicable behaviour. Understand their power and you will grasp why the apparently tough-minded David Cameron and Alex Salmond still defend Rupert Murdoch. The ordinary rules of politics say they should abandon him without a moment’s regret. Base survival instincts ought to tell them that the scandals around News Corporation are a disease that may never be cured.

A by no means exhaustive list of the horrors ahead begins with Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks appearing at the Leveson inquiry this week. The non-Murdoch press will not shirk our duty to recall the fabulous social whirl that was once the “Chipping Norton Set”. We will remind you of how Brooks, Elisabeth Murdoch and Matthew Freud slapped and scratched the backs of David and Samantha Cameron at country homes, while Jeremy Clarkson flitted in and out of their parties – gambolling through the Cotswolds like a portly court fool.
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The Panglossian wisdom is that the web allows access to new sources of information and blogs, tweeters and online journals will replace the old newsrooms. But the pinpricks tiny sites can inflict on a target do not begin to match the cudgel blows the mass media of the 20th century could deliver. Of course, an oligarch or leader of a dictatorial regime would prefer that no criticism appeared anywhere. But he can rest easy if the criticisms are hidden in obscure corners of the web and do not enter the mainstream. The PR with the resources of a state or oligarch behind him is there to maintain a cordon sanitaire.

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‘It’s time, Chinese people! It’s time,” wrote the dissident Zhu Yufu in a poem he incautiously put online. “The Square belongs to all.” By “the Square”, he meant Tiananmen Square. But, alas, it does not “belong to all”. Like every other public space, it belongs to the Chinese communists, as Zhu discovered when the party sent him down for seven years for “inciting subversion of state power”.

Tomorrow, Britain will get a taste of dictatorial control when the London Book Fair opens.
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Slightly frustrated by his downbeat assessment, I told Bouvet that the Socialist manifesto showed that Hollande was anything but a bore. It was not just his plan to hit everyone earning over €1m (£824,000) with a 75% tax rate. Every page contained ideas to find work for the unemployed, to provide cheap housing for the young, to punish the shareholders of companies that lay off workers, and to break up dangerous banks. A politician who uttered his views in Britain would be to the left of the Labour party.

Pitying French eyes looked down on me. Someone unfortunate enough to have been born an Anglo-Saxon might regard Hollande as leftwing, my companions conceded. But to leftist French intellectuals he was merely a solid social democrat. A conscientious social democrat, no doubt about it, who would make life better for most French people. But the notion that he was some kind of radical was absurd.

“He just does not give me an erection,” a weary woman explained. I thought about telling her that, in true utopian fashion, she was demanding the impossible, but decided that the English and the French could never understand each other and moved on

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From the Observer
On the face of it, Ken Livingstone and George Galloway could not be further apart. Livingstone is the Labour candidate in the contest to be mayor of London. The party’s leaders defend him against every critic, and indulge his every excess. George Galloway hates Labour, and Labour hates him. He accuses it of being a nest of warmongers and capitalist lackeys. Labour replies that he is a dictators’ stooge, and adds that he is the worst possible politician to represent the urban poor because the record of the last parliament showed he preferred mewing like a cat on a reality TV show to turning up for work in the House of Commons.

Step outside party politics, however, and the differences between the two disappear like the morning mist.
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Who would want to kill Arab soldiers serving in a western army, a rabbi and three Jewish children? The white far right or the Islamist religious right? The inability of leftists and conservatives to reply “both” explains half the political hypocrisy of our time.
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