celebrity lookeylikey of the day

MP for Ashton-under-Lyne and our current deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, and, hem hem, adult entertainment performer Lauren Phillips (that link is safe, search for anything else and you're on your own). I mean, obviously it's mainly the hair. Anyway, one of them has regular encounters with Black Rod, and the other is a British politician; I expect you can make up your own jokes.

Leaving aside the knob jokes for a moment, I suspect Ashton-under-Lyne is one of the most commonly mis-spelt British place names, in that many people will assume it mirrors the form of the slightly better-known Newcastle-under-Lyme and therefore put an "m" in it. Ironically both suffixes seem to derive from words meaning "elm", in this case presumably elms on a hill, since the "under" conjunction usually (as you might expect) denotes that the thing after it is either the name of a nearby hill or a prominent thing on a nearby hill. 

There are quite a few place names of this type in Britain, some hyphenated, some not, including the splendidly named Weston-under-Lizard, which, like Newcastle-under-Lyme, is in Staffordshire, and not, as you might imagine, Cornwall. 

Anyway, other easily mis-rendered place names include Mevagissey (which is in Cornwall this time) which I genuinely spent a good chunk of my life assuming was called Megavissey, which not only rolls off the tongue more easily but also allows me to adapt the joke I made here and here and suggest that you get there by going through Millivissey and Kilovissey; if you get as far as Gigavissey you've gone too far. There is also the strange case of the Scottish town of Dumbarton (with an "m") being in the county of Dunbartonshire (with an "n") which can only be a cruel joke designed to catch people out. 

vloody near volodymyr

Never let it be said that Electric Halibut doesn't surf the bleeding edge of the Zeitgeist; as if to prove that point today's post is so topical it hurts, and it makes the following highly relevant geopolitical slash sporting point: former actor - whose previous roles included the voice of Paddington Bear and, erm, the President of Ukraine - and current President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy looks a bit like England scrum-half and (as of last weekend) caps record-holder Ben Youngs.

running for president

A couple of follow-up observations on earlier posts:

Firstly, I notice that politicians continue to embarrass themselves by attempting to ingest mildly intoxicating grain-based fermented fluids through their facial orifices in a way approximating what actual normal human beings would do in similar circumstances. The pictures below of Zac Goldsmith and Boris Johnson during a promotional stunt for Goldsmith's toxic (and thankfully unsuccessful) 2016 campaign for London mayor are the perfect example of this: Goldsmith genuinely seems to have no idea how to hold a pint glass and his facial expression after a very tentative sip is that of someone taking their first ever sip of beer. I mean, I should add that I almost certainly made a very similar expression after my first ever taste of beer, but I took the precaution of being about twelve and not on camera at the time.

Boris Johnson has at least (assuming he started with a full pint) managed a respectable quaff, although his facial expression suggests at least the faint possibility of it coming straight back up again.

Anyway, the other thing that politicians do, now that youth and vibrancy are supposedly the desirable things in politicians rather than, say, competence, trustworthiness and an absolutely massive beard, is make a point of being photographed running. Obviously the most convenient time is when just leaving or, better still, just returning to your house, as then you can just skulk round the corner and, at the most opportune moment, arrive back at a sprint and go: oh, good morning, everyone, sorry, just been out for a run, hahaha, what, these old things? just my running gear, bit sweaty, hahaha, anyway, must get on, cheerio! Nothing will convince me that Michael Gove, to pick the most obvious example, actually moves his lower limb appendages rhythmically back and forth thus propelling his entire autonomous corporeal module along laterally at greater-than-average speed for any reason other than to provide the flimsy illusion of being an actual normal human being for the minimal amount of time necessary.

My first recollection of politicians doing this sort of thing was during Bill Clinton's presidency, though of course human beings of a degree of political celebrity have run before. But I think it's more prevalent now than it was, via David Cameron and his disturbing habit of making what I assume is his pig-fucking face while out running, to Boris Johnson and his absurd outfits. It's not just British politicians - Nicolas Sarkozy used to do it and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is conspicuously sporty. I mean, fine, if that's genuinely your thing, but otherwise I think everyone should probably just Stop It.

Secondly, with reference to the recent-ish review of The Godfather and my reference therein to the bizarre episode with Lucy Mancini and her cavernous vagina, which I also mention here, it occurs to me that the canonical enormous vagina reference in fiction is its occurrence as a repeated theme in Jean M Auel's The Clan Of The Cave Bear and its sequels The Valley Of Horses and The Mammoth Hunters - there are three more books in the series but this is the point at which I got bored and drifted off to other things. 

The series' main protagonist, Ayla, has lots of exciting adventures, but a key plot thread is her desire to find a man who can fully occupy her, erm, cave, and, in parallel, the story of rugged hunter Jondalar and his desire to find a woman with whom he can, erm, sheath his spear in a full and satisfying way. I think one of the reasons I got bored with the books - which were big, doorstop-y tomes anyway - was the shift of focus away from the stuff about the rise of the Cro-Magnons (and the parallel demise of the Neanderthals) and towards a series of soap-opera-esque plot contrivances to force Ayla and Jondalar apart and back together again, complete with some furious spearing upon each reconciliation. It seems odd in hindsight, these being books I read as a teenager, to recall that I got bored because there was too much sex and not enough other stuff, but there it is.

keir and present danger

I had an interesting exchange on Twitter earlier after I saw this tweet on my timeline, which basically makes the claim that, on the basis of a recent interview, Keir Starmer, if he were to become Prime Minister, would be the first openly atheist Prime Minister of the UK. My first thought was: well, Keir Starmer's leadership of Labour may be distinctly underwhelming on a number of levels, but the statement of non-belief here is commendably clear and non-waffly and pretty unusual for a top-flight politician who might actually harbour some ambition of getting to be Prime Minister one day. 

You'll notice the response from Humanists UK, though, basically saying: yes, this is great, but it's actually not that unusual, as there have been plenty of atheist Prime Ministers, and here are a few examples. My original quote-tweet sounded a note of caution, mainly intended to emphasise how unusually direct I thought Starmer's statement was. I would describe Humanists UK's two subsequent replies as "brusquely dismissive" and "slightly defensive" respectively. I should add that I'm not intending any criticism of them as an organisation or their social media team individually here, but it is a useful exercise in proper critical thinking and scepticism not to take statements at face value, even when they are made by people whose worldview and aims you broadly agree with. It would be ironic, after all, if we were to have what you might call "articles of faith" which are recited by rote but never subjected to any scrutiny.

all this may well be true in terms of their private views, but I suspect none of them are on record as making quite such a bald statement of non-belief. I mean, I may be wrong, but on the other hand it takes seconds to unearth public Goddery such as this https://t.co/0jtwJCbf4H https://t.co/UGkVVzXIsI

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) April 12, 2021

Taking Clement Attlee as the first example, just about all the Google hits for "Clement Attlee atheist" bring back the exchange referred to here which is his biographer Kenneth Harris' recalling (at an unspecified later date) of a conversation they had on an unspecified date, but almost certainly no earlier than mid-1950s, i.e. well after Attlee's stint as Prime Minister had ended in 1951, and probably after he ceased to be Labour leader in 1955. Attlee died in 1967 and Harris' biography of him, containing this brief exchange, wasn't published until 1982. I have no reason to doubt the basic truth of Harris' depiction of Attlee's beliefs, but I think that a) 15 years after your death and b) while still Leader of the Opposition and prospective Prime Minister are worlds apart when it comes to expressing them.

James Callaghan was a Baptist Sunday school teacher in his early life, and the standard Google result for "James Callaghan atheist" is a reference to a television interview in the 1980s where he supposedly professed his atheism. Again, I have no reason to doubt that that is true (although I haven't seen a transcript of the interview anywhere), but Callaghan's stint as Prime Minister ended in 1979 (when he was already 67) and he stood down as an MP in 1987.

Ramsay MacDonald seems to have roved about through various flavours of religious affiliation throughout his early life but to have arrived at what would these days be called humanism by the start of the twentieth century, well before his multiple stints as Prime Minister (the first of which started in 1924). In fact he served as President of the Union of Ethical Societies a couple of times in the early twentieth century, that organisation being a precursor to the British Humanist Association who have now changed their name to Humanists UK. 

Finally, what of dear old Winnie, the increasingly problematic saviour of Britain during World War II? Well, again, most of the obvious Google search terms yield results which all point back to the same source quote, which is one supposedly from a letter he wrote to his mother in his mid-twenties which includes the line "I do not accept the Christian or any other form of religious belief". On the other hand if you trawl through his most famous quotations looking for invocations of God and Christianity as key pillars of civilisation which need to be defended against, variously, Nazism, Communism, Islam, you name it, you will find many. 

So I think if you were to ask yourself the question: which of these people had made clear, unambiguous and widely-circulated public statements of non-belief prior to their being Prime Minister, I think you could only really come up with Ramsay MacDonald. On the other hand it's almost unimaginable that any of the people mentioned here would have been subjected to, or subjected themselves to, an interview where such intrusive questions would have been asked. Times change, and I, for one, view this as progress.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today's pair is Nadia Whittome, Labour MP for Nottingham East, and Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Most pictures of Kahlo have a rather severe look to them as she wasn't really into smiling for the camera, and the particular image of Whittome you see here is a screengrab from a Zoom call that I saw posted on Twitter where she has her hair in a more scraped-back style than usual and is unsmiling throughout, probably as a result of being forced to listen to Alastair Campbell. To be fair she is usually less severe in both demeanour and hairstyle (not, just to be clear, that I demand that female MPs are all smiley and unthreatening; they can of course present themselves however they like).

I guess my fridakahlometer is still calibrated to a higher degree of sensitivity than usual in the wake of reading The Lacuna.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today it's Theresa May's former chief of staff, advisor and election strategist Nick Timothy, and Bridget McCluskey's former chief of PE staff, bullying advisor and expulsion strategist Geoff "Bullet" Baxter.

the last book I read

Middle England by Jonathan Coe.

There is, I think, a reasonably convincing argument that there was a moment in 2010 when the UK's reality timeline diverged into two radically different futures: the normal one where everyone continued bimbling along, muddling through, not really worrying too much about customs unions, non-tariff barriers, regulatory alignment or overt and unashamed displays of racism (not to mention actual murdering of MPs in the street), and the shouty dystopian right-wing fractured hellscape we currently inhabit, and that furthermore that moment can be identified as the few hours during which the Gillian Duffy affair played out in the public eye. Perhaps there is even now a wibbly-wobbly parallel universe where Gordon Brown either remembered to remove his radio mic before getting in the car, or provided a more robust response to her criticisms than caving in and issuing a grovelling apology.

Pundits will try to tell you that austerity that caused Brexit. I can categorically tell them that they are IDIOTS. The moment that Gordon Brown was secretly recorded calling Gillian Duffy a 'Bigot', politicians were exposed as the disrespectful, power junkies that they are. 🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/EXArs1mxBP

— Cailean Neal (@CaileanNeal) January 31, 2020

Broadly speaking, Middle England takes the same view, or at least it starts in the same place, in the run-up to the 2010 UK general election. That is where we meet most of the major characters: Benjamin Trotter, his sister Lois, her daughter Sophie, and various of Benjamin and Lois' schoolfriends - journalist Doug Anderton, publisher Philip Chase, and a few others. All of them would be in their early fifties (Sophie is younger, obviously) and will be familiar (in younger incarnations) to anyone who's read Coe's earlier books The Rotters' Club and The Closed Circle, to which Middle England is a loose sequel.

Benjamin is really the focal point of the story here, as he was in the two previous books, and he's currently living a comfortable enough life in a nice riverside cottage, single, no particular need to work for a living, spending a lot of time honing his magnum opus, a gargantuan novel with accompanying self-composed prog-rock soundtrack. Lois, meanwhile, is still married to, but living apart from, her husband, and their daughter Sophie is in the early stages of an academic career and nurturing a fledgling romance with Ian, whom she met when he was the instructor on a speed awareness course she was obliged to take.

Benjamin is persuaded by some friends (specifically Philip, who offers to publish the book for him) to trim his enormo-novel down by a couple of thousand pages to a brief novella encompassing the pursuit and subsequent loss of an ex-girlfriend and ditch all the other stuff (including the prog-rock soundtrack). Against all odds, it is a slow-burning critical success and gets longlisted for the Booker Prize. Meanwhile Sophie's relationship with Ian progresses through engagement, marriage and some post-marriage disillusionment at the realisation that basically he isn't as bright as her and harbours certain attitudes that might have been kept safely under wraps were it not for certain external factors, specifically the Conservative victory at the 2015 general election and David Cameron's offer of a referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union.

So you don't need me to tell you what happens next: wild and unpredictable forces are unleashed, MPs are murdered in the street, Britain votes to leave the European Union and an uncertain future faces everyone. Sophie and Ian manage, against the odds, and perhaps only temporarily, to hold things together, and Benjamin and Lois, disillusioned with the state of the UK, decide to move to France and open a B&B.

I read both The Rotters' Club and The Closed Circle (published in 2001 and 2004 but set in mid-1970s and late-1990s respectively) but I find myself oddly unable to tell you much at all about what happened in them, other than some of the real historical background they played out against (the only point where the characters' lives intersected that I can remember was when Lois Trotter's then-boyfriend was killed in the Birmingham pub bombings). Perhaps this is because not a great deal actually does happen, a criticism that could probably be levelled at Middle England as well. There's an odd sort of contrast between the low-key personal concerns of the characters and the grand sweep of history that they play out against, and to be honest I'm not sure how well it really works.

One of the obvious problems with writing about Brexit in particular is avoiding the temptation to portray all the Leave voters as frothing racists; all the more difficult because a significant proportion of them undoubtedly are frothing racists. Coe is pretty good at identifying some of the long-term causes of Brexit - Thatcher-era hollowing-out of the industrial heartlands of (mostly) the north and the failure to replace them with anything; the increasingly London-centric focus of investment, the increasing feeling of people in the former industrial areas that they were being ignored by successive governments and therefore had nothing to lose by a destructive lashing-out, however irrational, when offered a rare opportunity to do so via direct democratic means.

The problem, I think. as with any novel that purports to closely track actual history, is avoiding just writing a series of editorials about the real events you're describing, and also convincingly entwining these real events with the lives of your fictional characters in such a way that it they seem to have a real impact. I'm not sure Middle England really carries off this second bit, largely because most of the major characters are too middle-class and comfortably-off to be affected in any fundamental way. To put it another way, anyone who is able to react to Brexit by upping sticks and moving to France to open a B&B with seemingly no pressingly urgent need for it to turn a profit is someone who wasn't going to be too badly affected by it in the first place, even if they'd stayed put.

However: Coe's novels are always intensely readable, the weird fracturing of personal and family relationships that undoubtedly did happen in the aftermath of the referendum when it became apparent that apparently simpatico people had voted in opposite ways is well presented, and most of the characters (Sophie in particular, who is a bit less cosily middle-aged than the rest) are broadly sympathetic. I think my favourite Coe novel is still the slightly odder The House Of Sleep, though.

the last book I read

The Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck.

O-OOOOOOH-KLAHOMA where the wind comes sweeping down the plain
Where the wavin' wheat can sure smell sweet
When the wind comes right behind the rain

Um, well, yes, but in fact *record scratch noise* it's not quite like that in the mid-1930s. Sure, the wind comes a-sweepin' down the plain, but there ain't no rain, and consequently there ain't no wheat either. And those of you with first-class degrees in agricultural science and wheatonomics and farmology and the like will realise that that's BAD NEWS for the hordes of tenant farmers who depend on the crops to be able to feed and clothe themselves and pay the rent on their homes. Bad news for the landowners as well, of course, but they have the resources to absorb some misfortune of this kind, and in some cases it provides a convenient excuse to evict the tenants, demolish their dwellings and massively expand and mechanise their farming operations.

Tom Joad hasn't been doing a lot of the old farming lately, since he's been in prison for killing a man with a shovel in a fight. Freshly released from the state penitentiary, he's hitch-hiking his way across Oklahoma to get back to the family farm. When he arrives, having hooked up with ex-preacher Jim Casy on the way, he is surprised to find the family home abandoned and derelict, and it's only by a chance encounter with a neighbour that Tom discovers where the family have gone - over to Uncle John's place to gather up their possessions ready to make the great trek west to California, a green and luscious land of opportunity where the fruit fields stretch off over the horizon and there are jobs for everyone.

Once Tom has had his emotional reunion with the family, thoughts turn to loading up the family truck with as many of their possessions as it will hold, plus a dozen or so people. This done, they set off down the road, immediately realising that thousands of others are doing exactly the same thing.

Those of you with first-class degrees in geography will know that the United States is a pretty big place, and the route from Sallisaw, Oklahoma where the Joads live to Bakersfield, California where they end up is a little over 1600 miles, with some pretty big mountains in between. No mean feat in an overloaded jalopy, and it takes several weeks, with much rough roadside camping on the way. By the time they get over the state line into California the party has been depleted somewhat: both Grampa and Granma have died on the journey, Tom's elder brother Noah has decided to wander off and seek his own fortune, and Connie, fiancé of Tom's sister Rose of Sharon (universally referred to as Rosasharn by family members) and father of her unborn child has decided that he doesn't really fancy being a Dad and snuck off into the night.

The remaining Joads soon make the inevitable discovery that while there is indeed fruit and vegetables and cotton that need picking, there is also a massive influx of people like them desperate for work, and therefore not only is work scarce and a strict first-come-first-served policy is in operation, but some basic economics dictates that those offering the jobs are able to brutally slash the wages being offered, on the grounds that if you don't want to work at that rate, there are a hundred hungry desperate people in the queue behind you who will.

Of course a man's thoughts turn at this point to notions of worker solidarity, mass withholding of labour and things like that. This is a risky train of thought, though, as the authorities are brutally repressive of any activities which smack of GODDAMN COMMUNISM, and economic reality once again dictates that there will always be people desperate enough to break a strike and take the wages being offered anyway, as the Joads themselves do at a peach farm, largely through their own ignorance at what the people lined up outside the fence are shouting about.

Tom is a bright lad, though, and soon puts two and two together by talking to some of the protesters outside the farm, but in doing so gets involved in a fight with the authorities trying to clear out the protesters and clubs a man to death in making his escape. Once again the family is forced to move on hurriedly, concealing Tom in the back of the truck. They eventually find work picking cotton, but Tom can't work because he has to keep himself hidden to avoid detection, and Rose of Sharon can't work either as her baby is nearly due.

Eventually Tom's cover is blown and he has to leave the family. Rose of Sharon's baby is stillborn, and the winter rains begin, ensuring that there won't be any work for at least three months. As the abandoned box car where they've been living is about to be flooded, the Joads head off on the road again, this time on foot.

Sooooooo it's not exactly a barrel of laughs, this, but, a bit like One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, it's actually a bit less grim and more uplifting than you might imagine. Family bonds, the unbreakability of the human spirit, the urge to help others even when you have little or nothing to give yourself, that sort of thing. What it also is is a book clearly fuelled by righteous anger at the relentless oppression handed out to the Joads and their kind, and an impassioned appeal for a system of government that didn't allow this sort of thing to happen. A lot of people interpreted this as being a manifesto for GODDAMN COMMUNISM at the time, although that didn't prevent it becoming a multi-million-selling publishing phenomenon when it first came out in 1939.

It is entirely coincidental that I was reading this during the period of the 2019 general election, but there's no escape from the historical echoes in the choice facing modern-day voters. Clearly Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn agreed with me as one of his immediately pre-election tweets featured him and his cat perusing a copy of the book. You can skip actually zooming in on the watch as instructed as a) nothing very exciting is revealed and b) it's sadly all a bit academic now.

Zoom in on my watch. pic.twitter.com/IQbxiOZYdz

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) December 12, 2019

The Grapes of Wrath was garlanded with most of the major literary awards when it was first published, including the National Book Award (previous winners on this list include The Moviegoer, The Wapshot Chronicle and The Corrections) and the Pulitzer Prize (so you can add it to the list here). It also appears on the TIME magazine 100 novels list that many previous entries on this list (a non-comprehensive list is here) appear on. All that was also presumably a key factor in Steinbeck being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, although it has since been revealed he was something of a compromise candidate and the academy were a bit unsatisfied about the whole thing. It was also almost immediately made into a film, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad.

None of that stuff really amounts to a hill of beans in this crazy world, though, except in that it's indicative of a wide recognition that this is a major work of 20th-century fiction, a view with which I heartily concur. I am almost certain that my Pan paperback copy was one of the large stash of books I acquired at a 30% discount on leaving my job in the Town Bookseller in Newbury back in the early 1990s (On The Road was another, and I think possibly Midnight's Children too). I strongly recommend that you don't wait 27 years to read your copy.

brexilebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today it's legendarily suave and stylish Roxy Music front man Bryan Ferry and Leave.EU communications director Andy Wigmore. That's his official title; he apparently prefers to be known as one of the "bad boys of Brexit" or, perhaps even more embarrassingly, the "Brex Pistols", along with Nigel Farage and my fellow old Bartholomewian Arron Banks. Now, as the man said, that's a name no-one would self-apply where I come from, as it would mark you out as an unspeakable wanker. On the other hand, every single public utterance Wigmore is on record as having made would seem to bear out the theory that he in fact is an unspeakable wanker, so that might account for it.

I cunt believe it's not jeremy

There was nothing more inevitable than Jeremy Hunt's throwing his hat into the ring at the Tory leadership election resulting in yet more people calling him a cunt. The only question was: who would crack first under the unbearable pressure of an internal monologue yammering "DON'T SAY IT DON'T SAY IT DON'T SAY IT" relentlessly at them?

It turned out to be Victoria Derbyshire, on her daily BBC news and current affairs programme, with a full and unashamed rendering, not the wishy-washy "Cu...Hunt" that some people come out with.



As we know, this particular verbal gaffe has a long and glorious history, some of it documented here on this blog but inevitably some of it slipping by unnoticed, by me anyway. The mashups/compilations included in these two tweets provide a good potted summary. The prospect of this becoming a global phenomenon and international heads of state bellowing CUNT at each other across the table at the United Nations is a delightful one, but must be tempered by the realisation that there is absolutely zero chance of Hunt winning the Tory leadership contest, and therefore becoming Prime Minister.

slapheadrity lookeylikey of the day

This is a bit of an echo of a long-ago lookeylikey post about bald people; I want to make it clear that I'm trying to do something a bit more considered than saying that all bald people look the same. Whether I have succeeded is for you to judge.

Here are cabinet minister and serial disaster area Chris Grayling, Vic Reeves' comedy sidekick and spirit-level enthusiast Les, and current PDC world darts champion Michael van Gerwen.

You'd expect Les to win the Most-Deranged-Looking Bald Guy contest hands down, but actually I think it's van Gerwen. Grayling evidently keeps his derangement more securely under wraps.

brexit: it's all getting a bit hairy now

One of the reasons I don't do as much blogging as I used to, in addition to the various reasons already mentioned elsewhere, is that the current political climate in both the US and the UK is pretty much anathema to the blogger who might want to make some facile but vaguely satirical points about current affairs. It's been said before, but the current political climate has rendered satire effectively redundant. Brexit is a jaw-droppingly stupid and self-destructive idea? Trump is a moron? Well, duh, as the kids say.

So while this post is tangentially Brexit-related, it's really mainly about other things. I was listening to the Today programme the other day in the car and there was a bit where John Humphrys was interviewing a woman about Brexit-related matters. Nothing out of the ordinary there, you might think, and you'd be right if it were not for the fact that she was sitting in the studio naked. This sort of stuff doesn't come across especially well on the radio, but it was apparently for real. Dr Victoria Bateman's point, as far as I can gather, is that "Brexit leaves Britain naked" and the best way to illustrate this is to turn up on various media outlets literally naked (or, alternatively, in a big coat which can be removed at the right moment) and with slogans daubed on one's torso to make that point.

Now obviously Dr. Bateman (a perfectly respectable academic economist at Cambridge University by day when she's not doing naked protests) is right about Brexit in a general sense (a lengthy lecture wherein she sets out her arguments is here, though you should be aware that she delivers most of it naked, so it's obviously NSFW), but of course being right doesn't automatically lead to you getting your own way, otherwise we'd never have got into this colossal mess in the first place. It might also have occurred to Dr. Bateman that this sort of thing has a distinct air of upper-class types horsing around about it, which might give you pause for thought after reflecting that one element of the Brexit vote (among many others) was a frustrated and self-destructive swipe at a perceived "elite". Imagine how a naked protest would be received if it were a working-class woman doing a tour of betting shops in Sunderland in order to get her kit off.

It should also be noted that Dr. Bateman has a certain amount of previous in this area; as far back as 2014 she was in the news for posing for a fairly mundane full-length nude portrait, the most interesting thing about which was that it was at the centre of a sex discrimination case brought against the company her husband James works for, partly as a result of old Jimbo enthusiastically showing it to people at work. Which is mildly ironic, since the point of the portrait, and indeed the thrust of most of Dr. Bateman's protests, is the objectification of women's bodies. Which is a fine and admirable thing to protest about, but there is just a suspicion - and maybe this is unduly cynical, I don't know - that the Brexit thing is just a convenient vehicle to keep her profile up.

Anyway, that lengthy preamble is really just by way of scene-setting: the thing that really struck me about all this was how the media chose to cover it - the "respectable" outlets did their best to be all groovy and unconcerned about it, while pixelating the hell out of various key areas for TV purposes. Some amusement can be obtained by seeing how people like John Humphrys, Owen Jones and the legendary Richard Madeley react at having to interview a naked woman. At the other end of the scale, you can imagine how the tabloids reacted. Interestingly, while the Daily Mail adhered fairly strictly to the rules regarding acceptable terminology (modesty = fanny, broadly speaking) the Daily Express went off the rails completely:

Dr Victoria Bateman took to the stage in her modesty last night

Hard to imagine what they thought that actually meant, although to be fair they did go on to say later in the same piece:

She then blasted UKIP in Cambridge for criticising a prior naked performance for lacking incredulity

That's even harder to parse; I assume that the last word is meant to be "credibility", but evidently the leering hack was too busy furiously wanking to proof-read his own article. Most of the rest of the reaction on the internet focused on her refreshingly laissez-faire attitude to pubic topiary, apparently an anomaly worthy of mention in these waxed and shaven times. Perhaps it's an ironic commentary on the amount of fannying about, beating about the bush, etc. etc. which has gone on in the Brexit negotiations.

In entirely unconnected news it should also be noted that Dr. Bateman has a book coming out fairly shortly. If only there were some way of getting some advance publicity.

bevan knows I'm miserable nye

It's a few days late for the official anniversary but let me commemorate the 70th birthday of the National Health Service by appointing as Welshman Of The Day its primary architect Aneurin Bevan.

The really interesting thing about the inception of the NHS, a much-beloved institution by all right-thinking people, many of whom are currently rightly concerned for its future, is how unlikely it all was, and how several different things had to align in order for it to happen, any one of which could have scuppered the whole thing by its absence.

• Bevan's own personal drive, deriving in large part from his Welsh working-class background, was a major factor. The historical narrative which has Great Men standing head and shoulders above their contemporaries and achieving Great Things is generally wrong, or at best a gross over-simplification, but if Bevan hadn't been in the role of Health Secretary at the time, would the changes have been driven through? My friend Ben wrote this article as part of Welsh History Month in 2015 which gives some interesting context.
• Secondly, the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the general mood of optimism and brotherly love, perhaps accompanied by a general flattening of the class hierarchy after everyone's shared experience of warfare and existential peril, all of which led to the Labour landslide in the general election of 1945 and a massive political mandate to do a bit of the old socialism. But it was a fairly narrow window of opportunity: Labour won the 1950 general election only narrowly and then lost in 1951 after an ill-conceived snap election designed to increase Labour's slim majority. Clearly no-one would be foolish enough to try a similar gambit nowadays, hahahaha. Imagine!

So what do we conclude? Most obviously that it's very possible none of this would have happened but for the unique set of circumstances that existed in the wake of the Second World War, and therefore: no Hitler, no National Health Service. There, I've said it. Obviously Hitler never lived to see the scheme come to fruition, which is a shame as I gather the NHS leads the world in reconstructive testicular surgery and the treatment of cranial gunshot wounds.

Finally, no blog post mentioning Nye Bevan can fail to address the question of what Nye Bevan would have done in the event of a nuclear holocaust.

good morning and here is the vagina, I mean news

By my reckoning no-one's called Jeremy Hunt (or anyone else) a cunt on live TV or radio for just over a year. Well, that run ended today as Today presenter Justin Webb dropped a big old c-bomb during a news item about social care costs (about 10 seconds into the clip below):

Justin Webb drops the c-bomb while trying to say Jeremy Hunt - listen for his sigh during the next link pic.twitter.com/ziWbDEj67P

— Matt Chorley (@MattChorley) June 25, 2018

There is some suggestion in this Radio Times article that Webb managed to swerve the gaffe at the last moment; Webb and some ex-colleagues are certainly spinning it that way. But have a listen to the clip: he might have just about managed to chop the last "t" from "Cunt", but that makes no difference whatsoever, it basically sounds the same.

Webb thus joins a long and distinguished list of broadcasters who have suffered such an outburst on live TV or radio, many but by no means all of them relating to an attempt to say Jeremy Hunt's name. Previous inductees include:

• Ellie Price and Laura Kuenssberg
• Bill Turnbull
• Norman Smith
• John Inverdale
• Niki Cardwell
• Jeremy Paxman
• and most magnificently of all, Jim Naughtie and Andrew Marr

That list is by no means exhaustive, even when you add in the extra items linked to from the Bill Turnbull and Norman Smith posts, including Nicky Campbell's thrilling life-or-death struggle with the words "West Kent Hunt". The Niki Cardwell one also includes a bonus penis from football pundit Mark Lawrenson.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Ex-CEO of ExxonMobil and, as of his unexpected (to him at least) firing yesterday, ex-US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and former showbiz publicist and convicted sex offender (and, as of December, former living person) Max Clifford.

election night special with david quimbleby

Hey, there was a general election recently. You might have missed it, so here are a couple of snippets. What I'm going to try and do is bring you a flavour of all the excitement solely through the medium of female journalists saying the c-word.

Firstly, in the grand tradition of many journalists who have gone before her, including Naughtie and Marr but many others as well, here's BBC reporter Ellie Price calling Jeremy Hunt a cunt.

Err... what did she say just now @BBCNews ? #FreudianSlip #JeremyHunt 😂 pic.twitter.com/slPZpyvRxT

— Lisa Allen (@LisaTheAllen) June 11, 2017

And here's the BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg mangling the word "re-count". To be fair to her it was nearly 3am, about the time I was switching off and retiring to bed.

celabourity lookeylikey of the day

Leader of the Labour Party and thereby Leader of Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition Jeremy Corbyn, and the Wise Old Elf from the splendid Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom (whose real name, proper series enthusiasts will know, is Cedric). One of them is an elusive and mystical creature whose various crackpot schemes invariably end in disaster, and the other is a cartoon character. Boom, and, strictly entre nous, tish.

celebrity lookeylikeys of the day

I've got two for you today. Firstly, presenter of CBeebies science-y programme Do You Know? (one of Nia's current favourite things) Maddie Moate, and iconic 1980s teen movie star (and ex-niece-in-law of Angela Lansbury) Ally Sheedy.

Just as with the Sally Phillips/Martha Wainwright one, it's all about the smile. This particular smile involves flaring the nostrils and raising the top lip clear of the teeth before stretching it out into a straight line. They both have very slightly pointy chins as well.

Secondly, union leader and target of cartoonish tabloid hatred "Red Len" McCluskey, and legendary Who guitarist and occasional tabloid featuree Pete Townshend.

cream pie with a cherry on top

Couple of follow-up notes on previous posts:

• It appears that virginity auctions are still a thing, or at least still a thing that people claim to be doing in order to generate tabloid headlines, since I'm far from convinced that any of them are actually real. The latest one involves "Ariana, 20, from Russia" and an auction reserve of £130,000. Bidders can also bid for Ariana's 21-year-old friend and alleged fellow virgin Lolita (almost definitely her real name) at a similar price. If the same bidder should secure both ladies it's unclear how the logistics of the encounter would work, i.e. in series or in parallel, so to speak.
• You may recall my brief post in which I alluded to cricket commentator Alan Gibson's comment about New Zealander Bob Cunis' surname ("neither one thing nor the other"). Well, it turns out that Gibson may have nicked the phrase from Winston Churchill, who used it (several times, by the sound of it) to describe architect and MP Alfred Bossom. I know this because David Owen mentioned it while plugging his new book on Radio 4's Midweek on Wednesday morning. So Churchill gets dibs on coining the phrase, unless of course there are any earlier citations out there, but I think Gibson's use is funnier, just because the two words you're meant to be thinking of are slightly more sniggery. 

it's all good fun until someone loses an EU

So, Brexit, then. And while it's awfully tempting to dismiss the 52% of the UK population who voted to leave the European Union as just a rabble of dimwitted racists, and I'm not saying there isn't a good deal of truth in that, it might just be more productive to try to work out what the hell went wrong.

A few things are obvious: no-one really thought there was an economic case to be made for leaving, so no-one really seriously bothered trying to make one. So basically there was just a lot of dog-whistling around the subject of immigration, which has turned into an elephant in the room totally out of proportion with its actual importance (since the British public are as utterly wrong about the immigration figures and impact as they are about just about any other subject you could care to mention). So when people urge political parties to really tackle immigration, what they really mean is address people's largely imaginary concerns about it and their mistaken perception of its impact. This is actually quite hard to do without just pointing out to people that they are massive racists, which as a vote-winning strategy is not great.

Equally obvious is that, of the major Leave campaign figureheads, Boris Johnson is a brazen and ruthless political opportunist who was campaigning for a Remain vote as recently as February 2016, and moreover as a European correspondent in the 1990s was personally responsible for a whole stream of the sort of barmy Eurocrat banana-straightening stories that fuelled UK Euroscepticism in the first place. Nigel Farage, by contrast, is a proper old-school fascist of the type that always seem hilarious and buffoonish right up until the point where they acquire power and it becomes clear they weren't joking after all. Like that comical Charlie Chaplin lookalike guy in Germany in the 1930s. I mean, who remembers him now?

A gazillion words have already been written bemoaning the barking irrationality of the Leave vote, and in particular how places like Ebbw Vale were persuaded to cast a vote profoundly in opposition to their own best interests, so it might be more profitable to explore a couple of wider (but still related) issues, like, for instance: who can we blame? I have a couple of suggestions.

Firstly, and most obviously, David Cameron. I'm inclined to blame Cameron for a lot of things, as you know, but this referendum really is his fault, since he promised it back in 2013 as a sop to the truculent faction of borderline Nazis in his own party who he feared would otherwise defect to UKIP in large numbers.

But, you might say, what's wrong with having a referendum? This is democracy in its purest form! Anyone arguing against having a referendum must basically HATE DEMOCRACY. This is quite difficult to argue against, since the counter-argument basically boils down to: people are idiots. It's quite salutary to remember why parliamentary democracy exists: because it's absurdly impractical to canvass everyone's opinion on any particular subject (modern technology means it's easier than it's ever been, but it's still absurdly slow and difficult) and it's desirable to bundle up that decision-making capacity - region by region, say - into a single elected representative whose job it quite literally is to be engaged and informed on the topics that decisions might need to be made about, while the people who elected him or her get on with their day jobs amid their usual fug of ignorance.

I'll tell you who else is to blame, though: the media. The BBC, for one, has come in for some criticism in the past for, as this Huffington Post article puts it, "sacrificing objectivity for impartiality", or, in other words, promoting some bullshit idea of "balance" in a debate by presenting both sides and being reluctant to take a position on how those sides align with reality. Both of those linked articles were about climate change, but the same charge can be levelled at the BBC's (and other broadcasters') coverage of the referendum. If there are two sides, and one side is peddling easily-debunked lies and nonsense, it might actually do the viewing public a service if the liars were held to account. To put it another way, the current model only really works when politicians occupy a position somewhere within the bounds of what you might call "reasonableness" or at least can be trusted (most of the time) to be arguing in good faith - once you get a statistical outlier like Farage or Johnson (or Donald Trump, to pick an example from elsewhere) who will just brazenly lie, and, if challenged, shift their position and lie again, the system can't really cope. And treating people like Farage like any other politician legitimises and normalises his political views - look at how often he gets invited onto Question Time, say. I haven't seen Nick Griffin get invited back, and pretty much the only difference between them is that Farage looks less like a thug and has a posh voice.

On that subject, it's interesting to reflect how much we as a nation are still unconsciously in thrall to archaic notions of class, and more specifically notions of what a member of the ruling class looks and sounds like. Take the currently-beleaguered Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, for instance. Now I'm certainly not going to claim him as the potential saviour of humanity, but my experience is that most people, even those not inclined to vote Labour, think that he is clearly a man of principle, honesty and decency who talks a lot of good and compassionate sense on issues regarding social justice. However, ask those people whether they can see him as Prime Minister and they'll probably laugh and say: well, no, of course not. But why not? Because, I put it to you, that's not what members of the ruling class look like. Rather than looking like a scruffy and slightly humourless geography teacher, the ruling classes wear sharp suits, have braying penetrating posh voices and have arrived at the top of the political ladder without acquiring any messy baggage along the way by ever having expressed any sort of principled view or taken a stance that might now be inconvenient.

Furthermore the ruling classes have their debating skills honed at debating societies at Oxford and Cambridge where they become well-practised not only in arguing for causes they have no belief in (equally handy for a career in the legal profession if the political thing doesn't work out), but also in the art of the meaningless sound-bite, the swift and pithy put-down, and the sort of wordless braying and hooting that will stand them in good stead in the House of Commons. So, for instance, despite being a monumental failure as a Chancellor even by his own self-imposed measures, George Osborne still gets a free pass as a "serious" politician because he's a toff who can afford some nice suits, as well as, as some may have alleged, a boatload of cocaine. Similarly, Tony Blair, despite not being a Tory, looked the part, while Ed Miliband, while he had the suits, talked a bit funny and once made a bit of a hash of eating a sandwich, so clearly he wasn't quite the thing.

Now it's certainly true that, as well as not having much support among the Parliamentary Labour Party, Corbyn's approval figures with the general public aren't great either. But one thing we know after the referendum is that Joe and Josephine Public are easily swayed by bullshit tabloid stories, and if there's one person the tabloids love writing bullshit stories about, it's Jeremy Corbyn.

I think, as it happens, that it's likely he'll have to go, but I'm troubled by the whole business as a natural Labour voter for several reasons. Firstly I don't see an obvious successor, secondly I wonder how the Labour party membership have got so out of step with the PLP and the public (or vice versa, depending how you look at it), and thirdly the tabloid venom, which is just an aspect of the wider problem I've described above, can't be a healthy thing in the 21st century. But then again neither can a vote to leave the EU. So, in summary, fuck you, Britain.

Actually, hang on, lots of Brexit- and Corbexit-bemoaning there without any proposals for solutions. So, briefly, here's a couple of ideas:

• Stop legitimising racism by saying either that a large tranche of the Leave vote wasn't motivated by it or that lots of people have "legitimate concerns" over immigration. No they don't, they just hate brown people. Tiptoe round the issue and you are part of the problem.
• Electoral reform. If, as looks possible, the Labour party splits into left and centre-right factions and the LibDems experience an uptick in popularity as a result of their commendably bold anti-Brexit stance, then we're going to be in the sort of multi-party environment we haven't been in since forever. Which is all great, but for the first-past-the-post system which will ensure massive Conservative majorities forever under those circumstances, particularly if the Scots take themselves out of the picture by leaving the Union after a second referendum. Some sort of proportional representation system whereby every vote counts might go some way towards hauling general election voter turnout upwards towards the 70-odd percent that the referendum got. 
• Stop having referendums, as they're clearly a terrible idea, particularly if most voting happens under the first-past-the-post system, and therefore encourages the view that people can register a "protest" vote (perhaps as part of a general unfocused desire to register dissatisfaction with the political process) without it having any consequences, as some people seem to have done here.
• Have a look at the House of Commons. Yes, tradition, heritage, all that bullshit, but it's toe-curlingly embarrassing to watch the general school-playground quality of the exchanges in there. If some of the I-refer-the-right-honourable-gentleman-to-the-answer-I-gave-some-moments-ago bullshit has to be swept away in order for Joe Public to feel involved in the policy-making process, then so be it. Alternatively, require ministers to regularly appear before some sort of select committee for some much more forensic questioning, get some non-political subject matter experts in to grill the hell out of them, and make sure it's televised.