The Critical Commentator

Mandelson and Cummings Morgan-le-Fay, Frederick Sandys (1829-1904) Photo Credit: Birmingham Museums Trust [CCO} … As an editor, I had dealings with Mandelson. No one doubted his brilliance: a much more substantial figure than Cummings, he was foremost among the inventors of New Labour. The issue was always that of trust. One day in 1998 our news desk told me that he had borrowed a large sum of money from his cabinet colleague Geoffrey Robinson to buy a house, and failed to declare this. Robinson's business affairs were already controversial. Then I received a phone call from Peter himself, who had become secretary of state for trade and industry. "I hear you've got hold of a story about me getting money from Geoffrey Robinson," he said. "I can tell you categorically that it is untrue. I borrowed the money from my mother." I called in  the staffers running the investigation and told them to hold publication. They remonstrated furiously. Our politi...

Ken Clarke K en Clarke is a keen luddite. When the former chancellor was an MP he refused to use a mobile phone (his office told me that he owned one but "keeps it turned off in case people ring"). So it is unsurprising to hear that he has not embraced online shopping. Indeed, Clarke, 79, may think Ocado is a Latin first-person verb. A friend tells me, however, that his neighbours in Nottingham were keen to help and told him over the fence that they had secured an online delivery slot. Were there any essentials that they could get for him? A Cuban Cigarette,   Thomas Stuart Smith (1813-1869) Photo Credit: The Sterling Smith Art Gallery & Museum [CC BY-NC-ND] "Oh that's kind," replied Clarke. "I would love a bottle of brandy, a bottle of calvados and six boxes of cigars." (The Times, 2020) Good on you, Ken. Top man!   Tosh Brown and Blue, 1974 Alan Michael Green. Photo Credit: Senate House, University of London [CC BY-NC-SA]...

                                                               The New Normal A Giant Hand Roaming Through the Dark Streets of London Richard Tennant Cooper (1885-1957) Photo Credit: Wellcome Collection [ CC BY] ... I don't care about the shops and schools and restaurants being closed, or not having a summer holiday, or never seeing my friends, or the possibility that people I love will die. I can cope with all of that. As long as people stop saying "new normal" all the time. Same goes for your witless variations on "keep calm and carry on". None of them is funny! None of them is interesting. I wish you would all keep **** and **** off. And stop observing how all the people are complaining about people in the park are in the park. And as for all your tweets about how "alert" you are, they can get bent, as wel...

Foundry Scene , Artist Unknown, Photo Credit: Derby Museums Trust. [CC BY-NC-SA Work and Automation                              ...Here then is the horrible choice coronavirus will spring on us as the working world creaks slowly back to life: between lingering fear of infection on one hand, and the relentless march of automation on the other. Recessions don't so much change the world as speed it up, accelerating trends already rippling beneath the surface. ... The authors of an Oxford University study in 2017 thought that by 2035 it would be possible to automate 86% of restaurant jobs, three-quarters of retail jobs, and 59% of recreation jobs. (Gaby Hinsliff, The Guardian, 2020) Questions Patients waiting to see the Doctor,   Rosemary Carson, (b. 1962) Photo Credit: Wellcome Collection [CC BY]  ... We do not yet know why Britain appears to be having a worse pandemic than o...

                       The Ninth Annual Boring Conference , held in central London today, is surely the only event to need a bigger venue because of a lack of interest. …It will include talks on police phone boxes (not the Tardis, that would be too thrilling), the Albertus typeface, shipping containers and Battersea Park. The audience will be gripped. Ennui ,  Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY -NC-ND] James Ward, the founder, suggests, this is a response to the modern need to make everything instantly exciting. It sits alongside “slow television”, where broadcasts of birdsong or canal journeys in real time have proved popular. The more boring a talk appears on paper, the more riveting it often turns out to be. Especially if it is on riveting in the metalwork sense. This is not about mocking apparently dull subjects but giving a platform for people to talk about their niche intere...

                                   Granny Dumping Granny,   Richard Quick (1860-1939) Photo Credit: Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum [CC BY-NC-ND] …an American man took his frail father, who was suffering from dementia, on a flight from Los Angeles to the UK, where the confused old man was left at a bus station in Hereford with no way for anyone to trace his family – all to avoid having to pay for his care. The story of 78-year old Roger Curry is a sad one, but it is an all-to common phenomenon in the US: “granny dumping”. It’s estimated that about 100,000 elderly Americans are abandoned every year, by relatives who are unable or unwilling to help look after them or pay for their care. …This also happens to hundreds of people every year in Japan, where it is called ubasute . To cope with this, some charities have even set up a “senior citizen postbox” in recent years, a se...

                                               People Meeting your heroes is dangerous. The comedian Matt Forde tells Richard Herring’s podcast that, as a ten-year-old mascot at Nottingham Forest, he met his idol, Brian Clough. Forde was suffering from eczema, so when Clough saw him he said: “Bloody hell, son. You are an ugly bugger.” He gave Forde some cream from the physio but it later transpired that it also caused skin cancer. Years later Forde met Clough again and asked him to autograph a picture of them that day. “Ah!” said Clough with a fond smile. “You looked a lot better back then.” ( The Times, 2019) Politics The Dolls' Dinner Party ,  Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) Photo Credit: The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham [CC BY-NC-ND] …The news, splashed over the front of the Daily Mail, tha...

                                     Gender table turning If your taxi was coming at 5.15am, what time would you get up? As I faced a long, tiring day, my calculation was that sleep was imperative, vanity was secondary, breakfast unpalatable. The Toilet ,   Antoine Emile Plassan (1817-1903) Photo Credit:The Cooper Gallery [CC BY-NC] So I set my alarm for 5am. Enough time to shower, slap on a bit of make-up, pull on the smart outfit I’d carefully laid out, grab my pre-packed bag and let my hair dry “naturally” in the cab. Although not exactly “red carpet ready”, I wasn’t a fright. My companion for the day, a well-groomed young man, was amazed by my 15-minute turnaround. He’d set his alarm a full hour before departure. Since he sports designer stubble and doesn’t need to shave, I wondered what he was doing. “Shower, skin-care, blow-dry and style my hair, check my clothes ...

                                              People Steve Pemberton, an actor, was asked: What is the worst job you’ve done? Eccles Wakes : Ale-House Interior,   Joseph Parry (1756-1826) Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery  [CC BY-NC-ND] Collecting glasses in a Lancashire pub. Try to take a pint glass with a millimetre of foam still in it, and you get a lit cigarette on the back of your hand. (The Guardian, 2019) * Hannah Critchlow, a Cambridge neuroscientist, has written a book – The Science of Fate (See Books) – which examines how much of our life is predetermined at birth and to what extent we are in control of our destiny . … “For example, anxiety, obesity, depression and addictive behaviour have all been revealed to have a quite high hereditary basis. But of course, all these behaviours may be amplified and reinforced by the...