Cameron, Coulson, and Caesar's Wife

Carl Bernstein's Newsweek article yesterday, 'Murdoch's Watergate', does a good job of showing just how the current phone-hacking scandal could keep rippling, with effects far more potent that the closure of a newspaper that's been in commercial decline for years. His summary's pretty useful:

'The facts of the case are astonishing in their scope. Thousands of private phone messages hacked, presumably by people affiliated with the Murdoch-owned News of the World newspaper, with the violated parties ranging from Prince William and actor Hugh Grant to murder victims and families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The arrest of Andy Coulson, former press chief to Prime Minister David Cameron, for his role in the scandal during his tenure as the paper’s editor. The arrest (for the second time) of Clive Goodman, the paper’s former royals editor. The shocking July 7 announcement that the paper would cease publication three days later, putting hundreds of employees out of work. Murdoch’s bid to acquire full control of cable-news company BSkyB placed in jeopardy. Allegations of bribery, wiretapping, and other forms of lawbreaking—not to mention the charge that emails were deleted by the millions in order to thwart Scotland Yard’s investigation.

All of this surrounding a man and a media empire with no serious rivals for political influence in Britain—especially, but not exclusively, among the conservative Tories who currently run the country.'

I've been trying to get my head around the whole News International web of scandal, with particular reference to the question of David Cameron's folly in hiring Andy Coulson back in the day, and in particular in keeping him on as the evidence and the allegations against him mounted up. So, in an attempt at pulling together what seem to be the salient facts in connection with Coulson alone, rather than Rebekah Brooks, James Murdoch, and others, and in full awareness that much of this must be speculative, I'm going to get this straight for my own sake. There are timelines out there, but they're a bit skeletal for my liking. I want to put more flesh on those bones.

So...

In January 2007, following an investigation begun in response to a December 2005 request from Buckingham Palace that the police investigate interference with mobile phone messages,  Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire were jailed for their phone hacking activities on behalf of the News of the World. The same day it was announced that Andy Coulson had resigned as News of the World editor, though Coulson maintained that he had been unaware of Goodman and Mulcaire's illegal activities. His resignation meant that the Press Complaints Commission no longer needed to investigate the Goodman affair and thereby ensured that Rupert Murdoch would not have to face questions about what had happened.

In July 2007, on the advice of George Osborne, David Cameron appointed Coulson as the Conservative Party's director of communications. Cameron had until this point kept his distance from the News International mob, but Osborne had been building connections among them, and, apparently having headhunted Coulson, persuaded Cameron that wrongdoing on Coulson's watch shouldn't be held against him.

In December 2008, Stratford Employment Tribunal found that Coulson had presided over a culture of bullying at the News of the World, and upheld sports writer Matt Driscoll's claim for unfair dismissal and disability discrimination. In particular, the tribunal found that bullying behaviour on the part of Coulson personally led to stress-related depression among staff. Other editors who had worked under Coulson were found to have emulated him in bullying staff and had lied to the tribunal. The News of the World was later directed to pay Driscoll £800,000 as compensation for unfair dismissal.

In July 2009 a host of new revelations were published in the Guardian about phone-hacking during Coulson's News of the World tenure, notably pointing to out-of-court settlements -- signed off at the highest level of News International -- with prominent individuals, to evidence that phone-hacking was far more widespread than hitherto believed and indeed was, in effect, routine on the paper. Former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott publicly called on Cameron to dismiss Coulson, but a spokesman for Cameron said that he was 'very relaxed about the story'. Prescott wrote to Cameron about the matter, pointing out that the Conservative MP in charge of Parliament's culture, media, and sport select committee said that the Guardian's allegations raised very serious concerns and that the committee would probably call on Coulson to give evidence. He concluded his letter:

'You now appear to be the only person satisfied with Coulson's role while every other relevant authority is investigating the claims. In light of this, will you ensure that Coulson fully co-operates with the select committee and, if called, attends to give evidence. Finally, I must say that I feel your "very relaxed" attitude to these allegations seriously calls your judgment into question. If they are true, Coulson is not fit to enter government as your director of communications if you are elected or, indeed, remain in his current post. I look forward to your prompt reply as a matter of urgency.'

David Cameron did not reply, dismissing as a 'political stunt' a demand from former Home Secretary Charles Clarke that Coulson should answer questions about the Guardian's allegations. The Metropolitan Police refused to investigate the Guardian's claims, saying that in its opinion 'no new evidence had come to light'.

News International issued an official statement saying that it had conducted a thorough investigation into the phone-hacking allegations, and there was not and never had been evidence to support allegations that News of the World journalists had directly oe indirectly engaged in phone-hacking, or that there had been systemic corporate illegality by News International with the intention of suppressing evidence. Called before the Commons committee later that month, Coulson insisted that he had never condoned phone-hacking, and didn't recall any incidents where phone hacking took place.


In February 2010, the Parliamentary select committee publicly accused News of the World of engaging in phone-hacking on an 'industrial scale', criticising News of the World executives and editorial staff for their 'collective amnesia' and 'deliberate obfuscation' and criticising the police for the limited scope of their original investigation. It seems pretty clear that Coulson was one of those they had in mind, and yet Cameron kept to his Tammy Wynette strategy. The government welcomed the report, and said it would consider what action it should take, with Gordon Brown's Downing Street office stating, 'The scale of this is absolutely breathtaking and an extreme cause for concern.' The Sun responded to the committee's report by scorning its findings and characterising it as having wasted its time on unsubstantiated claims by 'the Labour-supporting Guardian'.

Given that a general election campaign was beginning, the Guardian contacted the leaders of all three main political parties later that month to inform them about a matter on which the Guardian was unable to report due to ongoing legal proceedings. In a phonecall to Steve Hilton, Cameron's director of strategy, the Guardian said that a private detective named Jonathan Rees was awaiting trial for a murder, and that he had in the past been involved in illegal activities on behalf of the News of the World; after serving seven years in prison for conspiring to frame a woman by placing cocaine in her car, he had been rehired by Coulson. The Guardian made it very clear that Coulson must have been aware of Rees' corrupt activities, and understands that Edward Llewellyn, now No. 10 Chief of Staff, was informed of this.


In April 2010, Crown Prosecution documents became public showing that although the police had named in court only 8 individuals whose phones they believed had been hacked, Scotland Yard were in fact in possession of 4332 names or partial names of individuals who might have had their phones hacked by News of the World journalists or investigators in their pay during Coulson's tenure; the police had deliberately ringfenced the evidence in order to suppress the names of prominent individuals. That same month it was revealed that Andy Hayman, the officer who had headed the original Scotland Yard investigation, had left the police and now worked for News International, writing a column for the News of the World. Still in the pay of News International, he continues to write for the Times.


In May 2010, following a general election, David Cameron's Conservative Party forged an alliance with Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats in order to form a coalition government. David Cameron replaced Gordon Brown as Prime Minister and appointed Andy Coulson as Director of Communications at Downing Street, on a salary of £140,000, and with access to the highest level of top secret material. Cameron did this despite the advice of Lord Ashdown:

'I warned No 10 within days of the election that they would suffer terrible damage if they did not get rid of Coulson, when these things came out, as it was inevitable they would.'

Nick Clegg had also expressed concerns to Cameron, who rebuffed them, insisting Coulson was entitled to a second chance.

In September 2010, the New York Times reported that colleagues of Coulson said that, contrary to his claims of ignorance, he had indeed been present during discussions about phone-hacking, with one saying that he had directly ordered reporters to engage in phone-hacking.


In October 2010, a former colleague of Coulson's revealed on Channel 4's Dispatches that Coulson had made a point of listening to illegally-obtained voice messages. An assiduous editor who wouldn't run stories unless he was sure they were correct, he apparently made sure to listen to messages or at least read their transcripts himself. The same programme also featured a Plaid Cymru MP saying that the Parliamentary committee that investigated the hacking affair had been threatened by News International:

'I was told by a senior Conservative member of the committee, who I knew was in direct contact with executives at News International that if we went for her [the News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks] they would go for us – effectively that they would delve into our personal lives in order to punish them.'

The Conservative MP in question denies this, but then, he would, wouldn't he?

In December 2010, the Crown Prosecution Service said that the evidence presented against Coulson fell short of what would have been necessary to proceed with a case against him. Witnesses had withdrawn allegations and been unwilling to support previous claims when interviewed by Scotland Yard  under criminal caution, such that they themselves could have faced charges if they admitted their own knowledge of or involvement in phone-hacking. That same month, Coulson gave evidence in a perjury trial in Glasgow, in which he said, under oath, that he had never instructed anyone to do anything untoward.

The constant drip of allegations continued, and despite Cameron and Osborne's determination to protect him, Coulson tendered his resignation in January 2011, saying:

'Unfortunately, continued coverage of events connected to my old job at the News of the World has made it difficult for me to give the 110% needed in this role. I stand by what I've said about those events but when the spokesman needs a spokesman it's time to move on.'

In the aftermath of the resignation, Osborne, who had described Coulson as 'an incredibly talented, dedicated and patriotic servant of this country' referred to him as a 'good friend', and Cameron lamented the fact that -- as he saw it -- Coulson was 'being punished twice for the same offence,' maintaining that Coulson 'had resigned as News of the World editor as soon as he found what was happening'.

In April 2011, Neville Thurlbeck, the News of the World's chief reporter, and Ian Edmondson, its former news editor, were arrested on suspicion of phone-hacking; they have been bailed, and are to face charges in September. News International issued an apology to a handful of phone-hacking victims, accepting responsibility for the News of the World's crimes under Coulson's editorship and admitting that previous internal investigations had been inadequate. A third journalist, James Weatherup, was arrested just under a week later. Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, challenged the evidence given to Parliament by John Yates, the acting Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who had refused to investigate the Guardian's July 2009 claims. Starmer said that the evidence shows that the police had of their own accord chosen to limit the scope of the original inquiry, and had not done so under direction from prosecutors.

In June 2011 the trial of Levi Bellfeld for the 2002 murder of Milly Dowler came to an end with Bellfeld being found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. A few days later, in July 2011, the Guardian reported that police working on the News of the World phone-hacking case had found evidence of the targeting of the Dowlers by the News of the World in the aftermath of their daughter's abduction. That's why the story exploded when it did -- it has nothing to do with Jeremy Hunt's BSkyB decision, and everything to do with the Dowler investigation having come to an end.

The rest of the story is pretty clear, at least in terms of Coulson, who was -- along with another journalist -- arrested the other day, apparently on suspicion of bribing police officers, and has been bailed till October. David Cameron, as ever, has insisted that even though it didn't work out, he feels he had been right to offer Coulson 'a second chance'. And, it would appear, to have kept him on as long as he did, and to call him a friend even now, despite...

• An employment tribunal in 2008 having found Coulson guilty of bullying and awarding £800,000 compensation to his victim. 
• John Prescott in July 2009 having advised David Cameron to dismiss Coulson from his position in the Conservative Party, saying he was a wholly unsuitable person for such an important role. 
• A Commons committee in February 2010 having criticised News International executives and editors -- including Andy Coulson -- for deliberately obstructing their investigation, and having described as completely unbelievable the claim that the likes of him had been unaware of the illegality in which his paper was indulging. 
• The Guardian later in February 2010 having given Cameron evidence of how Coulson as News of the World editor had employed a convicted criminal known to have had a history of dealings with corrupt police. 
• It becoming quite apparent in April 2010 that the original police investigation into Coulson's News of the World had been determinedly and woefully inadequate, hardly scratching the surface of what had gone on there. 
• Paddy Ashdown and Nick Clegg having both personally advised Cameron in May 2010 not to allow a man with such a whiff of brimstone into the highest levels of British government. 
• Former colleagues of Coulson claiming in September and October 2010 that he had been fully aware of News of the World phone-hacking, and had even directed people to engage in the practice.
• An ever-swelling stream of allegations about Coulson and the paper he ran over the following months, most easily understood by looking at Nick Davies' Twitter feed... 

And still David Cameron kept him on at the highest practical level of British government. After all, he felt Andy Coulson was entitled to a second chance. Because apparently in this Downing Street, as too often before, Caesar's wife need not be above suspicion.

Bone, revisited, or why I need to read Moby Dick

I realise it's only been a few days since I talked about Jeff Smith's Bone, but it's something I've thought about with unusual frequency in recent weeks. Partly this has been because I've been considering what comics it's be worth introducing to my housemate or other potential comics readers, having already decided that The Tale of One Bad Rat would be perfect for that; partly it's that I gave a friend the first two volumes of Bone just after Christmas in what may have been a futile attempt at cheering her up; and partly because I keep thinking it's about time I read Moby Dick.

Sometimes it bothers me that I have too many books, and I often wonder whether I'm better off reading the books I've yet to read, or rereading ones I know I'd get more from now than I once did.  Take The Lord of the Rings, for instance. I've read it twice, once as a child and once as a teenager, and I've no doubt that if I read it now it'd be a different book to the one I remember. I'd not read any epic poetry back then, for instance, I'd never read a line of the Icelandic sagas and Beowulf, and I knew next to nothing of Tolkien's life or the events and books that formed him. I certainly had no idea of how one could make a credible case for The Lord of the Rings being one of the sacramental pinnacles of the twentieth-century Catholic imagination. So I want to read it again. I've changed, and I think it'll have changed too, to being a deeper, darker, richer book than the one I read so long ago.

Unfortunately, I keep wondering whether my reading time might better be spent on other books, sitting unread and awaiting my attention, most especially Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, and Moby Dick. I've had them sitting on shelves for far too long -- the latter in a lovely Everyman edition -- all neglected as I fear their enormity, the commitment to reading that each one will take, and the fact that they're too big to be lugged about in pockets.

Moby Dick in particular has drawn me for a long time, though, certainly since I first read Bone, with Fone Bone boring everyone unconscious whenever he read from it. It's Jeff Smith's favourite book, so he at any rate, clearly doesn't find it that dull. A huge fan of its structure, it's pretty obvious that he shares Fone Bone's opinion of it, rather than that of his cousin Smiley...

... or, for that matter, the stupid, stupid Rat Creatures, who Smiley attempts to ward off by subjecting them to Melville's words...

To be fair to Herman Melville, though, it may well be that the problem may not lie in his words but in Fone's reading voice. Certainly, that's what most haunts the Rat Creatures when they groggily wake from their nautical nightmare.

Why wait till now to doubt David Cameron's Judgement?

I find it baffling that, leaving aside his apparently being so hand-in-glove with Rebekah Brooks that they go riding together, he has dinner at her house over Christmas, and he may well be responsible for her still having her job, people are pointing to his links with Andy Coulson as reason to doubt David Cameron's judgement.

I have difficulty understanding why people ever had faith in it in the first place. This is, after all, a man who not three years ago chained a supposedly treasured bike to a bollard while he went to the shops and then was surprised that people stole it.

Remember the story? It was late July in 2008, when David Cameron stopped for five minutes at the Tesco on Portobello Road. 'I was cycling home, he said, 'and stopped to pick up some things for supper. I chained the bike through the wheel then put it around one of those bollard things.'

When he came out, rather predictably, it was gone. One eyewitness said, 'He chained his bike to one of the bollards. There had been a couple of kids hanging around. They noticed he had chained it to a short bollard and they just picked it up and ran off.'

And how did he react? With complete incomprehension, it would seem: 'He was going up and down Portobello Road. He said, "I am sure I chained my bike here and it is not here. I left it for five minutes - how can it be gone?" To start with he was not sure whether he had just left it somewhere else then after a few minutes he realised it was stolen. He was embarrassed and a bit annoyed. He was going round talking to people asking them if they had seen it -- most people didn't recognise him.'




I reckoned last year that the British people would have to be morons to vote for Cameron. How could they trust a man who couldn't look after his own bike to look after their country? There are, after all, three things about this whole episode that pretty much showed him to be a clueless buffoon.

1. Firstly, Cameron's surely a man who can afford a decent D-lock, rather than relying on a chain, but let's assume* he's got a high quality chain. Given that, then, surely he knows that you don't just lock your wheel to things; you lock the frame and a wheel if you can manage that too, as the wheel can always be removed, and often pretty quickly, something I learned the expensive way when I was nineteen.
2. Second, if the prospective Prime Minister was using a flexible chain rather than a rigid D-lock, he should have realised it wouldn't be of any value unless it was chained around something it couldn't possibly have been slipped off; a rail, say, or one of fourteen U-shaped bicycle racks. Anything but a two-foot high bollard, basically. As it stood, his bike wasn't locked. It was merely decorated.
3. Third, thousands of  bikes are stolen in London every year. In 2007, it was reckoned that about 440,000 bikes were stolen in the UK -- that's one bike every 71 seconds, and the police reckon that a huge amount of bike theft goes unreported, so there could be 60,000 or so bikes stolen in London every year. The then leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition really shouldn't have been surprised to learn that his bike was not immune to this phenomenon. Bike theft, sadly, happens all too often, and if the Conservative leader didn't realise this it merely shows how unaware he is of the realities of modern British life. He certainly shouldn't have stood there in disbelief and wandered about bewildered, repeatedly saying 'But I locked it,' especially when he'd done no such thing, having instead opted merely to drape a chain around a neighbouring bollard.

There are old sayings about how if you look after the pennies the pounds will look after themselves, and how a man who can be trusted in little things can also be trusted with big ones. Bikes matter, as Cameron seems to believe, claiming his is a prized possession, yet the man who's now Prime Minister showed in the summer of 2008 that lacks the basic wit needed to look after something about which he says he cares deeply; why would anyone be surprised if it turns out that he's been naively snuggling up to criminals and liars? The man's clearly devoid of common sense.

And I'd have thought common sense was something the British people would have seen as a basic requirement in their Prime Minister, not a mere optional extra. I guess the 23.5 per cent of the British electorate who voted Conservative last year would beg to disagree, though.

Yes. Bollards.

* A risky venture, in light of the stupidity demonstrated in the whole affair.

Eolaí and his Painting Tour: Week One

Well, the Brother's cycling trip seems to be going well so far, barring a near-disastrous tube explosion early on. 

Over the first couple of days of the trip, he cycled through the hills of South Dublin, where he painted Glenasmole before cycling into Kildare where he visited the cemetery where Arthur Griffith is buried, and then went on to Sallins. From Sallins he made his way through the Wicklow Gap and on to Wicklow town, where he marvelled at the sunrise after a long night with his host, had a fine view of a coastguard rescue, and then sat painting on a windy hillside in Wicklow before crossing the Dereen into Carlow, where he did a colourful take on Duckett's Grove for his hosts. He's somewhere in Kilkenny now, a week into his travels, and is currently painting on a sunny hill, with cows lazing to the right of him, birds arguing behind him, and the whole world in front of him.

One of his hosts has posted the picture he did as a guest-gift. Nice, eh? 

You should follow his exploits, on his blog and more particularly on Twitter. And, y'know, if you reckon he might be passing within twenty miles or so, and you have a bed to offer and fancy a painting, you should let him know. Just send him a message. It's not called social networking for nothing...

There's a Reason Why the New Testament Calls 'Party Spirit' a Sin

No, really, it does. Factionalism leads to tribalism, and tribalism kills thought.

There are friends of mine who make me sigh, people who are incapable of changing their minds when faced with inconvenient facts, things that challenge or flatly refute their dogmas. They have a habit of reading stuff merely to validate what they already believe, and are incapable of realising that when a source they trust is shown to be either dishonest or ignorant on one issue, that it may well be far from trustworthy on others.

One yesterday said he was a bit cynical about the Guardian's revelations about the News of the World coming three days before the BSkyB decision goes through, as they'd surely known about it long ago.

A Manichean Siege Mentality

This, of course, is typically tribal nonsense, as spouted on the Telegraph blogs yesterday with reference to the BBC, paranoid rot which even the normally odious Cranmer is sensible enough to recognise as reprehensible gibberish. It's of a par too with the victim mentality displayed by Boris Johnson last year and by Conservative Home's Tim Montgomerie in the Guardian the year before, when he said:

'Given that Coulson has behaved impeccably since becoming a key adviser to the Tory leader, we can only assume that the attack on him is politically motivated... 

If this affair was simply a matter of Labour versus the Conservatives it would have quickly died a death, but the antagonism towards Coulson is also rooted in the hostility of the Guardian and the BBC to Rupert Murdoch's media empire. Polly Toynbee articulated that hostility on Saturday. She accused the owner of the Sun, the Times and Sky of "Europhobia", and of corrupting politics. 

I do not wish to defend every action of the News International empire, but Rupert Murdoch has been an overwhelming force for good in this country's life and politics. Sky Sports has revolutionised English football. We now have the most exciting football league in the world thanks to the money that football was denied when the BBC and ITV possessed their duopoly of stale, pedestrian coverage. Murdoch's Wapping adventure broke the stranglehold of the Fleet Street union barons – a bold action from which all newspapers have since benefited. His newspapers and Sky News have formed the most powerful rival to the dominance of the BBC. Without the Sun and the Times, the Eurosceptic message would have struggled to prosper. The BBC has never reflected the British people's concern about the European project and Murdoch has been a champion for them.'

Well, of course. We can only assume that attacks on Murdoch's Minions News are politically motivated. It's inconceivable that there might more to it than that. It's inconceivable that demanding journalistic integrity, standing up for the British people, and opposing the Murdoch Empire might just be the same thing. Isn't it? And no doubt Murdoch is shocked to learn what's been going on...

Of course, the claim that all the newspapers have gained from 'Murdoch's Wapping adventure' is a dubious one: their sales figures certainly haven't. And the idea that the Premiership is a particularly exciting league is, frankly, codswallop, given that it's less competitive now than it ever was in the pre-Sky era. The poppycock about the European project is particularly reprehensible; opposition to the EU has been moulded for decades in Britain by the Murdoch press. It hasn't so much been that Murdoch championed opposition to the European project, as that he basically formed it. Sensible Conservatives can see that.

Margaret Thatcher, Champion of European Integration!

Look at Thatcher, for instance, who before she became Murdoch's creature was herself a champion of the European project. She'd been part of the Conservative government that had negotiated entry to the EEC in the first place, and that signed Britain up to a process of ever-closer union, that being the avowed aim of the European project as stated in the very first sentence of the Treaty of Rome. She had thus been fully aware that a single currency was on the cards at the time of UK accession, and that there was no point the UK joining the Common Market if didn't plan on adopting the planned Common Currency.

When running for the Conservative party leadership in early 1975, just months before the British referendum on Europe, Thatcher insisted that leading Britain into Europe had been Heath's greatest achievement, and said:

'This torch must be picked up and carried by whoever is chosen by the party to succeed him. The commitment to European partnership is one which I full share.'

On 8 April of that year, she openly championed Britain's continued participation in the European project, basing her case on Britain's need for security, guaranteed food supplies, and access to the European market in general, as well as the prospect of a more important role in the world, saying:

'I think security is a matter not only of defence, but of working together in peacetime on economic issues which concern us and of working together on trade, work and other social matters which affect all our peoples [...] The Community opens windows of the world for us which since the war have been closing. [...] When we went in we knew exactly what we were going into.'

She was right, too. It's clear that way back in the 1970s, before Murdoch and his ilk got their talons into her, Thatcher had foreseen and was comfortable with all those things she has denounced since the late 1980s,* with her rabid minions whining and yelping in chorus behind her ever since.

Did Blair Really Sell Out Britain to Europe?

And unfortunately, those curs just keep barking idiotically, foaming at their feral mouths. Yesterday I saw a piece in the Spectator, entitled 'Barroso's EU Confidence Trick', which argues that

'... the battle for Britain's EU spending was lost under Blair. In 2001-02, Britain was a net beneficiary of EU to the tune of £900 million. The next year, the cost of EU membership soared to £3.4 billion. By 2004-05 it was £5.7 billion and in 2009-10 it was £6.6 billion. It's rising even more. Consider that the total defence cuts will save £2.4 billion: this is masses of cash. And for what? [...] Britain is paying billions for membership of a club that most of us think isn't helping at all.'

In the first place, Britain gains massively from the EU through trade within the common market and through having a combined negotiating position globally, so it's ludicrous to limit Britain's gains to what it receives from Brussels directly. That aside, though, 2002 was an anomalous year for Britain, where various factors including the rebate led to Britain receiving more from Brussels than it contributed; this was compensated for the following year. Britain has basically been a contributory state -- which makes sense, given that it sees itself as a successful and wealthy country -- for a very long time, long before Blair. All you have to do is look here to see how long this has been the case.*

Secondly, that contributions to the EU should have risen over the last decade is hardly surprising, given that a dozen countries have joined the Union since 2004, most of these having needed financial help in becoming functioning and profitable capitalist economies, or, if you like, in becoming useful partners for Britain. The UK, in fact, has long been the great champion of EU expansion, and had wanted the accession of all those countries, just as now it's the UK that shouts the loudest in favour of Turkish accession to the Union. This has to be paid for, of course, so it's somewhat ironic that those who should cry most for the Union to be broadened should then cry loudest when the bill arrives.

But of course, the opponents of the EU don't care about such facts, evidently taking the line that reality is something to be sampled rather than understood. They probably don't realise that as a proportion of national GDP, Britain contributed rather less to the EU under Blair and Brown than it did under Thatcher and Major.

* And if you don't believe me and can't be bothered trawling through Hansard, go and have a look at John Campbell's Margaret Thatcher, Volume I: The Grocer's Daughter. Because they hide this information in books.
** Yes, I know, this doesn't seem to incorporate the Rebate. Still, the general trend is discernible either way.

Jeff Smith's Bone, or more lessons in reading comics

I was talking the other day about how tricky it can be to teach the comics-illiterate how to read comics, and how Bryan Talbot deliberately created The Tale of One Bad Rat with such people in mind. The storytelling is straightforward, the art naturalistic, the dialogue kept to a minimum, and the panels devoid of the comics-specific conventions that have grown up as a form of narrative shorthand over the decades. That's not to say it's crudely simple; on the contrary, it's both subtle and sophisticated. It is, frankly, about as good an introduction to what comics can be as one could hope to find.

And it says important stuff, too.

Among the handful of other comics I like to show friends who are sceptical about what comics can do is Jeff Smith's Bone, which could hardly be more different from One Bad Rat. Here's a page from it, as a taster:

And if you think that's simple, you should take a look at the analysis of Smith's storytelling over here. You'll also see what happens next.

Clear and perfectly-paced, owing a lot to animation but not shackled by it, inspired in its look by the comics of Carl Barks and -- especially -- Walt Kelly, Bone is a hilarious and thrilling hybrid of Tolkien and Disney at its best. It tells the story of the three Bone cousins -- greedy Phoney, goofy Smiley, and everyman Fone, all of whom Smith had first drawn when he was a child -- who, having been run out of their own town after one of Phoney's corrupt scams goes wrong, get lost and find themselves in a lush and idyllic fantasy valley, complete with talking animals, burly barmen, grouchy old ladies, and a pretty redhead. It swiftly becomes clear that things in the valley aren't as rosy as they might appear, and that it has a dark past waiting to rear its head, and thus begins a story that as Time magazine said, is 'as sweeping as The Lord of the Rings cycle, but much funnier.'

Comparisons with The Lord of the Rings really aren't all that silly, given that Bone is a classic fantasy and is, indisputably, a very big book. As Neil Gaiman said of the collected edition back in the day, 'It's the height of a trade paperback, and over 1300 pages long. It looks rather intimidating in that format -- it looks like the epic fantasy novel that it is. A perfect gift, too.' Originally published in black and white, it's recently been coloured, which makes for a novel reading experience. I'm not sure that I think the colour's an improvement,* but it certainly does no harm, and adds an extra level to the storytelling, one that'll surely be picked up in the oft-promised film.

_____________________________________________________

* Is it even possible to improve on this? This is, surely, up there with the greatest panels ever.

Locked in a Shared Hallucination

It's interesting to see journalists admitting that there's nothing new about the kind of behaviour we've recently seen so bizarrely displayed in the viral Ed Miliband loop. Krishnan Guru-Murthy, on Channel 4's news blog, explains how common it is, and why it's so common: politicians expect their interviews to be drawn from for sample soundbites, so repeat their key message again and again so that TV stations have no option but to use it, and the Fourth Estate happily plays along.

Charlie Brooker had a great piece about this in yesterday's Observer, in which he says that the interview 'sounds like an interview with a satnav stuck on a roundabout. Or a novelty talking keyring with its most boring button held down. Or a character in a computer game with only one dialogue option. Or an Ed Miliband-shaped phone with an Ed Miliband-themed ringtone. Or George Osborne.'

Gideon, as Charlie points out, did exactly the same thing when interviewed last October, with the interview going as follows:

George: 'Well, I think we've got a double dose of good news today for Britain. We've got strong growth figures -- actually the strongest growth in this part of the year for a decade -- and at the same time we've just heard that the country's credit rating has been secured, and I think this underpins confidence in the economy, and I think it is a vote of confidence in the government's economic policies, and I think it gives us the confidence now to look to the future with some optimism.'

Interviewer: 'But even with these growth figures you have to admit that your cuts programme hasn't come in yet, VAT will rise next year, job losses haven't happened yet -- things could get worse.'

George: 'Well, I think what you see today is a double dose of good news today for the British economy. First of all, strong growth figures -- actually the strongest growth for this part of the year that we've seen in a decade -- and also we've just heard that the country's credit rating, which had been put at risk by the previous government, has been secured. Now both those things will underpin confidence in the economy, and I think they are also a vote of confidence in the new government's economic policies.'

Interviewer: 'Do you still worry about a double-dip recession?'

George: 'Well, I think what you see today, in an uncertain global economic environment, is Britain growing -- growing strongly -- the strongest growth we've seen in this part of the year for a decade -- and also our country's credit rating being secured. That's a big vote of confidence in the UK, and a vote of confidence in the coalition government's economic policies.'

Interviewer: 'The experts say that your cuts are unfair, and now in the first opinion poll they're showing also people think they're unfair. Do you have a problem with that?'

George: 'I think people know that this country had some serious economic problems and that the debt problem had to be dealt with. They see a new government has come in and dealt decisively with it, and now today we've got this double dose of good news. First of all strong growth figures, but also the country's credit rating reaffirmed and secured when it had been put at risk by the previous Labour government, and I think that will underpin confidence in the recovery going forward.'

It's well worth watching, actually, though Charlie's right to say that the clip should be accompanied by a message saying 'WARNING: WATCHING THIS MIGHT MAKE YOU FEEL A BIT MAD'. It does have that effect; indeed, he gets it spot on when saying that watching Osborne, or Miliband, or Alistair Darling in a clip he saw last year is a terrifying experience.

'First you think you're hearing things. Then you wonder whether time itself has developed hiccups. Finally you decide none of these people can possibly be human. Because they look absolutely, unequivocally insane.'

And if anything, it seems, it's worse if you're the person asking the questions.

The Myth of Mary

Speaking of myths, as I was yesterday, one of the most pervasive myths about the Catholic Church is that Catholics worship Mary. I keep hearing versions of this, and often from people who should know better. They say that Catholics worship Mary, that Catholics regard her as more important than Jesus, that Catholics think of her as a goddess, that Catholics believe they're only saved by praying to Mary, and that Mary is the real centre of what faith many Catholics have, with Jesus just being a sideshow.

None of this is true, I'm glad to say, and not merely because Marian devotion appears to have faded to some degree in the Church over recent decades, something that Karl Rahner thought was due to the Christian tendency to make an ideology -- an abstraction -- out of Christianity. And abstractions, he said, have no need for a mother.

Catholics don't worship Mary, and have never done so. To have done so would be in flagrant opposition to the first commandment. Indeed, worship of Mary has been condemned as heretical since at least the fourth century, when Epiphanius of Salamis spoke out against the Collrydian tendency to think of her as a goddess and to offer sacrifices to her. Mary, he insisted, was holy and venerable, but she should not be worshipped; indeed, worship should be reserved to him who was born from Mary's flesh. The Church still holds to this line, as it has always done, with Lumen Gentium, the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, insisting that that 'no creature could ever be counted as equal with the incarnate Word and Redeemer'.

As a general rule of thumb, if you're a Protestant and want to find out what the Catholic Church teaches, you shouldn't go to your favourite Protestant writer, no matter how smart and erudite he or she may be. Go and have a look at the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and use the index, looking up, say, 'Adoration, as principal act of the virtue of religion', 'Mary, veneration of, not adoration,' 'Mary, veneration of, prayer to', and, straightforwardly, 'Worship, and adoration of God.' As part of the Catechism's exposition of the first commandment, it says:

'Adoration is the first act of the virtue of religion. To adore God is to acknowledge him as God, as the Creator and Savior, the Lord and Master of everything that exists, as infinite and merciful Love. "You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve," says Jesus, citing Deuteronomy. To adore God is to acknowledge, in respect and absolute submission, the "nothingness of the creature" who would not exist but for God. To adore God is to praise and exalt him and to humble oneself, as Mary did in the Magnificat, confessing with gratitude that he has done great things and holy is his name. The worship of the one God sets man free from turning in on himself, from the slavery of sin and the idolatry of the world.'

The key thing to understand is that the Church is and has always been adamant that worship is for God alone and that devotion to Mary 'differs essentially from the adoration which is given to the incarnate Word and equally to the Father and the Holy Spirit, and greatly fosters this adoration.'

Catholics don't worship Mary. They honour her. They venerate her. They love her. They don't worship her.

That Catholics should honour Mary shouldn't scandalise anyone. As Jesus' mother, she would have been honoured by him and if Jesus honoured her, is it so surprising that we should do likewise? I'm always baffled by those Christians who try to push her aside, like an embarrassing relative, a madwoman in the attic. The Bible's pretty clear, after all, that she's blessed amongst women, and one whom all generations would call blessed.

Paying honour to Mary in no way detracts from the worship due to God alone, any more than visiting someone's house and talking to their mother insults the person who you've come to see. If anything, it pays a greater honour to the person your visiting. There are three main prayers associated with Mary, none of which should set Protestant hearts a-flutter.

• The Magnificat, said every evening as part of the Divine Office, has as its theme the greatness of God. It addresses Mary's humility and the fact that it is by God -- and by God alone -- that she is saved, saying that all generations shall call her blessed. It's a straightforward quotation from Scripture, and hardly something to panic any self-proclaimed 'Bible Christians'.
• The Hail Mary, said in various contexts, consists of two quotations from the Bible, both of which are deeply Christological, focused as they are on the wonder of the Incarnation, and a petition. The petition simply asks Mary for her prayers, which people should be okay with: we're called upon to pray for each other, and to ask each other for our prayers, as part of the community of love that is the Communion of Saints.
• The Rosary, finally, is a number of things, but above all it is a meditation on the life and promises of Christ, as seen through the eyes of she who was the first Christian, the bearer of the Word. Said in its entirety, the prayer entails contemplation of twenty different Christian mysteries, and is expressed through the recitation of the central Christian beliefs as proclaimed in the Apostle's Creed, the manifold praying of the Lord's Prayer and the trinitarian doxology known as the 'Glory Be', and most especially the Incarnation-centred 'Hail Mary', all introduced and concluded by the sign of the cross, that physical reminder of the death Christ suffered for us.

The Marian prayers don't celebrate Mary, save as a way of glorifying God by celebrating someone who he has especially honoured. Their purpose, ultimately, is to honour God, and especially to lead us deeper in our love for him through meditation on the mysteries of his Incarnation, including his teaching, suffering, death, and resurrection. Catholics may pray to Mary, but they don't worship her, that being for God alone.

What's more, Marian devotions aren't things that Catholics must do if they want to be saved -- an annoyed Protestant friend told me today how she'd been irked by one of her friends having claimed this, as she knew this wasn't true. They're gifts to help us get closer to God, and it's God and God alone that Catholics worship. Mass, after all, centred on that sacrament the Church calls the source and summit of Christian life, isn't offered to Mary.  

Catholics love and honour the mother of God. They don't worship her, and anyone who claims that they do shouldn't be trusted as a source for anything at all about Catholicism. It's one thing to disagree with the Catholic understanding of Mary; it's another to lie and to claim that understanding is something that it's not.
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And again, if you don't believe me there are a few places you can look to see whether I'm fairly reflecting Catholic teaching. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, of course, should be the standard go-to to find out what the Church teaches, and you shouldn't neglect the footnotes. I'd also recommend The Rosary of Our Lady by Romano Guardini, Hail, Holy Queen by Scott Hahn, and perhaps most especially Mary, Mother of the Son by Mark Shea.

Holy Hookers and Historical Myths...

I first  heard about Sacred Prostutution a few months before I started university, in an episode of Neil Gaiman and Jill Thompson's 'Brief Lives' storyline in Sandman. The episode, touching on themes that Gaiman would later explore far more fully in American Gods, was at least in part about happens to gods when people stop believing in them. In this case, the Babylonian goddess Astarte, or Ishtar, has been reduced to working in an American strip club, soaking up the 'worship' offered her by her drooling clients.

Temple Prostitution is first attested in the pages of Herodotus, and at the time I first heard of it, I didn't know quite how delightfully unreliable Herodotus is. I happen to like him a lot, and work with him constantly, but one needs to sample him with the saltshaker at the ready. Herodotus talks about sacred prostitution as part of a discursus on Babylon in the first book of his Histories, where he says:

'There is one custom among these people which is wholly shameful: every woman who is a native of the country must once her life go and sit in the temple of Aphrodite and there give himself to a strange man.* Many of the rich women, who are too proud to mix the rest, drive to the temple in covered carriages with a whole host of servants following behind, and there wait; most, however, sit in the precinct of the temple with a band of plaited string round their heads -- and a great crowd they are, what with some sitting there, others arriving, others going away -- and through them all gangways are marked off running in every direction for the men to pass along and make their choice. Once a woman has taken her seat she is not allowed to go home until a man has thrown a silver coin into her lap and taken her outside to lie with her. As he throws the coin, the man has to say, 'In the name of the goddess Mylitta' -- that being the Assyrian name for Aphrodite. The value of the coin is of no consequence; once thrown it becomes sacred, and the law forbids that it should ever be refused. The woman has no privilege of choice -- she must go with the first man who throws her the money. When she has lain with him, her duty to the goddess is discharged and she may go home, after which it will be impossible to seduce her by any offer, however large. Tall, handsome women soon manage to get home again, but the ugly ones stay a long time before they can fulfil the condition which the law demands, some of them, indeed, as much as three or four years.'

I was thinking about this recently when I yet again came across someone on the Internet warbling about temple prostitution in ancient Corinth. This is, I'm afraid, a common trope in lazy Christian preaching, and someday I'll get round to tracking down why it's so popular. The guts of the issue is this: Saint Paul, in chapters five to seven of his First Letter to the Corinthians, has a lot to say about sexual immorality in Corinth, and so all too often when people talk about this they wheel out cliches about how Corinth was particularly notorious in the ancient world as a centre of sexual vice, and how the huge temple of Aphrodite had thousands of sacred prostitutes and was the corrupt heart of Corinth's decadence. Sometimes you'll even hear rubbish about how Paul's comments at I Corinthians 11 about women covering their hair were driven by his desire that long-haired Christian women not be confused with long-haired prostitutes from the Temple. 

This, frankly, is poppycock, and one of those things that set my teeth on edge. Sure, there's a lot of argument about what means what in ancient history, but you don't need to dig into the real research to find out how ridiculous it is that anyone should be holding that first-century Corinth was a bastion of cult prostitution. The whole idea is a modern myth, based on a spectacularly stupid and lazy reading of the following passage from Strabo's Geography, in which Strabo talks of how fabulously wealthy and powerful Corinth used to be, and after talking of Corinth's famously rich eighth- and seventh-century rulers, says:

'Again, Demaratus, one of the men who had been in power at Corinth, fleeing from the seditions there, carried with him so much wealth from his home to Tyrrhenia that not only he himself became the ruler of the city that admitted him, but his son was made king of the Romans. And the temple of Aphrodite was so rich that it owned more than a thousand temple slaves, courtesans, whom both men and women had dedicated to the goddess. And therefore it was also on account of these women that the city was crowded with people and grew rich; for instance, the ship captains freely squandered their money, and hence the proverb, "Not for every man is the voyage to Corinth."'

The son in question, for what it's worth, was Tarquinius Priscus, reputedly Rome's king between 616 and 579 BC, so what Strabo should be understood as saying here is that Corinth had been incredibly wealthy six hundred years before he wrote, and that back then the temple of Aphrodite was so rich it had a thousand temple prostitutes. That things were rather different in Strabo's own day are immediately apparent to anyone who bothers to read the next paragraph, in which Strabo comments at some length on how the former grandeur of the city is apparent when one looks at its ruined defensive walls and the remains of a building so badly ruined that he cannot tell whether it was a great palace or temple. He specifically says that the city of his own day is a new city, rebuilt by the Romans.

This, of course, would hardly be surprising to anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of ancient history or archaeology. Corinth had been destroyed by the Romans under Lucius Mummius in 146 BC, and was only reestablished as a city in 44 BC when Julius Caesar, shortly before his assassination, ordered it be rebuilt as a Roman colony. Over the following century, during which it became the capital of the new Roman province of Achaea, Corinth grew in size and once again became a thriving port city, albeit a Roman one, very different from the Greek one of centuries earlier. Like any other port, prostitution was common there, but we've no evidence whatsoever that suggests it was vastly more common in Corinth than in Massilia, Ostia, Alexandria, Brundisium, Piraeus, or any other first-century Mediterranean port.

Given how easy it is to find this out, I've got to a point where I have no patience with people who trot out this kind of rubbish. It's one thing for people in the pews to believe it; it's another for preachers in the pulpits to propound it. All teachers, of whatever sort, have an obligation to honesty and lazily repeating this kind of claptrap shows at best a cavalier attitude to historical reality. Temple Prostitution didn't exist in the Corinth of Saint Paul. It's as simple as that.

To be honest, whatever about the arguments that sacred prostitution never existed in the Mediterranean world, I'm very sceptical that Corinth at any rate was ever a centre for such a practice. A trip to the site should start one wondering, to begin with, not least because the ruins of the temple of Aphrodite on the Acrocorinth don't look like they could have been associated with a hundred temple prostitutes, let alone a thousand. Herodotus, talking about how disgraceful Babylonian temple prostitution is, and saying that a similar practice prevails in Cyprus, doesn't make any mention of Corinth; indeed, if cult prostitution was common in any major Greek city,  Herodotus would hardly have thought Babylonian temple prostitution so remarkable. It seems that the absolute most that could be said about Corinthian prostitution, even in the city's heyday, was that as a city with two ports, Corinth was a city with no shortage of prostitutes, and that all of Corinth's prostitutes were protected by the goddess Aphrodite, to whom they paid honour, but that in no way were their sexual relations associated with -- let alone performed in -- the temple.

* That's an unfamiliar man, not one who was notably strange, whether in appearance, manner, or way of life. Just, you know, in case you wondering.

Eolai's Cycling Tour of Ireland - And He's Off!

So, the Brother's finally set off on his jaunt -- a 32-County Painting Tour of Ireland. It was nodded to in a couple of pieces in yesterday's Irish Independent. 

He posted a thoughtful and witty and oddly poignant little recording on Audioboo in the early hours, before he'd packed and set out. It's worth a listen. I'm not sure where he is right now, but a few hours back he was painting in the hills south of Dublin somewhere.

The bike's impressively loaded, as you'll see, thanks to the Brother's Xtracycle, which he happily refers to on a regular basis as the best thing he ever bought. As far as I can tell he's carting around paints, brushes, canvas, a seat, tools, and all the other stuff you'd expect if you were cycling round a whole country, covering two or three thousand miles over a couple of months. Which, of course, you would do, wouldn't you?

Anyway, you should follow his adventures on his website, and on Twitter. I expect there'll be no shortage of pictures. It's about Irish social networking and the internet as much as it's about cycling and painting, after all.