There’s a school of thought, I know, that personality shouldn’t matter in politics. So Silvio Berlusconi ogles schoolgirls? So Gordon Brown throws phones? So Nicolas Sarkozy tries too hard to pretend he doesn’t make Carla Bruni look like she’s six dwarfs down? So what? Such stories are a damaging intrusion into serious politics, the theory goes. Just tittle-tattle and froth.
I’ve always liked this theory. You can be an accountant who cross-dresses at the weekend, but this shouldn’t make people quibble with your maths. You can be a dentist, even, who is mean to his dog. So it is with some reluctance that I must now take this theory, and hurl it from my conceptual window. I blame the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister.
He’s a chap called Daniel Ayalon. He arranged a meeting, I read, with the Turkish Ambassador to complain about a Turkish TV drama. It depicted shady Israeli commandos kidnapping Arab children in order to convert them to Judaism, so he certainly had a point. It’s really not that easy to become a Jew. Remember, we haven’t even let Madonna in.
Only, he couldn’t just tell him off. No, he had to invite TV cameras along, and put an Israeli flag on the wall but not a Turkish one and, most viciously, ensure that the Turkish guy was sitting on a low seat.
It’s basically what Lord Sugar does to the contestants on The Apprentice. Not just rude, but petty, too. And as a result, diplomacy between Israel and Turkey has all but broken down.
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Now I’m thinking about Gordon Brown, and the scene that Labour’s former general secretary describes in a book serialised this week, about the PM losing control of the seating plan at a dinner for US Democrats in Downing Street and, thereafter, refusing to speak to anybody. And I’m thinking about Sarah Palin, and the way that, as described in another book serialised this week, she completely shut down under pressure. And, of course, I’m thinking about Iris Robinson.
Being a politician isn’t like being an accountant. It’s not a bad thing about modern politics that these intimate personality flaws get cruelly exposed. It’s a brilliant thing. Otherwise they lurk beneath the surface, quietly offending people. Then one day they rear up in public, and suddenly Turkey won’t take your calls any more. Long live tittle-tattle. Long live froth.
Litter bug
Speaking of froth, can people please stop going on the radio and advising other people to grit their snowy, slippy paths with cat litter?
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Does anybody know which terrible scumbag started this? Does anybody know where they live?
Cat litter diaries, Day 1: listen to radio. Believe radio. Go to supermarket and buy big bag of cat litter. Sprinkle over path. Stomp around trying to slip, and failing. Go inside. Boast to wife.
Day 2: Begin to grow concerned about mysterious abrasive white patches of disintegrated cat-litter dust that have appeared on your carpet, your skin, your walls and all your clothes.
Day 3: Wake up to find that the soggy cat litter has turned into thick, chalky white paste now coating your garden, your house, everything you own, your neighbours’ houses and at least 200m of the pavement on the street outside.
Day 4: Spend entire day cleaning house, path, walls, children, neighbours etc and apologising to everybody, even though it is supposed to be your day off.
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Never do this.
Do you dig it?
Heading into work on Wednesday, for reasons not unrelated to the above, I bought a shovel. It’s a very odd experience when you carry a shovel around all day. People just can’t help themselves. They have to ask you why. It’s like an unconquerable instinct, as though they’re worried you might have mistakenly picked it up instead of your phone. I mean, come on. It’s not a chainsaw. It’s not a sword. There’s four inches of snow outside and I’m covered in cat litter. Why the hell do you think I’ve got a shovel?
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EU Xanadu
Brussels at the beginning of the week, to visit the European Parliament. I hadn’t been before. So big. So bright and clean and flash. It makes Westminster look like a shabby, apologetic village fête of a thing.
You can see it, at the risk of being crass, simply in the way that it is possible to wander around and fancy people. This simply doesn’t happen in Westminster, unless you really aren’t fussy at all. In Brussels, though, the interns of both sexes are all beautiful. Well-dressed, long-limbed, wet-eyed with the joy of their own sheer, West Wing-esque dynamism. And they can’t all be Swedish.
Maybe it’s just something to do with the sort of social group that the place attracts. International, affluent, trilingual, equally at home in any city of the world, the sort of people whose younger siblings go clubbing with Prince Harry. Oh yes, it’s a very impressive place. If only somebody could tell me what it was all for.