Tag: David Cameron

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Ralph’s extraordinary world

 

© Columbia Pictures

 

The recently released 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is the latest in the series of British zombie movies that began with 28 Days Later (2002).  It’s also a direct sequel to last year’s 28 Years Later.  Though I had a few reservations about 28 Years Later, which was scripted by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle, creators of the original 2002 film, it generally impressed me.  I felt wary about the forthcoming Bone Temple, though, because one of my 28 Years Later reservations was how it ended and set up its sequel.

 

I wrote at the time: “Its last minutes have upset a few people with their unexpected reference to a dark episode in recent British history, but I don’t mind that.  I think it’s a pretty audacious move by Garland’s script.  Rather, I don’t appreciate the goofy, cartoony manner in which those last minutes are filmed, which jar against the sombre tone of everything that’s happened previously.  This makes me nervous about what the sequel will be like (and it isn’t directed by Boyle, but by Nia DaCosta).”

 

Happily, having just seen 28 Year Later: The Bone Temple, I realise I had nothing to worry about.  It isn’t goofy or cartoony at all.  Actually, Nia DaCosta shoots her movie in a more measured, controlled style than Boyle shot his – he filmed with numerous iPhone cameras, edited frenziedly, and intercut the action with clips from old war documentaries and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944).  Parts of DaCosta’s film are so still and character-focused you feel you’re watching a stage-play.  And overall, it’s a near-perfect blend of horror, violence, humour, pathos and, yes, optimism.  I’d even rate it as the best of the 28 Days / Weeks / Years Later movies – praise indeed, since I think the previous three films are all quality.  (I know the 2007 installment, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later, gets some grief. But, apart from one idiotic lapse in plot logic, I like it.)

 

A warning.  From here on, there’ll be spoilers for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

 

So, what was that ‘dark episode in recent British history’ referenced at the end of 28 Years Later?  Well, it concluded with its juvenile hero Spike (Alfie Wiliams) being rescued from the infected – the series’ name for the humans who’ve succumbed to the ‘rage virus’ and transformed into slavering, red-eyed, hyperactive zombies – by eight youths wearing tracksuits, bling and long, blonde wigs.  Their leader, played by Jack O’Connell, introduces himself as ‘Sir Jimmy’.  Indeed, they’re all called ‘Jimmy’: Jimmy Shite, Jimmy Fox, Jimmy Snake, etc.  Wandering around this post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested hellscape is a gang fixated on Jimmy Savile.

 

At this point, British viewers of 28 Years Later went, “Eek!”  Everyone else in the world probably went, “Huh?”

 

Savile, in case you didn’t know, was a British disc jockey, children’s TV presenter and charity fundraiser – in his lifetime he raised around 40 million pounds – who died in 2011.  With his long, greasy locks of blonde hair, penchant for tracksuits, cigars and bling, and irritating, homemade patois (“Now then, now then, as it happens, goodness gracious, how’s about that then, guys ‘n’ gals?”), he cut a grotesque figure, but was regarded as a saint because of his charity work.  One year after his death, though, he turned into a modern-day folk-demon when it became apparent he’d been a sexual predator who’d abused children, young women and others on an industrial scale – often patients in hospitals he’d raised funds for.  In fact, there’d been rumours about his evil proclivities while he was alive, but he never faced justice thanks to his saintly image and connections with the political and media establishments.

 

© Columbia Pictures

 

28 Years Later began with a prologue, seemingly unlinked to the rest of the film, wherein during the rage virus’s original outbreak in 2002 a group of children are stuck in a room watching a Teletubbies (1997-2001) video while their parents try, unsuccessfully, to barricade the house against an army of the infected.  Only one small boy escapes and he flees into a nearby church.  There, he sees his father, the local cleric, get attacked, transform and then seemingly lead the other infected off in a macabre, marauding dance.  The boy, it transpires, becomes Sir Jimmy, O’Connell’s character.  Grown up, his brain is an unhinged cocktail of zombie trauma, garbled religious dogma (from his father) and obsolete British pop culture (from the TV) – in the films’ alternative timeline, civilization ended in 2002, so Savile’s crimes were never revealed.  Thus, Sir Jimmy enthuses about Teletubbies and has trained one of his gang, Jimmima (Emma Laird), to do a Teletubbies dance-routine.  Also, echoing Savile, he frequently talks about ‘charity’ – though he uses the word as a euphemism for ‘torture’.

 

For Sir Jimmy’s gang are Clockwork Orange-type psychopaths.  He’s convinced them he’s the son of the devil and they’re on a holy, or unholy, mission to slaughter the infected and uninfected alike in what’s left of Britain.  Spike, fallen into their clutches and forced to join their ranks, spends 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple trying to stay alive and figure out how to escape from them.

 

The movie has a second plot-strand, concerning Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), whom we also met in the previous film.  He’s a hermit who, in the middle of the countryside, has created a spectacular ‘bone temple’ – a structure built from the skeletal remains of the victims of the 28-year-long contagion that also honours those victims.  Kelson is certainly eccentric, but he’s decent and humane too and he’s managed to find a way of peacefully co-existing with the dangerous, brutal world around him.

 

Emblematic of that danger and brutality is Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) – the name Kelson has given an ‘alpha’ member of the infected who stalks the environs of the temple.  Alphas are specimens bigger, stronger and even more dangerous than the ordinary infected.  Kelson uses morphine-tipped darts fired from a blowpipe to subdue Samson as he approaches, but he’s noticed that Samson has been coming back to the temple more often.  It’s as if he enjoys the doses of morphine he’s getting.  This inspires Kelson to experiment on the alpha.  How much, he wonders, of what’s wrong with the infected is a virus and how much is psychosis?  If the psychosis can be calmed – possibly lifted? – by drugs, what remains of the victim’s mind and memories?  Though Spike’s dad (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) claimed in the previous film that the infected don’t have souls, Kelson, as his relationship with Samson develops, realises something of a soul does linger in the infected’s simultaneously terrifying and pitiful husks.

 

So, Spike is trapped among the Jimmies, Fiennes is improbably bonding with Samson and, ominously, we know these two storylines are going to crash together sooner or later with painful results for everyone.  One thing I like about The Bone Temple, again scripted by Alex Garland, is that for all the simplicity of its plotting, it’s less predictable than you’d expect.  I’d assumed the Jimmies would intrude violently on Kelson with a ‘home invasion’ of his bone temple, but what happens is more complex.  I’d also seen people assume online before the film’s release that the Jimmies would kill Kelson and an enraged Samson would go on the rampage, or the Jimmies would kill Samson and an enraged Kelson would go on the rampage – but neither happens here. The real outcome is unexpectedly hopeful, funny, sad and satisfying.  And the long-awaited scene when Sir Jimmy and Kelson finally come face to face is splendid in both its drama and its restraint.  Generally, while O’Connell’s performance is great, Fiennes’ performance is one for the ages.

 

The previous film posited that although Britain had been ravaged by the rage virus, mainland Europe hadn’t and it’d continued to develop as it actually did in the 21st century.  This scenario of an isolated and seriously in-the-shit Britain was an obvious metaphor for Brexit.  The Bone Temple is less on the nose with state-of-the-nation metaphors, but you can still see some.

 

The kids making up Sir Jimmy’s gang – and they are kids, as evidenced by scenes where a couple of them suffer fatal injuries and reveal their true, frightened selves during their death throes, one of them even lamenting about a long-ago pet kitten – symbolize the victims of a half-century of ruthless government policies that decreed there had to be winners and losers and split the country into haves and have-nots. They’re the losers, the have-nots, the left-behind youngsters condemned to membership of a feral underclass.  Tellingly, the opening scene shows the Jimmies gathered in a decayed public swimming pool in some abandoned post-industrial city: the sort of public amenity, in the sort of place that desperately needed public amenities, that got the chop during David Cameron’s premiership and ‘austerity’ project in the early 2010s.

 

Significantly, they’re exploited, manipulated and fashioned into a squad of killers by someone modelling himself on Jimmy Savile.  The real Savile was a respected member of the establishment at the time when British politics turned callous and abandoned the principle that all citizens, including the weak, poor and vulnerable, should be looked after.  Each Christmas-time in the 1980s, for instance, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would invite him to spend Boxing Day with her at Chequers.  He was also a confidante of Prince (now King) Charles.

 

© Columbia Pictures

 

If Sir Jimmy and his minions represent everything rotten about Britain recently, Kelson represents the opposite.  For one thing, he was formerly a doctor in the country’s National Health Service, an institution founded on the principle that the weak, poor and vulnerable should be looked after (and not have to pay a fortune for their treatment).  When he treats the arrow wounds that a doped-up Samson has incurred during his travels, he quips, “So you owe me…  Only kidding.  I’m NHS, free of charge.”  Another British cultural reference that may go over the heads of American audiences.

 

Kelson also reminds us that as well as being an imperial superpower, Britain was once a more benevolent, cultural one. (It helps that he’s played by Ralph Fiennes, a fixture in two massive, British-originating cultural franchises, Harry Potter and James Bond.)  Despite the apocalypse, Kelson has managed to hang onto his old vinyl collection and he plays stuff from it at appropriate moments – Duran Duran’s Ordinary World (1992) when Samson needs some pacification; Radiohead’s Everything in its Right Place (2000) when he’s wistfully contemplating the night-sky; and fabulously, when he has to deal with the Jimmies, Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast (1982) – “Let’s turn this up to 11,” he says, and he does.  Iron Maiden, Radiohead, Duran Duran…  In their different ways, at different times, these British bands were massively popular, musical juggernauts worldwide (and coincidentally, all three have been touring again lately).  That’s the sort of global soft power Britain should be proud of.

 

Indeed, Kelson seems an embodiment of the caring and creative British values that the country tried to project to the outside world during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics – a ceremony whose artistic director was Danny Boyle.

 

Aside from the script, performances, themes and general execution, a reason why I liked The Bone Temple so much was because the relationship between Kelson and Samson echoed something in one of my all-time favourite horror movies, George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985).  In the Romero film, a scientist called Dr Logan (Richard Liberty) attempts to ‘domesticate’ a zombie nicknamed ‘Bub’ (Sherman Howard).  Good though Chi Lewis-Parry is, Samson doesn’t quite have the pathos of Bub – it would be difficult, since at the start of The Bone Temple we see Samson doing business as usual, i.e., ripping off someone’s head and dragging their spine out of their neck-stump.  Kelson, though, is a far more endearing character than the obsessed and unbalanced Logan.  The scenes with him and an ever-more docile Samson are both amusing and touching and you feel increasingly worried about them both as the Jimmies close in.

 

If I have a criticism of The Bone Temple, it’s about how it depicts the other infected, the ones who aren’t Samson.  They feel like a device that gets turned on and off according to the needs of the plot.  Uninfected humans out in the open who need to be threatened?  The infected are ubiquitous.  Uninfected humans out in the open who need to have a chat by the campfire?  The infected are nowhere to be seen.  Also, near the end, I can’t understand why the infected don’t immediately swarm the bone temple when it’s lit up like a chandelier and blasting out Iron Maiden.

 

Otherwise, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a hugely impressive achievement by Nia DaCosta, Alex Garland and their cast and crew.  And while Ralph Fiennes won’t win an Oscar for his performance, much as he deserves to – zombie movies don’t win Oscars – Iron Maiden should at least get him onstage during the rest of their world tour.

 

© Columbia Pictures

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Jim Mountfield goes to the dogs

 

© The Stygian Lepus

 

My short story A Man about a Dog is featured in the new, eighth issue of The Stygian Lepus Magazine, a short-fiction and poetry publication that ‘leans to the dark side’.  And as usual with my writing that leans that way – dark-wards – it appears under the penname of Jim Mountfield.

 

A parable about how human beings treat and mistreat dogs and, indeed, how human beings treat and mistreat each other, A Man about a Dog is set in an anonymous north-of-England city during the grim, austerity-stricken years of the 2010s.  Well, the setting was inspired by the three years I spent living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which strictly speaking isn’t a north-of-England city but a northeast-of-England one.  I lived there from 2002 to 2005, when the place had a buzz and sense of optimism about it, largely due to new developments like the Quayside, the Millennium Bridge, the Baltic Gallery, the Sage (now known as the Glasshouse) Music Centre and Antony Gormley’s striking Angel of the North statue.  Okay, most of those things are actually in Gateshead, which has its own council, independent of the Newcastle one.  So, I’m really talking about ‘Newcastle-Gateshead’ here.

 

From all accounts, though, the place took a battering during the 2010s, when the just-installed Conservative government imposed an austerity programme on Britain.  300 million pounds had been cut from Newcastle’s council budget by 2019 and the decade saw the closure of local libraries, youth clubs, children’s centres and other amenities.  Between 2013 and 2018 there was even an 89% reduction in the number of its lollipop men and women, leaving just seven of them to shepherd the city’s schoolkids safely across the roads.  By an evil coincidence, the week A Man About a Dog was published also saw the return to public office of the smug, oleaginous and stuck-up architect of austerity, former British prime minister David Cameron – Rishi Sunak has ennobled him as ‘Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton’ and made him the country’s Foreign Secretary.

 

An American publication, The Stygian Lepus requests its contributors to submit their work in American English.  I slipped up slightly and made a few references to ‘wheelie-bins’ in my submitted story.  When I saw the version of A Man about a Dog that appears in the magazine, it amused me that the wheelie-bins had been changed to ‘dumpsters’.  So, it’s just as well I kept the city in the story anonymous and didn’t identify it as Newcastle.  You don’t hear many Geordies talking about dumpsters.

 

For the next while, A Man About a Dog is accessible to read here, while the main page for The Stygian Lepus, Issue 8, can be reached here.

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Percy, prince of darkness

 

From wikipedia.org / © Prime Minister’s Office

 

In late February this year, I moved from Sri Lanka to Singapore.  It’s fair to say, though, that Sri Lanka still occupies most of my headspace. The country has made the headlines lately for all the wrong reasons and I’m constantly visiting the websites of Sri Lankan news outlets, following events on Sri Lankan social media, getting WhatsApp messages from friends still living in Sri Lanka and discussing the situation there with Sri Lankans I know in Singapore.  It will definitely be some time before I switch to a Singaporean frame of mind.

 

The crisis in Sri Lanka supports Ernest Hemmingway’s famous assertion that things first develop ‘gradually’ and then develop ‘suddenly’.  During the second half of 2021 it was apparent that, slowly but surely, the country was going off the rails.  Inflation had been an issue for a long time – I can think of many commodities that, within a couple of years of my arrival in Sri Lanka in 2014, had doubled in price – but even by recent standards prices were surging upwards. Also creeping up relentlessly were fuel prices, one symptom of which was the constant upping of fares by the country’s army of tuk-tuk drivers.

 

Then there was the exploding gas-canister phenomenon.  From the start of November until the middle of December 2021, almost 730 canisters had exploded, often in people’s kitchens. The majority of these had been bought from Sri Lanka’s state-run Litro Gas Lanka Ltd but nobody, company executives or politicians, seemed in a hurry to take responsibility or hold someone else responsible for the carnage. I heard rumours that Litro had changed the make-up of the canisters’ contents to cut costs, inadvertently making them dangerously volatile.  For a time, Litro and the other main supplier, Laugfs, had to stop selling their normal canisters and only sell ones that’d been approved by the country’s Standards Institute, which caused the gas supply to dry up.  This wasn’t ideal in a country where just over 40% of the population used the stuff and nothing else for cooking.

 

And then there was the fertiliser fiasco.  In April last year, the government banned all chemical fertilisers, plus pesticides, weedicides and fungicides, for the supposed purpose of converting Sri Lanka’s two million farmers to organic farming – overnight, apparently.  While this attempt to make the agricultural sector ‘go green’ might seem a noble, if fatally rushed and over-ambitious, undertaking, the Sri Lankan rumour mill suggested darker reasons for why the government did this – namely, that it was a ploy to make thousands of farmers bankrupt, so that powerful interests could buy up their land at reduced prices.  Whatever the real reason for it, the policy had quick, tangible but negative results. By October, food inflation was at nearly 12% and experts were predicting the output of the country’s paddy fields to drop by 43% in 2021.

 

With hindsight, I realise I left Sri Lanka near the end of the ‘gradually’ part of the process whereby things went tits up.  The ‘suddenly’ part happened a few weeks later. That was when the country was stricken by power cuts lasting many hours and its fuel supplies ran out, due to it having no more revenue to pay for imports.  The weeks after my departure was also when mass protests began against the government.  These protests culminated in the Rajapaksa clan being chased out of office and last week, in the case of the Rajapaksa who’d been president, chased out of the country.

 

Ah, the Rajapaksas.  Living in Sri Lanka for the last eight years was like living in a beautiful house with a beautiful garden and beautiful views, but with dodgy drains.  The Rajapaksa dynasty were like a bad smell from those drains, sometimes faint, sometimes severe, which never wafted away.

 

When I arrived in 2014, Mahinda Rajapaksa had been president for nine years.  In November 2005, during the later years of the Civil War between government forces (representative of the Sinhalese majority) and the northern-based Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, aka the Tamil Tigers, he’d taken power after winning an election with a slim majority of 190,000 votes.  He was fortunate that the Tamil Tigers forbade the Tamil people, who’d have definitely voted against him, from participating in the election.   It was as if the Tamil Tigers had wanted a Sinhalese-nationalist hard man like Rajapaksa to win.  There’d be no pussyfooting around.  There’d be a bloody fight, all Tamils would rally to the LTTE’s cause and hopefully, with Rajapaksa hammering at them, they’d win more international sympathy and support.

 

If that was the calculation, they got the fight they wanted but not the end-result.  By 2009, the Sri Lankan military had crushed the Tigers in the country’s northeast and Rajapaksa could declare victory.  Ignored, hushed-up and forgotten in the rush to celebrate the war’s end was the civilian death toll in the zone where Rajapaksa’s forces had wiped the Tigers out.  According to the United Nations in 2011, troops slaughtered some 40,000 people there, and that’s one of the more conservative estimates.

 

Among those demanding that the Sri Lankan government investigate its military for war crimes was Britain’s then-British Prime Minister David Cameron, who raised the issue at a Commonwealth summit in 2013.  Rajapaksa did not take this well and I suspect it contributed to the long, long wait I had subsequently before I could get a visa to live and work in Sri Lanka.  I have British and Irish passports, but the British passport was the one I applied for a visa with, and British passports weren’t flavour of the month at Colombo’s immigration office.  As is usually the case when Britain criticises its former colonies, Cameron’s criticism came with a large dollop of irony.  It was Britain, in its role as imperial overlord, that gave the Rajapaksa clan their first opportunity to shimmy up the greasy pole of Sri Lankan national politics.  In 1936, Don Matthew Rajapaksa, Mahinda’s uncle, was elected to the State Council of Ceylon, which the British had set up based on the model of London County Council.

 

As a foreigner, life in Sri Lanka was superficially pleasant, but I wasn’t there long before I became aware of things going on behind the scenes that you’d associate with bullying, semi-authoritarian, ‘strong-man’ regimes such as Erdogan’s Turkey, Orbán’s Hungary and Bolsonaro’s Brazil – discrimination against minorities, intimidation of journalists and so on.  Meanwhile, Rajapaksa’s face was ubiquitous.  It wasn’t quite George Orwell’s 1984 and ‘Big Brother is Watching You’ but you sometimes wondered if the place was setting off along that road.  I particularly remember seeing billboards depicting the president, plump, moustached and clad in a white jathika anduma, while he grasped the wheel of a ship.

 

It seemed appropriate that his birth-name was Percy Mahendra Rajapaksa.  He definitely looked like a Percy.  In fact, he reminded me of a well-fed Terry-Thomas, the comic actor who’d specialised in playing upper-class cads, bounders and scoundrels in old British movies, including one called Sir Percy Ware-Armitage in Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1965).

 

 

But Percy, sorry, Mahinda Rajapaksa wasn’t a one-man band.  He had three siblings who were also politicians: younger brother Gotabaya, a former military man who’d served as Secretary to the Ministry of Defence since 2005; younger brother Basil, who’d been Minister of Economic Development from 2010; and older brother Chamal, who’d been Speaker of Parliament from 2010 too.  Needless to say, holding such power, and with few, effective systems in place for public accountability, the family were in a position to squirrel large sums of government and party money away into their own bank accounts and businesses.  Meanwhile, money that was spent in public view was often borrowed and shovelled towards self-aggrandising white-elephant projects.  These included the Colombo Lotus Tower, commissioned in 2012 and finally opened in 2019.  Meant to represent a sacred lotus flower, I always thought of that tower as ‘the hand-grenade on a stick’.

 

The billboard depicting Mahinda Rajapaksa at the helm of a ship reflected the fact that another election was coming up.  In late 2014, as the election neared, I was running a training course on Colombo’s Duplication Road.  One day, for five minutes, the training was disrupted by a cacophony of revving engines and blaring horns outside the building.  This came from a procession of motorcyclists and tuk-tuk drivers, many with Sri Lankan flags fluttering from their vehicles, who were driving by in a stage-managed rally to show support for their beloved President Rajapaksa.  A Sri Lankan trainee explained to me that the rally would wind up at one of Rajapaksa’s residences, where the drivers would be treated to free grub and arrack.  “And that,” she concluded bitterly, “is what our taxes get spent on.”

 

As it turned out, thanks to some wily manoeuvring by Maithripala Sirisena, who’d served as Rajapaksa’s Minister of Agriculture and then Health, the plump, moustached incumbent-president lost the election.  Sirisena replaced him in the presidency.  Sri Lankans I knew reckoned Sirisena had squeezed ahead of Rajapaksa thanks to the combined support of the country’ ethnic and religious minorities – Tamils, Muslims, Christians – and the more liberal-minded citizens living in Colombo.  My experiences bore that out.  When I was in the countryside of central and south Sri Lanka, where people were more conservative and Singhalese nationalism was more of a thing, the tuk-tuk drivers would regularly drop Rajapaksa into their conversations and tell me what a great guy he was.  The tuk-tuk drivers who took me to and from work in Colombo every day were less willing to gush about the topic of Rajapaksa’s greatness.

 

Power was handed over peacefully, though later there were allegations that once he’d realised the game was up, Rajapaksa attempted to do a Trump and trigger a coup.  The military, however, wouldn’t play ball.  Soon afterwards, Pope Francis came to visit Sri Lanka and told everyone how wonderful they all were.  The feel-good factor was high.  Folk were full of optimism, and felt not a little relief.  Surely a corner had been turned.

 

Would it last?  Of course not.

 

© Lilith & Cupid Studios

 

To be continued.

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Student politics

 

© Profile Books

 

I’ve just read a review in the Guardian of Simon Kuper’s new book, Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. Chums tell the real-life story of student politics at Oxford University during the 1980s, a world whose inhabitants would often become well-known public figures in the 21st century.  On the Labour side there were ‘the Miliband Brothers, Dave and Ted, and Eddie Balls and Yvette Cooper’, who were busy ‘organising rent protests at their respective colleges’.  However, it was some Conservative student politicos at Oxford in the 1980s who’d become particular big-hitters and who’d handle – or mishandle – the levers of power in Britain during the 2010s and 2020s.

 

They included Michael Gove, whom Kuper says was bought, wearing a kilt, for 35 pounds at a charity-fundraising ‘slave auction’ at Oxford Union in 1987.  Even in 2022 and even after three-and-a-half decades of inflation, 35 pounds seems rather more than Michael Gove is worth, though maybe the kilt bumped up his value a bit.

 

They also included Britain’s current Prime Minister, the walking disaster area that is Boris Johnson.  Recently, the Mail on Sunday claimed that Johnson’s ‘Oxford Union debating skills’ were so formidable that, during debates in the House of Commons, Labour’s working-class, comprehensive-school-educated deputy leader Angela Rayner had to resort to crossing her legs like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (1992) to distract him.  According to Kuper, the young Johnson’s debating strategy was ‘to defeat opponents whose arguments were better simply by ignoring their arguments’ and rely instead on ‘carefully timed jokes, calculated lowerings of the voice, and ad hominem jibes’.

 

Also spicing up life in 1980s Tory Oxford University was David Cameron, though he was ‘rich enough and connected enough to feel himself above the “hackery” of student politics’; the BBC’s future political editor Nick Robinson; Daniel Hannan, NHS-basher, Enoch Powell fan, arch-Brexiteer and now in the House of Lords as Baron Hannan of Kingsclere, who, it’s been said, ‘may have contributed more to the ideas, arguments and tactics of Euroscepticism than any other individual’; and the future spin-doctoring Svengali behind Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings.  Cummings, apparently, was a protégé of Dr Norman Stone, the historian, lecturer, author, advisor to Margaret Thatcher and student-groping pisshead from Glasgow.  One obituary published after Stone’s death in 2019 hilariously noted that he ‘hated Oxford, which he thought… was full of Marxists.’  Actually, I can’t imagine Stone and Cummings together without thinking of Saruman and Grima Wormtongue in The Lord of the Rings movies (2002-04).

 

© New Line Cinema / WingNut Films

 

Incidentally, Kuper acknowledges that Oxford University educated and employed not only J.R.R. Tolkien but also Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis.  He notes how ‘the timeless paradise of Oxford inspired its inhabitants to produce timeless fantasies like Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit, Narnia and, incubating from the late 1980s, Brexit.’

 

Anyway, apart from making me mightily glad that I didn’t attend Oxford University during the 1980s, reading about Kuper’s book has got me thinking about the place where I was a student during the 1980s, Aberdeen University.  What about the student politicians I encountered there?  Did any of them ever get near – remotely near – those all-important ‘levers of power’?  There follows a heavily revised, fully up-to-date version of a piece about this subject I first posted in 2014.

 

To be honest, I wouldn’t have encountered any student politicians at all if I hadn’t got involved with Aberdeen University’s student newspaper and co-edited it for a term in 1986.  The newspaper office was located in the same building as the offices and meeting rooms where the members of the Students’ Representative Council did their business.  And obviously, those student politicians also figured in a lot of the stories we reported on.  So, I got to observe the species close up.

 

The one who probably did best for himself was Stephen Carter, who served as SRC President from 1985 to 1986.  I found Carter lacking in warmth, humour and character and at one point, in a fit of naughtiness, I published in the newspaper a spoof article depicting him as an aloof Roman Emperor in the manner of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius novels.  The article was entitled I, Carterus.  We didn’t get on very well, though not because I’d likened him to one of the Caesars.  Near the end of my editorship, I wrote a front-page article that made several criticisms of his reign as student president, which infuriated him.  To be fair, I later discovered that I’d made an error with a financial figure I’d quoted, so at least part of his anger was justified.  Being bawled out by the bland, automation-like Carter was a strange experience.   The abuse didn’t seem to emanate from a real human being.  It was like being scolded by an indignant speak-your-wait machine or a cranky elevator voice-recording.

 

From gov.uk

 

Decades later, in 2008, Carter served as Gordon Brown’s Downing Street Chief of staff.  Also, from 2008 to 2009, he was Brown’s Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting.  As he wasn’t a member of either house at Westminster at the time, which would have barred him from taking on a ministerial position, he was quickly ennobled.  He was made Baron Carter of Barnes and entered the House of Lords.  I didn’t hear much about how that he got in on those roles, except for claims that his relationship with Brown’s notorious spin-doctor Damian McBride was ‘fractious’.  Actually, McBride was such a scumbag that it’s to Carter’s credit that the pair of them didn’t get along.

 

Coincidentally, days before Stephen Carter – sorry, Baron Carter of Barnes – ended his stint as Brown’s Chief of Staff, I found myself a full-time student again.  In October 2008 I started an MA course at the University of East Anglia.  The students there had mounted a protest against student debt, with hundreds of them sticking fake cheques to a campus wall.  On each cheque was written the sum of money that each student expected to owe by the time of his or her graduation.  To me (who’d graduated in 1987 with an overdraft of £1,500, which I paid off within two years), some of those sums were eye-watering: £40,000 or more.  What, I wondered, would we have thought at Aberdeen University in the mid-1980s if we’d known that our student president would one day be a key figure in a government presiding over levels of student debt we wouldn’t have imagined in our worst nightmares?

 

Another student politician from that era who’s done well is Katy Clark.  She was a leading light in Aberdeen University’s Labour Party and in 2005 became Labour Member of Parliament for North Ayrshire and Arran.  Her career as an MP ended in 2015 with the virtual wipe-out of Scotland’s Labour seats that happened under the kamikaze leadership of Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy and spin-doctor John McTiernan.  However, she kept busy, working as a strategist for Jeremy Corbyn and authoring for him a review of the Labour Party’s democratic structures. Then, in 2021, she got elected to the Scottish Parliament as a Labour MSP for the West of Scotland region.

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Scottish Parliament

 

When I co-edited the student newspaper, Katy came to our attention when she led protests against Aberdeen University’s then-rector, the former Scottish National Party MP Hamish Watt.  At a debate during Freshers’ Week, Watt had made some supposedly-jovial comments in which he compared the young female students who’d just arrived on campus to ‘unbroken fillies’.  Now, while Watt undoubtedly deserved to be strung up by his sexist testicles, I didn’t enjoy having to speak to Katy about the incident.  I found her to be intense, one-note, lacking in personality and devoid of humour.  Actually, looking at what I’ve just written about Stephen Carter, a theme seems to be emerging in that regard.

 

Despite that, I felt some admiration for Katy because, unlike many other student politicians, she stuck by the left-wing principles she’d had as a university student and didn’t drift rightwards as she started to earn money.  During her career as an MP, she voted against the introduction of ID cards, against the renewal of the Trident missile system and against bombing campaigns in Iraq.  However, in 2020, that admiration was dampened by the fact that she accepted a peerage and entered the House of Lords as Baroness Clark of Kilwinning.

 

What were you thinking, Katy?  I don’t know how any socialists could debase themselves by becoming members of the archaic, undemocratic and embarrassing Lords.  It’s a place where you rub ermine-clad shoulders with the likes of Baroness Michelle Mone of Mayfair (who’s just had her home raided by police as part of a fraud investigation into her links with a dodgy PPE company); and Baroness Dido Harding of Winscombe (who got where she is today through cronyism and blew 22 billion pounds of taxpayers’ money on a failed Covid-19 track-and-trace system); and Baroness Claire Fox of Buckley (the former Revolutionary Communist Party member, Bosnian genocide denier and IRA supporter, now swivel-eyed Brexiteer and enthusiast for all things right-wing); and the afore-mentioned Baron Daniel Hannon of Kingsclere… and many more.

 

While she was there, I wonder if Katy ever bumped into her old Aberdeen University compadre Lord Carter of Barnes and they reminisced about their days on campus in the 1980s. (“What was the name of that hairy, beer-swilling prick with the Northern Irish accent who used to edit the student newspaper?”  “Can’t remember…”)

 

I should add that while running for the Scottish Parliament, Katy promised to ‘stand down’ from the House of Lords; and, according to her Wikipedia entry, on becoming an MSP she took ‘a leave of absence’ from the decrepit institution.  That, though, isn’t the same as ‘quitting’ it.  Also, I notice that on Wikipedia she’s still billed as ‘Baroness Clark of Kilwinning.’

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Scottish Parliament

 

To the rightward end of the spectrum, meanwhile, I have to mention someone else from my old alumni – Murdo Fraser, who’s in the Scottish Parliament as an MSP for the Mid-Scotland and Fife region and was once deputy leader of the Scottish Conservative Party.  That Murdo became a big name in Tory circles surprised me because he’d seemed an unprepossessing character in Aberdeen.  The detail I remember most about him was that he wore a Glasgow Rangers scarf 24/7, to the point where I wondered if it’d been stitched on.  A good friend who knew him a little, the late Finlay McLean, told me once that he had ‘the personality of a deep-frozen Cyberman’.  Then again, for an ambitious politician, not having a personality seems to be part of the course.

 

Murdo’s political ascendancy happened despite the fact that he was once associated with the notorious Federation of Conservative Students, an organisation that by the 1980s had become more right-wing than the Conservative Party of which it was the university branch.  At the time the Conservative Party was led by Margaret Thatcher, so being more right-wing than her was quite an achievement.  In 1986, after a string of well-publicised incidents – wherein FCS members had abused ethnic-minority staff at student bars, brayed their support for the Contras in El Salvador, sang the Special AKA song Free Nelson Mandela with the words changed to ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’, and so on – this extreme-minded group was disbanded by Tory Party Chairman Norman Tebbit.  And yes, being disbanded by Norman Tebbit for being too extreme was quite an achievement too.

 

The FCS at Aberdeen University were particularly obnoxious.  Among other things, they had a penchant for insulting gay people and taunting them about AIDS.  The start of my term as newspaper editor coincided with an incident wherein a bunch of FCS students invaded and disrupted a health-and-welfare talk being given to an audience of new students.  Their motive for disrupting the talk seemed to be because it covered safe sex for gay as well as straight students and was therefore, somehow, encouraging AIDS.

 

Later, after the newspaper had published an article about the society for gay students, Gay Soc, we received a letter from one deranged FCS member accusing us of furthering the interests of ‘the plague rats of the 20th century’.  We published his letter in the belief that by allowing the FCS to air their views publicly, we were letting people see what arseholes they were.  Give them enough rope and they’d hang themselves, we felt.  However, at least one gay friend of mine was deeply upset that the letter had appeared in our newspaper.  Today, 35 years on, I’d think twice about publishing it.

 

In Murdo Fraser’s defence, I’ll admit that he seemed aware of what a squad of bampots he was having to keep company with in the FCS.  He kept his mouth shut when the rest of them were being as offensively vocal as possible, and whenever I saw them strutting about the campus en masse he seemed to trail silently and reluctantly along at the back, rather like Eddie Bunker’s Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs (1992).  Actually, being Mr Blue was appropriate given his footballing allegiances.

 

Having dissed the Labour and the Conservative Parties, I suppose in the interest of balance I should say something about Aberdeen University’s 1980s Liberal Party, the Liberal Democrats as they are now.  The Liberals’ most visible representative was one Dan Falchikov who, with his excitable and eccentric manner and his striking dress sense (a psychedelically-coloured sweater), possessed something that other people I’ve mentioned lacked: a personality.  And I think Dan was a genuinely well-meaning guy even if he wasn’t endowed with a great deal of common sense.  However, he was also an easy target for us unscrupulous hacks at the student newspaper and we spent a lot of time poking fun at him, calling him ‘Dan the Man’, ‘Desperate Dan’ and (when he was being particularly off-the-wall) ‘Dan F**k-me-off’.

 

From the Sutton & Croydon Guardian

 

Out of curiosity, I googled his name a while ago and discovered that, in 2010, while he was a Liberal Democrat activist in the London constituency of Kingston-upon-Thames, Dan got himself embroiled in controversy.  He was overheard boasting on a train that he’d managed to ‘plant’ a story, a false story, in the Evening Standard newspaper about the Labour Party having plans to close Kingston Hospital.  Unbeknownst to Dan while he blabbed about this into a mobile phone, a train-passenger sitting nearby was none other than the journalist Kevin Maguire, political editor of the Daily Mirror.  Maguire not only tweeted about what he was overhearing but also sneaked a camera-phone picture of Dan and posted it online.  Thus, it was a bit unsettling to find the eccentric, psychedelically-sweatered Dan the Man of Aberdeen University dabbling in the political dark arts and establishing himself as the bad boy of local politics in Kingston-upon-Thames.

 

I should add that since then Dan seems to have ditched the Liberal Democrats and joined the Green Party.  Considering that the Lib Dems were part of David Cameron’s discredited, austerity-obsessed coalition government from 2010 to 2015, and were disastrously led by Jo ‘nuke-’em’ Swinson in 2019, this suggests he has more sense than I’d credited him with.

 

I don’t think any of the student politicos I knew in the Scottish National Party went on to have political careers.  Probably having to deal with Hamish Watt, the university rector, ex-SNP MP and vocal admirer of young unbroken fillies, put them off politics for good.

 

I’ve tried to keep this account of student politics at Aberdeen University light-hearted, but there were some goings-on I found pretty unsavoury.  For example, before I graduated, some nasty rumours circulated in the SRC building about one student politician making another one pregnant.  There wasn’t actually a pregnancy but this didn’t prevent two SRC people, from two different political parties, both of whom had axes to grind with the guy involved, from approaching me and assuring me it was true.  One even swore that she’d seen the results of a pregnancy test.  Presumably, I was fed this false information in the hope that, as a student journalist, I’d spread the word to the detriment of the guy’s reputation.  Never mind what distress it’d cause him or the woman.  None of the people I’ve mentioned above, I should say, were involved in this saga.

 

Some student politicians I did genuinely like.  Indeed, if I ever bumped into the likes of Graeme Whiteside, Tim Morrison, Alan Strain or Stuart Black again on the High Street of Old Aberdeen, I’d invite them into the St Machar Bar and buy them a pint.  However, with regard to those people, there’s a sobering point to make.  None of those decent sorts, as far as I know, pursued their political careers any further than university.  None of them ended up becoming real politicians.

 

It reinforces Douglas Adams’ famous comment in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980) that “it is a well-known and much lamented fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Nick Bramhall