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Graeme Archer's Diary: Love, Actually

There’s a place for us. Somewhere, a place. For us. Hold my hand.

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Hold my hand, and I’ll take you there. So, Saturday night, and like a few million others we’re agog at the X-factor final. I’m watching a nice young man from Wales singing a song from West Side Story, a song I’ve always been aware of, vaguely, without really, you know, focusing on it, and suddenly it transports me. It pierces me; whatever carapace I wear to get through life is pierced, is torn asunder, and I’m sat there with tears streaming down my face. Fully clothed and completely naked. George Orwell wrote about this, didn’t he, in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The potency of sentimental music.

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Love, Actually was the name of the Richard Curtis film, which I gleefully nicked for the name of the first Platform piece which Tim kindly printed of mine. This is the last Column (didn’t you know?) [I told you not to mention that, and to write about politics, just for once – Ed] so I’ve re-nicked the title and, of course, the subject matter: the only “political” thing I really care about.

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There have been twenty-six young people murdered so far this year in London. So far. That unconscious addition of “so far” is a telling example of Londoners’ expectations about crime. Not that it matters what time of year it is, but I find that the near-coincidence of the current death-toll with the countdown to Christmas has brought the horror home to me. Twenty-six families across London facing Christmas without their child.

Meantime we still have a Met chief who presided over the fatal shooting of an innocent Londoner on a tube train, but who refuses to take any institutional responsibility for it. Great message. Blair, of course, is kept in place by the Labour mayor, some of whose other cronies, we are now discovering (courtesy of some remarkable journalism from Andrew Gilligan in the Standard) appear to have siphoned of hundreds of thousands of pounds that were intended to give young people some sort of life-opportunity more attractive than street-crime. If the allegations against Livingstone’s cronies are proved (and there have been no convincing denials from his office) then there will be a direct line to be drawn: from the corruption over which he is accused of presiding, to the failure to empower local communities, to the ever-increasing cohort of dead London youth.

My fondest New Year political wish: a turbo-charged campaign from Boris. We don’t just need to defeat Livingstone in May: we need to chase him from office, covered in opprobrium.  Catharsis required.

Graeme Archer: Ghosts

This is a civilised country, right? I mean, we moan about noisy children on buses, and the celebrity culture, and rubbish football managers, but we’re still a decent country where the vulnerable get a basic level of protection, aren’t we?

Steven Hoskin died on 5 July last year, age 39, after being tortured by Darren Stewart, a drug-dealer, and Stewart’s girlfriend, Sarah Bullock. Steven Hoskin had learning difficulties, so he was a nice easy target for Stewart and Bullock. They moved into his flat, where they dragged him around on a dog lead. After months of degradation – months during which Steven Hoskin contacted the police for help on twelve separate occasions, with no effect whatsoever – they’d had enough of their fun. They forced him to swallow 70 painkillers, marched him to a viaduct and pushed him over. What basic desire for life led Steven Hoskin to cling onto the edge of the viaduct? No matter. The seventeen year-old Bullock stamped on his fingers until he fell thirty metres to his death.

A special report into this horror concluded – surprise! – that the failure to help Steven – despite his repeated attempts to signal his distress to the many agencies which “cared” for him –was a lack of communication between those agencies. The report into his death, by Dr Margaret Flynn of Sheffield Hallam university, concludes that he would have been saved by “better inter-agency working”. Really? Imagine the scene at the police station. “Please help me, I’m being tortured.” “Sorry sir, you’ve got learning difficulties, so I’ll file a memo on that for social services and leave it on this pile here. Now get out”.

I don’t think so. The failure, obviously, is a failure of love. Some terrible failure of love led, first, to the manifestation of evil that is Darren Stewart and Sarah Bullock. That anyone could have come into contact with Steven and failed to move to his assistance is another failure, and I think is what causes that sick feeling in your stomach when you read of his death. What would I have done, if he had been my neighbour?

Are we supposed to believe that the problem would be solved, that no-one else with learning difficulties would be tortured to death, if only another committee writes another protocol for inter-agency communication? What a Labour solution, and how depressing in its poverty of insight. When are we going to learn that systems and processes do not prevent error, that the more you build up a machine to deliver care, the less humane will be the outcome. What is needed is not a Standard Operating Procedure: what we need is more space for humanity to flourish. I can see a connection with the social responsibility agenda, though it would be too crass to spell it out. We have to destroy these machines which bind us down and force us apart, the machines to which we’ve devolved our responsibility to care and our duty to act. Remember Iris Murdoch again: in the end, all our failures are failures of love.

Graeme Archer: The Naming of Cats

I’m lying in a metal box, me and about fifty other humans. The others are fast asleep: the light is dim and the air is filled with the susurration of their snoring. I am unable to share this air of somnolent unconcern, because a moment ago the ground lurched from under my bed and my stomach attempted to find its way into my mouth. I’m gripping the sides of the bed in a cold funk, composing farewell letters to everyone I care for. Is this it? Welcome to BA’s overnight flight from Philadelphia to Heathrow. Not going to dine tonight, sir? asks the nice steward, but of course in my terror I hear Not going to die tonight, sir and I’m relieved. Until we hit the next bout of turbulence.

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Yes, I know there’s an irony in the fact that someone who spends so much of his life strapped to a board above the Atlantic should be increasingly terrified of flying, especially given that he’s a statistician, since we all know that there’s nothing safer than flying. Don’t you think the aviation industry pushes that statistic a bit too much? Like, almost hysterically? I sort of think it’s a bit like sword-swallowing. Your risk of injury from sword-swallowing is vanishingly small, because most people don’t swallow swords. Condition on the fact that you decide to repeatedly swallow swords, however, and the risk potential surely rises dramatically. Sooner or later some plane I’m in is going to fall from the sky in a ball of flame. It will be of little comfort to me that I had previously been at greater risk by taking the bus down the Hackney Road.

Graeme Archer: Sex and the Single Woman

I know, I know: ID fiasco, Darling’s lies to the House about who’s to blame, broken military covenant, part-time defence secretaries, more foot-and-mouth (government sponsored!), Lord West publicly recanting his thoughtcrime (he loves the Big Clunking Fist, for ever), Charlie Whelan’s sad delusions printed in the Telegraph and 24 billion of our Earth Pounds being pumped into Northern Wreck (so presumably there’ll be no more rubbish about Tory “black holes”?). It’s almost Wagnerian in its horror, innit? Let’s close our eyes and pretend this government never happened. It is Sunday, after all. That’s better. And breathe out.

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The government has said that IVF should be available to single women and lesbian couples who want to have a child “of their own”, without involving anything as retro as a man. I nearly didn’t write about this, because I feel so strongly about it (which makes me suspicious of my motives); also I noticed what might look like an internal inconsistency in my reasoning, and, maybe, because I feared you would think “what’s it got to do with him?”, given that the closest I’ll ever come to child-rearing is the odd occasion we drag Keith’s nieces and nephews around London (“Can we go to Macdonald’s?” “No.” “I hate you. You’re a man and you’re married to my uncle. Ha ha ha ha ha … ” “Chicken-bits-burger or cow-bits-burger?”). Then a friend pointed me to this article on the BBC website, and I read, with a sense of outrage, this piece of anti-male orthodoxy from Carol Sarler in the Times and I thought, this is getting ridiculous.

Deliberately creating babies in the absence of a father is a terrible proposal and no matter how often I deleted my scribbled thoughts about it this week, I kept coming back to it. I can think of statistical, evolutionary and cultural reasons to reject the proposal.

The potential inconsistency in my reasoning is that I am a supporter of the legislation which requires adoption agencies to consider gay couples as adoptive families for the children in their (the agencies’) care. Yet I find the concept of gay couples or single women engineering the creation of a child through IVF – if I’m honest – repulsive. After careful thought, and some statistical reasoning, I don’t find this an inconsistency. The difference is between what statisticians call marginal and conditional inference, about the outcomes for the child. Children who need families exist, now, and it seems to me to be impossible to say, with complete certainty, “none of those children could ever be raised well by a gay couple”. We have to condition on the existence of the child, and consider the options available to him or her: there is at least a finite probability that the child would be better off in a gay family than would be the case were he or she left in institutional care (and we know that no child would be so placed unless he or she would benefit). This is the conditional inference – a posteriori – conditional on the existence of the child. However, before a child is born – a priori – we cannot make specific inference about his or her outcomes (because he or she doesn’t exist): we can only make marginal inference, averaged over the population – an estimate of the outcomes for an as yet theoretical, but definitely fatherless, child. And we’ve got enough evidence now, haven’t we, that the average outcomes for fatherless children are bad enough for us not to seek to increase the number of children in the fatherless pool? Haven’t we?

I have sympathy, I am human, of course I have sympathy, for women who are driven by an intense biological longing to be a mother. That need, however strong it may be, does not overwhelm my distaste at willingly creating a child whose likely life outcome is profoundly at a disadvantage vis-à-vis those for a child born to a mother and father. To do a quick Richard Dawkins impersonation, there must be an evolutionary requirement for some people to be childless (it’s my favourite theory for homosexuality too), because such people (infertile heterosexuals, gay people) exist, generation after generation. My theory is that we require surplus (childless) adults, in order to enable the tribe as a whole to continue to thrive, because there’s not much more physically demanding than raising children. It requires on average slightly more than two people, in fact. That’s also why I find it ridiculous to read those articles by lazy journalists, bemoaning the fact that people with children sometimes get a bit of slack cut them at work, slack which, of course, the childless tend to pick up, as though those of us without children don’t benefit in any way at all from the raising of a generation of well-rounded children. What’s the alternative, anyway? That we encourage people to stop having children, so they can put in longer hours in the office? And that would lead to what, precisely, for a culture? Exactly. It leads to where we are now.

It is this cultural impact of fatherlessness which troubles me the most. Accepted, I have no paternal longings of my own; but like all of you, I had a father, and, like many of you, I can compare existence when he was alive with existence, now, without him. I think of him every time I cross London Fields to go to the Lido and see men kicking leaves for their children; I think of him every time I’m sat upstairs on the no.26, listening with half an ear to the tipsy, happy men phoning home to explain their lateness; I wonder if he would like Belle and Sebastian; I wonder what he would advise me to do about work (not that I’d listen, not at first, anyway); I think of him when Keith and I are falling about with laughter and then I wish, I wish every day, that he could meet Keith. I dream he’s alive quite often, and I suppose, in the sense that I am alive, and am a product of his love, that he is, metaphorically at least, still here. I told you before: most that is good in me, comes from my father. So. I’m unusual? I don’t think so. How can it be contemplated to willingly produce children – particularly boys – who will never have the love of a father?

I’ve written on a similar theme before, so apologies for the thematic repetition, but the educational and societal outcomes of the marginalisation of the male from families is all around us: and the government’s “solution” is to offer more of it? Society needs more children without fathers? Boys need less paternal input to their upbringing? Time for more deep breathing.

Graeme Archer: Common People

Monday 12 November, 7pm

So. I’m sat on this bus, heading up the Kingsland Road, the No. 242. I’ve never been on this bus before and I’ve never been so far up the Kingsland Road either: we’re about to go through Clapton, or so the very annoying, omnipresent Machine Voice keeps informing me. I’m going to the Homerton hospital, to visit John.

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About twenty minutes ago I was sat outside Caffe Nero on Bishopsgate, finishing off some “urgent” memo and then emailing it to my boss in Italy. One of the very few good aspects of modern life: wifi. Two years ago I’d have had to stay in Harlow until I’d finished work, and I’d not have had time to get to the hospital. Now I can draw my graphs and conclusions on the train, then email them from nearly every café in the City. When I was negotiating for my current position at work, I demanded: a huge pay rise; and –  I wanna be a vice-president; and – I want the smallest laptop money can buy. Well. I got the laptop. Two gay men sit down at the table behind me and instantly irritate me. Their conversation is about parties in New York and the emails they’d just sent each other from their iPhones. I want to shout Why don’t I get asked to parties? Why am I sat here drawing ****ing graphs? What happened to that youthful promise? Then I remember Mr Keith waiting at home for me, and where I’m going in a minute, and feel bad.

Graeme Archer's column will return next week

Graeme Archer: The Time of the Angels

Friday 2 November

I write a lot about London Fields, I know. It’s not quite square, and not quite safe; the archetypal London park. One step further today: I’m writing this while sat on a London Fields bench, watching the mums pushing their toddlers and the dogs chasing their sticks. Step into my office, baby. I’m not sure why, but a wistful, melancholic happiness settles on me here, as well as a sense of calm. Normally. Today I’m feeling more of a bladder-pain type sensation, since I’m just back off the overnight flight from Philadelphia, to find the flat filled with surly Polish builders, who have destroyed our old bathroom, but not yet fitted the new one. For the first time I notice that to which I was previously blind: there are no public conveniences in Hackney parks. 

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The Democratic candidates for President held a debate in Philadelphia while I was there, so I grabbed a ticket and went along, to bring you all the news from the campaign frontline. Just joking! Instead I went to dinner (El Vez, brilliant Mexican) with some American friends, all of whom are Democratic. I did ask them who they thought would win the primary: all thought Hillary. None wanted to vote for her, and not all of them were convinced she would become President. Strangely, they didn’t think any Republican could win either. What I notice about the Americans I know –  and none of us are gonna like this –  is that decent people vote Democrat, and revile the Republican party. It’s got nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with manner and culture. Conservatives everywhere need to remember this. If you cut off your educated middle-class nose, pretty soon you end up spiting your face.

Graeme Archer's Diary

Risk/Benefit

When was the last time you were in pain? For most of us, fortunately, pain and the trauma of injury are random, or accidental, events. The worst pain I’ve ever had to cope with (touch wood) was caused by some shoddy dental work, and I recovered from it by gulping down scaldingly hot black coffee in a Bow café, with more paracetemol than any hepatologist would countenance. It passed, of course it did. A very minor and transient brush with pain. How many of us, though, go to work in the full understanding that life-shattering pain and injury, perhaps death, are part and parcel of the terms and conditions we’ve signed up to? Not many.

Read this:

At first I couldn't move or speak. I was in shock and the words just wouldn't come out. It was as though I was paralysed. My arms were burnt and bleeding with shrapnel wounds. Then I managed to move. I looked down and could see that my foot had gone - it had been blown off - and I thought: 'I'm going home.' I was gutted because I wanted to stay with my mates. I eventually managed to shout 'Woollard, I've been hit.'

These are the words of Private Matt Woollard, of the 1st Battalion, Royal Anglian Regiment, as recounted in the Sunday Telegraph on the 15th October. He’s 19 now. He was 18 when his right foot was blown off by an anti-personnel mine in North Helmand, Afghanistan.

The medics rushed over and patched me up. I was conscious all the way through the whole thing so I saw and heard everything. I could see the look of concern on the faces of the blokes and I didn't think I was going to make it. I thought I was going to be one of those guys who survives the blast and then dies later.

This man – this nineteen-year-old – has shown more bravery, forbearance and courage than I can conceive of. He’s risked everything in order to carry out the foreign policy intentions of his country, and to help keep the Taleban out of Afghanistan. As a result, he’s left with the sort of injury that would knock most of us down for the rest of our lives.

What’s the very least that such men should expect from their fellow Britons? That their pay and conditions will reflect the risk they take on behalf of us all? Well, no. If you want to make a living in the public sector, best to forge a career spewing foul-mouthed drivel on the BBC’s radio service, than to offer to fight for your country. Risk/benefit, eh? Do we offer, instead, to look after the families left behind? Hardly – the accommodation we offer is reputedly foul, and would most likely be deemed unsuitable for the least deserving on any council’s waiting list. (Even seven years ago, the divorce rates in the armed services were double that of civilians, and I doubt the intervening period has done anything to narrow the gap.) Do we ensure that soldiers are adequately equipped, with the best protective and offensive materials available, befitting the bravest and most professional army in the world? Of course not! Soldiers famously spend what little money we do pay them on bettering their equipment. And when they are injured in the line of duty, do we offer them the best medical service the world could offer, in order to help them get back to peak? Dream on, matey. We sometimes allow servicemen with the most severe injuries to be treated on mixed civilian wards, sometimes next to elderly patients suffering from dementia (how we look after the old: that’s another article. Perhaps just as shaming).

I won’t quote the Military Covenant at you, though it’s worth reading, and I defy you to read it while thinking about Private Woollard and not feel a stab of shame. We should be providing any man or woman who is willing to fight for our country the following: decent pay and conditions; superior accommodation both for singletons and for those with families; world-class kit and equipment; and dedicated military hospital services in Britain, so that the injured can be looked after in a fitting environment.

I heard Geoff Hoon the other day on the radio, blethering on about democracy or something. You remember Geoff Hoon. He was the defence secretary who presided over the demonstrable inadequacies of the kit supplied to the army, kit which was shown to have rendered soldiers at greater risk of death than was necessary. He denied any such gap in provision, although he quietened down after the widow of Sergeant Steven Roberts released her husband’s audio diary, a recording made before he was killed in Basra from a gunwound in the chest, where he complained: Things we have been told we are going to get, we're not – and it's disheartening because we know we are going to go to war without the correct equipment. What happened to Geoff Hoon? Did he step back from public life, to eek out his career in some activity more suited to his – let’s be kind – average talents? Not at all! This is the Blair-Brown era remember! He was quietly refashioned and now sits as “Leader” of the House of Commons, like some overfed, self-satisfied cat, oozing smugness, ready to lecture us sternly about the importance of upholding democracy. What did the designers forget to include, when they put the New Labour Machine together? A sense of shame.

Here’s Private Woollard again, learning to overcome his injuries at the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre:

Even if I knew I was going to lose my leg I would do it all again. Being a soldier is the best job in the world.

It probably goes without saying that this young man is desperate to complete his physical rehabilitation, and rejoin his comrades. I don’t want to peddle clichés, but I’m in awe of Private Matt Woollard.

It’s nearly Poppy Day. A piercingly beautiful campaign from the Royal British Legion asks us all to remember the many soldiers like Pte Woollard, as well as the many families who’ve lost a husband, a father, a son. One hesitates to make a political comment; in fact I won’t. I doubt it’s necessary. Remember the men who died for us.

Graeme Archer on Canadian politics, the Lib Dems, and the BBC

Saturday 8am All the leaves are brown, but the sky is not grey. Walking through London Fields on the way to the Lido. All the leaves aren’t brown, in fact, many are still dark green and clinging to the trees, but there’s a golden brown carpet to shuff-shuff through. The sky, in fact, is warming up to be a crystal clear light blue. Another sunny day, I met you out in the garden (that’s for the other Belle and Sebastian fan who read Conservative Home).

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So I’ve been in Canada all week, in Toronto. Usually I come back from these trips kicking myself for not having paid the slightest attention to the politics of whatever state I happen to find myself in, thereby having nothing political to write about in this column, so this week I made myself watch the local news (oh God) and read the local newspaper (the Globe and Mail – very impressive). OK! Here’s the Archer factfile on Canadian politics...

Graeme Archer: Waterloo Sunrise

I know what you were expecting: a diatribe about the brazen burglary committed by Alistair, Darling last week (I’m sorry but I can’t think of his name without inserting a comma). Well, you know, imitation is the sincerest form of etc etc, and I think recent events will have convinced most people of the difference between a policy enacted from core principles – because a party wants to reduce the tax burden – and one yelped out through fear as a panic-stricken response to a resurgent Opposition. Organic policy growth versus the chattering of a machine, if you like. The difference is authenticity. I don’t think we should care a bit about Labour copying our policies, or the legion of dead-eyed Brown spawn that appear on the news to shriek about how our nummas don’t add up (all numbers add up – it’s one of their basic properties – you don’t need a doctorate in mathematics to know that. Although, I remember an interesting group theory lecture … well maybe another time).

To be serious. Our opportunity arises from our contrast with Brown. Unlike Blair, who had some palpable if mislaid fragment of decency buried deep within his chest, the Fist is hollow. Nothing drives him other than power. I suspect that his self-impressed coterie – the Ed-James-Burnham-Purnell-Andy-Balls creature – can you tell them apart? – really do think that by appearing on C4 News and shouting loudly they will create the impression that Tory policy is ill-thought out. Since our spokespeople have discovered the authority that comes with being calm and unflustered, I advise simply: more of the same please. Every Brown MP on telly is another marginal in the bag.

Graeme Archer: The rise of the machines

Gordon Brown and Labour. Close your eyes for a moment. What did you see?

Sunshine? Happy faces? Did you feel bathed in joy?

I saw: blackness. Ugly faces contorted in hate (to coin a phrase). Metal boxes, the height of skyscrapers, set out in a row and stretching far into the distance. If I listen carefully I can hear a frantic scrabbling and scratching at the walls from within.

You remember I told you once of my obsession with Iris Murdoch. Her novels talk endlessly about machines, indeed one of them is called The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. I think that by machine she meant the almost-cosmic algebra that binds us all together, and can tug hard between proximate humans. (This is the atheist’s surrogate for God.) If you’re in love, there’s a sort of machine binding you to the Other, almost independent of your two selves. Machines like that are good, though I find it important to understand their intent (even if it is only a literary device designed to mask the essential biological imperative we all obey). Work is another machine, one in which it is very important to feel in control. Lose that control at work, and you will lose your self-respect, your self-esteem and ultimately your integrity.

Graeme Archer's diary

Greetings from the City of Brotherly Love. Beautiful Philadelphia is awash with that late summer sunshine which I so confidently predicted last week was now finished for the year. Gone in Hackney it may well be, but Pennsylvania remains very warm. I would tell you the temperature but of course it’s reported in “F” rather than “C” and I have no idea what it means so I can never remember it. It’s hot – I’m wearing shorts.  The shorts follow from the heat, not the other way round, by the way. 

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I enjoyed an afternoon drink in the Groucho Club in Soho last Saturday, before I left for Philly. OK the truth is that I was at a creative writing class there and I was drinking a glass of water, which was the only substance we were allowed to consume, as non-members. Have you ever been to a creative writing class? They are a great fillip for winter months. There’s always the shocking moment when the girl with the sweetest face and the quietest voice starts reading her homework: You shut your f***** mouth you f***** f**** of a***** f***, he said, as she twisted the budgie’s neck. Even more embarrassing is when you introduce yourselves for the first time. “My name is Graeme and I’m a statistician. From Hackney” I announce, after listening to someone say “Hi, I’m a corporate lawyer, I’ve had two plays produced on Radio 4 and I’ve just submitted my second novel”. Anyway I labour on. It is surprising and a bit frightening sometimes to read what you produce when you’re forced to write without stopping for five minutes. Let’s hope no-one in our HR department ever reads them.

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Graeme Archer: Deirdre or Dave?

Verona, Thursday evening

Here we are again, back in Piazza Bra’, gazing at the Arena. The opera season’s over now but there’s some sort of furniture show on at the Fiera di Verona which is driving the population wild. Apparently furniture’s “in” this season, the way that Crocs were last. Actually I don’t see many Crocs on the marbled Verona streets, which is a shame, because these slippy surfaces are probably one of the few places they would serve practical advantage. I spend the evenings wandering from square to square, clutching a novel under my arm, thinking: this is probably not the best preparation for writing a column about politics. Away with that pitying look, madam! I’m a happy-go-lucky statistician, and all of Europe is my oyster. Well, a small part of north-eastern Italy. And it’s not really mine. And I don’t like oysters. (Isn’t that the dirty line from Spartacus?)

Alright: oh God. I’m so, so sick of squeezing myself through airports and flying about, just to go to work. Airports heave with salarymen like me, being pushed like model soldiers across some war-gaming-board, mostly for reasons that could not be justified under any reasonable criteria (I mean: I work with some of the smartest minds on the planet. You’d think we’d have learned how to use a phone by now). Most of us are separated from our loved ones. I’m never apart from Mr Keith without wondering how many days we have left before The Event overtakes one of us. I doubt I’m unique in this? It’s such a short life, isn’t it? Am I getting the Quality Of Life balance right?

Whenever newspapers discuss quality of life, it’s always in terms of “Tories want to stop poor people going on holiday”. I think it’s more true to say “Tories would prefer that people who live in Scotland don’t have to fly to London in order to fly somewhere else on holiday”, but never mind. If by some miracle I ever found myself in front of a candidate selection panel, I can save them one question: No more airports or expansion thereof, in the south east, none, ever. I don’t know anyone who ever flies anywhere voluntarily, other than for their summer holiday.

And I think government could play it’s part. The company I work for has a beautiful suite of videoconferencing facilities that save us a lot of travel – we just don’t have enough of them. We should offer taxbreaks to large companies, to get them to switch from flying to videoconference. Maybe boroughs should build them, and hire them out to small businesses.

More taxbreaks could be offered to people to have them work at home. Am I wrong in this simple reasoning? If everyone who went to work in an office spent one day a week working at home, we’d reduce rush-hour traffic by a fair bit, no? I know, some people can’t work at home – but an awful lot more people could, than do currently. It strikes me as ridiculous that in 2007, so many people still undergo hell in order to get to an aesthetically repulsive office environment, to do work that could as easily be conducted from home. Everyone should experience the strange joy that comes of dialling into An Important Meeting while lolling around the bed in a scuzzy pair of trackies. Not that I ever do this.

Graeme Archer's Diary: In praise of men

I was going to write about my father this week, since what would have been his seventieth birthday passed recently, and the daily ache I have for his company has been consequently more pronounced. But the drafts became too personal, so I’ve tried to rephrase in more general tones. I’d like to pay him some small dedication by talking about the lessons he taught me, if that’s OK with all of you.

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I sometimes think that one of life’s grand ironies is that gay men appear to be the last group of people to celebrate the worth of heterosexual men. It feels that way to me, anyway, as I flick through the endless succession of adverts, sitcoms and “dramas” that make straight men out to be foolish, feckless and worthless. If we are to believe the chatter of the culture, men can no more pass GCSE English than they can select the correct laundry fluid for the weekly wash. The stereotypes of gay men are revolting enough – we’re not all obsessed with celebrity gossip, and most of us couldn’t tell a soft-furnishing from a screwdriver – but our ultra (numerical) minority status, and the usually auxiliary role we perform in child-rearing (the odd break for harassed parents provided by the uncles!) mean the gap between the media narrative and the truth about male homosexual experience remains a matter for private toe-curling, rather than a political problem. But what about straight men? They are nearly half the population and until recently seen as core components of successful child-rearing. What is the effect of the “all men are rubbish” narrative on them?

Graeme Archer: Bob Crow, Ian McEwan and wire flowers

Bishopsgate, 7.30am  The world, someone once said, divides into two groups of people: those who divide the world into two groups of people, and those who don’t. I think I’m one of the former. The world also divides, another way, into people who are fairly relaxed about social interaction, and those for whom any attempt at organising a group event becomes an enervating, Abigail’s-Party type nightmare. I fear I’m closer to the latter there.   

Thus it was last night. Mr Keith and I invited a couple of friends over to our manor to sample a bit of Hackney life. You may have noticed, I’m very fond of Hackney; so I arranged to meet my mates at Bishopsgate, from where I planned a leisurely stroll through Spitalfields, pointing out Jeanette Winterson’s house, and the Hawksmoor church, up Brick Lane (really: I’ve read enough novels about Brick Lane now, thank you), over onto Columbia Road (flower market), past the Hackney city farm and up and over the Regent’s Canal to Broadway market, and then into the Evening Standard five-star, Fay Maschler loved, uber-trendy eaterie I’d selected to show off the East End at its culinary best.

Graeme Archer's Diary: “If a man is tired of New York, he must be tired of walking in a grid pattern”

Where does one person end, and another begin? Such was the preoccupation of that great lady, Iris Murdoch, whose novels had a very powerful effect on my adolescence. Since she was also preoccupied with swimming – many of her characters spend a lot of time in the water – and since most of my mornings begin in the London Fields Lido, her fundamental question often forms itself in my head, as I make my stately progress from one end of the pool to the other, under the lowing greyness of the East End sky.

She didn’t mean, of course, that we all run into one another in some sort of biological mish-mash. I think she meant that all our actions have the potential to impact on everyone else. You see this very clearly in a swimming pool. So long as all the swimmers take care not to get in the way of the people close by them, the entire pool ‘works’ as though under the guidance of a supra-physical observer. By concerning yourself with your near neighbours, a harmonious steady-state is induced across the entire pool even though that is not your personal objective. By contrast, swimmers who think only of themselves induce a chaotic pattern of interference over the whole pool that spoils the experience for everyone.

There’s actually a mathematical under-pinning to this, known as the Hammersley-Clifford theorem, which I made great use of in writing my own utterly rubbish Ph.D. thesis (on parameter estimation in hidden Markov random fields, since you ask, about a hundred years before most of you were born, and subsequently read by precisely nobody). Well-defined neighbourhoods have the property that they can induce a global optimum. (God, as Iris may have been suggesting, is in the machine; but that’s another article.)

Not to stretch the analogy too far: but isn’t this what we mean by Social Responsibility? And isn’t it why left-wing people, for all their good intentions, don’t “get it”? Conservatives understand, on an intuitive level, that when you take care of your neighbourhood (either a physical or emotional neighbourhood), everyone helps to create an ordered society. When those local neighbourhoods break down, chaos will reign – everywhere – even if the neighbourhood breakdown is not universal: anarchy in the UK. Left-wing people, though often individuals of great kindness, cannot believe that optimum global conditions can arise from undirected local behaviour. To return to the Lido, the left-wing replacement for the good neighbourliness of my fellow morning swimmers would be a chap on a high chair, barking into a megaphone, issuing instructions: “You there! Middle lane! Red shorts! Wait at the end for her in the cap to pass you! Hey – matey with the tattoo in the slow lane – this is a pool not a social club”. Of course this wouldn’t work (but it’s an amusing thought, and I’m surprised that Hackney council haven’t tried to implement such a system).

Graeme Archer: London-ness and Andrew Boff - How to beat Livingstone

I was going to write about Iris Murdoch and Social Responsibility this week, but the media frenzy about the London Mayor seems to be heating up, and the esteemed Editor suggested I might like to try something new, like, ooh, why not write about politics? I said: Have you gone completely insane? But he meant it, apparently. So here goes: my four point plan to end Ken Livingstone’s career. My suggestions are in places general (i.e. they would apply to whoever fights the Tory corner) and in other places specific (either in terms of policies or in terms of the candidate: I am partisan for Andrew Boff, whom I believe to be best placed to defeat Livingstone).

Step 1 - Select a candidate who frightens Labour

I’ve known Andrew Boff for ten years, and I can’t think of anything about him that doesn’t make him a perfect candidate to be a great Mayor. He has the right set of just enough attention-grabbing, much-needed policies (some of which I discuss below). More importantly, he has London-ness in buckets: he has been the leader of Hillingdon Borough Council – so has experience of the fabled ‘Outer London’ of Tory mythology – as well as scoring the most spectacular by-election victory in Hackney’s Queensbridge ward a couple of years ago – so he knows how to win in Inner London. He helped establish (as secretary of the Residents and Traders association) the Broadway Market, one of the most successful of London markets that has been responsible for the regeneration of the London Fields area. He lives round the corner from London Fields and you’re more likely to see him cycling down the Regents Canal towpath to see a client in Maida Vale (non-London readers: that's a long way!) than you are ever to see him in a car. “London-ness” is what I call that ineffable quality a candidate for Mayor must have: they have to look, sound and live like the Londoners they want to represent. That might seem a tall order in a diverse world-city, which is why I call the quality “London-ness” rather than any specific demographic. Like the divine, you know it when you see it, and you feel its absence when it ain’t there. Andrew has it. The others don’t.

Andrew also frightens Labour. The Compass website is a sort of leftwing mirror of ConservativeHome. In a number of its recent discussions on the mayoralty, commentators there have singled out Andrew as the Tory they would most fear to battle. This might be, as I have previously suggested, because he is the sort of Tory who confounds the expectations of the commentariat (in a way that some of the other candidates do not). I happen to think they’ve misunderstood Andrew’s most pertinent charms – being leftwing, Compass focus on certain of his demographic characteristics – but having been with Andrew on the council estates of Hackney and seen the visceral hatred with which Hackney Labour poured enormous resource in order to win back that single ward seat, I know that this guy is the sort of person who terrifies the left.

Tory discussions about strategy always seem to devolve to either/or – either we focus on Outer or Inner London – when what we need, of course, is someone who’s a natural in both. For proof that an Etonian education is not required in order to be comfortable with people of any type of background, look no further than Mr Boff.

Graeme Archer is away

His column returns next week.

Graeme Archer's Diary: Why do Conservatives love George Orwell so much?

A cat may look at a king, but it’s a brave amateur writer who decides to discuss George Orwell, Nick Cohen and P.D.James in one article. Oh well. Here goes.

Why do Conservatives love George Orwell so much? My first (and probably last) attempt to sway a parliamentary selection panel involved me reading passages aloud from Nineteen Eighty-Four, to draw attention to the illiberal creep of the culture under Tony Blair. I am probably only one of hundreds of spotty Tory youths who have felt passionately that Orwell had put his finger on the seductive dangers of totalitarian regimes, and that by reminding the population of his warnings from the 40s we could persuade them to vote for us in the 90s. But Orwell, of course, wasn’t a Conservative.

It isn’t only foolish and correctly unselected Tory candidates who reach for Orwell when they want to make a point: do you remember John Major (sigh!) murmuring of “old maids cycling to communion through the morning mist”? He was derided for it at the time, but I knew what he meant. It was an idea of England. Romanticism isn’t meant to be realistic. But this romantic vision was Orwell’s, and he wasn’t a Conservative.

Leave aside the fact that the man was a genius who understood the power of fiction to convey political ideas. I wonder if Orwell is such a hero to Conservatives because he was a democratic socialist. Would we venerate him so much if he were completely ‘one of us’? Our big idea – the theme that runs through our modern history – is that freedom is more important than equality. We don’t usually state that so baldly, because it’s a frightening concept. But whether we choose to highlight it or not, it’s the answer to “I am a Conservative because…” for those of us who are liberal Conservatives. (It is not the answer that would be given by social Conservatives.). The fact that a man of sterling non-Tory credentials also thought it important to warn of the dangers of suppressing freedom is the perfect external validation of our Big Tory Idea. 

Graeme Archer's Diary: Cohabitation, Archer's Conjecture, cats

The Law Commission has renewed its calls for legislation to provide “partnership rights” for couples who have been cohabiting in an unmarried state. Their concern is with the legal status of the “injured party” in a broken-down common-law relationship, after said partnership ends, and they want to give such people legal claim on the property of the partner they have left/been left by. I don’t know where to begin with the mess of this proposal. Practically all pair-bonding sexual partners have always been able to regularise their legal commitment to one another: we called it marriage. Some grotesque inequalities were tidied up for gay couples with the advent of civil partnerships, although oddly heterosexual couples were forbidden to register CPs. (So in fact we’re now in the ridiculous situation where gay people can get married, but mustn’t call it that (though guess what – we do! Ha ha!), while straight people can’t form civil partnerships, if they want to get married but avoid the cultural connotations of that word.) The Law Commission’s “solution” – which, farcically, is presented as a tidying up exercise – merely adds another tier of legal distinction and polices that most private of spaces: the bedroom habits of private adults.

Graeme Archer's Diary: Shambo and racial profiling

The City of London crumbles into the borough of Hackney at the interface of Bishopsgate and Shoreditch High Street. Between these two is a tiny handful of properties called Norton Folgate. On Monday evening I passed along this route on the upper deck of the number 26 bus – nothing unusual in that. I was reading Tamburlaine Must Die, a novel about Christopher Marlowe written by Louise Welsh. Just as the bus juddered out of Bishopsgate, I read the following: Where else can a poet live but the bastard sanctuaries? Beggars’ breeding grounds where all are as welcome, or unwelcome, as the other. My lodgings are in a broken-up tenement in Norton Follgate. Well! By chance I found myself passing along the same street that Christopher Marlowe was entering in the novel. This is only the second time I’ve experienced this; the first was half my lifetime ago. I sat in Russell Square one hot, yellow evening in July 1989, reading (with my mouth hanging open) The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst, as the characters made an entrance into the same square. Is this a universal sensation, like deja vu? There must be a Greek word to describe the oddly pleasurable, reality-flickering jolt it serves on you. Russell T. Davies, if you are a Conservative Home columnar regular – and I can imagine nothing else – please take note: there’s a Doctor Who story in there somewhere.

Graeme Archer urges all good Tories not to buy Campbell's Diaries

Graeme Archer's Sunday diary.

Alistair Campbell has published his diaries. Lots of apparently sane Conservatives are poring over them. The blogosphere, Sunday supplements (and BBC supplicants) are awash with reviews. Why this? Am I alone in finding the thinly-veiled respect for Campbell, evident in many Tories, completely repugnant? Why would you want to read anything written by that bullying, foul-mouthed, moral pygmy of a man? What can he teach us, exactly? How to besmirch the name and reputation of honest, good public servants? How to plagiarise Ph.D. theses and pass them off as “intelligence”? How to blacken the names of people who can’t answer back, such as hospitalised pensioners or the victims of train crash carnage? How to use belligerence as a mask for the fact that you have lost whatever moral compass you may have been born with? No thanks. Bad enough that my taxes paid his salary while he infected the body politic; unbearable to contemplate adding to his retirement pension scheme.

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If you’re not awake at 6am of a weekday morning this won’t mean much to you, but those of you who are: don’t you get sick of those two-way conversations with which Today illuminates its main news stories of the day, after the 6am headlines and before the 6.12am paper review? For the uninitiated, it goes like this: suppose the topic is a report on poverty by the Rowntree trust, or a government white paper on Improved Regulations For Breathing. What happens is that some BBC reporter, adopting the confident tones of a lifetime expert on poverty, or breathing regulations, or whatever, is “interviewed” in a scripted manner by the main presenter. So we’ll have Edward Stourton [for it is he] saying “So, Sally, this report makes pretty grim reading for the government, does it?” – as though he doesn’t know what Sally is going to say – whence Sally replies – breathlessly, as though importing news that should shock you bolt upright against the pillow -  “Yes Ed, that’s absolutely right, this report really does make pretty grim reading for the government”. Sally then proceeds to read out the press release from the lobby group, government ministry or political party involved. It’s pointless (we know no more than had we just read the press release ourselves), patronising (are we supposed to think, post-Hutton, these are spontaneous conversations?) and when the “news” story being so breathlessly relayed to us by Sally is a press release from the Labour party about how great the prime minister is, downright sinister.

Graeme Archer's Diary: David "David" Cameron and other things

Graeme Archer's Platform archive can be read here.  He begins his column today.

Verona
For Janet Daley and I to agree about anything, something pretty tectonic-plate-shifting on the centre-right must be happening. After all, I’m an authentic card-carrying, leaflet-delivering, vote-garnering grassroot Tory activist of twenty-plus years experience, while Ms Daley is a (formerly) Marxist journalist at the Daily Telegraph. Just joking! I speak of course of our support for marriage. Ms Daley this week wrote beautifully of how a marriage is an act of union between families, and is not solely a machine for providing the best upbringing for children yet found (though it is this too, of course). At Mr Keith’s and my Civil Partnership ceremony last March I told our guests (including our families, sat together for the first time – you’ve not experienced stress until you’ve introduced one set of inlaws to another, have you?) how I had struggled to find a non-confrontational form of words to describe the event, before I gave up and used those which seemed the best fit: “Today we got married. Welcome to our wedding”. Anyway. As you read this, the newspaper columns will be filling up with 500 word articles, saying that tax-system support for marriage is either nothing but common sense, or an unfair attack on single mums. I think this line of Labour’s – that we are intending to subsidise feckless men at the expense of struggling mothers – will not gain traction, not least because David “David” Cameron is so visibly at ease with the good things about modern Britain. You can’t be a happy supporter of legal and cultural equality for gay people and be easily painted as some sort of finger-wagging right-wing authoritarian nutter. Some of “David”’s critics at the Telegraph might like to reflect on this.

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I woke this morning to a Sherlock Holmes moment: the mystery of the clanging bells (the mystery being that there were none). Italian church bells are more cow-herd than Canterbury (think “Heidi”), and their noise, for the 5 years I lived here, was my first intimation of consciousness of a morning. But no more. Italians are increasingly unwilling to have their sleep disrupted in this way, and have required the church to put a sock in it, at least before 7am. I’m not sure how this creeping modernity makes me feel, though I was once driven close to a psychotic state by the relentless, multiple-churched, quarter-hourly clanging which was perhaps the only interesting feature of the frazione of Laveno in which I dwelt. E. M. Forster understood something of the gap between the Englishman’s dream of Italy and the reality: Where Angels Fear To Tread.