MICHAEL? WHO’S MICHAEL?

WHEN DON VITO CORLEONE wakes up in hospital after an attempt on his life has left him near to death, Marlon Brando manages to condense years of practising method acting, distilling his expression and reducing his mannerisms to a little as possible, all brought to its head in the phrase “Michael. Where’s Michael?” When no Michael is forthcoming, Corleone and Brando wave away the entourage with a dismissive back of the hand swat and a mumble.

IN SOME CONTRAST, “Godfather” Joe Jackson, the octogenarian head of a clan with almost as much power as the mythical and real Corleones may have had in the fifties in New York City, was also expected to pronounce his justice on his feelings about his lost son when he appeared at the gates of the family’s mansion in Encino yesterday.

THE ASSEMBLED MEDIA obviously expected Jackson to say something touching that could go down as an obituary and perhaps even be set in stone. Bafflingly, Jackson Sr. stated “I wish Michael were here to see all this”, suggesting that he was not quite sure that “this” was “there” because Michael wasn’t.

BUT THE “LOWLIGHT” (as folks say now) of his “press conference” was when he introduced some grinning half-wit with whom he told us he had formed a new company and that a DVD would be out next week, and that Blu-Ray was the format of the future. He may have later added that he was “grieving on the inside”, but this lack of sensitivity suggests that he chose the wrong profession all those years ago: if he had gone into politics he would have made it to the top anywhere.

LEST WE FORGET

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR ANYONE TO HAVE MISSED the fact that Michael Joe Jackson, the popular singing and dancing entertainer, has recently died. There can be no doubt that he was one of the prime movers and shakers in the pop world over the last half of the XX century, and although I never witnessed him “live” on stage, have never bought any of his singles or albums and have never seen his famous Thriller video-clip from beginning to end, I have to admit that there must have been something extra special about him.

AS I HAVE BEEN BUYING RECORDS REGULARLY SINCE 1972, spending a considerable amount of my sometimes hard earned money on music, the above detail may be a little surprising to those dozens of commentators, analysts, experts and journalists who have repeatedly come out with expressions such as “We all have a Michael Jackson record somewhere at home”, and “Every one of us has bought a record of his”. This despite my record collection being as catholic as to go from Abba to The Zombies, with almost everything in between except for Heavy Metal and Hard Rock, or any gentlemen with very long hair except for the lead singer of The Human League, although that was only on one side of his head.

ANOTHER STATEMENT UP WITH WHICH I have been reluctantly putting over recent days is “Everyone has their own ‘Michael Jackson moment’.” I am not quite sure that I do, although perhaps the best I can offer is what follows.

COMMENTATORS ARE CONCERNED, it seems, about Michael Jackson’s legacy. “How will he be remembered?” they worry. Among their concerns is whether history will see Jackson as a great artiste or as a man with a troubled personal history. He may equally, I imagine, be remembered for his charity – the vast amounts of money he gave to children’s associations, in particular one case of him giving 20 million United States dollars to one boy in Massachusetts. For me, however, it must be his sense of humour: on a rare occasion when he appeared on stage alongside his beloved sister Janet in 1995, he quipped the following to the audience, “This is just for you to see that we are not the same person.”

DOABLE AND WE CAN DO IT

Persicos odi, puer, apparatus
Horace Odes xxxviii, 1

IMPISH, BEAMING, MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD, President of Iran and sometime bespoke outfitter to the Royal Navy, must be seething over the West’s high-, heavy- and cack-handed coverage of his country’s recent elections. In most of his heartfelt speeches against Western interference, it is at times possible to feel that he has a right to claim he is genuinely upset and is the victim of underhand activity by “Britain and its evil allies”, which apparently include the USA.

I HAVE NEVER BEEN TO PERSIA, although everything I have read about it, including the sublime The Road to Oxiana, by Robert Byron (not the Byron you are thinking of), has suggested that a trip to Persia, now strangely called Iran, is a must for anyone who enjoys beauty, ranging in its scope from landscape to fruit, from smell to taste, and from women to architecture.

BOTH THE SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS CHAPS who have run Persia since Byron went there and the British were then encouraged to leave it to the influence of our esteemed fellow westerners the Russians, have gradually managed to make it become less appetising to both myself, with my wistful imagination and images of rich cloths, luscious drapes and carpets, scented pomegranate bushes, lemon trees and the sound of cool water softening the harshness of the afternoon’s shuddering heat hazes, and indeed to anyone else who might have found a visit interesting, profitable or fun.

GOOD OLD AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI and his reign of mullah terror certainly added to my worries about visiting the region, and now Ahmadinejad and the new Ayatollah, this time Khamanei, have now more or less put a lid on any ideas I had about a holiday in the sun in their country. And even if the lid were made of lead I would still be worried about the nuclear threat underneath it.

THE SAD THING ABOUT ALL OF THIS is that although I feel I have a perfect right to feel worried about visiting Persia, I would have thought that Gordon Brown and – in particular – Barack Hussein Obama might have wanted to give these people a ticking off. Alas, no. Obama seems to be as afraid of Ahmadinejad as he is of slobbering fanatic Hugo Chavez.

PRIMUS INTER PARES

THOSE WHO ARGUE THAT THE BNP is proving that Britain has become a racist country obviously do not know how to count. Despite electing two MEPs to the inconsequential, buffoon-filled European Parliament, the British National Party actually managed to receive fewer votes in the last European elections, but, thanks to the idiotic system of proportional representation used in most European countries, have done better than ever before.

BUT THE TRUE STATE OF RACISM in Britain must be seen in the light of the recent election of John Bercow to the highly prestigious position of Speaker of the House of Commons. Whilst people have already been making unpleasant jokes about Bercow’s diminutive height, no one has decided to make an issue of the fact that, somewhat surprisingly, he is the first person of the Jewish faith to be elected to this position.

THE STRENGTH OF MULTICULTURALISM in Britain should be assessed against that of our neighbours in Europe; whilst there is definitely at least one more prominent politician in Europe who has to stand on books in order to make speeches or kiss his wife, how many prominent leaders are Jewish?

NOT ONLY DO WE HAVE THIS TO BE PROUD OF, but we also have Pola Manzila, Baroness Uddin, the first and only Muslim woman in the British Parliament. She is also the only Bangladeshi woman in the House of Lords. Admittedly, however, she may also become the first woman member of the House of Lords, Bangladeshi or Muslim or not, to go to prison for fraud, after claiming £83,000 in taxpayers’ money for a house that does not exist, living in subsidized accommodation in London and all the while keeping a mansion in Bangladesh. All of this adds to the eclectic nature of our democracy. Despite the fact that Roman Catholics aren’t even allowed in the lobby.

THE BLACK ADDERS

OXYMORA ARE PERHAPS NOT everyone’s cup of tea, but I have been thinking rather deeply about what can be done with the terms “transparency”, “blackout” and “whitewash” in relation to the covert revelations produced about the expenses claimed by our good leaders during the period of Tony Blair’s “whiter than white” New Labour Party. More than one of the commentators on our daily newspapers have obviously been doing the same thing.

NO RACKING OF BRAINS seems to have been needed for The Sun to come up with “Blankers”, or The Daily Mail to produce “Blackwash” in order to describe the “redaction” of the sums and accounts showing where our representatives have been spending our hard-earned money.

A PRIME REDACTOR has to be much-loved Conservative MP Andrew Mackay, who has, to the chagrin of the people of East Bracknell, Berkshire, discovered that he ought to resign from Parliament “after a phone call from David Cameron”, the content of which he will not reveal. The content of his expenses claim form, however, can be seen above.

YET SUCH HARSH TREATEMENT must surely be doing great damage to our once-proud democracy, and I do feel we should stop this nonsense now. No one who works in an office pays for staples or paper clips, so why should MPs be any different? After all, most of them have never learnt any better. So it is time to draw a line under this issue. Or perhaps through it.

ALL THE WAY TO THE BANKSY

MY RECENT TRIP TO BATH, to take the waters and jolly about in the company of my good lady wife, met with the fortunate coincidence of the opening, in nearby Bristol, of the Banksy vs. Bristol Museum exhibition. This is probably the most spectacular showing of works by someone who is without doubt the most relevant popular artist of recent decades. The opening of the exhibition, in keeping with the foolhardy approach adopted by “Banksy”, also known as Robin Banks, had been kept an absolute secret, and thus, when I was watching the BBC news, I almost gagged on a forkful of my “Somerset apple and beef sausages on a bed of garlic, chive and aromatic mustard mash with thyme and coriander”.

THE NEWS ITEM WAS FOLLOWED by one of far greater import; this was the good soul Ban-ki Moon, announcing that the dreaded swine flu was now about to, and I quote, “overcome all humanity within weeks”. Ban-ki showed all of his power as the head of the most powerful Quango in the world when he mumbled that, and I quote, “We must all be very careful, or we all risk death.” I will take his words to heart, although to my mind there is something very “Prince-Charlesish” about all of this fuss.

BUT THIS JUXTAPOSITION OF BANKIES served to highlight the similarities between these two gentlemen. In both cases they are utterly unknown to the public at large; both make ephemeral, puzzling statements that may disappear the next day; even those who hear their messages have no idea of what they wish to convey; no one wants them to do what they do; they would not be missed were they to be vaporized into oblivion in completion of their own dreadful predictions; they both make enormous amounts of money for doing nothing; and they have both put their names and reputations on pigs.

MAKING PLANS FOR NIGEL

UNFORTUNATELY FOR EUROPE, as I write, Nigel Farage and several of his entourage have been returned to Brussels and/or Strasbourg to waste more Euros and to denounce those who waste even more than he does but do not admit that they are involved in “doing a daylight”, as they apparently say in the world of commodity brokerage, in which Farage led his own business to bankruptcy. Yet there is hope for converting Farage into acting in the “European way”.

STAUNCH BRITISH PATRIOT FARAGE has, despite his own convictions, learnt something from mixing with our amis and freunden. Far from remaining a simple, incorruptible enfant terrible and scourge of all things continental, Farage has married the German Fräulein Kirsten Mehr, who now works as his secretary, at £30,000 per year, showing that even Farage has found inspirazione, and also a little lebensraum in the hinterland of something European.

A BARRAGE OF FARAGE

THE MEMBERS OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT must be hoping against hope that the United Kingdom Independent Party, led by ever-smiling aristocrat Nigel Farage, is defeated by some other fringe group of lunatics so that European Deputies can happily get back to stealing money from the European coffers without anyone telling the wider public what they are up to.

FARAGE AND HIS MERRY MEN (pictured above) have spent most of their apparently fun-ridden time in the European Parliament denouncing the evil-doings of European politicians, who have been startled by the fact that there are people in Britain who think that members of parliament should not be corrupt. Farage himself was responsible for denouncing the French convicted criminal and MEP Jacques Barrot, after he had stolen two million pounds from government funds yet was immune from prosecution in France as he was a member of the French government, thus being punished by being “sent to Europe”, to fiddle some more.

JOSÉ MANUEL BARROSO, THE PORTUGUESE head of the European Commission, chosen under fishy circumstances, has also been the victim of Farage’s whistle-blowing. In 2005, using European legislation requiring MEPs to divulge their interests, Farage asked Barroso to declare where he had spent his summer holidays. Outraged at the suggestion that he should comply with the law, and unwilling to tell the world that he had spent the summer on the private yacht of Greek shipping millionaire Spiro Latsis, with whom Barroso had just signed a 10.3 million Euro grant of European Commission “aid”, Barroso did everything to have the issue hushed up, and any MEPs who supported Farage’s motion of no confidence in him were thrown out of their groups in mid-debate.

CAROLINE SAYS (2)

AFTER HAVING DEFENDED GORDON BROWN to the hilt on Wednesday night, stating that he was the ideal man for the job of running the country, someone in whom she had “every confidence”, intellectual former Minister of State for Europe Caroline Flint (pictured above) came out shortly before lunchtime on Friday with an excoriating attack on our good leader, denouncing him as being a sexist, double-dealing macho who only sees women as “window dressing” and refuses to allow them into what she called his “inner circle”.

WHILST I HAVE NO DOUBT THAT GORDON BROWN might occasionally look down upon women, even sometimes thinking of them in a sexual way, I cannot believe that he would do so about straight-talking Ms Flint, who, after all, has an Honours Degree in Film and Literature from East Anglia University and used to work for Lambeth Council.

QUESTIONS MUST, HOWEVER, be asked about some of the points Ms Flint states in the e-mail that was released on Friday, apparently through the good offices of her husband and fellow Labour campaigner for a better life for all. What concerns me most is her curious use of idiom, employing an expression that I believed I understood, but which I now imagine has arcane signification beyond my wit; in her communication she directly states to our worthy Prime Minister, discussing her loyalty: “You have strained every sinew of that loyalty”.

THE MANNEKEN PISS

TWO ELECTIONS IN A WEEK should be seen as something similar to walking down one of those long passages in the underground railway full of irritating buskers singing old Joan Baez or Bob Dylan songs and expecting us to throw money into their battered guitar cases so they can go off and buy drugs for themselves and food for their foul-smelling dogs. We all know they shouldn’t be bothering us and we are sure that they really should be working for a living, and yet we are divided into those who give them a shilling or two because they feel self-conscious, those who ignore them and walk past, those who bizarrely actually think they sound nice and those who sometimes have too much to drink and start shouting at them or threaten to call the police. I will leave it up to readers to work out which of these I am.

BUT ONE SHOULD NOT CONFUSE the local elections with the European ones. In local elections people more or less know who the candidates are, because these are the haunts of the retired tweed-attired colonels, who rabbit on about returning to the good old days with traditional values, when one could take one’s secretary over one’s knee without getting hauled up before some sexual discrimination court, and the Woodbine-smoking anorak-wearing lefties who want the local power station closed down so we can all go back to using candles and be plunged into darkness and sub-zero temperatures for most of the winter while we watch our vegetables stewing over peat fires.

BUT THE EUROPEAN ISSUE IS ENTIRELY NEW to most Britons, hardly any of whom have actually voted in this charade over the last twenty years, and most of whom never will. The usual suspects never line up for these elections, with the right wing being too suspicious of foreigners to want to have to sit next to them for long periods of time and listen to their unintelligible gibberish, and the Woodbine brigade too afraid to be very far away from a betting shop for too long. Thus we are left with nondescript men in grey suits – suited perfectly for what they will have in their hands in Brussels.