The dinner was held in the State Department on the eve of the United Nations deadline. The room was filled with classy Washington hostesses, ambassadors, naval and military brass hats and political journalists. At the table where Hugh Laurie and I sat was Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post, famously played by Jason Robards in the film All The President’s Men, the man who stuck with Woodward and Bernstein throughout the Watergate Scandal. I sat next to his wife, better known as Sally Quinn a quondam television anchorwoman. Hugh sat on the other side of Mrs Bradlee and next to a girl called Doro, short for Dorothy. Hugh was telling this charming woman about our day in Washington. We had walked all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the protesters camped outside the White House, which sadly had been closed to visitors, and on to the Capitol, where we had obtained tickets to watch a senatorial debate which, naturally, had consisted of Senator Robert Dole, on his own, talking to Mr Speaker and a shorthand-taker about Social Security. To be fair, the average day in the House of Commons is no more exciting, but we had felt a little let down. Doro suggested that she come round to our hotel the next morning and take Hugh and me on a private guided tour of the White House herself. We naturally thought this kind, but expressed polite scepticism, or – as we were in America – skepticism.
‘I don’t think there will be a problem,’ she assured us. ‘You see, the President of the United States is my father.’
True to her word and in the company of a Secret Service agent straight from Central Casting, complete with ear-piece and Burberry, Doro picked us up from the hotel and we sped, to the accompaniment of much radio communication between our car and the White House security staff, to number 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Doro and a White House girl called Lydia gave us a tour that included the kitchens and the flower rooms. At one point we passed a large photograph of a couple standing in front of a Christmas tree. ‘The two nicest people in the world,’ said Doro. It was of her mother and father and she clearly meant it.
We passed the Oval Office as we walked away. I swear to you I didn’t press any buttons. I’m almost sure I didn’t anyway. If I did and this whole conflagration is all my fault then I’m terribly, terribly sorry.
The curtains of the Oval Office were drawn shut. One could almost smell the intensity of the conversation going on within amongst the hatchet-faced men helping this girl’s father come to a decision that would deploy thousands of aircraft and men and change the history of the world. ‘Should I give a little wave?’ said Doro. ‘He’ll be busy,’ we said. Indeed, at that moment it turns out that the Execute Order was being prepared for his signature. We waved anyway and passed on.
On the flight back home the Concorde pilot, Captain Riley, invited Hugh and me to the cockpit for take-off and landing.
It is indeed something to have friends in high places.
The Sin of the Wheel
If you want the clearest proof in the world that there are no such things as clairvoyants, you only have to visit a casino. They are temples erected to the Absolute Certainty of Uncertainty. For every person who claims that they once had a vision of the number twelve, that they went up to a roulette table, planked their everything on twelve and then walked away with a fortune in their pockets, there are thirty-six people who had the same vision, planked their same everything and stumbled away broke.
Casinos live on what they call their ‘vigorish’. In roulette there are thirty-six numbers. If you place one single chip en plein, as they say, on one of those numbers and it comes up, the casino will give you in return thirty-five chips tax free – honest odds of thirty-five to one, you might think. But no, there are in fact thirty-seven numbers on the wheel: there is a zero. The house should therefore pay odds of thirty-six to one on every en plein bet. That difference of one in thirty-seven is the vigorish. This tiny percentage pays for the croupiers, the furniture and props, the surveillance cameras and all the paraphernalia of a well-appointed casino, leaving enough over in profit to justify government bribes, gang warfare and all the muscle an anxious concessionaire can bring to bear on rivals and authorities to enable him to run his gaming house free from interference.
Casinos do not cheat. There are no magnets under the wheel, no loaded dice, no marked cards. The mathematics does all the work for them. In American roulette, it grieves me to say, there is not only a zero, there is also a double zero. They more than double their vigorish. Americans, as we know from countless Hollywood dialogues, like ‘an edge’.
I am full of all this nonsense at the moment because I am currently staying in the South of France, barely a craps roll away from any number of casinos who are more than willing to let me prove the immutability of the laws of probability. In conversation with a number of the croupiers, I have been wondering at the amazing gall of American casinos and their double zeros.
Before the first sortie was flown in the Gulf War, over a month ago, I remember seeing on television a number of street interviews with American citizens. They were nearly all in favour of using force against Saddam. One of the reasons they gave was that they were ‘fed up with America being kicked around’. To anyone but an American such an idea is fantastic in the extreme. Americans are kicked around? Ask a national from any other country how much they think the most powerful nation on earth has been bullied and coerced like a fall guy on the world stage and you will hear what Americans call ‘the horse’s laugh’.
We have been there before ourselves. From the first Afghan War to Rhodesia’s UDI the British felt themselves ill-used by smaller countries. You only have to read our press comments at the time of the Boer War or Indian Mutiny to see this. It is the fate of a dominant power to feel a kind of paranoia, to see itself as a Gulliver pegged by the hair and fingers to the ground by hordes of squeaking Lilliputians. This is not by any means to say one thing or the other about the justification for the war against Iraq or any war, merely to try and understand the American point of view. As they see it their might and their sense of moral responsibility gives them a duty to police the world and yet they are derided and traduced every time they attempt to do so.
As a dominant power they are used to an edge, a double zero; massive superiority in conventional forces and unparalleled nuclear capability. But it is an edge they can never cash in on. To use nuclear power against a non-nuclear nation would be regarded as genocidal mania; to assemble all their conventional forces in one place would be logistically impossible and leave dangerous gaps in other parts of the world. Their edge disappears and they feel mightily hard done by. Suddenly any punter with enough chips to sustain big losses at successive spins of the wheel looks as if he can come close to breaking the bank. The odds are almost matched and America has lost its vigorish. It complains to the world that it is being kicked around and everyone laughs to hear a giant complain that its ankles are being nipped. Next time, they swear, next time they will come in with a triple zero – SDI, lasers from satellites, whatever they can dream up; next time no one will kick their butts.
But ‘next time’ is the cry of the irretrievably lost gambler. As the errant computer discovered at the end of the film War Games, the only winning move is not to play. Americans may discover this too and next time they may decide to keep their money in their pockets. Who can blame them?
I have to go now – opening time at the casino. I’m rather anxious to try out a new system. If it works Prince Rainier may well be washing my car and calling me ‘sir’ before the week is out.
Patriot Missive
There have been a number of bracing remarks made about patriotism over the years. I think it may have been Clemenceau, or someone who looked very like him, who gave it as his opinion that a patriot loves his country and a nationalist hates everybody else’s. Doctor Johnson is credited of course with having decided that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, while the poet Roger McGough offered the view that patriots are ‘nuts in the head’.
Perhaps the weirdest, wildest and wickedest idea of patrio
tism, however, comes negatively, through defining what is unpatriotic. Some have claimed, and you may find this hard to believe, that it is unpatriotic of broadcasters and journalists to use the phrase ‘British troops’ instead of ‘our troops’.
I am immensely fond of this country, its language, its scenery, its eccentricity, its traditions, its customs and its people. It is, after all, home. I cannot claim in all conscience that were I born a Yugoslavian I would fret with dismay at not having been born British – who can? But I do have a genuine love of home, which is what patriotism means. One of the things that I particularly admire about Britain is the measure of free expression afforded its citizens. It is disturbing to note, therefore, that a strange and disturbing heresy has been creeping into public life recently. This takes the form of a crazed belief that any public use of free speech is automatically an abuse.
When the protesters were camped outside Greenham Common the remark could often be heard from politicians and interested observers that ‘they wouldn’t be allowed to do that in Russia.’ The same insight was offered the people who gathered to protest against the Gulf War earlier this month. Whatever one’s views about the conflict, British people anywhere do have the right to assemble peaceably in order to express their grievances and disagreements. But the argument was shrieked forth nonetheless: ‘You wouldn’t be allowed to do this in Iraq, you know,’ as if the protesters should therefore get down on their knees, praise God for making them English and vow never again to disagree with anything their government did. The use of free speech was regarded as abuse: but free speech, if it is to mean anything, must surely be taken to be unconditional.
‘We all agree that the individual is inferior to the State if the Revolution is to succeed,’ the Stalinist argument went. ‘Therefore what is good for the State must be right. Therefore anyone who doubts the State must be wrong. Therefore you must be shot.’ It was a ghastly logic and it would be something of an old shame if a similar one began to obtain here, for all that it would be more jolly and British and a great deal less Draconian.
‘We all agree that Britain is marvellous, it has things like free speech and a jury system. Anyone who starts complaining that governments make mistakes or little confusions with the truth is undermining the good name of Britain. Governments are democratically elected, therefore anyone who argues with the government is arguing with the people. Therefore they are being undemocratic, seditious and subversive. Therefore they should put up or shut up.’
If you love a person, a son or daughter for instance, you are not blind to their faults, you do not stop your ears to any criticism that may come by way of school reports, complaints from neighbours or the evidence of your own eyes; you feel shame and anger and you do your best to correct those faults. You want your child to be better and nicer to know. So let it be with one’s country. A patriotism that is blind to faults and deaf to criticism is no patriotism at all.
We can be proud of our protesters. We are not obliged to agree with them, but we are honour-bound to present to them a better argument than one which invites them to relinquish their freedom of speech simply because they should feel privileged to possess it. Our troops, of whom we can also be proud, are not engaged in a jehad for the western democratic way of life; they are not going into battle with cries of ‘Freedom!’ on their lips; they are not risking their lives for good obedient Britons only. They have no wish to read drivel about ‘our heroic forces gloriously breaking through the defences of the satanic enemy’. When they come back they will tell as many stories about hilarious incompetence and puffing majors trying to rescue two-ton food trucks stuck in the sand as they will about courage and sacrifice. I cannot imagine that their morale will be boosted by the thought that we back home descended into a fog of censorship and witless propaganda in order to demonstrate our support for them.
When an important general comes to address the school in Kipling’s Stalky & Co. he starts beefing on about the flag, the good old Union Jack, how we love it and all it stands for. Outraged, Stalky and his friends begin to hiss with indignation. That’s patriotism.
Oops …
I have to start with an apology. I feel such a fool. Last week I made a reference to Stalky & Co. in which I confused a general with a politician. I am grateful for the letters – the barrage of what one might call patriot missives, some friendly, some frankly vicious – which put me right on this catastrophic error. The only excuse I can plead is that I wrote the offending article in France where I had no access to the works of Kipling. Dame Memory, I am sorry to say, let me down. The actual quotation would in fact have lent greater weight, as one sympathetic letter-writer pointed out, to my argument such as it was, than my mistaken memory of it. The less sympathetic correspondents, I fear, will accept nothing less than my suicide which, for the moment, I am reluctant to offer.
I will never cease to be surprised at the kind of letters it is possible to receive from readers and television viewers. I suppose more experienced journalists than myself think nothing of finding anonymous postcards and strangely printed communications full of dark threats and savage imprecations plopping onto their mats on a daily basis. Bernard Levin, I dare say, thinks the morning a dull one on which he is not traduced and abused in different coloured inks by concerned citizens from all over the country. I am still weedy enough, however, to gape and blink with astonishment when confronted with evidence of the vituperation and apoplectic frenzy into which people can be driven by contrary opinion.
There is an infectious and dispiriting paranoia abroad which causes the Right to be filled with obsessions of a conspiratorially Marxist BBC and a dangerous and unaccountable vortex of chattering classes determined to undermine democracy; it causes the Left to imagine a rampant Tory press determined to smother and ridicule all opposition and monolithic cliques of business and administration wielding dangerous and unrepresentative power over the impotent masses. Nothing new in that, perhaps, but something new in the blind detestation of one side for the other. Those on the Right noted, with wonder and despair, the volume and depth of the dislike that the Left felt for Mrs Thatcher; those on the Left gasped with amazement at the level of contempt in which the Right held Mr Kinnock, or even their old leader, Mr Heath.
I have met many politicians: Tories with consciences, warm hearts and an understanding of the plight of the poor and Socialists with sense, moderation and charm. I have seen Conservative MPs talk amicably with producers of Panorama and Newsnight and I have seen Labour front benchers sharing vol-au-vents with newspaper editors. Nothing strange there, you might think. Yet why does there exist, ranged behind these largely equable and temperate people, a phalanx of supporters so monumentally angry that they cannot hear a view on immigration or monopolies or read an opinion on patriotism or religion without reaching for the glue-pot, the scissors and the copy of yesterday’s Telegraph? I am all for passion; we are all, all of us, for passion. Adversarial heat drives the turbines of this great democracy, none can doubt it. Vitriol, however, can only eat through the casing and bring the mighty engines to a juddering halt.
I suppose letter-writers are driven by a kind of frustration. They are given furiously to wonder why this figure or that should be given a public platform for their facile and muddle-headed views. Without such a platform themselves, they have no recourse but to their writing-desks where they can pour out all the bitterness and accreted venom of a lifetime.
They have a point, of course. Why should a mere journalist be allowed to give his opinions every week? What qualifies him? Why should an actor or a writer be heard and not a welder or quantity surveyor? What right does this chosen few have to expound and express its fatuous ideas? Well now that you come to mention it, I have to admit that I am absolutely damned if I know. All I can observe is that no one challenges the rights of journalists and writers with whom they are in agreement. If we agree, we applaud the stout good sense and the witty disparagement; if we disagree, we froth and fulminate against the snide, graceless
tone and the gratuitous insult and we question what business these writers have to be addressing the world in the first place.
‘We must love one another or die’, wrote W.H. Auden, who did both. Perhaps our new Prime Minister and the tradition of One Nation Toryism from which it is claimed he descends will go some way towards sweetening the sour breath of contemporary politics. It would be a disservice to the Royal Mail perhaps, but that is surely a small price to pay for inculcating such a rare and unfashionable quality as niceness.
Comic Belief
The Ides of March are come. Aye, Caesar, but not gone. Today is the day that sees millions of Britons behaving more oddly than usual – a source of irritation to many, including one writer of leading articles in this newspaper. Comic Relief and its Red Nose Day inspire different feelings in different breasts. In my breast a mild, fluttering panic is beginning to be replaced by horrid fear; this is because there are a number of functions which it is necessary for me to perform at the BBC television centre before the day is done. At round about seven o’clock this evening I have to help deposit a personage into a bath of steaming, viscous gunk, a personage that the young of Britain have voted for in their hundreds of thousands as being the one they would most like to see sploshing helplessly around in something green and nasty. At one o’clock in the morning there is more to do, of a secret and terrible nature. It is the long interval between the two events that terrifies me. How on earth can a person fill six nervous hours without becoming hopelessly intoxicated? I suppose I shall have to take a long improving book and a bottle of Evian to my dressing room and hope for the best.
But these are trivial problems and I should be ashamed of myself for bothering you with them. The most important point about the event is that through the energy of the hundreds of thousands who participate by comporting themselves oddly and by sponsoring others to do so, millions of pounds are raised. Two years ago Red Nose Day raised twenty-six million. There are those who argue that the existence of such events allows governments to abnegate their responsibilities; that the longer we rely on charitable institutions the less we question the parlous state of affairs that allows so many hundreds of millions around the world to depend upon such charity. Events like Comic Relief or Live Aid are described as ‘sticking plaster’ exercises that cover up the real sores that should be addressed at a global level. This is true, of course, few doubt it. But which of us has the ability to tolerate present suffering in the hope of future justice? If there is pain now our instinct is to relieve it now.