Inevitably, Margate

In the absence of anything untoward happening this week at Harrow or the Derby County F. C., it is to the BBC's Resident Intellectual that we must turn for the latest in our occasional but ever-popular series "Serendipitously Geographical Scandals of Our Times."

Andrew Marr (for it is he) has caused the entire blogosponge to seep & reek menacingly in his direction for some unguarded remarks he made recently dissing the Nerd Collective and accusing (what I am forced to refer to as) us for living in our parents' basement and suffering from acne.

Much of the considered response to this has been of the who-you-calling-ugly-Jugears? variety, which does sort of cede the high ground, but if blogs were written with pencils then a rainforest would by now have been thrown away as they were whittled to an ever-more-lethal sharpness for the purpose of bursting the R. I.'s balloon.

Yet the contrarian Sordel suspects that the hidden purpose of Marr's attack may have been missed. In 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev wished to repudiate Stalin, he did so in closed session of Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. When Ed Murrow sought to denounce the U.S. Television industry in 1958., he did so directly to the Radio and Television News Directors Association in Chicago.

The Resident Intellectual, noted historian that he is (despite actually being an English graduate), could scarcely have overlooked these precedents. One braves the lions not from behind the bars of their cage, but in their very den.

Presumably this is why he excoriated us not on his Sunday television show, but at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, where you can hardly throw a shoe without hitting full in the face someone who has been nursing a modest commentary on Google.

(After all, The Times is virtually the patron saint of writers of unsolicited opinions.)

There they were, suckling at the teat of literary wisdom, composing quietly in their heads the Cheltenham Festival installment at which they would doubtless issue a stinging rebuke to Melvyn Bragg and pass a cruel but apposite comment on Mark Kermode's leather jacket when - Bingo! - the probing searchlight of the Resident Intellectual pinned them to their seats.

In a moment of Brechtian alienation, the audience was suddenly upon the metaphorical stage, lampooned and vilified like the celebrated men & women of letters that we all so long to be.

Yet once the Great Magician had pulled this rabbit from the hat, he had one more elegant trick to play upon us all. He looked us tenderly in the collective eye and gently, reassuringly, told us: "not you, constant reader ... not you, middle aged office clerk raging against the dying of the light."

"I do not inflict this cruelty upon you, but upon the spotty teenager drinking cider in his parents' basement."

Whew, for a minute there I was feeling wounded.

After You, Cecil

Other than encouraging the media to discover the word psychodrama and turn it into the new vuvuzela, the catastrophe that befell David Miliband is most notable for bringing to further light a distressing new phenomenon in British Politics: Buggins's Turn.

It began with Mrs. Brown's Little Boy who (for those who cannot remember a time when he was anything other than an object of hissing and derision) was pictured as a sad-faced child looking on in a bereft manner while that nasty Tony boy from next door hogged the Nintendo and crowed about his High Score. "Let Gordy have a turn," encouraged the Great British Public from the doorway while greasing up a cake tin in preparation for High Tea.

Well, the position of Prime Minister is not like your fifteen minutes of fame ... not everyone gets a go.

David Miliband (latest example of the Pod People generation into which our current Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister were hatched in a damp basement some years ago) seems to have thought that letting the sour Scot have a few more moments steering Mario repeatedly off the high cliff and into the rapacious man-eating vegetation below was somehow "the decent thing to do". I suppose with his foot almost upon the stirrup of power, David felt that exquisite pleasure that can be derived from patient expectation.

Quite possibly David was an able Foreign Secretary, although that would be difficult to establish during an era when international detente is actually being conducted by the Ministry of Defence. Like the hare, however, he rather overestimated his supposed lead in this particular race and was to be found napping as his steady reptilian sibling crawled past him and across the Finishing Line.

So now Labour MPs are affronted. Clutching small pieces of coloured paper with numbers written on them and shaking their fists like shoppers at a cheese counter, they turn their fury upon the vuvuzela Ed Miliband.

(The word vuvuzela in my last sentence can (and will) be replaced by ruthless if you are a BBC Political Correspondent.)

Amusing though it was to see David pipped at, and to, the post, for sheer callousness Ed falls well short of the standards of Stalin and Hitler. Unless he actually hangs his brother from a meat hook (something that he might be well-advised to consider) I think that his victory only qualifies for the description "business as usual".

Still, the whole sorry mess has made work for lip-readers who assure us that the comment passed by bad-loser David to Harriet Harman was: "Why are you clapping? You voted for it."

Rarely has the word it been more readily replacable by the word me.