Margate 2: This Time It's Personal

Sordel is confident that we all thought the same thing when we heard that the BBC's Resident Intellectual had obtained a super-injunction to prevent publication of the news that he had been unfaithful to his wife:

It's only to be expected when one is as irresistible as Andrew Marr.

It has often been observed that the mind is also an erogenous zone, and that Mekon-like pixie, whose high-domed cranium becomes only more disproportionate as time goes by, must have been beating them off with a stick these many years.

Nothing says amours like a Marr.

Indeed, one can only imagine that he sought the super-injunction not so much for the sake of his reputation as to protect the ladies of this island, who might be driven to self-destructive yearning at the discovery that - far from being permanently off the menu as previously assumed - this dish was, like sashimi fugu, a rare delicacy obtainable by the woman reckless and dedicated enough to attempt it.

Before you dismiss this, however, as mere tawdry Schadenfreude, a loathsome paddling in the neck of tabloid sensationalism, Sordel would like to raise in your mind an intriguing possibility.

Marr's wife, Jackie Ashley, is a journalist. The woman in the case is evidently also a journalist. Andrew Marr ... well ... he knows a great many journalists. Here is a man whose championship of the Freedom of the Press would normally be above suspicion.

Is it beyond possibility that this great mind, with his lofty view of the chessboard and ability to think many moves ahead, actually foresaw that if one wished to break the issue of super-injunctions, the only way to do so would be to obtain one and then voluntarily forego it?

Might it not be that at the very moment that strange fingers coyly fondled his Full Windsor for the first time, the plot hatched in that mighty brow which only now has come to full fruition?

Sordel says not that it happened thus, but how could it have happened else?

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.

The Arena of Antagonism

Devotees of gladiatorial combat on television will have enjoyed the last few weeks, during which the red corner has been pitted against the blue corner with a regularity not seen since The Jerry Springer Show.

It all began with a warm-up: the Resident Intellectual vs. Mrs. Brown's Little Boy, during which Andrew Marr enquired about some health issue to which it would doubtless be legally hazardous to allude too specifically. This was the appetizer, however, to a discussion of the same on Question Time, during which overweening windbag David Starkey grappled to the mat Preening Coxcomb Ben Bradshaw. These two combatants (one blue rinse away from playing the ugly sisters in an exceptionally well-cast run of Cinderella at a seaside town) provided the most compelling man-on-man horseplay since Alan Bates and Oliver Reed went at one another in Women In Love.

Better was to come, however, for in the Main Event Ian Hislop was being oiled up for a round or two with Sordel's favourite Brownie, Yvette Cooper-Balls. I have alluded to the Stepford perfection of YC-B in previous blogs. She is like the youngest matron in a boarding school: an object of fascination to boys and masters alike yet given to a defensive frostiness only thawed in the communal imagination by suspicions of illicit liaison with one of the unattached housemasters. In an environment where personal attractiveness is a secondary consideration and gender itself barely a prohibitive one, YC-B is about as comely as Labour ladies come.

Hislop, however, is no respecter or of the fairer whatever. His career on Have I Got News For You? has been founded on the sneer of startled loathing with which he meets every guest on the show, as though the only way he would even tolerate their company is if he were well-paid beforehand. Evidently he holds the duo Balls in special contempt, because it was without a blush that he accused the distaff ball of riding to a political career on the coat-tails of her husband.

At which Stepford perfection - as it always will - short-circuited and YC-B have a look that could have only been more perfectly emoted had her eyes glowed red and a spring popped out of her left ear.

Shame on you, Mr. Hislop. A low blow indeed.

This, then, is an era in which hard thoughts are given voice, as when the Resident Intellectual put it to David Cameron that he was a bit of a toff.

Yet for all the political combat, the crowning unpleasantness of this purple patch comes not from a political programme but from The X Factor, for it was here on Saturday that Danii Minogue decided (and I forget whether the predominant metaphor here was wrestling or boxing) to take off the gloves completely.

It is difficult to see exactly what prompted Danii's animosity to Danyl Johnson, but it may have something to do with a proprietorial anger at someone else choosing to spell their name in a non-standard way. Whatever the reason, she chose to greet the 27-year old's first performance on live television by alluding to tabloid stories that he is ... well, I'm guessing bisexual or bi-curious.

(Sordel doesn't read tabloids ... and if that sounds snobbish, he doesn't read broadsheets either.)

So, this is what we've come to.

It seems a long way to travel in a short time to go from an entirely reasonable question as to whether the Prime Minister is healthy enough to do the job to an (at best) tangential reference to the sexual orientation of a virtual nobody who may at some future point wish to resume his regular career as a teacher.

Maybe, though, the British Public has grown tired of the bread and only a genuine circus will do.

It Shouldn't Happen To A Dog

The naming of dogs, as T. S. Eliot once so nearly put it, is a difficult matter.

BNP supervillain Nick Griffin was interviewed by resident B.B.C. intellectual Andrew Marr at the weekend, encouraging the viewer to believe that a great unmasking was in the offing and that those darned meddlesome kids would be blamed at any minute for the would-be Great Dictator's fall. Having softened Griffin up with some tedious policy questions, however, Marr steadied himself for that last question ... the coup de grace. What are the names of Griffin's dogs?

Those, like Sordel, who had heard the story before were one step of the drama unfolding before their eyes, for Griffin's dogs (at least, according to widespread assertion) are called Anne and Frank. Griffin's jet-shoes and discombobulator ray could surely not save him now. The Resident Intellectual had the "genocidal racist" parked upon his own petard on the cusp of detonation.

Except, it turns out that the Griffin hounds are called Bella and Otto.

Now, I'm not sure where I heard that thing about Anne and Frank, but in retrospect it always sounded rather odd. As a thought experiment, the idea of an anti-Semite calling something that he intends to love, feed and exercise by a name that will call to mind a young Jewess does not seem especially likely. Unless Griffin actually bought the dogs to beat - an imputation that even his many detractors have yet to suggest - it would have made more sense for him to have named the pets Adolph and Eva.

Or perhaps, in the light of his patriotism, Oswald and Diana.

The problem is that one is only too ready to believe the worst of Griffin. When a man, with sober rationality, proposes sinking the ships of would-be immigrants, the views that he will espouse in public invite speculation as to the ones that he is concealing.

Gordon Brown for example, speaks of a future increase in public spending, when everyone knows that he is lying through his teeth and intends to cut it dramatically. In the light of this shameless and transparent neglect of the truth by a "mainstream" politician, no great leap of the imagination is required to hop from sinking ships to Arbeit macht frei.

So, perhaps Griffin is lying about the names of his dogs. Or perhaps he is lying about something considerably more sinister.

Either way, the more that Griffin is perceived to have been smeared by his unscrupulous opponents, the more likely it is that the electorate will be to discount even those accusations that have a sound basis in truth.

Which is a worry, because the tag that Griffin used most frequently when referring to those opponents was Liberal elitists.

And, to be perfectly honest (delightful though it might be to meet The Resident Intellectual) Sordel would not wish to do so at the cost of the bring the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.