Not With A Bang

As much of the world breathes an unnecessary sigh of relief that the Mayan Apocalypse did not come to fruition, at least one person in the United Kingdom must be wishing that it had. But unfortunately for David Cameron, he really does have to lead the government right up to the next election and (one suspects) not a second longer.

Rarely can John Lennon's perennial inquiry "And so this is Christmas and what have you done?" resounded more reproachfully in a British politician's ears.

Now, Sordel must acknowledge from the off that Gordon Brown did little more of any actual value, but at least he must have been fully occupied by whimpering, chewing his nails, mopping his nose with a dirty handkerchief and, of course, holding his breath when anyone came into his office looking for him.

Cameron, however, seems to be completely idle. Which is perhaps hardly surprising that he has no money to do anything. If he had an elder sister looking for some quality smooching time with her boyfriend, she would have to advance him the tuppeny bit to get himself down the pictures and take the long way home. Rarely has someone of high net worth been so administratively down on his uppers.

The measure of the situation is perhaps given by the way the government approaches problems these days. Rather than actually read the Leveson Report, for example, Cameron came straight out and said that he was not minded to legislate on it, but would the press please come up with their own ideas?

Faced with tax evasion by big corporations, the government did not actually attempt to close tax loopholes, but instead invited the British Public to shame those corporations into paying up.

Defeated by the complexities of the education system, the government now encourages people to set up their own local schools, and hospitals cannot be far behind. Indeed, if its relationship with the police continues in the direction it has been taking, it won't be long before social order is delivered by posse.

Perhaps not all of this, however, is a bad thing. Upset with civil war in Syria, Cameron wondered aloud who would rid him of this troublesome Assad, but otherwise kept his head down, an approach whose lack of heroic statesmanship is at least offset by a little practicality and humility.

Doing nothing has a virtue all of its own, as demonstrated by the fact that no one at the BBC got into any trouble at all for shelving that Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile. Perhaps not doing something is the new doing something.

Personally (and as demonstrated by the thin nutshell pickings of recent months) Sordel feels rather ahead of the fashion in this respect, and welcomes Cameron to join him on the sidelines, where we shout just as much but are not required actually to break a sweat.

Whatever else happened in 2012, we can expect less of it in 2013.

Some Guy Behind The Editor's Desk

Sordel learnt a valuable lesson from the example of Jonathan Aitken.

For those too young (or perhaps too old) too remember him, Aitken was one of what seemed at the time a great many Conservative politicians forced to resign by various scandals last century. This one is rather more interesting to us today than some of the others because it involved the Saudis, but what people tend to remember is not the scandal itself but the speech that Aitken made when embarking upon a catastrophic libel action that landed him in prison for perjury:

If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play, so be it, I am ready for the fight. The fight against falsehood and those who peddle it.

And the lesson that Sordel learnt from this episode is that the clearest evidence available to us that someone is a scoundrel is the grandiloquence with which they appeal to high principle.

At which one turns to Michael Gove.

Gove - whom under normal circumstances one would have dismissed as a pompous nitwit perhaps shortly before he opened his mouth but certainly shortly thereafter - has managed to hold much of the country thrall beneath his mesmeric, piscine glassiness during his tenure as Secretary of State for Education. He is rather like an unsettling child who, having been liberated from the need to blink by genetic abnormality, settles all arguments with a staring competition.

"Good fellow, Gove" we mutter nervously, leaving him in the classroom at break to eat flies and cogitate on future improvements to the English Baccalaureate.

His appearance before the Leveson Inquiry yesterday revealed, however, the man's Inner Aitken as he proceeded to lecture Lord Leveson about the Freedom of the Press and admonish him pre-emptively for seeking to curtail it in any way.

Gove (like Aitken as it happens) is a former journalist who finds himself on the Westminster side of a revolving door. Presumably having been rendered giddy by passing through it, Gove seemed to have forgotten himself completely, regarding his testimony as an opportunity to bloviate insufferably in a manner that is fairly characterised by Esther Addley in The Guardian.

Clearly his dizziness was infectious as well, since it was clear from the tone of voice employed by both Robert Jay and his judicial master that their eyes were rolling almost as persistently as Gove's vainglorious oratory. Go watch the full performance if you can find the time.

Clearly such a man is not to be contained in my Promethean nutshell: like the Press itself he strides free of such bounds bearing the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play.

Still: it might be appropriate for him to remember that those editors of whom he speaks in tones befitting deities did all put their trousers on one leg at a time. The Press is all very well in abstract, but in particular some of them might prove to be the sort of odious tick who would presume to lecture a judge on his public duties for the sake of striking a public pose.

In such cases it is surely justified to extend the right to freedom of speech only grudgingly and with scant reason for celebration.