From Eton to Beaten?

There has always been a trace of the Asian knock-off about David Cameron. The kid down the street was making all the running with its New Labour logo, and the Conservatives wanted one too, but there was always the suspicion that you'd get a hundred yards down the track and the stitching would come out. With the climax of the Ashcroft debacle, the Nike Heir-to-Blair label is definitely starting to peel off.

This fiasco is hardly a -gate or a scandal, but it has certainly been a running sore. For months, Tory politicians straying unwarily in front of the cameras have repeatedly been forced to squirm miserably at the name of Michael "I-can-get-that-honour-for-you-wholesale" Ashcroft. Indeed, it is arguable that the value to Labour of this constant emasculation of Conservative speakers has been worth more to it than the final revelation: that Ashcroft did what any other businessman in his position would have done and protected his income from the Inland Revenue.

Quite frankly, if there's a businessman who cheerfully foregoes the tax loophole, I'm not sure I want him at the shoulder of political power, whispering and advising.

The problem is not what Ashcroft did or did not do. It's Cameron.

For months he and Hague have seemingly been hanging their heads and mumbling in a corner, hoping to God that they would never have to be forced to admit that Ashcroft was diddling the British taxpayer. Sordel cares little that the Conservatives have been so spineless, but it is terrible that they have been so unprepared. Like the MPs whose last vestige of protection - the wisp of lawn on their marble nudity - was the hope that their expenses would never be published, Cameron and co. appear to have been sleepwalking towards their doom.

Where was the bold counterattack that Cameron should have had in his back pocket, ready for this situation?

Instead, he simpered about his delight that Lord Ashcroft had decided, voluntarily (and the people at the Oxford English Dictionary will be examining this new definition for future validity), to 'fess up to his private tax arrangements. Yes, Cameron looked delighted. (Delighted, adj., experiencing the sensation of dejection appropriate to one unrepentant yet discovered in wrongdoing).

So, now Gordon Brown is in possession of a retort that will be crafted by his speechwriters for the live debates. Here are some he can have for free:

"Where was his concern for our brave fighting men and women in Afghanistan when he took for his political campaigns money that ought to have been paid to equip them?"

"Let him lecture me on the good stewardship of the public finances once he has control over the money flowing, unscrutinised, into the coffers of his own party."

"His only clear policy is to maintain a system of honours that he has shown himself all too ready to manipulate to his party's financial ends."

"It is a strange campaigner for Education whose own knowledge of Geography led him to believe that Belize was in the British Isles."

And so on.

Haplessness is an unattractive quality in a politician. This is a very bad time for Cameron to make it his most prominent quality.

Snow News Day

Much to the surprise of BBC editors, they have had to shelve their customary plans to drum up interest in obscure social and overseas stories during the sleepy New Year period. B-roll reports on the condition of women, animals or possibly agriculture in countries hitherto unknown to Thomas Cook were returned to their hard drives unplayed. Tales of marital discord, credit card fraud and the drinking habits of feral teenagers were held over until the stars (or at least, the heavens) were propitious.

Instead, it has been all hands to the pump as the necessity arose to cover something rarely dreamt of in their philosophy. News.

As in, something actually happening.

Admittedly, what was happening was only weather, which happens all day every day whether it is covered by the BBC or not. Nevertheless, weather in general is to be distinguished from photogenic weather, and what can be more visually appealing than the sight of every regional news reporter in Britain shivering in a snowfall for hour after pitiless hour? ("Let's go back to Amanda, who is going to tell us about school closures while standing outside some gates in Cheshire ..." smirked the presenters, probably squirming their feet joyfully in Christmas's fleecy slippers.)

News 24 has come of age ... as a blood sport. No wonder Sordel was hooked.

As it turns out, however, not only does bad news come in threes, but news in general seems to as well, for today was also the opening of the hunting season, a.k.a. the first PMQs of the parliamentary New Year. Undesked from his office, shot full of that most bracing of stimulants (Fear) and determined to shake off his seasonal disappointment at being named GQ's Worst Dressed Man of the Year, Gordon was brimming with vim as he tackled Cincinnati Kid Cameron.

Cameron got in one exquisite dig (approximately: "At least when lean over to say "I love you, Darling" I can do it with sincerity") but Gordon was back at him in a flash. If wordplay can be likened to the experimental rough-and-tumble of a pair of Labrador puppies, they were all wagging tails and bitten ears for five minutes before coming, panting, to a halt. A good day for both and every expectation that their respective party faithful would bear them shoulder-height to greatness.

Sadly (well, for one of our protagonists) the third piece of news hit just before 1pm and scattered even snowshowers before it. Geoff Whoon? and Patricia Who-it? - two minor Labour bulbs who must be grateful that anonymity, like virginity, never quite grows back - launched what was rather optimistically described as a "coup".

Given that Whoon? is actually a former Defence Secretary, it is saddening to note the lack of military planning that went into this insurgency. By the evening most of those micturating out of the cabinet had disappointed the hopes of those micturating in the complementary direction by swearing blood oaths in Gordon's favour. Wet shoes were certainly experienced by all parties - not least the shoes of David Milliband, who demonstrates himself to be sodden through and invertebrate at every opportunity - but once Mrs Brown's little boy is tucked up in bed tonight he can take great comfort that the snow seems to have more sticking power than his opponents.

BBC news reporters and cabinet ministers seem to be of one mind one the subject: it's cold outside.

Merry Christmas (War Ain't Over)

Staunch though his championship may be of the popular hate figure Peter Mandelson, Sordel's defence budget also extends to chinooks for Simon Cowell. Cowell (in the popular imagination at least) is stricken this holiday season as a consequence of the bird flipped collectively in his direction by the people of Great Britain when they made "Killing in the Name" number one this Christmas.

"Fuck you," chorused the Facebook masses: "I won't do what you tell me!"

This is a pretty remarkable consensus given the fact that the bankers took their bonuses, the MPs refused to give back their swag (or the bags that it came in) and we are still (still!) prosecuting two unjust wars overseas. Way to go, People of Britain ... you really managed to focus out the Pervasive Evanescent this holiday season.

Cowell, if only because he scowls so much and wears a lot of black, is good casting for a pantomime villain, and - in the dim apprehension of a great many Rage downloaders - cheating him of the top of the festive chart is the equivalent of stick a large bomb down his underpants and running away chortling.

Apparently all that was needed to motivate the campaign against the harmless Joe McElderry and his largely pleasant single was the perception that Cowell's X Factor had locked up the "coveted" throne at the top of the hit parade and was preventing other musical acts (JLS, Cheryl Cole, Alexandra Buck, Leona Lewis and the X Factor Charity single, presumably) from getting their fair time in the spotlight. Next week the big chart showdown, for example, is scheduled to be Cole vs. McElderry. Assuming that the Facebook community is resting on its laurels and collecting its winnings from William Hill, you wouldn't need the National Weather Center's help to forecast business as usual for 2010.

Cowell, like the Formerly Red Baron, is with us so untiringly that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse may as well advertise for a keyboardist & second drummer before heading into the coming decade as a sextet.

Before we bid a fond farewell to 2009, however, it is worth shunning the sherry long enough to remember with due sobriety the many British families bereaved this year as a consequence of the brace of conflicts continuing in the absence of an effective Facebook campaign to end them. Sordel will be remembering in his prayers also the families of the many Soviet troops killed and injured in Afghanistan as a consequence of the U.S.-backed insurgency there.

Killing In The Name indeed.

And on that cheerful note Sordel bids a Merry Xmas to all his reader.

Nutts to (Gordon) Brown

Until the birth of New Labour it was comparatively rare for a British politician to be assassinated. These days, the only job more perilous is being a member of the Columbian judiciary.

Consider Alan Johnson, once considered the brightest and best in the Labour ranks.

This, of course, is like being considered the most liberal member of the B.N.P. or most charismatic member of the Liberal Democrats. Nevertheless - however shallow the compliment - it was enough to push Johnson way out in front in the race to lead his party through its rapidly-approaching eight years of impotence and opposition.

Having taken the Brownian shilling however, Johnson now finds himself with a portfolio that can best be described as Minister for Shitty Jobs. Now that the traditional poison chalice set to the lips of tall poppies of yore - Minister for Northern Ireland - has been leeched of its venom, prime ministers have to be more creative in sticking it to the junior ranks.

The bad news started for Johnson when he was (literally) pushed to the front in the Afghan War, becoming the first Home Secretary to be honoured with a paddleless visit up that particular creek. Presumably Bob Ainsworth - a Defence secretary who has unwittingly become the most persuasive apologist for every standpoint that he opposes - is now so unwelcome that even close members of his family shy him with date-expired vegetables when he arrives home.

Thus it is that Johnson found himself arguing in defiance of all physiological instinct to blush that he regarded Britain's continued support for C.I.A. operative Ahmed Wali Karzai and his vote-rigging brother as a key element in the war against domestic terrorism.

This is a bit like sending the Minister for Transport out to Afghanistan on the basis that reducing military traffic on British roads is a key element in our motorway policy.

Anyway, no sooner was Johnson done with hitching his wagon to that particular lost cause than Mrs. Brown's little boy peered out from his customary place of hiding with another job that he needed doing. Inclining an ear to the mahogany drawer from which the Prime Minister's glowered up at him, Johnson must have been surprised to hear that he was being asked to write a letter sacking David Nutt.

It is not recorded whether he had the courage to ask "Who?" but Nutt's name had certainly not been tripping off the tongue until Brown decided that it was important to (send a flunky to) sack him.

Thus it was that Johnson found himself appending his John Hancock to a letter motivated by no higher purpose than Gordon's spite and vindictiveness. Go back a few centuries and Johnson would have been hiding his weapons under a sycamore tree and demanding that Thomas Beckett submit to the King's will.

Yet we weep not for Johnson, for this is a man who - contrary to all hopes that other might have placed in him - decided that the percentage play was neither to join the rats leaving the sinking ship nor wrest the wheel from the captain who had driven it aground in the first place. Instead, he chose the honour of serenading on first violin those running up and down the deck attempting to save their birdbaths and toilet seats from the rising waters.

In contravention of the elegantly-phrased Miltonian epigram, he is the first man in history to think it was actually better to serve in Hell than rule in Heaven.

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.

Mand of the Hour

Even those who viewed with scepticism Sordel's previous adulation of the Formerly Red Baron cannot deny that Peter Mandleson has had a good couple of days.

Sunday was, of course, the day when he put in his application to work for the forthcoming Conservative government, by announcing during the course of a Sunday Times interview that he would certainly be willing to serve his country during a future Cameron administration. This is entirely consistent of Baron M., since if the thought of working for people who loathed him was uncomfortable to the Great Man, he certainly wouldn't be toiling for Gordon Brown. Indeed, the faces of his colleagues could scarcely be less friendly if they belonged to die-hard Tories.

Monday then saw Baron M.'s speech to conference.

Unlike another prominent Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Peter Mandleson is not a well-known conference darling. Michael Heseltine - in many ways his closest antecedent as a maverick, egotistical power-broker - returned to the conference podium like a rock star coming to the stage in his home town. Mandleson, however, has merely been tolerated ... like a blob of toothpaste on an adolescent pustule.

The sound-bite that the news went with was "If I can come back, we can come back": a line delivered with a coprophagous grin and the air of one delivering a very simple joke to a very young nephew. He gave a sort of stage chuckle half way through, simulating good spirits in much the way that someone might simulate appetite by licking their lips and rubbing their stomach in a great big clumsy circle.

The line - however well-received in the hall - makes very little sense, though. It's like saying "if herpes can come back, swine flu can come back." The entire point about herpes is that it comes back: a guarantee that does not extend to the Labour Party.

In any case, Mandleson's best line was less widely reported. "I know that Tony said our project would only be complete when The Labour Party learned to love Peter Mandleson ... I think perhaps he set the bar too high." Here we see the essence of the splendid Baron: a man who at the summit of his power can still reproach those who declined to sign their name in blood on the dotted line.

It takes a particularly gloating form of villainy (one not seen since Cary Grant hung from Mount Rushmore providing Eva Marie Saint with a lifeline) to step on someone's knuckles when they are clinging on for dear life. Peter, Übermensch that he is, could do it with a smile.

Not, perhaps, a warm one.

It has widely been reported that the Baron has secured the prime minister's future and won over the hearts and minds of the Labour delegates with his performance.

Sordel suspects that in this case the media and the party faithful have both been misled. To misquote Richard Thompson: they thought he was saying good luck when he was saying goodbye.

Outsider Art

Not since the angel with the fiery sword told Adam and Eve that if their names weren't on the list they weren't coming in has humanity so strained with fury at the injustice of an exclusion.

It seems that Gordon Brown has been refused admission to the cool kids' table. President Obama's dance list was mysteriously full every time that Gordon's party planners suggested a Terpsichorean tryst. If it were a Jane Austen adaptation he would be hiding his face behind a fan and hissing to his sisters at this very minute.

According to FT.com, a spokeswoman has been attempting to play down what lesser news outlets are describing as a snub. "She argued that the two were talking informally all the time – including a short encounter in the kitchens of the United Nations in New York."

Let's script that out shall we?

Obama: "While I'm here can I get a club sandwich?"

Brown: "Mr. President, it's Gordon!"

Obama: "My error ... can I get a club sandwich, Gordon?"

Sordel's amusement at this serious insult that our leader has suffered at the hands of the Rebels (surely the most vexing since the Boston Tea Party) is not unmixed, however, with fellow feeling. I was myself excluded this week: from the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Now, it must be acknowledged before I go any further that the exhibition had not, in fact, opened yet, but it was nevertheless galling to be forced to gaze impotently through the glass at corridors that will soon be thronged with milling culture vultures. By the time I am able to form an opinion on this particular exhibition the expiry date for such an opinion will doubtless have passed and I will be left bewildered by discussion of the next artistic sensation.

It was not an entirely wasted journey, however.

For those of us unable to pass the gate, the Royal Academy has provided a very large courtyard sculpture that is best described as a Fizzy Drink. Shiny polished spheres (something of a stock in trade to which Kapoor resorts for his more obviously institutional artworks) effervesce upwards in a loose column, providing reflections of the surrounding buildings and one another.

As a consequence, those of us unable to enter the exhibition were forced to contemplate our own bleak physiognomies peering back at us.

It would be nice to think that Mrs. Brown's little boy will also use his time in the wilderness to indulge in a little self-reflection. In a crowd of little versions of himself he might at last find some friends.