Anyone looking for a handy excuse for bad behaviour can now shorten their list by reference to Charlie Gilmour, whose defence on a charge of violent disorder seemed to use an awful lot of them to little effect.
It was regarded by the defence as a mitigating factor that Gilmour was drunk (in addition to being on a cocktail of valium and LSD). David Spens, the defending QC, also advanced one of those arguments that would be enough to make any mother proud: "up until Topshop, the worst of his behaviour was playing the fool, showing off, posing for the cameras." High praise indeed.
It was argued on his behalf that the Cambridge history student was unaware of the significance of the Cenotaph when swinging from it by a flag. The Judge, Nicholas Price QC, specifically rejected this claim when handing down a 16 month jail term today.
More troublesome, however, was the claim that Gilmour's psychological decline had been due to having been rejected by his natural father, the poet Heathcote Williams. This was a case in which family looms large.
According to the headlines, Gilmour is the son of Dave Gilmour, and much of the brouhaha attendant on his involvement in the riots sprang from the idea that he was the feckless millionaire offspring of a rocker who had quite possibly served as a very poor moral role model to him.
Son of Rock Star in Riot is a headline; Son of Poet in Riot less so.
Of course, to all intents and purposes Dave Gilmour is indeed Charlie's father, having adopted him when the boy was only four or five, yet such is the destiny of blood that the boy looks very like his natural father: slender, with black wavy hair sufficiently striking to have persuaded Charlie to register with a modelling agency.
Who knows what psychological drama may have unfolded in Charlie's mind if indeed he were to have been rejected by his poetic sire? And, who cares?
Investigations into the roots of crime are doubtless of great sociological interest, but the circularity of blame becomes less than compelling when the crimes are of the order of throwing a waste bin or sitting on the bonnet of a car.
We do not inquire into the root causes of crimes that are trivial, and we cannot afford to consider the root causes of crimes that are immense.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Long Spoons, Short Memories, Tall Stories
Short of toppling a statue of Rupert Murdoch and beating at it with their shoes, Britain's MPs could scarcely have depicted themselves in recent days more like the long-suffering victims of the despot's whip.
For displays of pomposity, self-congratulation, mutual back-slapping and retrospective posturing, the last week has known no equal. There were members of parliament standing up in the Commons on Wednesday declaring that in their handling of the News Corporation scandal they had collectively expunged memories of the Expenses scandal.
Gordon Brown - a man who can turn any amount of public sympathy to eye-rolling apathy with a single word - explained to skeptical government benches that it would all have been done on his watch but for those meddlesome kids at the Civil Service.
Faced with an open goal, the honourable members have not so much kicked a ball through it as dived bodily into the net. As Sordel writes, there are politicians, responding to the news of the resignation of Rebekah Brooks, flailing wildly in self-made toils in their desperation to press some new demand.
Yet where was all this a month ago?
To the peasants who stream, torches in hand, to Baron Frankenstein's castle, the news that this is the birthplace of the monster is at least news. Indignation is at least comprehensible.
Britain's politicians can hardly claim innocence in the original and subsequent cover-ups of wrongdoing at the News of the World. If Rebekah Brooks had a fiduciary responsibility (to know who was being paid by her paper, and for what) then so did politicians: to ensure that the investigation into the original hacking case was a little more probing than accepting the assurances of the very organisation being investigated.
The story of the News International scandal is not only about journalists going rogue in search of a story. The greater blame falls on the police and government that were supposed to prevent or punish that wrongdoing.
The spite with which MPs are attacking the Murdochs would perhaps be justified in small boys overpowering a bully. It rings false from people hitherto only too happy to turn a blind eye for the chance of an invitation to dinner.
For displays of pomposity, self-congratulation, mutual back-slapping and retrospective posturing, the last week has known no equal. There were members of parliament standing up in the Commons on Wednesday declaring that in their handling of the News Corporation scandal they had collectively expunged memories of the Expenses scandal.
Gordon Brown - a man who can turn any amount of public sympathy to eye-rolling apathy with a single word - explained to skeptical government benches that it would all have been done on his watch but for those meddlesome kids at the Civil Service.
Faced with an open goal, the honourable members have not so much kicked a ball through it as dived bodily into the net. As Sordel writes, there are politicians, responding to the news of the resignation of Rebekah Brooks, flailing wildly in self-made toils in their desperation to press some new demand.
Yet where was all this a month ago?
To the peasants who stream, torches in hand, to Baron Frankenstein's castle, the news that this is the birthplace of the monster is at least news. Indignation is at least comprehensible.
Britain's politicians can hardly claim innocence in the original and subsequent cover-ups of wrongdoing at the News of the World. If Rebekah Brooks had a fiduciary responsibility (to know who was being paid by her paper, and for what) then so did politicians: to ensure that the investigation into the original hacking case was a little more probing than accepting the assurances of the very organisation being investigated.
The story of the News International scandal is not only about journalists going rogue in search of a story. The greater blame falls on the police and government that were supposed to prevent or punish that wrongdoing.
The spite with which MPs are attacking the Murdochs would perhaps be justified in small boys overpowering a bully. It rings false from people hitherto only too happy to turn a blind eye for the chance of an invitation to dinner.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Tomfoolery
Here's a challenge: try to think of some characters from Four Weddings and a Funeral and write down either the character name or the name of the actor or at least some distinguishing characteristic. Four or five should do.
Go ahead, I'll wait.
All done?
Now, take a look down your list and see if you have Tom, played by James Fleet. You may have described him as "upper class nitwit and brother to Kristin Scott Thomas's character, Fiona", although if so you would seem to have been taking this exercise more seriously than I anticipated.
What's that you say? Not at the top? Didn't really think so.
Now, to my point. Sordel believes that the very best that David Cameron can do in his entire career is to come away with a place in people's hearts as dear as James Fleet's Tom. That's it. It doesn't get any better. Cameron was never going to be the romantic lead of British Politics.
Tom is the quintessential example of the tolerable aristocrat. If someone were building a guillotine, his would be the last head in line for the basket, and by the time he arrived for execution he would have so won over the crowd that he would be set free with a gentle cuff of the ear.
Under the terms of their Hippocratic Oath, all would-be Toms fall under a strict enjoinder to "do no harm". They are also sternly admonished to keep well out of the way of trouble: something that Cameron has managed quite ably thus far, but "Golly ... bloody Thunderbolt City!" is still some way off.
If one is aiming to be Tom, the last thing one wants to do is to create the impression that your jacket is out at the elbows from brushing up against the likes of Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks.
Moreover, finding yourself on the other side of the issue to Hugh Grant, unlikely wielder of the Sword of Truth, is definitely a misstep.
The trouble with Tom is that really, deep down, the British Public has an instinctive hatred for him that only some clever mugging and a self-deprecating joke can attenuate. He who would be Fleet must first be fleet.
The News of the World scandal is Cameron's first real crisis, and it will be very interesting to see how he weathers it.
Go ahead, I'll wait.
All done?
Now, take a look down your list and see if you have Tom, played by James Fleet. You may have described him as "upper class nitwit and brother to Kristin Scott Thomas's character, Fiona", although if so you would seem to have been taking this exercise more seriously than I anticipated.
What's that you say? Not at the top? Didn't really think so.
Now, to my point. Sordel believes that the very best that David Cameron can do in his entire career is to come away with a place in people's hearts as dear as James Fleet's Tom. That's it. It doesn't get any better. Cameron was never going to be the romantic lead of British Politics.
Tom is the quintessential example of the tolerable aristocrat. If someone were building a guillotine, his would be the last head in line for the basket, and by the time he arrived for execution he would have so won over the crowd that he would be set free with a gentle cuff of the ear.
Under the terms of their Hippocratic Oath, all would-be Toms fall under a strict enjoinder to "do no harm". They are also sternly admonished to keep well out of the way of trouble: something that Cameron has managed quite ably thus far, but "Golly ... bloody Thunderbolt City!" is still some way off.
If one is aiming to be Tom, the last thing one wants to do is to create the impression that your jacket is out at the elbows from brushing up against the likes of Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks.
Moreover, finding yourself on the other side of the issue to Hugh Grant, unlikely wielder of the Sword of Truth, is definitely a misstep.
The trouble with Tom is that really, deep down, the British Public has an instinctive hatred for him that only some clever mugging and a self-deprecating joke can attenuate. He who would be Fleet must first be fleet.
The News of the World scandal is Cameron's first real crisis, and it will be very interesting to see how he weathers it.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Boring Writer Declares Less Boring Writer "Boring" Shock
In the days before Sordel suffered the misfortune of subscribing to a newspaper, I admonished a friend for writing a vituperative series of blogs about columnists. "Set your gaze upon a target lofty enough for your critical muse," I encouraged him.
Yet it comes to this.
Richard Brooks, the "veteran arts reporter" of The Sunday Times, writes what is intended to be a bitchy gossip column by the name of Biteback. This week he turned his attention, inter alia, to Tony Blair, and this (in full) is what he had to say:
"Tony Blair has selected nine of his favourite books for a new literary magazine, We Love This Book. I'm gobsmacked he has actually read nine. Even so, three are religious tracts - no surprises there. At least he remembered to list the boring Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott. After all, it was the one he chose on Desert Island Discs 15 years ago."
Really, Richard? You are gobsmacked that Tony Blair has read nine books? You really are very susceptible to surprise; I would have thought that Tony Blair is exactly the sort of person who would have read nine books.
In any case, it's the sort of line that would be pretty thin if used of Wayne Rooney, but it would need some dressing up for him. Something like: "Wayne Rooney has selected nine of his favourite books for a new literary magazine: I'm surprised his colouring pencils held out that long." (It's not comedy gold, Ladies and Gentlemen, but at least there is a genre of Rooney stupidity jokes.)
With Blair, the jokes are all to do with how much of a liar he is, or how superficial. "Tony Blair has given us a list of his favourite books, which only leaves us to wonder which of them he didn't enjoy and which of them he hasn't read."
Such a missed opportunity.
I'm not convinced by the other jokes, either. I'm sure that many people find Blair boring, but it isn't exactly a satirical staple. Is the joke that Blair is boring and therefore likes boring books? Or is the joke that Walter Scott is boring? If the former, a better joke would be to say that he is too exciting by half. If the latter, well, Scott entertained a lot more people than Brooks ever will and his books are scarcely the dust standard of literary dullness.
Oh, and those "religious tracts"? A look at the Bookseller reassures us that there are no religious tracts in Blair's list. The books are Jesus Was A Jew, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes and Martin Lings's biography of Muhammad. These are not exactly the books that one would choose if you were seeking to characterise Blair as a joyless Catholic.
Then again, perhaps Brooks was counting The Lord of the Rings as a religious tract. When it comes to titanic battles of Good and Evil, Blair may have been more Tolkienesque than was entirely to the interest of the rest of us.
Yet it comes to this.
Richard Brooks, the "veteran arts reporter" of The Sunday Times, writes what is intended to be a bitchy gossip column by the name of Biteback. This week he turned his attention, inter alia, to Tony Blair, and this (in full) is what he had to say:
"Tony Blair has selected nine of his favourite books for a new literary magazine, We Love This Book. I'm gobsmacked he has actually read nine. Even so, three are religious tracts - no surprises there. At least he remembered to list the boring Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott. After all, it was the one he chose on Desert Island Discs 15 years ago."
Really, Richard? You are gobsmacked that Tony Blair has read nine books? You really are very susceptible to surprise; I would have thought that Tony Blair is exactly the sort of person who would have read nine books.
In any case, it's the sort of line that would be pretty thin if used of Wayne Rooney, but it would need some dressing up for him. Something like: "Wayne Rooney has selected nine of his favourite books for a new literary magazine: I'm surprised his colouring pencils held out that long." (It's not comedy gold, Ladies and Gentlemen, but at least there is a genre of Rooney stupidity jokes.)
With Blair, the jokes are all to do with how much of a liar he is, or how superficial. "Tony Blair has given us a list of his favourite books, which only leaves us to wonder which of them he didn't enjoy and which of them he hasn't read."
Such a missed opportunity.
I'm not convinced by the other jokes, either. I'm sure that many people find Blair boring, but it isn't exactly a satirical staple. Is the joke that Blair is boring and therefore likes boring books? Or is the joke that Walter Scott is boring? If the former, a better joke would be to say that he is too exciting by half. If the latter, well, Scott entertained a lot more people than Brooks ever will and his books are scarcely the dust standard of literary dullness.
Oh, and those "religious tracts"? A look at the Bookseller reassures us that there are no religious tracts in Blair's list. The books are Jesus Was A Jew, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes and Martin Lings's biography of Muhammad. These are not exactly the books that one would choose if you were seeking to characterise Blair as a joyless Catholic.
Then again, perhaps Brooks was counting The Lord of the Rings as a religious tract. When it comes to titanic battles of Good and Evil, Blair may have been more Tolkienesque than was entirely to the interest of the rest of us.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
To Crack This Code Took Sega
In today's column - in a regular series in which Sordel draws upon extensive experience in the shadowy world of Internet hacking to decrypt the private communications of the hactivists - I shall break a code that has defied even our most august media outlet.
This, from Alexi Mostrous (surely not her real name) in today's Times:
"If the police want to stop these groups, they will have to penetrate murky online chatrooms and learn the hackers' language, which seems, at least to an outsider, often inexplicable. "Current Target: store.playstation.com || Status: FIRING NOW!" one member wrote during an attack on Sony."
While I am sure that Bletchley Park would have scratched its collective head at this code, and - at this moment - GCHQ has thirty supercomputers running permutational algorithms in the hope of cracking the private key with brute force, to Sordel this code is as simple as if it had been written in perfectly comprehensible English.
First one must work back from the known fact: that this was written during an attack upon Sony. Although this is not widely known, secret corporate documents reveal that the brand name Playstation was registered as a brand by Sony some years ago. This is just the sort of arcane commercial information that is prized by Anonymous.
Revisiting our code, we can therefore see that the string "store.playstation.com" is possibly a location of some sort.
Now examine the structure of the secret message. There are two binary pairs in the syntax, each separated by a colon. Since we now believe the second string in the first pair to be some sort of target, it is credible that the first binary pair represents some sort of targeting function. Indeed, the first part of the dyad does seem to include the word "target", so we may be thinking along the right lines.
Again, it will not be widely appreciated outside the group itself, but attacks of the sort mounted by modern anarcho-techno-rebels require both a target and some sort of temporal coordination. The word "status" is a little-known marker, used at the start of the second binary pair, to indicate the situation at the time that the message is issued.
Many of these hackers play computer games such as "shooters" in which words such as "fragging" are used as oblique references to attack. "Firing", presumably imported by analogy from the world of employment to which so many young IT amateurs have been excluded, is one of these, representing "attack, as with a laser pistol".
Finally, "now" is used to indicate the time of the firing. In order to encode this information, it has been converted to upper case. Without information as to the time that the message was sent, it is impossible to identify the actual date and time represented by the "Now Function", but it would certainly have been expressed in UTC in defiance of state borders.
I hope that nothing in today's edition will compromise similar codes currently in use by the CIA and MI5. After all, it's all fun & games until someone gets extradited to the U.S.
This, from Alexi Mostrous (surely not her real name) in today's Times:
"If the police want to stop these groups, they will have to penetrate murky online chatrooms and learn the hackers' language, which seems, at least to an outsider, often inexplicable. "Current Target: store.playstation.com || Status: FIRING NOW!" one member wrote during an attack on Sony."
While I am sure that Bletchley Park would have scratched its collective head at this code, and - at this moment - GCHQ has thirty supercomputers running permutational algorithms in the hope of cracking the private key with brute force, to Sordel this code is as simple as if it had been written in perfectly comprehensible English.
First one must work back from the known fact: that this was written during an attack upon Sony. Although this is not widely known, secret corporate documents reveal that the brand name Playstation was registered as a brand by Sony some years ago. This is just the sort of arcane commercial information that is prized by Anonymous.
Revisiting our code, we can therefore see that the string "store.playstation.com" is possibly a location of some sort.
Now examine the structure of the secret message. There are two binary pairs in the syntax, each separated by a colon. Since we now believe the second string in the first pair to be some sort of target, it is credible that the first binary pair represents some sort of targeting function. Indeed, the first part of the dyad does seem to include the word "target", so we may be thinking along the right lines.
Again, it will not be widely appreciated outside the group itself, but attacks of the sort mounted by modern anarcho-techno-rebels require both a target and some sort of temporal coordination. The word "status" is a little-known marker, used at the start of the second binary pair, to indicate the situation at the time that the message is issued.
Many of these hackers play computer games such as "shooters" in which words such as "fragging" are used as oblique references to attack. "Firing", presumably imported by analogy from the world of employment to which so many young IT amateurs have been excluded, is one of these, representing "attack, as with a laser pistol".
Finally, "now" is used to indicate the time of the firing. In order to encode this information, it has been converted to upper case. Without information as to the time that the message was sent, it is impossible to identify the actual date and time represented by the "Now Function", but it would certainly have been expressed in UTC in defiance of state borders.
I hope that nothing in today's edition will compromise similar codes currently in use by the CIA and MI5. After all, it's all fun & games until someone gets extradited to the U.S.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Some Blood for No Oil
The pro-war media (and I don't mean those media pro- the Libyan war but those media who would happily line up behind any war whatsoever) are very fond of telling our government to "hold its nerve". This instruction was trademarked some years ago by The Economist, but today's leader in The Times, which was presumably written some weeks ago in the expectation of civilian deaths, trots it out with equal confidence.
Don't stop bombing Tripoli now, just as things are going so well.
Sordel veers towards pacifism, appeasement and running away screaming like a small girl at the first sign of trouble, but even I must admit that to get this far into a war without significant civilian deaths or (to the best of my knowledge) any NATO military casualties, is a remarkable success. It's rather like going into a bar, shooting the place up with a shotgun, but doing so with the care and attention required to leave its clientele largely unmolested.
Unfortunately, this display of scrupulous vandalism is not entirely cheering.
For a start, Danny Alexander announced over the weekend that the Libyan War was costing tens of millions of pounds and would likely run to hundreds of millions. That's a bit like shooting up a bar with a shotgun and having to pay for repairs. While living under threat of having your house repossessed.
Secondly, the rebels aren't advancing, and a report in today's Times paints a sorry picture of their condition. After their last advance failed due to indiscipline, they have retrenched in Misrata and claim to be facing a more effective government assault. They have also run out of money.
Thirdly, although the coalition has done a very creditable job of preventing civilian deaths and injuries, it does occasionally bomb the rebels themselves, which is ... embarrassing for us, and fatal for them.
And fourthly, while shooting up a bar without killing someone is an achievement of sorts, shooting up a bar several times a night for three months is hardly a kindness to the people unable to leave that bar in whose interests one claims to be doing it. The bombing raids themselves inflict terror on the people of Tripoli.
So "holding its nerve" is not really going to be enough for the British government. What The Times really needs to do - in the fashion of Lady Macbeth - is taunt the government on to do something bloodier and yet more ruinous.
Because this isn't a war that is going to be won on its current rules of engagement.
Don't stop bombing Tripoli now, just as things are going so well.
Sordel veers towards pacifism, appeasement and running away screaming like a small girl at the first sign of trouble, but even I must admit that to get this far into a war without significant civilian deaths or (to the best of my knowledge) any NATO military casualties, is a remarkable success. It's rather like going into a bar, shooting the place up with a shotgun, but doing so with the care and attention required to leave its clientele largely unmolested.
Unfortunately, this display of scrupulous vandalism is not entirely cheering.
For a start, Danny Alexander announced over the weekend that the Libyan War was costing tens of millions of pounds and would likely run to hundreds of millions. That's a bit like shooting up a bar with a shotgun and having to pay for repairs. While living under threat of having your house repossessed.
Secondly, the rebels aren't advancing, and a report in today's Times paints a sorry picture of their condition. After their last advance failed due to indiscipline, they have retrenched in Misrata and claim to be facing a more effective government assault. They have also run out of money.
Thirdly, although the coalition has done a very creditable job of preventing civilian deaths and injuries, it does occasionally bomb the rebels themselves, which is ... embarrassing for us, and fatal for them.
And fourthly, while shooting up a bar without killing someone is an achievement of sorts, shooting up a bar several times a night for three months is hardly a kindness to the people unable to leave that bar in whose interests one claims to be doing it. The bombing raids themselves inflict terror on the people of Tripoli.
So "holding its nerve" is not really going to be enough for the British government. What The Times really needs to do - in the fashion of Lady Macbeth - is taunt the government on to do something bloodier and yet more ruinous.
Because this isn't a war that is going to be won on its current rules of engagement.
Monday, June 13, 2011
This Just In: People Lie On The Internet
Let's just clear this up straight away: Sordel is not [repeat: not] a gay half-American girl called Amina Abdullah who lives in Damascus.
And neither is Tom McMaster, who posed as a Syrian political blogger for as long as people were credulous enough to believe him. Score: one for the Blogosponge; zero for anyone still sitting at home waiting for their ten million dollars to arrive from Nigeria.
McMaster is, so says Yahoo, "a Middle East activist, while his wife is studying at Scotland's St Andrews University for a doctorate in Syrian economic development". This may, however, be wrong, if their fact-checking is as dismal as that of Pink News, who were among the media outlets entirely taken in by what is now evidently to be considered a "hoax" rather than a piece of imaginitive fiction.
Oh, and if you think that the only people deluded by this were the Lesbian and Gay virtual community, here is Time: "Inspiring the Syrian protest movement is an honest and reflective voice of the revolution: a half-American citizen journalist who, in illustrating her country's plight, risks death herself."
Every day Sordel is surprised to hear tales of young girls persuaded to strip off in front of a webcam by sexual predators using tools of deception no more sophisticated than a fake Facebook account and six lines of leetspeak. Yet seemingly that girl's parents have been downstairs at the same moment in earnest discussion about the fate of Amina and how to check for the market value of those shares in the Brooklyn Bridge that they bought.
The really worrying thing about this (other than the fact that Sordel could evidently have been mounting a successful Ponzi scheme for the last few months rather than wasting time writing these vignettes) is that the media are so desperate for tales of repression that they will accept them from any source, however disreputable.
Fittingly, a book is about to be published about the truth behind Robinson Crusoe, which was also published as plain fact despite being (as we would now infer) a cruel hoax sneering in the face of maritime safety and the plight of shipwreck victims.
Don't look now, First Tier Media, your flies are undone.
And neither is Tom McMaster, who posed as a Syrian political blogger for as long as people were credulous enough to believe him. Score: one for the Blogosponge; zero for anyone still sitting at home waiting for their ten million dollars to arrive from Nigeria.
McMaster is, so says Yahoo, "a Middle East activist, while his wife is studying at Scotland's St Andrews University for a doctorate in Syrian economic development". This may, however, be wrong, if their fact-checking is as dismal as that of Pink News, who were among the media outlets entirely taken in by what is now evidently to be considered a "hoax" rather than a piece of imaginitive fiction.
Oh, and if you think that the only people deluded by this were the Lesbian and Gay virtual community, here is Time: "Inspiring the Syrian protest movement is an honest and reflective voice of the revolution: a half-American citizen journalist who, in illustrating her country's plight, risks death herself."
Every day Sordel is surprised to hear tales of young girls persuaded to strip off in front of a webcam by sexual predators using tools of deception no more sophisticated than a fake Facebook account and six lines of leetspeak. Yet seemingly that girl's parents have been downstairs at the same moment in earnest discussion about the fate of Amina and how to check for the market value of those shares in the Brooklyn Bridge that they bought.
The really worrying thing about this (other than the fact that Sordel could evidently have been mounting a successful Ponzi scheme for the last few months rather than wasting time writing these vignettes) is that the media are so desperate for tales of repression that they will accept them from any source, however disreputable.
Fittingly, a book is about to be published about the truth behind Robinson Crusoe, which was also published as plain fact despite being (as we would now infer) a cruel hoax sneering in the face of maritime safety and the plight of shipwreck victims.
Don't look now, First Tier Media, your flies are undone.
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