PFD Digital looks after clients in an increasingly complex and fast moving digital world. Whether it's ebooks, games, apps, social gaming or websites, our view is that digital products are a great way for our clients to exploit their content and we encourage new and innovative approaches to develop different revenue streams. In the new digital world content is paramount and we sell rights to our client's content across the most appropriate platforms.

We are currently working with clients to produce apps that take their product to mobile platforms, like the iPhone; we develop web led projects that create rich content environments; we look to take our clients' work to the gaming world; and we explore new routes for ebook publishing. We are always on the look out for new ideas and new digital products.

This website is owned by Peter’s Fraser & Dunlop. ("PFD") and is made available to you for informational purposes. By accessing or using this website, you agree to the following Terms of Use and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, you may not use this website.

 

Your Use of the Website

Unless otherwise expressly specified or permitted by a duly authorized officer of PFD, this website is provided for your personal and non-commercial use only. The copyright to the contents of this website and the trademarks, logos, characters and service marks displayed thereon (collectively the "Intellectual Property") are owned by PFD or other third parties who have licensed or authorized use thereof to PFD. Provided you do not modify or delete any intellectual property or other proprietary notices, users may download material from this website for their own personal, non-commercial use only. Any other copying, modifying, redistributing, reproducing, transmitting, creating derivative works from, using Intellectual Property from, or selling any information, products or services obtained from this website in any manner is strictly prohibited. Please be advised that PFD will aggressively pursue any violation of this policy in order to protect its valuable intellectual property rights.

 

Disclaimer and Limitation of Liability

Your use of and browsing on this website are done at your own risk. Neither PFD, its affiliates nor any other party involved in creating, producing or delivering this website shall be liable under any circumstances for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential or punitive damages arising out of or in connection with your access to, or use of, this website. PFD makes no representation or warranty as to the accuracy, completeness, adequacy, timeliness or usefulness of the contents of this website, nor does PFD promise that the website will remain available. PFD reserves the right at any time to terminate all or any portion of this website without notice to you. Without limiting the foregoing, everything on this site is provided "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR NON-INFRINGEMENT, FREEDOM FROM COMPUTER VIRUS AND WARRANTIES ARISING FROM A COURSE OF DEALING OR COURSE OF PERFORMANCE.

 

Third Party Materials

The contents of this website may from time to time contain documents, images, information, media and other materials not proprietary to PFD, such as photographs, artwork, articles, clips other text or audiovisual elements, or the names, trade names, trademarks, logos, trade styles or designations of third parties (including present and past clients of PFD) which have been published in newspapers, magazines or other media or venues, and may include the name, trade name or trademark of the medium or venue in which such materials were published or displayed. Any use thereof whatsoever is strictly prohibited, unless the prior written permission of the appropriate third parties has been secured. PFD has no editorial control of such third party content and does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness or usefulness of any such content nor its merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose.

 

Links

For the convenience of users of this website, one or more links to other Internet websites may appear from time to time. Except for Internet websites maintained by PFD (or by divisions, subsidiaries or affiliates thereof), the Internet websites to which links are provided in this website are not under the control of PFD and PFD assumes no responsibility for the contents of any such linked Internet website, or for any potential damage arising out of or in connection with the use of any such link. In addition, the existence of a link between this website and any other Internet website is not and shall not be understood to be an endorsement by PFD of the owner or proprietor of the linked Internet website, nor an endorsement of PFD by the owner or proprietor of such linked website.

 

Miscellaneous

It is strictly prohibited to use or contact this website to disrupt or damage the site, its contents or its security measures or to harass or disparage PFD, its employees, or its clients or their respective products, services or personnel. No unsolicited email (spam) may be directed to or through this site. PFD reserves the right to change the foregoing Terms of Use and Privacy Policy without notice to you, and your use of the website following such changes shall be deemed to constitute your consent to such modified Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

This section is currently under development. A current listing will be available soon.

 

In the mean time, if you have any questions concerning rights please contact either Sissi Lichtenstein for TV, Film and Stage Rights or Claire Daniel for Translation Rights.

 

TELEVISION, FILM AND STAGE

 

Unfortunately we do not currently accept unsolicited material from scriptwriters or playwrights. Any unsolicited pitches, outlines, or scripts will be returned unread if a stamped addressed envelope has been enclosed, otherwise they will be recycled.

If you are referred to one of the agents here by a producer, development executive or course tutor then you should email the agent directly, attaching a cv and giving details of who has referred you.  

Directors should send in up to two examples of their work to PFD Directors Submissions. A CV and covering letter should also be enclosed, with return postage and packaging if you would like your work returned.

Please note that we are not able to offer representation to writers or directors based outside Europe.

PFD London is represented in the US by Fletcher & Company for our frontlist titles. You can contact them on info@fletcherandco.com

 

If you are interested in any PFD backlist titles then please direct all contract enquiries to Terry Wong at twong@pfd.co.uk or call (0207) 344 1000.

 

For payment queries only please contact Fletcher and Co who handle this process on our behalf. Please direct enquiries to info@fletcherandco.com

 

Here is a list of the Estates that Peters Fraser and Dunlop represent. For further information, please contact Camilla Shestopal on cshestopal@pfd.co.uk

Read All About It

'Off topic comments from our clients and our Chairman'

__________________________________  

15/03/10

My Life As A Police Horse

Freddie Windsor 

I have always been known as the steady plod, wherever I went colleagues used to sing “Old Ned”, the Steptoe theme tune. It’s just my breeding – I am a pure shire - but it gets a bit tedious with all  the banter sometimes. 
 
I am jet black, but with white splashes up my front legs and on my face. One of the jobs that few people know about are the “Grey and Black escorts.” This means that on State occasions such as Trooping the Colour and the State Opening of Parliament, the grey horses lead the procession of the Queen, with eight horses at the front and 8 horses at the back.

In readiness for this every year all the grey horses get a chance to show off, and they have to be steady and trot without getting all silly. There are lots of different greys so they get matched up. Those that are very good get chosen to be in the Grey escort, and of course they get all big headed and boast a lot. Well, obviously I can’t get picked for the grey escort. However I do qualify for the black escort, this is for state funerals. My rider told me that we were going to the selection. PC Emma was very excited, and spent ages brushing me, and getting me looking gorgeous.

As we were loading onto the horsebox, the other officers were saying “Don’t be disappointed if you don’t get chosen”.

PC Emma said “Freddie’s perfect of course he’ll get chosen.” The officers said it will be like school; Freddie will be the last to get picked for the football team!!! We ignored them, and after a short ride arrived at the training centre with all the other black horses, it was so exciting; there must have been thirty of us.  I have to say there were a lot of horses that looked suspiciously dark bay!!! We had to ride round and round the field at a very steady pace. The Inspector was pointing at certain horses and calling them into the middle and lining them up. The last four left – yes you guessed it – I still hadn’t been chosen, PC Emma was getting very fed up. Then we were chosen fourth reserve!!!, we were told I had too much white on my legs – I couldn’t win. Then the Inspector told all the other black horses to start getting used to the Guards bands and loud noises. PC Emma said “Freddie’s already used to that he’s the best!” Inspector said He’s too white, but if we need him – you’ll have to dye his legs.

We got back to the stables - everyone was waiting to hear our news.

“Well?”  

“Last to be picked for the football team!” PC Emma said.

The officers laughed, but said “Never mind Freddie” they did feel sorry for me. Then one day I had been at Milwall, helping to keep the rival football supporters apart. I was putting my weight about and doing my job particularly well. People are scared of me; I am big and imposing and have got the biggest feet of all the horses in the police! We had just got the fans settled down and started to head back to the stadium when I turned the corner. Suddenly a large group of Milwall fans making their way to the game stopped. They all lined up along the pavement.  They saluted me and started singing the theme tune to Black Beauty!
PC Emma smiled and said Thank you. I grew two feet, puffed out my chest and felt a million dollars!

__________________________________  

15/02/10 

The Play's The Thing

I wanted to bring your attention to this great piece in the Daily Mail by our client Ray Connolly.  It's so hard to cut your teeth in television these days so Ray asks if it's better to start in radio. 

__________________________________  

4/02/10

Alex Scarrow on writing for Young Adults

TimeRiders, my young adult time travel series is launching with some fanfare and fortuitous timing as the BBC gears itself up for the imminent broadcasting of the new season of Dr Who. With a busy schedule ahead of me to pormote the book, and the decks cleared for a few weeks before I start on my next novel, it's perhaps a good time to reflect on how different the writing process for TimeRiders was compared to the adult thrillers I write.

Firstly, the subject matter itself; Time Travel. As an adult book, it would have instantly been getto-ized as SciFi and parcalled off to be branded as displayed in-store at the back of every Waterstones where all the other 'nerd books' live. As a Young Adult book, there are no such sniffy distinctions, it'll sit alongside shelves of angsty teem vampire romance books, zombie apocalypse stories, super-duper spy adventures. Knowing this...knowing there are no no-go genre subjects for me has been incredibly liberating. It's allowed me to pull out of the bag the most spectacular set pieces without my worrying that some junior editor might skim the 1st draft and politely ask me to 'reign back on the giant Nazi UFOs and hordes of post-nuclear mutants.'

Secondly, writing for young adults has been exactly like writing for adults, funnily enough. The only real difference has been the age of my protagonists - teenagers instead of thirty-somethings. That's it really. I haven't needed to dumb-down my choice of language, or the sort of near-the-cuff themes I usually explore. And yes, people have died in TimeRiders, some of them really quite horribly. I suppose the only thing I've had to tone down is the profanity. But then it's easy enough to create your own slang that does exactly the same job and in some case sounds even grittier than the real stuff. 

Thirdly, the length of the book. I was expecting to write a much shorter book than I normally write. I was expecting to write something ooohh...about half as long. Well, duh, stupid me, TimeRiders turned out to be just as long as my usual adult books. Which worried me intitially. I was concerned that the boys beta-reading the 1st draft were going to find themselves flagging halfway through, and skim-reading the rest. But, hallelujah, it seems there really is a generation of kids out there that can happily wolf down a 100k plus novel and still have room for more.

An interesting exercise then...comparing how I write for adults and how I write for kids. It turns out there's really no difference at all. And there really is no reason why an 11 or 12 year old reader can't enjoy a Stephen King, or a Harlan Coben, or an Iain Banks, or...dare I say...a Dan Brown. Young Adults really are smarter than they (sometimes) appear.

TimeRiders is out now. Click here to buy it. 

__________________________________  

21/01/10

Field Diary From Haiti

By Tamar Hahn

Port au Prince, 17 January

This morning I went to visit a field hospital set up at the MINUSTAH Logistical Base. The hospital consists of two giant tents filled to the brim with Haitians wounded during the earthquake. Conditions are deplorable: little food and water for both doctors and patients, no sanitation which means that urine and feces are being disposed of 

behind the hospital tents and amputated limbs end up in the trash.There is no morgue either so bodies are piling up on the side of the tent. An operating room was set up today and it is doing mainly amputations as the crash wounds suffered by many of the victims here  have become infected and life threatening. There is no capacity to perform any other surgery and all supplies are limited.

Amidst the cacophony of whimpers and cries of pain five children lie in their cots alone, with no relative to feed them, clean them or hold their hand. A two year old girl with cerebral palsy arrived here after the earthquake dehydrated and in shock, she lies in a cot crying and alone. She has no major wounds and is ready to go home but nobody knows her name - a piece of paper at her feet says Baby Girl - or where to begin looking for her family.

The same is true for Sean, a seven-year-old boy who came in and screamed for his parents crouched in a fetal position for 12 hours. From what little he has said since, the nurses surmised that he saw them both dead. Sean has minor scratches and walks around talking to other patients but the doctors are reluctant to discharge him without knowing where he will go and who will care for him.

There are potentially hundreds or even thousands of other children in the same situation in Port au Prince, either in hospitals or roaming the streets with no access to water, food and protection from violence and abuse. Even if these children have not been physically wounded they have suffered major psychological trauma which will scar them for life.They are at risk of malnutrition and disease and vulnerable to sexual exploitation and trafficking. UNICEF is identifying and outfitting two shelters which will house 200 children like Paul and Baby Girl. The shelters will provide a safe heaven for the children and begin to address some of their most pressing needs while their families are being traced. For those who cannot be reunited with their families, alternative solutions will have to be found. 

During the afternoon I went out with our Water and Sanitation officer to evaluate the water distribution efforts which began yesterday. Haitians no longer sleep in their homes. Even those whose houses were spared by the earthquake have taken to the streets and erected tents using whatever piece of cloth they have available. They crowd the few squares in the city and even the prime minister's house, a gated property with a big front yard which has now become an impromptu camp.

Those who are not in the squares and yards block the streets with slabs of concrete and sleep right on the pavement.

There are no latrines and I saw women kneeling in front of water pails, naked in the street, to wash themselves. With no latrines available people take care of their bodily needs on the sidewalk. Mounds of garbage are accumulating everywhere and when night descends on Port of Prince all of these thousands of people crowded one on top of the other are in complete darkness. 

When we came to the prime minister's residence a collapsible water tank was providing 5,000 liters of water, which covers the daily needs of 1,000 people. The line was orderly and people were patiently waiting their turn, jerry cans in hand. Right behind them a long line had formed to collect the hygiene kits being distributed by USAID.Four little girls came by to say hello. When I asked them how they were doing they smiled and said that things were all right. Then Stania, a 17-year-old girl overheard them."All right? What do you mean all right?," she said. "This is not all  right, this is terrible and we can't stay like this much longer." It was good to see that aid was beginning to reach people, despite the  horrid conditions in which they were living. I returned to the base where UNICEF has set up operations following the destruction of its Haiti office only to learn that the son of one of the drivers had died from the injuries he suffered during the earthquake. It was the third child that this man, a Haitian national, had lost. His daughter and another son were instantly killed when their house collapsed.

The tragedy of the earthquake is not affecting just those outside the compound; it affects every single member of UNICEF's staff on the ground. Several staff members have lost all of their belongings and have nothing but the clothes on their backs. Everyone is tired and traumatized, scared to be by themselves at home and edgy from the 

aftershocks which can still be felt daily. The education officer has been camped by the ruins of the MINUSTAH offices for five days, waiting for her husband to be dug out of the rubble. He is alive and has sent her text messages but he has not been rescued yet. 

The author works for UNICEF.If you would like to know more about how you can help, click here.   

 __________________________________ 

12/10/09

Who were your heroes then?

by David Davies, former Executive Director of The Football Association, now a freelance broadcaster and writer, and author of FA Confidential: Sex, Drugs and Penalties, recently published in paperback.
 

Ivan was my first. He was in the year above me at school, seemed to be in every school team we had, and was the first person I seemed to know--other than my big sister--who went out with members of the opposite sex. Furthermore Ivan-- with those dark good looks normally associated with Italian stallions( he was from Tring)--told us what happened on these "dates" all of which I seem to remember took place  at the Odeon In Watford High Street interspersed with watching classics like Cliff Richard's "Summer Holiday" or Raquel Welch in "One Million Years BC". I was in awe of Ivan.

Then there was Sir Matt Busby, manager of my beloved Manchester United. And JFK--President John Fitzgerald Kennedy of the United States of America --the first would-be  leader I remember debating with his political opponent(Richard Nixon) in the build up to an election, and looking to this young urchin like a normal human being unlike the elderly gentlemen who seemed to run my own country eg Churchill, Eden and MacMillan. Finally of course came Che Guevara, South American freedom fighter, leftist with a beard and a beret that adorned many a students bedroom including mine. This was of course in my first revolutionary phase a couple of generations before my second at The FA.

I only ask about your heroes because maybe like me you've been wound up just recently by all those stories of how awful it is that young people today look up to the likes of Simon Cowell, and Jordan, and wags like Cheryl Cole, and even the Simpsons rather than the true icons of the current age like.......um.........(Please fill in this gap as you see appropriate, and then send your answers on a postcard to me via Adam Crozier's Royal Mail-if it's working today). And as for so many kids wanting to be famous ??

Give me a break. For a start most of the people who write this "woe is me" stuff tend to be of a certain age eg mine, and are suffering from the increasingly contagious disease of the modern age called SMS, Selective memory syndrome. Were our heroes--with the exception of Sir Matt of course-- really so heroic ?? Were they not flawed as we found out more about them ??  How many haloes have  not slipped off the great and the good in our lifetime  ??  Mandela maybe, Mother Theresa. And ??

And do you know something else ? Don't I remember back in the late nineteen sixties one Andy Warhol musing aloud about everybodys need to be "famous for 15 minutes"??

PS   I wonder whatever happened to Ivan??!!                                                                                                                    

DAVID DAVIES
 

__________________________________ 

08/10/09

Jimmy Burns on his new book Papa Spy: Love, Faith & Betrayal (Bloomsbury)

I know that writing doesn’t get any easier, but this book has been the most challenging of the ones I have had published so far which is not say that previous ones were a piece of cake! After all, I would call reporting behind enemy lines for The Land that Lots its Heroes, and following Diego Maradona on his roadshow of sex, drugs, and brilliant football for the Hand of God, among my tougher assignments during more than thirty years of writing as a journalist and author.

But for a son to write about his father presents its own problems - you have to try and strike a balance between natural affection and the need to get to the truth. Papa Spy’s subtitle – love, faith, and betrayal in wartime Spain - suggests that the context for the answers to, ‘What did you do in the war Dad?’, have a complex human dimension to them within the context of espionage and propaganda.

I’ve spent over five years or so probing family papers, personal interviews, classified government documents, and other archives, and discovered details of a life that my father barely talked about when he was alive. For my Papa Spy was at the heart of the Allies’ intelligence and propaganda operations in Madrid, with responsibility that extended to Lisbon, Gibraltar, and Tangiers.

The story that emerges shows my father as an occasionally tortured individual, struggling at one point with a secret love affair with Ann Bowes Lyon, cousin to the then  Queen Elizabeth, the later Queen Mum. I always suspected there were other women in my late father’s life apart from the woman he married-my mother - but the discovery of a  bunch of love letters hidden in an old suitcase allowed me to recreate my father’s royal liaison in a way that personified the tensions of so many wartime relationships.

Papa Spy has several parts to it reflecting the broad nature work my father was involved in. The actor Lesley Howard, the abdicated King Edward VII, and the Man who never was are among the characters Tom Burns had dealings with. But I hope readers will find the pages of this book particularly evocative of a historic time in Spain, not least those chapters that involve my mother whose Spanish family suffered the Civil War before helping the Allied cause.

I discovered my father to be a many contradictions - he loved two very different women, he was a good spy and a bad one. Spaniards believed, wrongly, that he was the head of MI6 in Madrid. He nevertheless manage to bribe officials, run agents, and file secret reports, in a way that some of the more professional spooks could only envy. His propaganda was viewed by the Germans as a threat, but some of his own colleagues thought him untrustworthy and something of a Walter Mitty character.

I take some comfort in the fact that my father’s enemies during the war were the Nazis and also the Stalinist stooges that had infiltrated British intelligence, such as Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt.  You could say he fought a reasonably good war, with dubious morality, fighting to preserve Spanish neutrality under Franco as a fervent Catholic and patriot.

To buy Papa Spy on Amazon click here

__________________________________ 

24/09/09

Star Quality by Helen Chislett

There must be a word for the strange amnesia that affects writers between the point of finishing a book and seeing it finally appear in print; a misplaced pride at apparently knowing so much on a given subject, mixed with shock that you now know a great deal less. After 30 years in design journalism, my brain is frighteningly efficient at becoming ‘expert’ on related subjects, but is sadly equally efficient at erasing huge swathes of information. The fact is that when my first copy of the latest book arrives, I read it with genuine interest and curiosity - a sense of ‘How on earth do I know that?’ This is a guilty secret, but one that causes particular consternation when publicity starts and I find myself frantically mugging up on my own words so as not to appear a complete fool on local radio, for example.

Oddly enough, when I read words that I wrote perhaps 18 months’ ago and wonder at having ever written them, paradoxically they often conjure up with intensity what I was visualising and remembering at the time - a hidden subtext of personal emotion. And so it is with Star Pieces (co-written with David Linley and Charles Cator, neither of whom are likely to suffer from my kind of amnesia), which is devoted to the beauty and relevance of furniture. There is one chapter in particular, Why Furniture Matters, that was slow to write because it awoke so many memories of people, places and events that my mind would drift at every sentence. It touches on the fact that nostalgia and familiarity are powerful emotions when it comes to our relationship with furniture; that just as furniture builds up a surface patina over time, so it builds up a patina of memories.

As I wrote it, images kept popping unbidden into my head: the Gordon Russell dining table my parents still own which bears traces of my handwriting in its surface, because it was here I was made to sit each evening to do my homework; the lacquered long-case clock that has been keeping time for my husband’s family for nearly 300 years; the gateleg table with barley-twist legs that stood in my rented bedroom in Clapham 28 years’ ago and that my landlady gave to me as a wedding present (I am looking at it now); the rather ugly sideboard that was left by the owners of a previous house that is far too useful to ever do without . . . . soon my mind was crowded with images, as if each piece of furniture that had ever formed the backdrop to my life came jostling for attention. And not just the ones I still have, but the ones I regret letting go -  even the very ordinary, utilitarian dressing table that had accompanied me since childhood that I gave to a friends’ daughter on a ‘we need more space’ whim. But now I remembered it as an echo of my 1970s adolescent self - covered with Biba lipsticks, draped in scarves and strings of beads, stained with musk oil and powder. Just the memory of it was enough to transport me back to my midnight blue bedroom, with my father yelling up the stairs to turn the music down. For my husband it is the loss of the glazed bookcase that stood in his bedroom as a boy - the top didn’t match the bottom and its value was small, but it offered the comfort of the familiar whenever he paid a visit home and reconnected him with all kinds of happy memories.

Of course none of this was of particular relevance to the text of the book - the points I wanted to make needed to be far more general rather than so personally specific - but perhaps this chapter will act as a trigger for other people’s thoughts and memories, and make them look anew at their own furniture. That phrase “just part of the furniture” is horribly true; we take so much for granted. The fact is that most people own a piece of furniture that is to them a Star - not because of provenance or monetary value, but for reasons that resonate at a far deeper level.

__________________________________

15/09/09

 JOHN LENNON—THE LOST INTERVIEWS

 By Ray Connolly

 

John Lennon did many brilliant things in his life, but arguably one of his most inspired acts was his deliberate destruction of the Beatles in 1969 — just 40 years ago this month. It didn’t seem that way then, not to tens of millions of devastated Beatles fans around the world, and not to Paul McCartney, who, feeling abandoned, went off to his farm in Scotland and into a deep depression.

But if Lennon, who’d started the group that evolved into the Beatles, hadn’t murdered his creation at that moment, if the band had somehow struggled on through their rows into the 1970s, I doubt that you’d be reading this article today.

Because by killing the Beatles before they could disappoint us, as they inevitably would have done when music fashions changed and the band’s later albums didn’t quite live up to the ones we still love, Lennon froze them for ever at their peak.

At the time of their break-up in 1969, I was an interviewer on London’s Evening Standard with the special task of covering rock music. Today, journalists are kept at arm’s length from stars by legions of publicists, but it was different then, for me anyway. Only now, looking back, do I fully appreciate the astonishing access to the Beatles

I had, from 1967, that Sgt Pepper high water of their careers, until 1972, when their dissolution was making its way through the High Court.

Thus I was at the Abbey Road studios in October 1968 to hear Yoko Ono be happily indiscreet about her affairs during her first two marriages, before ending the evening being given a personal concert by McCartney at the piano as he worked on a new song called Let It Be — while from down the corridor I could hear John Lennon and the producer George Martin mixing Cry Baby Cry for the White Album.

Almost every conversation I had during those final febrile Beatle days ended up in my new little Sony recorder, where intimacies and opinions were caught on cassettes, and then stored away, forgotten and uncatalogued in an old Pickfords packing case. And it’s those tapes, unplayed in decades (if ever, in some cases), that I recently unearthed — recordings that in some cases challenge views of the Lennon-McCartney relationship that have been held for 40 years.

Not all the interviews have survived. Cassettes were expensive then, and I’m mortified to admit that I have one on which the names McCartney, Jagger and Hendrix have each been successively crossed out as the interviews were recorded over. Nor was everything that was recorded published. Much was off the record. Time heals. Now it doesn’t matter that I write some of it here.

By 1969 there were rumours of strife in the Beatles camp, but on the surface it still seemed jolly enough. Then, while I was hanging around their Apple headquarters in Mayfair one day in September, I realised something was seriously wrong. There was a Beatles meeting in the boardroom that suddenly ended in a row, followed by much running up and down the stairs. But nobody was saying what it was about.

A few weeks later I got a call from John telling me he’d just sent his MBE back to the Queen. He was in a giddy mood, I reflected, as I typed out my story. But he was also acting so separately from the other Beatles that two days later I wrote a piece headlined "The Day the Beatles Died".

At the time I was half-afraid I’d overstated my case, because to the outside world they were still very much alive. But no sooner was the article published than a white rose wrapped in Cellophane was delivered to my desk with the message "To Ray with love from John and Yoko".

From then on, when it came to covering Beatles affairs, my tape recorder and I would have the best possible source. And, just before Christmas that year, I would listen in astonishment (and some despair) as John, who’d flown me out to join him and Yoko in Toronto, gleefully let me in on the secret of how he’d destroyed the band.

"At the meeting Paul just kept mithering on about what we were going to do, so in the end

I just said, ‘I think you’re daft. I want a divorce.’"

He hadn’t planned to say that, but once spoken, and although news of the split wasn’t going to be announced until the Let It Be album came out the following May, the words were never withdrawn.

Of course, there are McCartney interviews on tape, too. While John was busy pulling the walls of the Beatles temple down around him, Paul eventually recovered from the setback enough to make his first solo album, McCartney. Usually astute with publicity, at this point he slipped up, putting out, in April 1970, an ambiguous press statement along with his record that was interpreted as saying that he’d broken up the band. Headlines of blame ran around the world. "How could he?" distressed fans wanted to know. "It was all a misunderstanding," he told me a few days later. "I thought, ‘Christ, what have I done now?’ and my stomach started churning up. I never intended the statement to mean ‘Paul McCartney quits Beatles’."

It was ironic. The Beatle who had most wanted the group to stay together, the biggest Beatles fan of all, was being blamed for its dissolution.

"Why didn’t you write it when I told you in Canada?" John demanded when he realised that Paul had accidentally got the dubious honour of ending the world’s favourite group. As he’d started it, he thought he should be the one to end it. "You asked me not to," I said. He was scornful. "You’re the journalist, Connolly, not me," he snapped.

What strikes me most, though, listening again to the tapes, is how prescient John was, how closely his ear was tuned to the changing mood of the times. As once he’d instinctively known which songs to write and what pithy comments would grab a headline, somehow, while in the middle of the whirlpool that was the Beatles, he’d seen the end approaching.

"The whole thing died in my mind long before all the rumpus started," he said in 1971 when I was spending a few days with him and Yoko in New York. "We used to believe the Beatles myth just as much as the public, and we were in love with them in just the same way. But basically we were four individuals who eventually recovered our own individualities after being submerged in a myth.

"I know a lot of people were upset when we finished, but every circus has to come to an end. The Beatles were a monument that had to be either changed or scrapped. As it happens, it was scrapped. The Beatles were supposed to be this and supposed to be that, but really all we were was a band that got very big.

"Actually, our best days were before we got that big, when we used to play for hours in clubs. My favourite number was always Elvis’s Baby Let’s Play House. We’d make it last about 10 minutes, singing the same verse over and over. I pinched one of the lines from it later to put in one of my own songs called Run for Your Life — something about ‘I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to see you with another man’.

"Mick Jagger said we weren’t a good band as performers. But he never saw us at our best in Liverpool and Hamburg. We were the best bloody band there was. I know all the early rock songs much better than most of those I’ve written myself."

During most of that time, however, John was in iconoclastic mode. It was as though, having made his decision, he couldn’t smash his Beatle persona quickly, or outrageously, enough. He didn’t want to be "one of four gods on the stage", he told me, so instead he invited the world’s press to his honeymoon bedside for a week "in aid of world peace". Then, not minding that he was being widely ridiculed, not to mention chastised by his formidable Aunt Mimi for "making an exhibition of himself", he appeared naked with Yoko on an album of electronic music called Two Virgins, before really chasing controversy with a series of erotic lithographs featuring Yoko, and sometimes himself, too.

"Why do you draw so much cunnilingus?" I asked him during the trip to Canada, as I passed the lithographs for him to sign. "Because I like it," the one-time moptop grinned merrily. London’s Metropolitan Police would later close down his exhibition in a West End gallery. They didn’t like it.

At the time, Yoko was much publicly blamed for the Beatles’ demise, and she certainly might have played her part more tactfully. But she was only one of several catalysts. And John, as I’ve been hearing again on my tapes, was absolutely besotted by her, this sexy, mysterious artist who matched the zany dottiness in him.

"It was Yoko that changed me," he teases her during one conversation in 1970. "She forced me to become avant-garde and take me clothes off when all I wanted to do was become Tom Jones. And now look at me! Did you know avant-garde is French for bullshit?" Then, referring to how she’d begun to join him on stage, he goes on: "We’ve only got to play four bars and she grabs the microphone and she’s off… Aggghhh! Take her anywhere and she does her number for you." In the background, Yoko giggles. She was his pal.

The John Lennon I recorded was a very funny man who liked to paint himself ironically as the indignant butt of his own stories. "Did you see that Time magazine is saying that George is a philosopher?" he asked me one day. "And there’s an article in The Times, that I’ve actually thought about sending to Pseuds Corner [in Private Eye] — anonymously, of course — saying how Paul is this great musician. One a philosopher, another a great musician. Where does that leave me?"

"The nutter?" I hear myself suggest.

"Yes. I’m the nutter. F*** ’em all."

Today he would have been a star as a stand-up comedian with a line in self-mockery. And, in 1970, returning from a session of primal therapy in California, he was more loquacious than ever. He could have done a whole act on the subject of what made people like him want to become famous. "There you are up on the stage like an Aunt Sally waiting to have things thrown at you. It’s like always putting yourself on trial to see if you’re good enough for Mummy and Daddy. You know, ‘Now will you love me if I stand on my head and fart and play guitar and dance and blow balloons and get an MBE and sing She Loves You — now will you love me?’" It was a typical Lennon rant, but he was smiling all the time.

On another occasion, talking about his song Not a Second Time from the Beatles’ second LP, in a conversation devoted to his music, he says: "That was the one where that f***ing idiot Thomas Mann (he meant the very respected William Mann, the Times music critic) talked about the aeolian cadence at the end being like Mahler’s Song of the Earth . They were just chords like any other chords. It was the first intellectual bullshit written about us." Then the knowing pause. "Still, I know it helps to have bullshit written about you."

Later, saying how a favourite of his songs, You Can’t Do That, was his attempt at being Wilson Pickett, he becomes mock-anguished when admitting it was "a flip side because Can’t Buy Me Love [Paul’s song] was so f***ing good".

He was competitive with Paul, yes, and, when relations between the two were really bad, vituperative, as evidenced in a line in a song about his former partner on his Imagine album: "The sound you make is Muzak to my ears."

Paul had to have been hurt, and a few months later in New York even John would admit slightly ruefully: "I suppose it was a bit hard on him…" But, as he would so often say, "They were just the words that came out of my mouth at the time."

In truth, he always knew how good Paul was, without necessarily liking everything he did.

"I only ever asked two people to work with me as a partner," he would boast of his talent-spotting abilities. "One was Paul McCartney and the other Yoko Ono. That’s not bad, is it?" Indeed, I recall a writer from an underground magazine being snide about Paul’s song Let It Be, presumably assuming John would agree. He didn’t.

"Paul and me were the Beatles," he would emphasise to me privately. "We wrote the songs." And on the subject of his debt to the young McCartney, he was actually generous. "I didn’t write much material early on, less than Paul, because he was quite competent on guitar.

Paul taught me quite a lot of guitar, really."

Those who see John as the towering greatest of the great should reflect on that: John Lennon quietly, happily admitting how much he owed to Paul McCartney. And while he could be flattering about some of Paul’s songs — he liked For No One particularly ("that was one of his good ones. All his semi-classical ones are best, actually") — he was disarmingly dismissive about several of his own. "I Am the Walrus didn’t mean anything," he says, consigning to the pointless bin the work of a generation of Beatles anoraks who’d tried to interpret its lyrics, while he always hated Yes It Is, didn’t think he sang Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds very well ("I was so nervous I couldn’t sing, but I like the lyrics"), and admits that he and Paul would give the lousy songs they wrote to George and Ringo to sing.

But It’s Only Love from the Help! album is the one that earned his greatest ire. "It’s the most embarrassing song I ever wrote. Everything rhymed. Disgusting lyrics. Even then I was so ashamed of the lyrics, I could hardly sing them. That was one song I really wished I’d never written," he says. Then, after another comic pause: "Well, you can say that about quite a few." And the ones he liked? "Across the Universe was one of my favourites. I gave it at first to the World Wildlife Fund, but they didn’t do much with it, and then we put it on the Let It Be album. It missed it as a record but maybe the lyrics will survive. And Strawberry Fields Forever meant a lot. Come Together is another favourite. It started off as a slogan song for Timothy Leary’s wife, but I never got around to finishing it. Everyone takes it as meaning ‘come together in peace’, but there’s the other meaning too!" Actually, he was proud of quite a few, too — In My Life, I’m a Loser, Girl… "When I was in therapy I was asked to go through a book of all the songs I’d written, line by line. I just couldn’t believe I’d written so many."

Interestingly, and it’s something I’ve only realised listening again to the tapes, no matter how much John publicly criticised Paul, in none of my interviews with Paul did he ever criticise John. Quite the contrary. "On Abbey Road I would like to have sung harmony with John, like we used to. And I think he would have liked me to. But I was too embarrassed to ask him."

I always wished I’d been involved in the Beatles’ early happier days, but my role was to cover the final act of their career, and to observe the fallout, mostly, though not totally, with John. There were some bizarre and revealing moments during those days. Visiting a Native American village in upstate New York the day after his 30th birthday, he showed that even he, in his enthusiasm, could get it wrong. "When I used to see cowboys-and-Indians films when I was a kid in Liverpool, I was always on the side of the Indians," he told the assembled group, not realising how patronising he sounded.

I’m sure when he said he wanted a divorce from the Beatles he never imagined how complicated, or expensive for all of them, it would be. But by October 1971, when he was living in New York, he was beginning to get a good idea. Asking me to be a go-between, he gave me a message to take to Paul suggesting that perhaps the two of them could solve at least one of their differences without either Allen Klein, his manager, or Lee Eastman, Paul’s manager and also Linda McCartney’s father, becoming involved. Back in London I delivered the message, but in the end it was inevitably lawyers who sorted out their problems.

Listening to the tapes, and hearing John’s singsong voice again after all these years, has led to some poignant memories. But what has stayed with me most from all the interviews is the vitality of the man, and that straight-faced, British, tongue-in-cheek delivery he had. A very generous person, he would say: "I can’t think about money. It rains in and rains out. I always wanted to be an eccentric millionaire, and now I am."

John on his education made me laugh: "If I’d had a better education, I wouldn’t have been me. When I was at grammar school I thought I’d go to university, but I didn’t get any GCEs. Then I went to art school and thought I’d go to the Slade and become a wonder. But I never fitted in. I was always a freak, I was never lovable. I was always Lennon!"

Then there’s John, as forthright as ever when I suggested he might like to write a musical. "No. No musicals. I loathe musicals. I never did have a plan for doing one. My cousin made me sit through some f***ing musical twice. I just hate them. They bore me stiff. I think they’re just horrible. Even Hair. And they’re always lousy music." What he would have made of Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas show Love, an interpretation of the Beatles’ records, would have been interesting to know.

John, talking about a Hare Krishna group who’d been painting a little temple in the grounds of Tittenhurst Park near Ascot, which was briefly his home, was typical. "I had to sack them. They were very nice and gentle, but they kept going around saying ‘peace’ all the time. It was driving me mad. I couldn’t get any f***ing peace."

And finally there’s John in 1970 being ominously prophetic. "I’m not going to waste my life as I have been, which was running at 20,000 miles an hour. I have to learn not to do that, because I don’t want to die at 40."

He was 40 and two months when he was murdered by a mad fan in New York in 1980.

I was due to interview him for The Sunday Times the following day.

 

©Ray Connolly 2009

__________________________________

10/09/09

Peter Bowles on Tour

I have become a bore. It is to do with age I am afraid. I’m on tour with Chekov’s Swan Song, and Rattigan’s The Browning Version and the first three theatres that I have played in this six week tour have been Bath, Cambridge and Oxford. The boring bit is not the judgment of the audience and critics, but heaven forbid – real life: that area that actors like to avoid if possible. The trouble is that the Theatre Royal Bath, The Arts Cambridge and The Playhouse Oxford are all theatres I first played in 52 years ago – and I’m showing off about it, boasting about it and… boring people about it. When I mention that I was last on at this theatre 52 years ago (Oxford) or that I played here when the Georgian stage was still intact (Bath), the theatre staff react as though they’re listening to some scientist talking about the millions of light years it took for the world to come into creation. The space of time is incomprehensible to them, as if it’s beyond all reason or imagination. Of course all the people I am speaking to think I look so ridiculously young.… at least that is what I tell myself.

In Swan Song, the drunk meandering and ageing actor (quite easy to play all of that) exposes fear of dying and not being remembered. It’s very true today I’m afraid. I keep meeting people working successfully in the theatre who have never heard of Cary Grant, Burt Lancaster, James Cagney or Robert Mitchum and they still show their films on TV! The saddest thing though is there are young actors who have been members of the ‘Stratford Companies’ who have never heard of Britain’s greatest classical actor of the 20th century, Sir John Gielgud. He’s not in Harry Potter I suppose and he never did a popular TV series, so why should they? Is there hope for me then?

I am with the most wonderful company of actors on this tour. Guildford this week, Malvern next then Kingston (The New Rose Theatre). If you like this I can tell you more. If you fancy the plays you can come and see me then.

Peter Bowles

__________________________________

13/08/09

Chicken Kievs, E-Books and Blood on the shelves at Tesco by Marc Peirson

According to The Bookseller magazine there is a furore rumbling in the publishing industry just now concerning the royalties authors receive for books sold in the e-book format. As a recently published crime author whose first novel is selling more in the e-book format than it is as a paperback at Waterstones this should be an area that is really grabbing my interest. Instead I am still fixating on Tesco and their Finest Chicken Kiev’s. The thing is that not all stores sell them and we don’t have a Tesco near to where I live. Readers of an earlier blog will realise how much of a contentious issue this is in the area. I for one am all for it. Not just the Kiev mind the whole kit and caboodle. Indeed I have been using the Kiev as an excuse to discuss Tesco and their excellent range of goods, apart from, of course, the one sad deficiency in their book department - namely my books – in my blogs and correspondence for some while. So it is clearly as a result of this relentless campaign that Tesco have wielded to the power of the mighty Kiev and are going to be stocking my next book, due out on the 13th August called Blood Work. Hurrah. So now when I next travel far afield to my nearest Tesco store I will be faced with a mighty dilemma. Should I check first whether they have the garlic and poultry based product on the shelves first or the blood and guts paperbound product in the book section. It’s a quandary I am delighted to be faced with mind - I am sure the gorgeous people in PR and Sales and Marketing and Editorial at Random House will no doubt take credit for this great news – but I am quietly convinced it is the power of the politely written letter about the price of baked beans and the magnificence of the Kiev that has worked the real magic.

In fact I have pursued a similar policy by highlighting in the acknowledgement sections of Blood Work both the Holly Bush pub in Hampstead and the magnificent Lucy’s Café in West Runton. Now if that doesn’t earn me a substantial breakfast portion and a Bloody Mary on the house I shall have to hang up my product placement quill.

Talking of Random House – they have just offered me another two book deal to explore the whimsical observations and humorous quips of mild mannered DI Jack Delaney a little more deeply – snuggle more closer into his cosy world as it were. Anybody who thinks Jack is a gritty, no nonsense, foul mouthed, Noiresque, anti hero of a copper obviously hasn’t been to Bodham on a Friday night that’s all I can say.

Blood Work will be available from Asda’s, Waterstones, Smiths, Amazon, and all good bookstores from 13 August. And from Tesco’s of course and don’t forget to try the Kiev.…

____________________________________

11/08/2009

Oliver Lansley on The Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

So here I am at the Edinburgh Fringe… again. After once more insisting last year was the last year, I am back for my 8th consecutive festival. I’m 27 - that’s nearly a third of my life! But that’s the thing about Edinburgh, it’s addictive, like theatrical smack. You risk losing all your money, your reputation and your sanity – but there’s nothing else quite like it...

Currently life consists of waking up, queuing for a shower in our flat which has the population of a small country, shaking off a mild hangover during our director’s notes, then getting ready for our show: ‘Ernest and The Pale Moon’.

We perform every day at 14.20 in Pleasance Above - Amazingly the show has started selling out, which is fantastic, although that many people crammed into one small space makes it hotter than Hades, so I sweat more than any human being ever should.

It’s interesting being a performer and a writer. I try to separate the two as much as possible though on the occasions where I forget my lines, I will sometimes attempt to pass it off as a re-write.

Alongside all this you have to deal with all the usual Edinburgh madness; life inside the Edinburgh bubble.

I say bubble as strange things happen to the time space continuum during Edinburgh. While time inside the bubble blurs into one, time outside stops – I remember a couple of years ago when we were up here with ‘The Terrible Infants’, Russia invaded Georgia, half the people at the festival weren’t even aware that one of the world’s biggest super-powers was at war – and they only started paying attention when the Guardian gave it 5 stars.

You can’t help but be sucked in. I always plan to do some ‘normal’ work while I’m here but it never happens. Back in the real world, as well as running the theatre company, I write for television. I’m currently working on a new series for BBC2 called ‘Whites’. It stars Alan Davies and Pam Ferris and will be on next year – I should be writing it now in fact but I’m not, I’m here, In Edinburgh, writing this, why? Because that’s Edinburgh, everything else takes a back seat - it’s all consuming, all powerful, and all you can think about for the month of August. Welcome to the bubble, careful, you may never leave…

____________________________________

30/07/2009

Gary Mitchell On Winning the pitching award at Galway Film Fleadh.

‘There’s the Pope Burner!’ A man’s voice called from across the street as I walked, hand in hand, with my wife Alison away from the Town Hall Theatre in the centre of Galway on the night of the 12th of July 2009.

Now if I was hearing this story some years ago in my own home, as a child of the troubles in Belfast, I would have expected this to be followed by scenes of angry Irishmen, wielding pitchforks and lighted torches, attacking the accused, ‘Pope Burner’ and eventually putting him to death, chopping his head off and parading it through the streets of Galway for all to see and cheer and of course to serve as a warning to any other Protestants from the Black North who might dare to venture west. So, imagine my surprise when whistles and spontaneous applause followed this shout and people wished us well and congratulated me on my triumph.

I can still see the proud smile stretching across my wife’s face because she understood what was going on. You see the reason I was walking away from the Town Hall Theatre in Galway, was not, as many might have suggested when I was a boy, because we had planted a bomb and needed to make good our escape but in fact it was because I had claimed the pitching award at the Galway Film Fleadh!

Yes, I had to tear myself away from all the trouble and controversy that occurs at this time of year in Northern Ireland as either side of the religious divide take up their traditional, opposing, positions for the marching season. Instead, I went to Galway with my pitch, ‘Get the Pope’ set at precisely this time of year and, that’s right, a film all about the trouble and controversy that occurs…

In 1974 after we lost our first ever effigy of the Pope from the top of our bonfire and I was selected as the boy to go and get it back, I wonder how many people would have believed that some 35 years later that same boy would pitch a movie idea about his ordeal, at a film festival in Galway, and win the first prize?

____________________________________

Lizzie Nunnery on the Everyword Festival

23/07/09

Last week saw the wonderful Everyword new writing Festival at the Liverpool Everyman, with a host of new plays of all lengths, cross disciplinary works, writers’ workshops and sofa talks with established writers, all crammed in to five and a bit days. As a fledging playwright I was involved in the first Everyword in 2004, when my full length piece Love was given a rehearsed reading. It was the first time I’d been paid anything for my writing, the first time I’d been in rehearsals with professional actors or had the benefit of pulling apart a script with a dramaturg. It was a magical experience and I’ve been hooked on the festival ever since; having had work featured every year to date. This year, my new full length play, Blood and Soil, was read by the brilliant Kevin Harvey and Wunmi Musaku; and directed by Suzanne Bell. It was a nerve wracking experience as always but I never cease to find the rehearsal process for such events illuminating and challenging in all the right ways. It’s a play set between Zimbabwe and Liverpool and the atmosphere was suitably stifling in the theatre last Thursday, but the versatility and commitment of the actors was staggering, and the performance met with a really positive response; leaving me desperate to get back to my computer and push the play on.

Personal highlights of the week for me include Liverpool actor Sean Mason performing Nick Leather’s monologue Danny Bollocks on the opening Monday night - a hugely physical and energetic performance of a finely woven story that had people exploding with involuntary laughter. I also gained a great deal from Howard Brenton’s sofa talk on the Tuesday which combined gentle charm with astoundingly precise articulation of the challenges of modern playwriting. My third pick of the week would be Nabakov’s Present Tense on the final night of the festival: a cross disciplinary event combining choreography, music, poetry, film, sketches, serious monologue; all on the theme of the BNP, and all written within a week. The result was an intense fusion of art forms and immediate ideas performed with incredible skill. The show opened with Jeff Young’s poetic monologue on the nature of hatred, performed to a sound track by the amazing Liverpool band, Seal Cub Clubbing Club, complete with high energy green faced actors and balloons popping: one of my favourite ever openings to a show.

The festival runs on very little money and masses of energy each year, under the direction and sheer will of Literary Manager, Suzanne Bell and Literary Assistant, Lindsay Rodden. It’s by nature raw and rough around the edges but each year there are gems within, and for anyone who knows anything about the anarchic socialist history of the Everyman, it’s utterly fitting that it’s become a staple in the theatre’s programming.

____________________________________

25/06/09

Life in the Treehouse by Nick Weston

So here I am…free from the confines of London and spending every day under a rich canopy of green. Life could not be better or more industrious! I don’t think I have ever exerted myself this much before. Still, if one is to build a habitable dwelling, 8 foot up a tree in a month there is no rest for the wicked.

I have been chopping down a few trees, adhering to the coppicer’s code of conduct, and mixing my build with a combination of recycled and natural materials. My magpie instincts are developing well and I have found myself frequently dropping into builders sites to see if there is any good wood up for grabs. Sometimes there is and sometimes there isn’t and sometimes I am sent on my way in a deluge of coarse language. Still beggars can’t be choosers!

Other than concentrating my efforts on the build, I haven’t been able to resist working on a few rustic amenities: a kitchen unit, created from a few craftily placed lengths of hazel and an old enamel sink unit I found in the wood. A fully functioning toilet without the flush has also become reality, and of course my beloved Bertha. Bertha is my stove, built from an old oil drum and she is the life and soul of the party. She bears an uncanny resemblance to Ned Kelly so perhaps a name or sex change is in order?

Life goes on in my wood much as it has in the past. My intrusion seems to have gone unnoticed. When you are on a platform in a tree, animals don’t really register you. I have had pheasants, deer and plenty of birds carrying on with their daily chores as if I didn’t exist, which is a wonderful thing.

On the food front, I have been wielding the shotgun more than I would like. The local rabbit population is slowly diminishing – a good thing they rut like, err, rabbits. After the 15TH June that should all change: closed season on rivers is lifted and I can happily fill my belly on fish!  Meanwhile, I spend my days smacking my lips at the thought of smoked eel every time I pass the river on the way to my “patch”.

The “patch”, in other words my vegetable garden, is coming on very well. The seeds were planted a few weeks ago and my efforts are gradually coming to fruition. Turning the corner of a farmer’s field into a workable vegetable hacienda can be incredibly dull, but it is worthwhile in the long run. Turfing, breaking up clops, sieving soil, planting, watering and weed patrol as well as animal defence have all been hard work! In a couple of weeks the first salad shall be on my plate, until then it is down to you Mother Nature…hand over them spring greens!

____________________________________

11/06/09

My Perfect Moments by Marc Diacono

Two people pop up regularly in my mind when I’m outside in the vineyard, orchards and gardens at Otter Farm. My father, because the process of planting, with all the inherent hope, projection and optimism, plays a vision of the future in my mind of a time when the trees are grown and the children run between them, pulling at the branches to twist off the fruit. But looking forward usually makes me look back too. My father would never say so - he wasn’t good at being positive - but he would’ve loved these 17 acres.

The other person is Spalding Gray. The much missed actor and writer used to talk about his search for 'perfect moments', when just about everything lined up in a sweet second to create a sense that everything was right and whole. The idea really stuck with me, and I’ve had a couple of brushes with these elusive moments. The first was four years ago, as I bumped the tractor around the field carefully cutting the grass between new trees and fruit bushes. I couldn’t help immodestly admiring the peach tree that I’d saved from peach leaf curl by carefully removing any blighted leaf on first sight. Slowly it had regained its vigour, until it stood handsome and full of leaves and, after 6 months planted, is now five feet tall.  I remembered a discussion with a friend who laughed at Spalding's idea of perfect moments, insisting that perfection and genius were by their nature ephemeral, and that they also needed an element of imperfection to humanise them and dirty them a little.  The Southampton footballer Matt le Tissier  (whose sporadic moments of true footballing genius were sweetly counterbalanced by the sight of his portly frame being dragged around the pitch to no great effect for most minutes of most games) demonstrated this perfectly. Who else could score a staggering 48 (and yet not quite a perfect 49) penalties out of 49 in his career?

As I sang Rufus Wainwrights 'Peach Trees' at the top of my voice, mercifully drowned from poor neighbours ears by the tractor’s engine, a perfect moment beckoned. The sun blazing, the cool wind blowing, the beautiful peach tree rejuvenated, the chickens pecking and the sight of my pregnant wife cutting flowers in the garden. A man at home with his lucky life, what could be better? I knew what Spalding was talking about. I submerged into the moment and, distracted, mismanouevered the tractor’s topper across the peach tree turning it into a thousand pieces of sweet smelling mulch, while in my head the needle scratched across Rufus' voice, the keepers outstretched hand tipping that 49th penalty around the post.

 

____________________________________

02/06/09

The Beauty of Rome by Jimmy Burns

My Barca scarf was still hanging this morning where I’d left it a few hours ago, by my bed. I had left it there because I wanted to wake up and realise I hadn’t dreamt that we’d beaten Manchester United and won the Champion’s League, lifting the European cup only for the second time in our history. To think back on the evening the morning after the night before is to reflect on a performance that anyone who loves football should cherish for the rest of their lives. Of the many words said on the night no-one sounded sweeter and more noble than those of Alex Ferguson. “The best team won,” he told the world simply.

This was a match where there were no complaints about the referee, and managers, players and fans showed mutual respect for each other. It was also a match that saw two popular royals - King Juan Carlos and Prince William - adopting scrupulous neutrality in public, and applauding both sides at the end.

FC Barcelona, the Spanish League champions and winners of the Copa del Rey this season, had chosen the old imperial city of Rome as the battleground in which to conquer Manchester United, the giant of the Premier League and reigning European champions, who claimed the status of the greatest club in the world.

Beyond an awkward first ten minutes - Barca comprehensively undressed and humiliated Man U, leaving the English club’s glory years and aspirations temporarily discarded on the turf of the Olympic stadium like so many broken dreams. This was Barca playing with the skill and style that turns football into poetry in motion - the updated ‘total football’ which Johan Cruyff brought to the club in the late 1980’s when the former Dutch international and Barca ‘star’ returned to his old Catalan club as manager.

There was nothing systematic about the Barca players in Rome as they swapped positions, and passed the ball from one to the other, one touch at a time, in a flowing and ever changing display of creativity. It reduced one Man U superstar, Wayne Rooney, to the bystand, and another Christiano Ronaldo, to the antics of an irate spoilt brat who does not get his way.

By contrast Lionel Messi weaved his way in an out of the obstacles played in front of him, and scored Barca’s defining second goal, the little man lifting himself to the skies to deliver a header into the top corner with effortless accuracy. No Hand of God here, just sheer determination and brilliance. Messi offered the goal up to God anyway.

My colleague Simon Kuper wrote in the Financial Times in April 2009 that Cruyff had taught Barca a style straight out of a Graham Greene novel: everything hinged on finding the ‘Third Man’. “Everyone has to be in motion so the man on the ball can always choose between two players to pass to.” A month later in Rome two players in particular provided an object lesson in sophisticated movement on and off the ball. Xavi and Iniesta, combined and distributed balls, as if they had eyes at the back of their head, with Iniesta responsible for setting up Barca’s first goal by Etoo, ten minutes into a game Man United had seemed to be able to dominate.

After that, Man U could barely engage with Pep Guardiola’s side, let alone disrupt them. Barca’s ambition was personified by Captain Pujol-no lumbering defender on this epic night, but an inspired jack of all trades, moving from defence to wing to centre foreword, thwarting attacks, threatening goals, with a mobility designed to shatter the opponent’s system of defence and counter-attack.

It forced Ferguson to bring on substitutes, and Rooney to swap flanks in the second half. Such pragmatism and regrouping had delivered results for Ferguson in the past, turning a game round in Man U’s favour, just when all seemed lost. But then he hadn’t reckoned on the effectiveness and elaboration of Barca’s shifting geometry, of players constantly linked with each other not just to play the game, but to win it, with honour - one for all and all for one. VISCA BARCA!

____________________________________

07/05/09

 MY LIFE AS AN ANIMAL

by  Char Counsel

When I signed up to My Life As An Animal I had absolutely no idea what I was letting my self in for, 4 days, 4 nights quite literally living and breathing like a seal.

I think it was only when I entered the seal enclosure it really sunk in quite how extreme this experience was going to be. My new home was far from exotic and a million miles away from the white sandy beaches I had experienced on Shipwrecked.

My shelter for want of a better word was quite frankly, ridiculous. One piece of pocksy tarpaulin was never going to keep the Scarborough storms at bay!!

My biggest challenge came in the form of some rather slippery fish, dead I may add but only just. This was to be my only food for the next 4 days. No matter how hard I tried to think of it as yummy sushi it didn’t work, it was discussing.  But on the plus side what a great diet!!
 
By the end of my first day it soon became apparent that if I was to form any sort of bond with these seas it was never going to happen from the safety of dry land. So donning a rather tight, (to tight for my lollypop head) dry suit I plopped into the water. Coming face to face with the seals and their impressively sharp teeth for the first time was surprisingly enjoyable if not a little cold.

The evenings were probably my favourite; the seals seemed to relish the time they had without the public, jovially playing and making hilarious noises which is something they never did during the day.

For my last night I was moved to the Humboldt penguin enclosure. The excitement of leaving my enclosure was soon shattered by the realisation that penguins are quite frankly bad-tempered waterproof chickens.

The night ended as it began with a rather inquisitive slug slithering across my face, by this point I was so tired I couldn’t have cared less. 

Sleeping on cobbles and eating raw fish was pretty much impossible, however some how all this was made bearable by the shear fact I got to hang out with these amazing creatures. I’m sure living with 4 Harbour Seals isn’t everyone’s cup of tea however I love the idea of being a fat old 85 year old granny, telling my grand children about all the ridiculous things I’ve done.

My Life As An Animal will be shown on BBC 3 at 9pm tonight.

 ____________________________________

08/04/08

TINS OF BEANS AND CANS OF WORMS

by Mark Pearson

I am on my way into town in a moment. But am digging out my Kevlar vest first, putting on my stoutest duffel coat and girding my loins. For it may not just be heated words flying in the air on the seaside today. Not brickbats but bricks!  I am anticipating scenes reminiscent of last week’s London demonstrations – for the Capitalism debate has come charging, full steam and whistles blowing, to the coast! I am walking into a war zone.

I dwell, as the faithful reader will know only too well, in a small seaside town on the North Norfolk coast, Sheringham to be precise. I moved here from West Beckham, and if there seems to be a football connection, there honestly isn’t – I know as much about the beautiful game as Gordon Brown does about Dancing on Ice. Very thin ice. Maybe less than that come to think of it. What attracted us here was the notion of the seaside idyll, the paradise on the coast, Shangrila ici la.  The cut, the thrust, the pumping hurly burly of modern life in the Metropolis was to be a long forgotten, slightly disturbing dream. Go North young man – but stop at the water. So North we went, but little did we realise that we were riding into a thirteen year old battle royale that is threatening to split the town in twain. Not since Oliver Cromwell decided Charles and his hippy followers needed a drastic haircut has a people been so divided. Not since Eoghan Quigg and Alexandra Burke or Mason and Dixon bisected a nation has there been such a line drawn in the sand! Well not in the sand exactly, about a couple of hundred yards up the hill from the beach – to be precise, on the Cromer road. There are only two factions in Sheringham now, and it’s not Blue or Red; not pro Europe or agains it. It ain’t even Manchester United versus Tottenham United, (did you see what I did there) it’s are you in favour of Tesco’s coming to town or against it! It’s a feud worthy of Rufus Hannessy and Major Terril, but while they might have duked it out in ‘The Big Country’, Sheringham is a little one horse town and there is no room to sit on the fence – especially as it has spikes on it.  

The first thing you should know is – I am a huge fan of Tesco’s Finest Chicken Kiev. For my money it is quite simply the best ready-meal purchasable anywhere in the country. Bar none. Proper Kiev properly made. My only grumble, perhaps, is that they may be smaller nowadays than when I first encountered them. Maybe it is just, as Cadburys Crème eggs people claim – not entirely convincingly – that it is just that I have grown bigger.

But I digress. The main problem with the proposed building which has been wrangled over for thirteen years, with secret deals being made with councillors, with approval given and repealed, with claims and counter claims and claims for smaller counters – to sell smaller products I guess – is the impact it will have on the local businesses. Sheringham’s high street for example boasts three greengrocers and two butchers and two fishmongers. The Lobster pub boasts a credit crunch lunch for just under a fiver, but I suspect they have merely relabelled their childrens portions – allegedly.

But it is a telling sign that – in these days of economic gloom and Kebab flavoured pot noodles and only Jacqui Smith’s husband providing relief from the horror of it all – that Tesco is one of the few companies declaring increased profits, taking on more staff, creating job opportunities and seemingly bucking the recession. Now the only way they can do this is by giving the people of this fair land what they want. What they really, really want. Cheap booze and really, honestly they are – believe me – tasty: Finest Chicken Kievs. So if they are giving the people what they want – why is there such an uproar and fierce debate about it here? Well the consensus seems to be a good local supermarket is needed but of what size. The worry being that the essential ‘ungot at’ nature of the town will change and local specialised stores will be put out of business. Will the town be able to support three greengrocers for example?   It’s a tricky one because the answer is - it would be very unlikely, but on the other hand a lot of residents would welcome, in these credit crunch times, the sort of value that Tesco offers. Particuarly the retired and elderly who are living on their pensions or interest battered savings or completely bankered share portfolios.  It’s a debate and a dividing issue that has made the national news on television. Only recently I was in the local when a news cameraman and a reporter were pointing a television camera at the anti campaign lobby who were celebrating the council turning down their latest application. What bothered me most at the time was not that I couldn’t get into my usual quiet seat at the corner of the bar to do my Daily Mail crossword, but that I didn’t have a copy of my novel, Hard Evidence, to hold up in shot for some free publicity – It hadn’t been published at the time.

This blog isn’t really just about an excuse to plug my book or hope for a free delivery of Tesco’s Finest Chicken Kiev. Ahem. But a look at the fact that Tesco do stock books too. In fact they sell a huge amount of them. Millions a year. But not with a huge range. They don’t for example, stock Hard Evidence, at the moment. So do I hold a grudge… I am not sure. I suppose it is a bit like the debate over celebrity book titles – covered far better than me by Sarah Murch at the BBC for the Money Programme.

So like I said, armoured without by a stout duffel and fortified within by a drop of the good stuff I am on my way into the town now where Tesco are making their case in the newly refurbished Oddfellows Hall, a really good, local civic community restoration project – where they will be showing proposed new plans for a more aesthetically pleasing and smaller edifice, closer to town to encourage people in to the centre to shop there as well. 

I am looking forward to hearing the pros and cons of the argument but am mainly hoping they might have some snack products at the event. Maybe some mini Finest Chicken Kievs!

Maybe the way forward is for Tesco to show Sheringham it really does care about the local community and their own produce and stop denying the loyal Tesco customer the chance for a really good read of a crime novel featuring, you know just for example, tough talking maverick cop DI Jack Delaney. 

Come on Tesco – Every little helps!

*Important update. I went to the exhibition but before that to The Lobster for their credit crunch lunch as there were no snack products at all within sight at the Tesco do. I had the Fish and Chips and my lunching companion, local EastEnders writer and internet poker addict plumped for similar with two rounds of bread and butter each at sixty pence a pop. Extremely nice it was too and not a niggardly portion at all! 

Hard Evidence by Mark Pearson is out now and is available here. 

 ____________________________________

25/03/08

SHEDLESS IN PARADISE

by Mark Pearson

Isn’t it ever the way? When you have the one thing you invariably don’t have the other. And I am not talking about marriage. I am talking about sheds.

These last few weeks have seen me on the rollercoaster of having a book published. Hard Evidence, Arrow Paperback.  A novel was something I always planned to do, but never seemed to get round to doing. Too many distractions, not all of them work based. Perhaps I liked the friendly collaborative nature of writing for television too much. Yes that must be it. Can’t think what else. But I am reminded of an article I wrote for the Telegraph a few years back about a garden shed I was planning for my garden…  

‘Was it Rousseau who said that a garden without a shed is like a Sunday roast beef dinner without the Yorkshire pudding and a bottle of claret? In any case, he might have done, if he had been born in Bradford. For it is true: a shedless garden is a Martini without an olive, a Gibson without a pearl onion . . .

I bought my property a year ago and spent last summer equipping it with all the really essential items: enormous TV with surround sound, Clavinova - so I could learn the piano - a well-stocked bar so I could make the necessary cocktail while I contemplated playing the piano, portraits of Mary Queen of Scots, of course, a hi-fi with digital radio, top-notch CD and studio-quality speakers, a capacious fridge to store Champagne, vodka, lemons and the bare essentials for when you have moved into a new apartment and it needs decorating from top to bottom.

And when autumn did its thing with the leaves and the wind and the rain, the garden was as it ever was - bare, barren and shedless. I knew that this sad state could not continue and over the winter months, as I took an early-evening refreshener or two at the bar, I talked the matter over with my friends Michael and Marion, the local landscape gardeners.

We agreed I needed a shed, but what sort? There was the rub. So, with a glass close to hand, I did some detailed research. George Bernard Shaw used to write in a shed in his garden; Dylan Thomas did likewise - and refreshed himself in an old bicycle hut. Children's author Philip Pullman, I am led to believe, scribbles his prize-winning books in a shed in the bottom of his garden, as did, ahem, Jeffrey Archer.

Clearly, any writer worth his briny stuff must have one, and so, after many, many warming glasses over the cold winter months, we finally agreed on the manner of the commission. Taking into account the leafy, and tranquil, suburban genteelness of Northwood, there was only one solution: a log cabin. Obvious, really.

So, as I gazed about looking at my Clavinova, and tinkling the ice in my glass, and thought about opening up the lid and playing the thing, I figured that what I really needed was a banjo, maybe one of these six-string jobbies as I can play House of the Rising Sun on the guitar. Pondering matters musical, I gave Michael the nod, or rather we spat, touched hands and sealed the deal with a large glass or two of the barley product.

The neighbours were a bit surprised as the edifice started emerging - rough-hewn logs of pine skilfully shaped and moulded, not by me, you understand, but I was close at hand with a pitcher or two of the cooling stuff with mint and cucumber, should the hard-working artisans have needed refreshment. And finally, magically, the shed was complete. Oklahoma had finally come home to Middlesex.

Wooden within, and without, it may have been, but it was not without electricity to run the fridge so I wouldn't have to trudge all the way back to the apartment to recharge the ice bucket. Oh, and to power the laptop so I could do some writing, which was, after all, the very serious business behind the project.

But summer is upon us, and the barbecue season is nigh: maybe the writing can wait until more important matters are taken care of. Like what to serve at a hillbilly barbecue? Happily, I believe Uncle Jack Daniel's may be of assistance in the research here.

As I plan the big Kentucky clambake to officially open the cabin, I am reminded of the great bearded one himself saying, strangely enough, about himself: "I don't believe in morality, I'm a disciple of Bernard Shaw."

And a disciple I am, too, with my own garden shed now.’

Well that was a few summers ago now: and two Log Cabins since I find myself with a book published but no garden shed! I moved twice and live now a stones throw from the silky, almost Mediterranean, blue waters of the North Norfolk sea near Cromer, with a small beck that flows through my courtyard garden down to the sun kissed, silver sanded beaches that snake along that coast like a ribbon from paradise – but no shed, and nature abhors a vacuum. Maybe when the sequel, BLOOD WORK, published this summer, is out, it might be time to bang on the estate agents doors again – and this time measure the back garden properly! Meanwhile the sun is over the yard arm and those final pesky edits can wait a while, after all as Raymond Chandler once said…    "Any man who can make a decent Martini cocktail adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love. "  Well he almost said it, and luckily I know just the barperson!

Hard Evidence by Mark Pearson is out now and is available here. 

 ____________________________________

18/03/08

DON’T LET DENIAL OVERWHELM THE ECONOMY 

by Yorick Blumenfeld

Yes, Gordon Brown is in an elusive self-denial. At least one cannot deny him that. But what about the rest of us? How many of us bury our heads in the sand and pretend there is “No Alternative”: to capitalism? to banks? to the global corporate structure? to interest rates? Indeed no alternatives to these constructs will be forthcoming at the economic summit being hosted by Gordon Brown on April 2nd. This kind of denial imperils the chances of global recovery and may spell gloom and doom for millions of human beings.

Politicians of all colours are trying to save capitalism when it is the growth addiction of this historically patched together economic system of inept banking conglomerates and globally evasive corporations that has rapidly been destroying our planet.

Capitalism is differentiated from other economic systems by its exceptional drive to accumulate and its built-in effort to grow and expand. Paul Samuelson taught me at Harvard that “understanding growth and how to keep it up is what modern economics is all about.” Mind you that was a full generation before Viagra!  Capitalism depends on perpetual growth – which is both a mathematical and physical impossibility given that we live on a restricted planet with rapidly diminishing resources. (You may rightly contend that perpetual growth does exist in nature: it is called Cancer.) 

I have contended for over a decade that capitalism, private banks, corporations and interest rates are not favourable to our long-term economic well being, are not morally defensible, and are damaging our chances of survival. But economists, politicians, and even the media refuse to accept that the threadbare clothes of the emperor of capitalism reek of greed and corruption and are polluting everything with which they come into contact.

All are in denial that capitalism pushes inequality and neglects the public interest. Although capitalists make much of the democracy of the shopping mall and the supermarket, I contend that democracy and capitalism are incompatible:

       *Democracy is based on liberty, fraternity and equality.
       Capitalism’s prime focus is on profits not people. It is amoral.

       *Democracy is about the wider spread of popular participation
       Capitalism is about the concentration of economic power.

       *Democracy is about access, transparency and communication
       Capitalism prefers secrecy, control and limited accountability i.e.: ltd.

My built-in preference for Democracy should be manifest but all around me I observe denial of the grave dangers capitalism poses.

The global capitalist system is based on a legally framed corporate structure which is both noxious and toxic. The multi-national corporations which today straddle the globe are responsible to no electorate and to no government. Their ONLY responsibility is to their shareholders. Corporations preach competition but actually practice price collusion, setting prices through monopolistic practices. And they avoid or evade taxes on a truly criminal scale.

The corporate sector is a mirror image of the banking sector and the quality of assets in banking can be no better than the quality of liabilities in the corporate sector. To the extent that the corporate sector (of which the banks themselves form an integral part) is fragile, over-leveraged or unprofitable, the assets of the banking sector are suspect.  There is a serious risk that the recent recapitalization of the banks in the US and the UK will fail to achieve its intended objectives because the corporate picture has been largely ignored.

No one is asking whether in the age of super-computers private banks are at all necessary. Visa and Mastercard do billions of £, $ and Euros of transactions daily with only a few thousand employees each. They provide an indispensable service which banks used to provide only with aggravation. All the services currently provided by our “chummy” and “clubby” banking establishment could be dealt with by powerful computers and the supervision of a few dozen managers from one of the centralized national banks, such as the Bank of England or the U.S. Treasury. These are already the two largest banking groups in their respective states.

Amidst all the current discussion about how to fix the tottering world of finance there is a gaping black hole: No one is examining or discussing the role corporate restructuring must play to restore the financial sector and the real economy back to health. There is blanket denial that corporate governance has become a burden on the overall global economy. The push by corporations to increase their rates of return by holding down wages, cutting down on employment and paring down both research and investment wherever possible have had overall negative consequences.

Corporations have pressured governments over the past three decades to relax environmental regulations, if not to eliminate them altogether. Such efforts were supplemented by bribery in the form of campaign contributions to political parties. Some tried to mask all of this by posturing their ‘corporate social responsibility.’  CSR is an oxymoron if there ever was one.

The headlines have focused on corporate bank directors who awarded themselves vast bonuses despite huge company losses and non-performance.  But no attention has been paid to their overall social irresponsibility. No more needs to be said than that Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, warned against the dangerously selfish powers of corporations and could not accept that these had a proper role in the market.

It seems common sense that the corporation must be so reconstituted as to serve, promote and be accountable to the broader interests of society. The world has curbed or eliminated the powers of monarchy over the past two centuries. There is no reason we cannot do the same to corporations. A start could be made by revoking their corporate charters and then to move on to roll back their limited liability. Ultimately, I see it as desirable to have a total changeover of corporations into worker ownership as practised by mutual societies and cooperatives such as the John Lewis Partnership in the UK and United Parcel Service in the U.S.

It is always pointed out by experts that such cooperatives are not efficient, are uncompetitive and are known to be risk adverse.  Is it not time to face up to the fact that greed, competition, short-termism and growth are no longer desirable in the 21st Century? Cooperatives have shown themselves to be far more concerned about the welfare of local communities and cognizant of the “public interest,” than the irresponsible and environmentally exploitative corporations. We should not deny our children and future generations a sense of the ‘Great Work’ that lies before them: namely ending the capitalist devastation of the planet and creating a more benign and balanced economic system for all. But the first step for everyone of us now is to stop denying the very basis of the economic facts of life.

For more detailed economic analysis see Dollars or Democracy.

 ____________________________________

11/03/08

Easy Reading, Easy Writing 

by Sara Lawrence

‘Easy reading is damn hard writing’ said Nathaniel Hawthorne. Well, I’m not sure what I think about that. Personally I find both reading and writing a hell of a lot easier when I’m prostrate on a day bed, bikini-ed up to the max. Beating hot sunshine lends everything a sharper perspective, literally and metaphorically. And there’s nothing like a pina colada to get the creative juices flowing.

I wrote the entire manuscript of my second novel: Jinxed, out in May, in three months on Bondi Beach. Julie Burchill (best friend and partner in oh so many crimes) and I finished our Decades script: Scars & Stripes, in a Cretan seaside bar – how we loved our office on the water. So it seems entirely appropriate that the two of us decamp immediately for warmer climes to put the finishing touches to the first draft of our latest three part drama series.

I’ve also got a new batch of books to read for the Daily Mail in my capacity as chief chick-lit reviewer. I find they go down so much better with a dose of extreme heat and my brand new Agent Provocateur bikini. Jay McInerney and Haruki Murakami work in London; Jilly Cooper and Jackie Collins work on holiday – something for everyone, see? 

Thank God, then, for Tenerife in March. We’re staying at the amazing Abama hotel: non-stop 5* luxury, the biggest and best sun loungers I’ve ever seen – trust me, I’ve seen a lot – and incredibly attentive, gorgeously good-looking waiters. There’s even an Argentine steak house on site – I literally could not be any happier when I discover this. (We go twice; poor Julie – I think she’d really like to be a vegetarian but she doesn’t complain as I stuff steaks the size of the plate down my greedy throat.)

We’re just so delighted to be here we can’t seem to keep a lid on the hilarity – nor do we want to. We giggle all the way through breakfast, smirk all the way down to the beach, laugh raucously throughout lunch and smile smugly in our sleep during afternoon siestas by the pool. Don’t even get me started on the cocktail hour(s). This non-stop mirth has alienated a fair few of the German holidaymakers, but we really couldn’t care less. If anything it makes us worse.

And the work? Oh, the work. I can’t tell you how pleasant it is to get down to a good few hours of writing after a massive buffet breakfast with lashings and lashings of coffee and smoothies. And how even more pleasant it is to decamp to the beach bar for the first drink of the day feeling like we’ve really achieved something. Or what an incentive said beach bar is to finishing an episode. We’re nearly done now, and I can’t tell you how much I’m going to miss this extreme civilisation – and my perfect holiday pal – when we get home to rainy old Blighty.

 ____________________________________

10/02/08

Dark Satanic Press Release Mills

by Mark Borkowski

A new year, a new American President, a new sense of austerity and asperity pervading the world and yet still no sign that sections of the PR world are little more than spam-merchants, pumping out press releases at the mill without any thought or caution, any sense of building the brand.

Press releases promoting all sorts of tenuous fluff are churned out daily at these dark, satanic mills and the fog they create smothers the good, creative, insightful and careful work of the many of the conscientious publicity agencies out there. The real problem is that the general public and the press more often than not only see the fog from these press release mills and assume that this is what PR is – an unthinking, scattershot form of cold calling.

It’s been like this for a while now – the invention of email has made it possible for the emptiest of stories to clutter up the inboxes of media outlets and make the journalists responsible for sorting the wheat from the chaff tear out their hair in despair as they read ever more unnecessary copy – and, given that it’s cheap, it’s becoming ever more widespread.

This should be cause for reputable publicity houses to tear out their hair too – this sort of lazy publicity, perpetrated by clichéd perky, bubbly types who post off any old story to any old media outlet in the hope that it gets printed and follow it up with badly researched over-familiarity, is bad news for the business. Yet not enough is being done to curb it.

The trouble is, it doesn’t cost much for the client in the short term – but it is so ineffectual that it is a waste of money. A client is then less likely to go to a more reputable publicist, assuming that they’re going to be short-changed again. The real cost lies in the loss of respect for good publicity, the sense of ennui that builds in the people who have to deal with it daily.

Paris, (and Picasso) however, was a wonderful antidote to economic and other miseries and apart from the price of a pit-stop coffee (why, oh why, are we not part of the Euro-currency? It may suit bankers but it’s horrible for tourists) quite cheap. Interestingly, however, the great experiences were, for me, unexpected and unscripted. One was a whole band of Russians complete with male voices and balalaika, busking at the Franklin Roosevelt metro station. And the other was an echt-Gallic parade by the Seine blocking the bridge to the new Branley Museum (overblown, murky, not recommended). We got the Marseillaise played by the combined resources of the Republican Band, a deep throated Legionary song, and a wonderful air of veteran patriotism a la Francaise followed by massed flics and old comrades enjoying just the one in the brasserie opposite.

A good press release should have an interesting story that relates positively to the brand or client and it should be targeted at the people it matters most to; if there is wider interest in the story, then it will spread naturally, putting out roots via word of mouth, through social networking and throughout the traditional media. There’s nothing wrong with perky and bubbly press officers, but the bubbles, if they are pricked, should contain something; such as good sense and careful planning.

PR is not and should never be a cold-calling business, plaguing people into agreeing to plug a brand. A relationship should be built between press officer and media outlet; one that allows them to be familiar and know what the outlet they have approached requires.

That relationship also needs to be preceded by a good understanding of the client or the brand the press officer is promoting. PR should be about promoting a good story that makes sense, that remains true to the source and that doesn’t just clutter up inboxes. Trying to sell trampolines by sending out press releases announcing that they are likely to fly around the garden in stormy weather, potentially causing “huge amounts of damage to gardens, property and potentially … serious injury if they hit a passer-by”, as one company did in 2008, is proof that there are too many press officers out there who do not recognise the need for brand integrity and who would be better off sending out emails offering to help “increase the size of your organ”.

Time for a change, I’d say. Let’s sideline the press release mills and leave room for the sort of PR that actually helps the client, the brand and the people it’s aimed at to make an informed decision.

This extract is taken from Mark Borkowski's blog.

For more information on Mark, see his Website, Facebook Group and Twitter page.

____________________________________

22/12/08

Paris

by Tim Heald

Half a century ago when I first visited Paris I travelled with my father and we flew by BEA Viscount from the collection of Nissen huts which was Heathrow to Le Bourget or Orly. Charles de Gaulle airport had not been built, nor the Channel tunnel through which I passed with my wife when we went to Paris by train the other day. In 2008 it cost £59 a head from the centre of one city to the centre of another and could scarcely have been quicker or less painful.

In many ways, more ways than London, Paris seemed much the same as she did in the fifties and yet although the old girl seems as foreign and French as ever she has become more accessible, easier to get to, easier to get around and full, at the moment, of amazing special Picasso exhibitions in le Grand Palais, the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay. In many ways she feels nearer to the capital of Britain than Cornwall where I live. The train takes less than half the time and… I was going to say much the same about the money… but whereas Eurostar seems to be locked on a cheapest return of just under sixty quid anyone who can fathom out the fares “structure” on First Great Western is a cleverer man than I am.

The paradox is that in terms of the written word and especially the word-world in which I grew up, we are less well-informed about Paris and the rest of France than we have ever been. When I first started out in Fleet Street Sam White still reigned in the bar of the Crillon Bar into which he had apparently poured himself as the Evening Standard correspondent in the 1940s. My friend Edward Mortimer was sent to Paris as number two to the Francophile Franco-expert Charles Hargrove of the Times (still in those pre-Murdoch days a serious world-class paper of record) and even the Express, when I joined in 1967, still maintained a serious Paris office with correspondents and staff. Come to that the Express had two reporters in Washington, four in New York and proper accreditation throughout Europe. But then the Telegraph still maintained former servicemen as Air Force, Army and Naval Correspondents as well as an overall Defence Correspondents. Those were the days.

So Paris was a time for a writers’ reflection. Our hotel (cheap, cheerful, central) provided free copies of the Guardian (which I remember the late great Bill Deedes of all people telling me was the paper to read nowadays) and the International Herald Tribune. We had supper one night with Canadian friends, one of whom works full time at the paper, and I reflected that it used to be regarded as a bit of a joke on the old Fleet Street but now looks amazingly literate and well-informed. The IHT a role model? Hmmm…

Often in a foreign city I find myself eyeing up accommodation and thinking how much I would like to spend time living in a local garret, writing a novel, chewing the fat in the local bar and generally going native. I’ve been very lucky in that I have lived abroad in agreeable places such as Santa Fe, New Mexico; Toronto, Canada; Hobart and Adelaide, Australia but never anywhere REALLY foreign with a seriously alien culture and language. Never, alas, Paris. I think of my former tutor and friend Richard Cobb, whose letters I am editing for Frances Lincoln, and who spent much of his adult life here becoming “un titi parisien” and my university contemporary Patrick Marnham who spent decades here and became an authority, like Richard, on Simenon and all things French. Not me, alas. It’s too late and though my French is serviceable and I’m pretty good on Corneille, Racine and Moliere I can’t do Stade Francais or Sartre. Not in French anyway.

Paris, (and Picasso) however, was a wonderful antidote to economic and other miseries and apart from the price of a pit-stop coffee (why, oh why, are we not part of the Euro-currency? It may suit bankers but it’s horrible for tourists) quite cheap. Interestingly, however, the great experiences were, for me, unexpected and unscripted. One was a whole band of Russians complete with male voices and balalaika, busking at the Franklin Roosevelt metro station. And the other was an echt-Gallic parade by the Seine blocking the bridge to the new Branley Museum (overblown, murky, not recommended). We got the Marseillaise played by the combined resources of the Republican Band, a deep throated Legionary song, and a wonderful air of veteran patriotism a la Francaise followed by massed flics and old comrades enjoying just the one in the brasserie opposite.

Finally we enjoyed a farewell meal at Terminus Nord, an old brasserie now subsumed into a chain, but preserving some character. I love its air of suitcase, speed and real French travellers eating crustaceans. I had a typical old-fashioned 31 Euro meal of oysters, cut-price steak (bavette or ongloise which the English just don’t do) and frites, and a simple Isle Flottante which was a perfect warm meringue on custard. But so much better in France, in French.

And while we’re on the subject, what about blogging? I did a Norman Lebrecht radio on the subject once and thought most participants too glib with the answers and not sufficiently interested in the questions.

But what are we doing? Or rather why aren’t more of us doing it on the PFD site? (I’ve been doing it on my own account for years – see http://www.timheald.com/!) Is it the money?
Is the form completely unlike the print column – which I’ve done for practically everyone? And talking of money, which on an agent’s site one really should, what about the money?

Well, seriously, what about the money?

____________________________________

18/12/08

The Daily Drumbeat Of Grim Economic News Continues Unabated

by Andrew Neil

There was one glimmer of light: retail sales rose by 0.3% between October and November, but that's partly seasonal and probably also the result of the massive discounts peppered across every high street window.

Every other statistic is gloomy: this morning we learned that net mortgage lending will be negative during 2009 and that around 75,000 people will have their homes repossessed, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders. That should extinguish what life there is left in retail sales.

The poisonous effects of the banking crisis are now fully infiltrating the so-called "real" economy: UK car production slumped by a third last month as the motor industry was increasingly hit by the economic downturn. The number of cars built in factories in the UK was 97,604, down by 33% on November last year, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. In America the carnage is even worse: US Motor giant Chrysler is closing all 30 of its factories for a month.

From banks to car-makers, everybody is looking to the government for a bail out. So it's hardly surprising Business Secretary Peter Mandelson confirmed last night he's been in talks with Jaguar Landrover, famous British names whose new Indian owners are seeking help with their cash flow – perhaps upwards of £1 billion of taxpayers' money over two years – because of "the unprecedented cash climate". 

If you're heading for Europe this Christmas, don't expect much cheer when the bills arrive. News that the Bank of England is likely to cut interest rates yet again (they're already only 2%) sent sterling spiralling down even lower against the Euro: though they have not yet officially reached parity, in some transactions you will find a pound already buys you LESS than one Euro.

All that and 2m unemployed, which some think might soon be closer to 3m. So I make no excuses for turning to the economy again today.

On a different note, the Prime Minister is, this morning, telling the Commons about how British Troops will effectively be gone from Iraq by July of next year. The armed forces, of course, can leave with their heads held high; not everyone says the same about those who sent them there almost six years ago – or set their rules of engagement and deployment once the invasion was over.

The blunt truth might well be that nobody on the ground will much notice the British withdrawal. After all, our troops have spent most of the past 15 months hunkered down at Basra's airport, well outside the city. Most effort has gone into to defending that base – and until they retreated, the Basra Palace base – rather than enforcing law and order in Basra and the surrounding southern provinces.

Basra is now relatively safe and normal, though still without enough clean water or 24-hour electricity. But it is a stretch for the British to claim that as their own success. Indeed many locals had come to hate the British not because we were occupiers but because they believed we had turned their city over to foreign-backed extremists intent on imposing hardline Iranian-style Islamist doctrines. It was during this time that I received a number of reports from people on the ground of women being murdered for wearing western dress and barbers being killed for shaving beards, while the British stayed holed up in their airport base and much of the British media looked the other way.

Andrew Gilligan tells what happened next in this morning's Standard: "The turning-point, this spring, was a military offensive, Charge of the Knights, in which we took no part. The troops who expelled the militias and criminals tormenting the people of Basra were Iraqi and American. To the intense frustration of British troops – no cowards they – Britain stayed in its secure base in the outskirts, looking on.

"Still not fully appreciated by the [British] public, Charge of the Knights marked one of the lowest moments in the proud history of the British Army. What prompted the operation was the Iraqi government's horrified realisation that we [The British] had secretly signed what was effectively a surrender agreement with the Mahdi Army to turn Basra over to them, in return for a promise that they would stop attacking us. Part of the agreement was that British troops would no longer enter the city."

So Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, ordered in his own troops (deliberately keeping the British in the dark until the last minute) to take Basra back. At first, it was a rout but then Iraq's crack 1st Division, American-trained, was sent in from Baghdad, backed by 800 US soldiers and marines also from the centre of the country, and they prevailed. Britain, held back by London and constrained by its surrender agreement, barely lifted a finger to help."

British officials would challenge Gilligan's version of events but it is backed up, privately at least, by American and Iraqi officers and by other independent commentators.

____________________________________

17/12/08

Twiggy's Evening Wear Tips

by Twiggy

If you are going to a posh do and want to up the glamour stakes, it can be fun to wear a frock.  What we really want in an evening dress is something made using beautiful fabric that holds us in, enhances every curve and looks drop-dead gorgeous.  It’s always the women who are comfortable in what they are wearing who really stand out at a glam event.  The women I always notice are elegantly dressed and aren’t over the top.  A true eccentric can get away with anything.  But, for me, elegance is all about wearing beautiful fabrics, not flashing too much flesh, a little flourish of something sparkling. 

I love velvet. Whatever your body shape and size, velvet is so sumptuous and beautiful.  It is also a lovely fabric to wear at Christmas.  I have a gorgeous crushed-velvet evening coat by Ghost, which has lasted years.  There’s nothing like velvet for a posh frock; it’s a chic option for smart trousers too. 

One of my big favourites for evening wear has always been a tuxedo.  Katherine Hepburn was the first to appropriate menswear all those years ago. It’s a great look if you’re not into frills, and I’ve never been a frilly girl.  If you want to girlify a tuxedo suit, layer it beneath with a sequinned bustier or tunic top, a sparkly necklace or a chiffon blouse.  If you’re short, what the hell, wear a killer heel.  It’s a great way to give yourself height and a touch of class.  Anyway, there’s no such thing as sensible shoes.  Flats can be just as sexy and perfect for evening as heels. 

If you’re got any rocks – costume jewellery or real diamonds – now is the time to show them off.  I love antique jewellery, especially art nouveau, art deco, Victorian and Georgian period.  These styles I much prefer to modern-looking jewellery.  I love choker necklaces.  Sitting on the neckline, they can look very sexy. Pearls with a little black dress is an unbeatable combination, as proven by Audrey Hepburn. 

Evening wear dos & don’ts:

• Make sure you’ve got enough time to get ready.

• Book yourself for a blow-dry if you have time, otherwise do it at home.

• Apply your make-up in good light.

• Pick the right footwear.  If it’s a sit-down dinner, towering heels will probably be fine, but they won’t be if you’re getting the bus home!  If it’s cocktails with lots of standing around, bear that in mind too.  If your feet hurt, you’ll be miserable all night. 

• Avoid chilly moments.  Pack a pashmina.  You can always drape it over your shoulder or twist it around your evening-bag chain.

• Don’t forget the benefits of adding a finishing touch of a fab piece of jewellery.  This can be costume or the real thing.

• If you put up your hair, consider the benefits of a pair of drop earrings.  This will elevate your look, especially if you have an off-the-shoulder dress.

• Don’t overstuff your evening bag.  All you need is lipstick, tissues and some money, or at least your bus pass if you’re lucky enough to have one!

Twiggy's new book: A Guide to Looking and Feeling Fabulous Over Forty is out now and available here.

____________________________________

17/12/08

Unemployment Is Still Rising...

by Andrew Neil

Unemployment continues its relentless rise, increasing by 137,000 to 1.86 million between August and October. The number of people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance (a narrower measure of the jobless) last month increased by 75,700 to 1.07 million. It is likely, given the huge number of redundancies announced since these figures were compiled, that there will be at least 2m unemployed this Christmas – and rising.

Some are already predicting it will reach 3m before the recession has run its course; the gloomsters include David Blanchflower, the Bank of England's labour market specialist (so he should know!), and several City forecasters.

If it does reach 3m then this will be significantly worse than the legendary 3m of the Thatcher years because now it would be 3m on top of the 3m-4m who are of working age but living on various benefits, excluding unemployment benefit. This would be a scary number of people without a job and depending on welfare payments.

Yet the politics of this are still not going the Tory way. The latest ICM poll shows Labour still cutting into the Tories' lead. In just over a month the gap between the two parties has narrowed from 15 points to five. Significantly, the Tories have fallen below the benchmark 40% to 38% (down seven points on last month) while Labour is up three points to 33%. This places the ICM poll in what this Blog called the "new poll consensus", which gives the Tories a lead of around five or six points – something any government could live with in mid-term.

So, plenty to talk about: one industry particularly badly hit by the downturn is motor manufacturing. We're told Peter Mandelson is drawing up a package to help for the sector. With a huge fall in sales and thousands of jobs on the line, how far should the Government intervene?

Our bad news comes as the US Federal Reserve slashes interest rates effectively to zero and President Elect Barack Obama warns the country is running out of 'ammunition' to avert a deep recession. The Fed has also announced it will indulge in some "quantitive easing"... i.e. pumping a lot more money into the system. We'll be looking at whether Britain will be following suit. 

Also today, Gordon Brown arrives in Baghdad to meet the Iraqi Prime Minister. He confirms British troops will leave the country by the end of July next year.  And while the PM is abroad, it falls to his party deputy Harriet Harman to field questions in the last PMQs before Christmas – keep an eye out for signs of Labour party rebellion over the planned part-privatisation of the Royal Mail, and at the divisions in Cabinet over the Heathrow expansion and look to see whether favourable opinion polls could be tempting Mr Brown to go for a snap election in the New Year.

____________________________________

16/12/08

Sarah Raven’s Christmas

by Sarah Raven

We all remember the Christmases of our childhood, as if – for a few days – a spell had been cast over the household.  In my family we always used to stay with my aunt in Westmorland.  Every year was reassuringly the same – a vast, sprayed-white Christmas tree in the curve of the stairs in the hall, beautiful rooms which smelled of hyacinths, piles of presents under the tree, and meal after meal of delicious food.

A couple of decades later, with a young family of my own, it was my turn to play the host and it dawned on me: the reason for this feeling of harmony had been that someone else was doing all the work.  To begin with I felt intimidated by the prospect of a houseful of people coming to stay for several days, having to manage all the different personalities, the decorations, the food, the drink, the presents, the money.  Stress levels were high until I realised that pre-planning – pinning down most of the meals and thinking through the flowers and decorations well in advance – would free me up to join in and have a good time. 

First comes a long gentle build up, time to put my larder in order and get ahead.  Then there’s a sparkly opening, which means, if I’m feeling energetic, throwing a Christmas party for friends and neighbours. A few days before Christmas, it’s time to make it all look nice, to create a wreath for the front door, to decorate the tree and to make a bumper, long-lasting table centre from ‘Paper White’ narcissi, hyacinths or amaryllis. 

If you consciously divide your Christmas holiday into phases, it will be much nicer for you and your guests.  That claustrophobic and rather deadening feeling of ‘Oh no, not another massive meal’ can be avoided and you can play the event like a conductor, alternating the trombones (a splash of rich, celebratory food) with a quiet passage on the flutes and strings (a crisp, clean-tasting winter salad or a warming soup made from leftovers).  Giving a clear rhythm to the meals should help you avoid feeling overwhelmed and will hopefully allow you to re-summon the bright, magical qualities of Christmas, not by floating through them as a child would, but by planning them – and then hugely enjoying them – as a grown up.

Sarah Raven's Complete Christmas is available from Amazon now.

____________________________________

16/12/08

Recession, Elections And Pensions

by Andrew Neil

Tessa Jowell's remark on yesterday's Daily Politics programme that Britain is facing a recession "deeper than any that we have known" is widely repeated this morning in the papers and on the political blogs. Some will see it as jarring with the Prime Minister's oft-repeated claim that the British economy is in better shape to weather the recession than most other major economies. If so, the Minister for the Olympics is in good company because yesterday the Chancellor seemed to agree with her.

Alistair Darling told the Commons that in some areas we will be hit worse than most: "We are going to be affected more substantially in relation to the loss of revenues that we are now experiencing because of the lack of profitability in the financial services sector ... Of course we are more likely to be more severely affected as a result [of] profitability being reduced ... We are also affected by the downturn in the housing market because of reduced revenues in relation to stamp duty".

The likelihood that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better is fuelling speculation, yet again, that Mr Brown is considering calling an election in the Spring (some are even mulling over the possibility of a February poll). Such is the febrile atmosphere that every tea leaf is examined for meaning, the latest being blogger Iain Dale's report that he has heard from a friend in the ad business that Labour is buying up advertising space for January. 

My own guess is still that Mr Brown will hold on until the last minute in the Spring of 2010 because he believes his fiscal stimulus really will rescue us from recession. But I fear we're in for another sustained bout of election speculation which, given what happened last time, the PM will want to dampen down, even if he does see merit in a Spring 2009 poll.

We may be in the run up to Christmas but there's no Christmas cheer this morning if you're a public-sector pensioner: a letter from the Government could be about to drop on your door mat telling you you've been overpaid for years and to expect a future cut in your pension. And if that news leaves you in need of cheering up ... how about a timely Whitehall farce?  The plot involves an efficiency drive that was meant to save £57m ending up costing the tax payer over £80m.   The farce took place at the Department of Transport and involved – yes, you guessed it – an IT project (but I bet you didn't guess it spoke German).  We'll try and get to the bottom of it.

Also, is the Government failing white working class boys? A study published today identifies a group of nearly 2.4 million young children in deprived Northern neighbourhoods who have low aspirations and fall well below the national target of five A-C grades at GCSE.   For a Government which put social exclusion at the heart of its agenda back in 1997 surely these are the very people who should be achieving more? 

Also today, how important is class when it comes to politics (or broadcasting for that matter)?  There were reports over the weekend that David Cameron is fretting over the image of his front bench because of the numbers who hail from public school and Oxbridge. So is being posh a handicap when trying to appeal to the wider electorate?  And how far should politicians go when it comes to looking and sounding like the people they want to vote for them?

____________________________________

10/12/08

More Kitchen Table Lingo

by The English Project

You’ve over-eaten, you’re feeling off-colour, you’re regretting the night before and you’ve got to meet up with your relations. Yes, it’s Christmas Day when there’s no divide between over-indulgence and having to keep up with the responsibilities of family life in the midst of the Season to be Merry. Here are some fantastic Kitchen Table words from the English Project for you to use when you get stuck. Enjoy. If you want to learn more fantastic words you can buy Kitchen Table Lingo from Amazon.

Foshel noun and verb; a shovel (n) and to push or shovel (v), for example, food into your mouth or coal into the fire ('to foshel it in').

Barry Lee-Potter whose family picked it up from Chicabanga, a lingua franca used by miners from all over the Zambian Copperbelt mining industry during the 1960s and '70s. “[Although it’s] looked down upon today, Chicabanga was a common way for white and black miners to communicate, especially to avoid misunderstandings and accidents at work.”

 ____________________________________

“After the six bags of crisps, the turkey, the double potatoes, the five mince pies, the double cream and the supersize Xmas pud I’m not surprised you’re feeling bloiky.”

Bloiky adjective; the feeling in your stomach after you have eaten too much.

Charles Frederick White whose son Marcus White created it to describe how he felt when he had eaten too much. It has now been taken up and used by the other members of the family. In view of growing obesity rates it’s a word we ought to hear used more often.

 ____________________________________

“I’ve already had six slices of Xmas cake – I’m just flup”

Flup adjective; replete. Derived from full-up. # Lesley Voice

In an extreme form can be fluppy # Annie Baker  who says  “[My friend] Wendy and I work together and at lunch we always have fruit to follow and force ourselves to finish the bowl no matter how full and consequently feel very, very fluppy.”

 ____________________________________

“I was just about to dry my hands when half a dozen justins turned up.”

Justin noun; someone who turns up with, for example, dirty cups and plates just before the washer-upper empties the sink.

# Valerie Cook who, along with her family members, was constantly saying "Just in time" to the late arrivals. As a result anyone turning up at the last moment is now referred to as Justin.

 ____________________________________

27/11/08

I must be getting old!

by Tim Heald

I’m riveted by Andrew Neil’s regular comments on the economic crisis which seems to be all-important at the moment but I remain faintly bewildered. Usually a crisis is triggered by some sort of obvious catastrophe whether it is a natural phenomenon such as plague, drought or flood or a man-made one which usually means war. This one, however, pax Her Majesty whom I have never thought of as a great economic brain, seems to have been largely unpredicted by “experts” and “commentators” and it doesn’t appear to have a very obvious cause.

One minute we in the west appear to be sailing along quite happily and the next we are in the throes of a horrendous disaster. Very few people seem to have seen it coming and the “reasons” appear to be as contrary and inexplicable as the solutions.

In a primitive way I have been bothered for some time by the fact that so many people seem to have been making money out of money. I have the layman’s distrust of bankers and financiers and the writer’s scepticism about middlemen of all kinds. Ours is basically a very simple trade and one of its virtues is that it is, even in a technically unnecessary way, productive. Before the writer came along there was a blank sheet, by the time the writer has done his or her work, there is something, a story or comment which did not exist before.

It also used to be, before the abolition of the Net Book Agreement – which I deplore – a very straightforward way of making money at least when applied to books. I remember some years ago being on a British Council sponsored visit to Rumania. Conversation between myself and Simon Brett, representing the British Crime Writing Community and our Rumanian counterparts was pretty desultory until we got on to the subject of money. This, as we all know, tends to be what excites writers more than anything, mainly because they tend not to have enough of it.

Spurred on by our interpreter I tried to explain how we got paid. It was simple, I said. Ten per cent of the cover price of the first two and a half thousand copies sold; twelve and a half per cent of the next two and a half thousand; fifteen per cent thereafter. I thought I explained it rather well: short, sharp and in words of as near one syllable as was possible. My audience, however, looked uncomprehending and the interpreter invited me to try again. This I did but I was met by similar bewilderment.

Very well, we said, conceding defeat. How do you get paid? Simple, said the Rumanians. The publisher pays money. We considered this and then asked how the publisher decided how much to pay. They shrugged. Theirs not, evidently, to reason why. The publisher paid whatever he thought fit. In other words, I ventured, there is no relation between the number of copies sold and the amount of money received – no link between earning and income.

The Rumanians looked incredulous. Of course not. What an absurd idea! 

We are all Rumanians now and I for one don’t care for it much.

And another thing. At the back of my mind I often hear the late Roy Jenkins, confronted by the idea that the society of graduates from Oxford University, of which he was Chancellor, should be concerned mainly with raising money. Jenkins demurred. “Let us hear it”, he said, “for the non-acquisitive professions”. Coming from Jenkins this was, perhaps, a bit disingenuous but I found it very soothing. When I went back for a college reunion I had never previously encountered so much non-acquisitiveness. The hall was wall-to-wall university professors. I had never seen so many very clever, not very well-off people in my life.

My elder son went to the same college at the same university and whereas I don’t remember any of us thinking that our degrees were going to be a passport to wealth and prosperity it seemed to be the only thing on the minds of his generation. He, I’m glad to say, is earning an honest crust as a school teacher and “coaching” the under-twelve “B” team at rugby football. His contemporaries, however, seem to be nothing but bankers or barristers (which sometimes seems to be virtually the same thing). Something changed between his student days and mine and not for the better.

So I’m sorry Andrew but it all seems incomprehensible, depressing and different. And while we’re on the subject whatever happened to “leisure”? When I was growing up my elders were much concerned about what future generations were going to do with all this spare time they were going to have on their hands but the concept seems to have vanished. Nobody seems to have any nowadays; nor money; nor much in the way of job satisfaction. Not even time off for lunch, if they could afford such a thing.

I must be getting old!

____________________________________

27/11/08

Mumbai

by Andrew Neil

The terrible terrorist attacks in Mumbai are still unfolding but they have already claimed over 100 lives with at least 250 injured, many seriously, grim figures that will rise as the morning goes on.

Anybody who thought al-Quaeda-style terrorism was largely aimed at the West will now have to think again. Some reports say the terrorists were specifically picking on Americans and British, but the death toll is overwhelmingly Indian. Islamic fundamentalist terrorism – of which this seems to be the latest deathly manifestation – clearly does not discriminate, or care. A previously unknown outfit, Deccan Mujahideen, has claimed responsibility.

The Times of India has the best summary of events so far: "In one of the most violent terror attacks on Indian soil, Mumbai came under an unprecedented night attack as terrorists used heavy machine guns including AK-47s and grenades to strike at the city's most high-profile targets – the hyper-busy CST (formerly VT) rail terminus; the landmark Taj Hotel at the Gateway and the luxury Oberoi Trident at Nariman Point; the domestic airport at Santa Cruz; the Cama and GT hospitals near CST; the Metro Adlabs multiplex and Mazgaon Dockyard - killing at least 101 and sending hundreds of injured to hospital."

Of course Islamist terrorist attacks are not new to India. Scores of innocent people have been killed by them in recent years, in attacks that are rarely reported or given much prominence in the Western media. But the assault on Mumbai is different in scale and ambition.

The exact motives of those behind this al Quaeda-style attack are not known but previous, smaller-scale attacks suggest it is part of a vicious campaign to hit busy urban targets which are popular with foreigners and the wealthy Indians who mix with them. India's economy is already slowing down because of the global financial meltdown and the atrocities in Mumbai, the country's financial capital, is likely designed to cause maximum damage to India's economy and international reputation.

Also, Peter Mandelson – he's been cracking his whip a lot lately and yesterday it was the turn of credit card companies to feel his wrath.  He called in company heads and warned tough action if they "stepped out of line" and failed to pass on interest rate cuts. 

Today he's off to meet car manufacturers to see what help he can offer them.  So we'll be asking: is the Prince of Darkness coming up trumps.  He's been credited with saving the post office, sorting out tips, the 10p tax rate and transforming Brown.  We'll try to get to the bottom of what's really happening.

____________________________________

26/11/08

A READING?

by Niall Williams

When I am writing I write out loud. I tell myself the story in the front room of the cottage here in Kiltumper and am my own first listener. So then it might not seem such an odd thing to go and do a Reading in public. But really it is. When you think about it, what is ‘A Reading’ supposed to be? Are you supposed to read from page one and follow on as it is written until twenty minutes or so pass, or are you supposed to dip in and out of the book if there are different narrative voices, styles? Is it, as one gentleman told me just before I went on, to ‘just give them a flavour?’

How much is enough flavour then? A page?  And then what? ‘Just speak about yourself,’ the gentleman said.

My own idea of the perfect Public Reading is the image of Charles Dickens performing all the parts in ‘Great Expectations’ to packed halls up and down England. Not only a one-man-show, but a one-man-world. The performances lasted for hours and Dickens worked himself to near-faint each time in the effort of becoming not only all the characters but the entire book. His Reading seems to me to have been an attempt to become a living book. He finishes and collapses like a bookcover closing.  

I had reason to think about this again recently when I was asked to read at the Queens Festival in Belfast. I was honoured to be asked and intrigued when told that I would be reading with Rebecca Miller. Apart from the pleasure of getting to meet Rebecca I was already thinking of how the audience would take to the two of us sharing the stage, or more particularly her sharp and witty Pippa Lee and my ancient Apostle John.

We wondered about it ourselves on the train to Belfast. As far as we could tell the books had nothing remotely in common, but was that the point?

Rebecca read first and we entered Marigold Village, a kind of all-in American retirement village into which Herb and the much younger Pippa move to the surprise of some of their friends. The audience in the Opera House listened intently, laughed at the sharpness of the observation, applauded. Then I stood up and wondered how in the world they were going to be able to move from Marigold Village to the island of Patmos in the first century where a blind old man was coming out in the dawn.

But then they did. I read from the beginning. I said the words out loud just as I had when I first wrote them, and, little by little, I knew that the audience was travelling into the story. You could almost feel they go. And in a way, it was remarkably heartening, for it made me think that Rebecca and I were like two books on the fiction shelf, thrown together by the chance of similar publication date, but that readers could pick up and read both, enter one world and then another just as easily. Be enriched by both.

On the journey home I played Fantasy Reading then, imagining unlikely pairs of writers on the same stage: ‘This evening, ladies and gentlemen, we have Mr. William Blake and Mr. William Butler Yeats, Mr. F.Scott Fitzgerald with Miss Emily Bronte…’

____________________________________

24/11/08

Never has so much been leaked to so few for the consumption of so many!

by Andrew Neil

If the hectic government briefing of the last 48 hours is anyway accurate, we already know the main substance of today's Emergency Budget (which is what the Pre-Budget Report has become): a temporary cut in Vat (to 15%), pressure on banks to keep lending to business and home-owners, deferment of some tax rises (from small-business corporation tax to fuel duty), rollover of this year's £120 income tax cut – oh yes, and massive tax rises to come after 2010 to reduce the massive budget deficit which will result, including (according to last night's leak) an increase in the top rate of tax to 45% for those earning over £150,000 or £175,000.

This latest leak gets all the newspaper headlines this morning – which means we should beware. The Chancellor will this afternoon announce he plans to borrow around £70 billion this financial year (08/09) and maybe as much as £120 billion in the next (09/10). The Prime Minister's regular claim that Britain is better placed than most to meet the economic crisis is likely to be challenged by him borrowing more than most – up to 8 or 9% of GDP.

These are massive sums and to bring the deficit back to anything like normality will require taxes to rise after 2010 and public spending to be squeezed. But a new 45% top rate will bring in merely an extra £1.5 billion (if that), which won't even meet the additional interest payments on the extra borrowing.

So this afternoon we will have to be careful not to be deflected by the headline grabbing stuff – the immediate cut in Vat, the future rise in the top rate (if Labour is re-elected) – and look closely instead at what the Chancellor proposes to do to bring the deficit back to around 2% of GDP in the years after 2010 – which will require tax rises for everybody (not just the 400,000 who would be affected by a 45% top rate) and eye-wateringly tight public spending controls, which in some areas will mean real cuts.

The Chancellor will not be able to fudge these measures or remain suitably vague. If the markets don't see a credible plan to return the budget to balance in the years to come after today's emergency measures, then sterling and the stock market will slump even further. On top of financial meltdown and recession, the government would be faced with a full-blown currency crisis and an inability to raise its borrowings in the credit markets – something it could most certainly do without. In effect, we will have two budgets this afternoon: one of immediate tax cuts and extra public spending, the other of deferred tax rises and a squeeze on public spending to come.

____________________________________

18/11/08

Further thoughts...

by Andrew Neil

The latest economic stats, out this morning, show that inflation is falling on all its measures. They are all still high – the underlying RPI, for example, is 4.7% – but inflation is clearly on a downward trajectory (as City and government economists have been predicting) and set to tumble fast in the months ahead.

Some folks think rising prices will be replaced by falling prices as a deep recession bites and even the Prime Minister used the D-word yesterday when he reported to the Commons on the G20 economic summit in Washington at the weekend (and the further away we get from that summit the less impressive it looks).

Falling prices – or deflation as economists call it – might seem an attractive proposition because it means that, even without a pay rise, your money will go further. In fact, it is even more scary than rampant inflation. If people think prices are falling and will fall even further in the months ahead then they put off purchasing anything in anticipation of buying things more cheaply later. But if most people postpone their spending this merely tips the economy into a deflationary spiral which destroys economy growth and produces mass unemployment.

The Japanese recently endured just such deflation for over a decade and no matter what they tried – zero interest rates, tax cuts, massive Keynsian pump-priming – could not easily escape from it. The truth is economists know better how to handle inflation than they do deflation. Even today the Japanese economy is a shadow of its former miracle-working self. My own sense is that Britain is not on the brink of Japanese-style deflation but the RPI could go negative for a while in 2009, reflecting the continued slashing of interest rates. That could push the recession deeper than the consensus expects.

What more can Ministers do to ensure there's no repeat of the appalling catalogue of events that lead to the death of Baby P, whose tragedy continues to play big in the headlines? Children's Secretary Ed Balls is expected to announce a new multi-agency Children's Trust Boards which will be legally responsible for children.  Mr Balls wants earlier intervention for children at risk. But will another layer of management and bureaucracy make a difference?

Also today British law now recognises Muslim Sharia Courts as tribunals which can hear family cases in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Government argues the move in no way overrides the courts but what are the dangers when it comes to the rights of women? 

And we all know how far politicians are prepared to go when it comes to playing the common man – remember the ease with which Tony Blair could slip into so called ‘Estuary English’ when he wanted to sound demotic – well, there are reports today that the Shadow Chancellor Mr George Osborne has been getting voice coaching (nope, I've not noticed any change in his voice either). We'll hear from an expert in the art of the political voice.

____________________________________

17/11/08

Leader of the pack – or bringing up the rear?

by Andrew Neil

Gordon Brown has returned from the G20 summit in Washington DC with international cover for pump-priming tax cuts in next Monday's Pre-Budget report, which is now shaping up to be a fully-fledged Special Budget. But he still has to convince the Treasury and his Chancellor.

There has been wild talk, surprisingly encouraged by the IMF, about a £30bn stimulus, which would amount to 2% of GDP. The Treasury has quickly hosed down such speculation but Whitehall is abuzz with rumours that Mr Brown wants a much bigger Keynsian boost that either Mr Darling or the Treasury are prepared to contemplate.

The PM still gets a kick from implying that he's leading world opinion in the banking crisis and it's certainly true that his bank bail out plan has proved rather more robust than Hank Paulson's in America. The US Treasury secretary has junked his original scheme to buy up all the toxic waste on US banks' balance sheets for something more Brownite in approach. Since Mr Paulson is a former boss of Goldman Sachs, it only goes to show that bankers these days aren't just incapable of running banks, they're also not very good at bail outs either.

But when it comes to fiscal stimulus, there is evidence to suggest Mr Brown is bringing up the rear rather than leading the pack. After all, many major economies have already cut tax or increased spending or done a bit of both, while Mr Brown talks about it: President Bush implemented a $150bn stimulus back in February; Japan is in a perpetual state of fiscal stimulus; the Chinese have just pumped up public spending and made VAT reforms worth a combined $600bn; the German and French governments have already approved pump-priming packages of their own, as has Spain; Australia did the same last month.

So I'm puzzled by claims that Mr Brown is leading the way since we'll have to wait until Monday to find out what the British government has in store; not for the first time, journalists are falling for a dollop of Downing Street spin.

The global consensus for tax cuts/extra spending, however, underlines how isolated the Tories and Shadow Chancellor George Osborne are in setting their faces against further fiscal stimulus. They will be vindicated if the Brown boost does little to mitigate economic misery in 2009; but if the economy starts to improve on the back of tax cuts, the Tories will have bet on the wrong horse.

At least Labour spin that Mr Osborne was talking down the pound – a bit rich coming from a government which has presided over a 30% slump in sterling – are likely to be muted: the pound rose in early trading this morning.

Big business, it seems, has now caught up with the rest of us: the CBI is warning today that Britain will be in recession for the whole of 2009, and that around one million people will lose their jobs as a result.

       
____________________________________

14/11/08

Women aren't funny? That's a syllogistic fallacy

by Catie Wilkins

To me ‘women aren’t funny’ is just an illogical sentence. For many, many reasons, but not least because of the universal nature of comedy. You can be anyone and tell a joke, and you can be anyone and laugh at a joke, and race, gender, nationality, sexual preference and position in society can’t stop you.

Secondly, it’s an illogical statement because it can’t be proved or disproved. Even if you disregard the fact that all humour is subjective, ‘Women aren’t funny’ is a sweeping generalisation about a section of society. It does not stand up to deductive reasoning and is a syllogistic fallacy.

For example, if I said, ‘All Scottish men are alcoholics’ a counter argument might be, ‘My mate Dave is Scottish, and he’s not an alcoholic’. I am then faced with two choices: I can say ‘All Scottish men are alcoholics apart from your mate Dave’ (the conclusion of which does not follow logically from the premise). Or I can realise that my premise is incorrect and say ‘Not all Scottish men are alcoholics.’

So why are so many people so keen to spurn logic in their bid to scrap option two, despite being faced with the mounting evidence otherwise, and cling to the notion that at least women are ‘in general’ less funny than men? Why do people see the women who make them laugh as anomalies? Why do some people think they are giving me a compliment when they say that I write like a man?

A friend of mine who is a female comic was introduced to an audience in Newcastle by the compere saying ‘our next act is a girl’. The audience booed before she’d even got on stage. She still stormed it though. She is very funny.

You could deduce from that, though, if you wanted, that society is sexist. They expected her to be bad because of her gender. I wouldn’t say all of society is sexist. That would be illogical. But some audiences and some promoters, and even some reviewers are.

My first ever review in Edinburgh (in Three Weeks) started with the sentence ‘I’m not generally a fan of female comics, but…’ implying that he viewed female comics as part of some weaker, sub-category of comedy, rather than just comics, which is how I saw us.

He kindly forgave myself and the other girl in the show (the very funny Hannah George) by saying we proved that women ‘can indeed be funny when given a mic and an audience’ (which I thought was odd criteria – because if you were actually going to deny women a mic and an audience, then it really wasn’t a fair contest to begin with).

But in a way I’m kind of glad, because at least we know where we’re at as a society. Comedy clubs are some of the last vestiges of freedom and freedom of speech. And that is going to include things that I don’t always want to hear, and possibly don’t agree with.

Freedom is crucial for comedy. Voltaire said I do not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it. I wouldn’t die for the right of the people who shout sexist abuse in comedy clubs to continue to do so – I’d rather they stopped. But if that is what they think, I am glad they have the freedom to express it. That is the world that I live in, and I feel like I need to know about it, partly so that as a comic I can then go off and write some jokes about it. And if society wasn’t sexist it wouldn’t be a problem anyway.

And it is not all doom and gloom. I won a gong show at the Comedy Store in May this year, and that was by audience voting slash drunkenly shouting and screaming for who they liked the best. So not all audiences can be sexist (according to my syllogism) or if they are, the way to unite them is with jokes about Aids. Nothing can possibly go wrong with that.

And we can all do our bit in society. Next time you hear someone saying something sexist, say ‘Excuse me, but I think your comment is based on an ill-judged cultural stereotype, and it is not fair that you are propagating it as fact, and spreading that misery-causing, opportunity limiting world view’. It’s easy.

OK it’s not easy. But it is not a man’s world. I live here too and I’m funny.

       
____________________________________

13/11/08

Turning away from the economy...

by Andrew Neil

More British fatalities in Afghanistan this morning: two Royal Marines were killed in an explosion in southern Afghanistan yesterday, the Ministry of Defence said. Next of kin have been informed.

So this morning we're going to put the economy on the backburner for the day (though BT's plan to shed 10,000 jobs shows we'll be coming back to it very soon and that there is now a daily drumbeat of grim economic news) and turn our attention to Afghanistan, where 8,000 British troops make up a key fighting part of the Nato deployment to defeat the Taliban and al Quaeda and give the country some semblance of peace and normality.

Unlike the invasion of Iraq, all three major British parties share and support that objective. But the British public is not part of the Westminster consensus. As Afghan President Hamid Karzai holds talks with Gordon Brown, a new BBC poll finds that more than two thirds of us think British troops should leave Afghanistan within a year. The poll shows little appetite for a war that too few think we can win (though nobody should seriously think we could lose – indefinite bloody stalemate is the feared outcome). 

Last month the departing commander of British troops in Afghanistan said a purely military victory was not possible – though nobody who matters has ever thought it was – and that there would have to be a negotiated end to the conflict. There is a growing view that while Nato keeps up the military pressure, it should begin talks with the supposedly more moderate elements of the Taliban.

Senior Indian sources tell me there is no such thing; even so, in practice there is not much difference between some of the Taliban and the Afghan warlords we've been dealing with for sometime. To that end we'll be asking: should we be talking to the Taliban?  Secret talks are said to have been held though Britain maintains a public posture of no negotiation (shades of how we handled the IRA there).

While in the USA last week I was given a gloomy assessment of Afghanistan by a senior US spook. He said the fundamental problem was that the Karzai government was riven with corruption and incompetence to its very core, which made for a fertile breeding ground for the Taliban, that Karzai was a decent enough character himself but that he was surrounded by "crooks, gangsters and people getting rich out of the opium trade."

He said that America and its allies had no Plan B to Karzai, that President-elect Obama's promise to send another 8,000 troops would make very little difference and that until the Taliban/al Quaeda safe havens in Pakistan were destroyed there was no chance of progress – but that if Nato attempted that with cross-border raids, the new, shaky government in Pakistan would tumble. He used a well-known Americanism: "We are between a rock and a hard place."

       
____________________________________

10/11/08

Tax cuts???

by Andrew Neil

Suddenly politicians are falling over themselves to offer us tax cuts – just at the moment when the cupboard is bare!

No matter, say the Keynsians, we need a mixture of tax cuts and extra public spending to mitigate the worst effects of the recession – and if that means borrowing even more, so be it.

That's the thinking behind reports that the Chancellor is contemplating a £15bn tax cut package to be unveiled in his Pre Budget report expected later this month (though Mr Darling has not yet got round to telling us exactly when). The Lib Dems are also calling for tax cuts.

The Tories are more chary of borrowing their way out of this recession (see George Osborne's reservations in today's Financial Times*) but are also worried about being left behind in the scramble for tax cuts. So tomorrow they'll unveil a new tax cutting policy to help ward off the symptoms of unemployment. If it's paid for by spending savings, however, it will not add to overall demand, which is the purpose of Keynsian pump-priming.

As Guido Fawkes says on his blog this morning: "tax cuts are the new black". But exactly what scope is there for tax cuts and would they really be a shot in the arm for an ailing economy? I'll be talking to a former Labour Minister who thinks he know's the answers, the independent-minded Frank Field, who has called on the Chancellor to scrap the Pre Budget report in favour of tax cutting Budget this month.  

Also today the Prime Minister's visit to the Gulf States last week underlined the growing power and importance of so called `Sovereign Wealth Funds' in investing in western economies that have been hard hit by the credit crisis.  Mr Brown called for hundreds of billions to be made available by Gulf States for countries in economic peril but also warned he did not want such states to use it to gain political influence.

It’s not just the Gulf States who have multi-billion dollar funds of theses kinds: China, Russia and Singapore do too. So, should we be concerned about who buys what when it comes to the sale of British assets?

       
And Post Offices… which way will the Government jump on the awarding of the new contract to handle benefits and pensions - will it go to the Royal Mail and help save thousands of local post offices currently threatened with closure or will the contract go to a commercial rival?  A report by MPs today warns delays in the decision is `destablising' the Post Office network.

*Here's the money quote from Osborne's FT article:
"Today, we must let the automatic stabilisers function. But as Lord Burns, former permanent secretary at the Treasury, warned last week, borrowing beyond that without being clear how the bills would be paid would be 'very dangerous at this point'. 'We begin from a position of a structural deficit. Adding to that structural deficit can only increase the problems subsequently,' he said. I agree. Spending our way out of recession will not work. Targeted tax cuts would help but they must be properly funded. Any tax cuts must not permanently increase the structural deficit and must be combined with a strategy to reduce it over time. If they are not, Britain’s international credibility will be further imperilled, future generations will be burdened with even more debt and a recovery would be threatened by the prospect of large tax rises. We would be sowing the seeds of the next crisis."

____________________________________

03/11/08

Thoughts from abroad – with three days to go ...
(and assuming an Obama victory ... if McCain wins expect very different thoughts on Wednesday morning!)

by Andrew Neil

1. That part of the world which does not include the USA is pretty much a one-party state for Obama and if he fails to win there will be much international wailing and gnashing of teeth at the “stupid, racist Americans.”

But the rest of the world should be careful for what it wishes because an Obama victory will make the usual knee-jerk anti-Americanism, now so common in the chancelleries and fashionable drawing-rooms of European and developing countries alike, much more difficult. With someone called Barack Hussein Obama, son of a Kenyan goat-herder sitting in the Oval Office, default ant-Americanism will be harder to sustain, especially in Europe which has no Obamas of its own.

Indeed Europe hasn’t even any Colin Powells or Condoleezza Rices. France has 6m Muslims plus another 2m immigrant stock of black African origin, all in a country of 60m people. Yet not a single black or brown face is elected by metropolitan France to the French Assembly (a few come from distant colonial dependencies). Germany, with its huge and long-standing Turkish population, can manage only a few brown faces in its parliament. Italy is nowhere in representing racial minorities while Britain, which does better than most big European countries, has more black and brown faces in Parliament but they are still under-represented and none is in the first rank.

Symbolically and practically, an Obama presidency, following hard on Rice and Powell, will place Europeans at a disadvantage when it comes to attacking America. After all, it may still be “stupid and racist” but there is no prospect in the foreseeable future of a British, French, German or Italian Obama (or Powell or Rice for that matter). 

Europe’s anti-American intellectual snobs will now have to think twice before uniting with the Jihadis to claim that whenever something goes wrong somewhere in the world “it is all the fault of American foreign policy, because it is racist and chauvinistic.”

An Obama victory would also reinforce the story of the “American Dream”, in which millions around the globe still believe, even if their governing elites affect to despise it. What other country would facilitate what Obama calls his “improbable journey?” It should chasten and humble other countries, which can only dream of such mobility.

2.  It’s just as well that an Obama presidency should be able to count on international goodwill, at least at the start, because the new president will be greeted by the in-tray from hell when he gets his feet under the Oval Office desk. Two unfinished wars (Iraq and Afghanistan), a key ally in the war on terror on the brink of becoming a failed state (Pakistan) and the unresolved problem of Iran’s nuclear ambitions – all to be dealt with against a domestic background of the worst financial meltdown since the Great Crash and what could be a long and deep recession.

       
He will have some advantages: anti-Americanism is still virulent but is now past its peak in Europe. Germany’s Merkel, France’s Sarkozy and Britain’s Brown are naturally pro-American and will want to work closely with the new Administration. In Iraq the new president should be able to declare some sort of victory and begin the disengagement, with the support of everybody from Baghdad to Berlin.

Afghanistan is the more immediate problem but there is a Nato consensus that withdrawal is not an option and that more men and materiel will probably need to be deployed. Many Europeans who opposed the war in Iraq will likely be on Obama’s side when it comes to Afghanistan.

Consensus doesn’t make it much easier to solve, however; and the one step that might make a difference (and which Obama has indicated he might do) – hard, relentless hits on the Taliban’s bases in Pakistan’s North-West frontier with Afghanistan – could tame the Taliban only at the cost of destroying Pakistan. Obama has called for 10,000 more troops in Afghanistan, a pledge he made to show he’s not soft on foreign policy. But that alone won’t make much of a difference.

While President Obama is grappling with that, he should expect difficulties from an emboldened Iran, which could be keen to test the new president to see on how many fronts he’s prepared to fight – militarily or diplomatically – at once. President Ahmadinejad’s star is in the descendent in Tehran for the moment, which is good news for the new incumbent in Washington. But a black man in the Oval Office – even one that wants to talk to Tehran – won’t make the Iranian regime any less anti-American. Iran could become for Obama what Cuba was for JFK.

There is, of course, also China, which could turn nasty and more nationalist in the current global downturn, but let’s leave that for another day.

3. The Democrats should rule the roost in Washington with an Obama presidency, with a bigger majority in the House and possibly a 60-seat filibuster-beating tally in the Senate after Tuesday. But monopoly won’t necessarily make for harmony between Capitol Hill and the White House.

Congressional Democrats will be more leftish than at anytime since the 1960s and they will put pressure on an Obama presidency to move in their direction. Mr Obama’s instincts might be to do so – he has been a very liberal Senator – but he will also have an eye on re-election in 2012 and that will keep dragging him back to the centre. Like New Labour in Britain, Mr Obama has the ability to disguise left-wing policies with right-wing rhetoric (so welfare tax credits are billed as tax cuts) but that will only take him so far with liberal-left Democrats in Congress, who will be pushing Obama to make some an epoch-defining reforms, in the manner of FDR.

That will appeal to Obama but he will not want to go too much against the grain of what is still a pretty conservative country. He is cautious and incrementalist, not given to bold moves. I expect him to govern largely from the centre, whatever his natural instincts, so tensions between the White House and Capitol Hill could emerge quite early in an Obama presidency. A sideshow of this will be deteriorating relations with America’s black political establishment, which doesn’t like Obama much and which he is bound to disappoint.

4. If the Republicans end up out in the cold in the legislative and executive branches of government, they will be hoping a Democratic Congress drags an Obama presidency as far left as possible – because they’ll see that as the most likely opening for a quick Republican recovery. Some Republicans are already speaking quietly about a Democratic monopoly triggering a Gingrich-style comeback and snapping the GOP out of its current morass.

Maybe. But Republican problems could be more deep-seated than that. For a start, the 9/11 effect in US politics, which was a huge asset for the Republicans, is pretty much gone. It got Mr Bush re-elected in 2004 but has done nothing for Mr McCain in 2008. He was chosen as the national security candidate in an election that turned out to be about economic security. Since the worst financial crisis for 80 years happened on the Republican watch that has been a huge handicap for him which could haunt the Republicans for years to come. The prominence of economic security issues in 2008 explains why the Republicans are not running as well as they did in states like New Jersey in 2004.

But it’s not just a reputation for economic competence that the Republicans have lost: because of Iraq they’ve also lost their reputation for national security competence. It’s potentially a fatal double-whammy, with historic ramifications.

The coalition of fiscal conservatives, social conservatives and neo-con hawks, which has been the dominant political force in recent American history, is coming apart at the seams (for Republicans that could be the most dismal part of the Bush legacy) and it is not easy to see either how it could be sewn together again or what would quickly replace it. FDR won in 1932 and 1936 largely by blaming everything on Hoover. The same could be true in 2008 and 2012, with Obama blaming Bush; the Republicans could be too busy trying to rebuild their own house to do much about it.

The GOP primary in 2012 could be a bloodbath because there is increasingly little uniting social, economic and national security conservatives (one of the reasons why Senator McCain has struggled in the campaign to find an effective domestic message).

Normally, you’d advise the Republicans to learn from recently successful centre-right renaissances, such as David Cameron’s Tories in Britain or President Sarkozy’s neo-Gaullists in France. But the US Republicans are so unlike any other right-wing parties abroad that I’m not sure there are any international lessons to be learned.

5. The election of 2008 heralds the emergence of a new America we will all have to get to know – and not only if it produces the first black President. If Obama takes Virginia and North Carolina, we will have come to terms with a new New South. Both states can no longer be considered part of the old New South, where the Republicans have dominated since Nixon’s Southern strategy in 1968: culturally and politically they have been moving away from the rest of the South for some time, thanks to a combination of migration from the North and the growth of hi-tech jobs. That could prove to be a major boon to the Democrats.

So could the emergence of a new New West. States like Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada are now the fastest growing in the Union, as people flood in from the East and West (from California and even Oregon and Washington state) and Hispanic immigrants push up from the south. In the process they are ceasing to be safe Republican strongholds. It is possible the Republicans will win only Arizona on Tuesday, and that would be because their presidential candidate is its favourite son. The new New West and the new New South are re-writing the electoral map of America.

6. Finally, let me finish on an optimistic note: America’s faith in its ability to renew itself. A widely-regarded disastrous two-term presidency doesn’t result in people turning away from politics or to violence on the streets or disillusion but instead leads to an election that breaks viewing records, sees a record number of people donate to a candidate, produces one ticket led by a black American, the other with a woman on it -- and, almost certainly, a record turnout come election day. Other democracies please note!

____________________________________

31/10/08

MY DIARY

by Pattie Boyd

I'm looking forward to going to New York on Monday, with Friends of the Watts Gallery, to visit the Forbes Gallery.  While I'm there I’m also going to the Dominic Dunne film and party and, on Thursday, to Andrew Neil's post election party. The Morrison Hotel Gallery is also having a small exhibition of some previously unseen photos of mine on the 8th.

On Wednesday the 12th and Thursday the 13th I will take part in some games of bridge for Sky Arts, which they will be filming over the two days – although I am feeling nervous with the idea of it. Some of the other players are Susan Hampshire and Mike Gatting.

And, on Monday the 17th, I leave for Toronto where I will have an exhibition at The Great Hall on the 22nd.

____________________________________

28/10/08

KITCHEN TABLE LINGO: LAUNCH DAY BLOG

by Edward Fennel

Just four months after the launch of the idea of Kitchen Table Lingo, going down the sweeping staircase of Waterstones in Trafalgar Square and there was the book itself piled up, fresh from the press and begging to be bought.

To say I was amazed is pathetically inadequate. We never thought it would be a book. It was just a kind of loopy idea from which we thought we might get a list of some kind. What we would do with it, no-one knew – or had even thought about.

All credit then – and I mean this seriously – to Tom Williams, Annabel Merullo & Co. at PFD, for contacting us, fixing up meetings, shaping the idea and then pitching it successfully to Virgin as a Christmas publication for this year. Everyone else said, “Well, nice idea but maybe 2009.” But PFD harried and hurried to do the deal. They seemed even hungrier than we were and I guess you can’t ask more than that from an agent.

Of course, Bill Lucas and I – plus a fantastic contribution from Richard Brooks, the arts correspondent of The Sunday Times - packed a lot of work into late June and July. (Personally I was selfishly grateful that England had been eliminated from the European Cup otherwise I would never have found the time). It also meant that both of us spent hours on holiday going through the proofs – in my case while sitting in an internet café by the Adriatic.

But as I write this- just a couple of hours into our publication date – we are Number One in Amazon’s Journalism section, and number Four in Dictionaries. And we are in the Top Ten for humour.

Had you told me that on June 6, when we launched the KTL idea on the world, I’d have said you were having a laugh.

 
____________________________________

20/10/08

Welcome back, John...

by Andrew Neil

"We are all Keynesians now," said President Nixon in the early 1970s, as he came to terms with deficit financing and prices and incomes policy, inspired by the economic doctrines of the great Cambridge economist, John Maynard Keynes. In fact, he couldn't have been more wrong: Keynesianism was past its intellectual high watermark and was about to cease to become a guide for economic policy makers. Its death knell was sounded by the double whammy of the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain (1979) and Ronald Reagan in America (1980).
 
That was then, this is now -- and the newspapers, in full "capitalism-in-crisis" mode, are carrying little potted biographies of Keynes while Chancellor Alistair Darling is resorting to some old-fashioned Keynesian pump-priming by talking about bringing forward some major capital spending projects.
 
"We are all Kenyesians now," to coin a phrase and, indeed, there will not be much objection to starting huge public spending programmes earlier than planned, such as Crossrail under London or the two new Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy, if it helps to mitigate the impact of an inevitable economic downturn (a little history will be made on Friday when officials announce an almost certain downturn in economic growth between July and September, for the first time in 16 years).
 
But how much pump-priming Mr Darling can do will be limited by the country's traditional slowness in implementing big capital spending projects and by how much more he can borrow, when net public sector debt is already set to double from previous projections. More important, expectations of just what Keynesian economic policy can achieve should be limited.
 
Its original exponent (other than Adolf Hitler) was Franklin D Roosevelt who, though elected in 1932 on a promise to balance the budget, quickly saw the nonsense of that and started to try to lift America out of the Great Depression with a public works programme financed by federal borrowing. Though this did wonders for America's morale (and helped get FDR re-elected three times!) it's effect on the economy and unemployment was marginal. US dole queues only started to plummet when Roosevelt went on to a war economy footing as Hitler's War raged in Europe and he knew America could not forever avoid engagement in it.
 
The most recent exponents of a Keynesian boost to the economy are the Japanese: they embarked on pump-priming on a massive scale undreamt of by FDR or Keynes in the aftermath of their banking crisis in the 1990s, which pushed the economy into a severe deflation. But no matter how much the Japanese government borrowed and spent -- current net debt is still an incredible 195% of Japan's annual national wealth (our borrowing is around 43%) -- the economy stayed mired between deflation and sluggish growth for years (it still is).
 
Perhaps that's why British politicians are currently looking for quicker fixes to ameliorate what could be a very nasty downturn, especially for small businesses (Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott, who is always worth reading on such matters, says this morning that "the next two years could be among the worst Britain has experienced since 1945"). Conservative leader David Cameron said this morning that government should temporarily cut national insurance by 1% and offer a VAT holiday while the Government is apparently considering delaying or scrapping new flexible working rights due to come into force in the Spring (which would cost small business most). On the Daily Politics today we'll be looking at the rival plans with leading economic commentator, Will Hutton.
 
Also on the show: is Bill Clinton the real man to blame for the banking crisis? Dennis Sewell thinks so and he'll be arguing the case with Will. We'll also be taking a look at the new immigration minister's comments on curbing foreign workers coming to Britain and asking the Conservatives why they're not convinced.
 
And as parliamentary bigwigs investigate options for relocating MPs for urgent work on the House of Commons, we take a look at possible temporary homes for our politicians with property expert Jo Eccles. All that on the Daily Politics on BBC2 from Noon -- for Keynesians, neo-Keynesians and non-Keynesians alike!

____________________________________

15/10/08

The economy...

by Andrew Neil

The latest jobless figures are out this morning and they're even worse than expected: unemployment, by the broad measure Labour always favoured in opposition, increased by 164,000 to 1.79m between June and August, the steepest rise since 1991.

This latest grim economic news comes hard on the heels of yesterday's 5.2% inflation increase, a 16-year high. Both figures undermine the economic record on which Gordon Brown has dined out since he became Chancellor in 1997.

And, as Mr Brown joins other European leaders in Brussels to push his plans for redrawing the global financial architecture, the bloom is coming off his much-heralded bank bail out plan: yesterday the New York stock market was unimpressed by the Bush administration's version of the Brown bank bailout and this morning the London stock market is back in negative territory again, as the complexities and difficulties of the rescue operation strike home.

All this should cause the boosters trumpeting a Brown bounce to pause: the bailout plan is no panacea and we're in for a miserable litany of economic statistics this winter and beyond. Even the public sector, which has enjoyed a privileged position during the Brown years, looks like it will have to shed jobs.

Unemployment is clearly heading for 2m and worse, if not by Christmas then certainly soon after; inflation might have peaked but there could be more in years to come given the huge debt and money supply increases being pumped into the economy; and the financial turmoil is going to take several years to sort out, its fallout still hurting by the time the general election comes in the spring of 2010.


On today's show we'll have the new employment minister, Tony McNulty, who has inherited a difficult portfolio in the current climate; and for the Tories we'll have the shadow innovation, university and skills secretary, David Willets. It's not clear that the Tories have anything to stop unemployment rising for the foreseeable future.

We'll be talking to a small businessman who is suffering from the downturn and having to lay off staff. We're also trying for a union leader.

It's Wednesday so it must be Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs) but with the PM in Brussels it's the reserve team today at Noon: Harriet Harman, William Hague and Vince Cable. Such contrasting styles always make for an interesting joust.

And we'll have Gordon Brown champion and TV star, Piers Morgan, yet another celebrity who wants to talk to us about the dangers of climate change.

That's all on the Daily Politics today on BBC2 from 11.30am til 1pm -- the best 90 minutes in political TV.

______________________________________

15/10/08

Who's to blame for the credit crunch?

by G.P. Taylor

My daughter asked me who was to blame for the credit crunch. It was as if an enemy from outside had crept in to our land and was systematically bringing down the banks and economic institutions one by one. To her it was the plot of some action movie. The ‘fire sale’ had started and we needed a superhero to save us all. It was Die Hard 4.0 and yet we had no Bruce Willis.

Like the movie, we humans always need to be able to blame someone. The credit crunch can’t just be a market force at work – that will later correct itself. There has to be a cause, a conspiracy.  It was the same in Germany before the last war. The scapegoat was a Holy nation that became a burnt offering on the altar of greed and prejudice.

Sadly, we humans have not changed. We still look for the secret enemy even when they are not there. A newspaper reported this week that the financial crisis was causing a rise in violent crimes such as robbery. People were so strapped for cash that they were going out and taking it from others. One report said that allotments were being dug up and carrots stolen. These were not ASBO rabbits but people who wanted food.

I heard one bus stop commentator wrongly lay the blame at the feet of the economic migrants. They bemoaned ‘them’ being here and wished they would all go away. Look at what they would save on the health service – they’ve taken our jobs… It was a familiar cry and one, which many would believe but wouldn’t admit to in polite company.

It is dangerous language to accuse the stranger at our gates for our misfortune. The wonder of our country is that we are so diverse. We often forget that we are a mongrel nation. There is no true British blood. We are an amalgam, a froth of ethnic mixtures that date back to a time before the Romans.

I myself am a mixture of races and creeds and proud of it. Irish heart, English blood as Morrisey so rightly said. My grandfather was an immigrant to these shores who was Irish until the day he died.

What we have to remember is that this crisis is not the fault of one group of people, a particular bank or nation. It is a problem of the world and one in which we must all admit responsibility. For too long we had our cake and ate it. Now the plate is empty and only the crumbs are left.

______________________________________

14/10/08

Choosing a Subject

by Charles Nevin

So there I was, pondering on which lucky person should be the subject of the weighty but elegant biography I am clearly not destined to write. One recurring difficulty is that I tend to recognise promising candidates only when someone else has written about them.

Nevertheless, undeterred, indomitable, I was on the lookout for a figure with a touch of dash, a bit of mystery. One advantage I do have is a wide-ranging, if necessarily sketchy, acquaintance with history and a love for minor characters and details fostered by a teacher (thank you, Mr Rigby) who was firm that footnotes were by far the best part of it.

How about, I thought, Jack Cade, Jack Amend-All, the mysterious rebel who ruled London, and nearly the country, for a few heady fifteenth century days? Or Jack Ketch, the extraordinarily incompetent public executioner who somehow managed to lend his name to his successors? Or Spring-heeled Jack, the even more mysterious leaping man who serially terrorised nineteenth century England?

By now, you, and probably the headline, will be ahead of me in detecting a theme: there have been rather a lot of dashing, mysterious and rogueish Jacks. Thus, irresistibly, The Book of Jacks, particularly when I vaguely recalled a newspaper story about there being rather a lot of them and discovered that it has been the most popular choice for British boy babies for a couple of decades: Birthdays! Christmas! Jackpot for struggling author!

And a lot of fun: I had no idea just how many outstanding Jacks there were: around 300 of them in my book alone, along with all the other odd things called Jack, such as the aforesaid pot, lifting equipment, fish, trees, fruit and, of course, boots.

The real famous Jacks - Kennedy, Kerouac, London, Nicholson, Dempsey - are there, as are the fictional famous Jacks, including, for a few, the Giantkiller, Jill’s friend, Sprat, Horner, Sparrow, Bauer, Aubrey, the one who built a house and the lively member of the Flash family.

But it was the more minor Jacks who especially intrigued me, the relishable eccentrics, the squires, soldiers, pirates and highwaymen, the roaring, the mad and the bad Jacks, the ones dangerous to know. Some favourites: Jack “Snuffy” Tracey, an American music hall trombonist with an interesting gimmick who also married Phyllis Dixey, Britain’s first stripper, and ended up as a golf club steward in Surrey; Jack Parsons, the rocket scientist who practised the occult, blew himself up, and has a crater named after him on the dark side (naturally) of the moon; and Butcher Jack, the Irishman who took part in The Charge of the Light Brigade drunk, brandishing an axe, mounted on a Russian horse, and survived.

You might also enjoy my favoured theory about why so many Jacks are like this, the one which my expert consultant, also employed by the OED, no less,  describes as “absolute rubbish”.  Thrill, too, at my solutions to the perennial problems for the compilers of these sort of dictionaries, the entries under X and Z; the latter, I think you will find,  if you have any plans to visit Oklahoma, is worth the price of the book on its own.

______________________________________

14/10/08

Now the hard questions begin ...

by Andrew Neil

The government has been forced by the Lords to drop its plans to detain terrorist suspects without charge for up to 42 days. Given the political capital Gordon Brown has invested in this proposal, such a setback would normally be of great import in general, and very bad news for the PM in particular. But not in the middle of the financial crisis, with Mr Brown posing as saviour of the nation (and Europe and, tomorrow, the world!) and self-styling himself as a cross between Winston Churchill and FDR (helpful note to PM: be careful not to overreach for it inevitably results in hubris followed by a fall -- just ask Sir Fred Goodwin).
 
So the loss of 42 days has not made much of an impact on the public, though most had come to dislike it, and even in the Westminster Village it is only of passing interest when banks are being nationalised and recession looms.
 
As the dust settles on Momentous Monday the largely favourable reviews are being replaced with questions. Why, for example, is the government insisting that, as a price of the bail out, banks continue to lend to house buyers and small businesses at 2007 levels? You can understand why the government doesn't want to the supply of credit to such targets to dry up -- which would turn an inevitable slowdown into a long and deep recession -- but 2007 was the height of the boom, when banks lent almost £120 billion in mortgages and business loans. To set the bar at that level surely risks yet another credit binge and a further fall just down the road.
 
Also, where will the government get the billions to prop up the banking system. Borrowing is the simply answer, but the likely consequences are anything but simple. The PM said yesterday that Britain was able to borrow freely because we enjoy "relatively low national debt because of the steps we have taken since 1997, where we wiped off perhaps more than around £100 billion of debt by reducing the proportion of debt in our national income.”
 
I fear that is just factually untrue. According to the Office of National Statistics net debt when Blair-Brown came to power in May 1997 was £351 billion; in August of this year it was £632 billion in August (£545bn if you exclude Northern Rock, which the ONS says you can't), an increase of almost £300 billion rather than a £100 billion wipe out.
 
Even as a share of national wealth (GDP), things have not got better. In 1997, as the economy was entering a long period of growth, debt was 43% of national income (and falling). Today, after 11 years of growth, it is still 43% of national income (and rising -- even before the banking crisis). No wonder many economists think that, far from starting a new borrowing binge from a low level of debt, as the PM maintains, we are actually doing so from a rather high level.
 
Just how high it goes remains to be seen. Even before the bank bailout City economists were predicting that borrowing could be close to £100 billion in financial year 2009/10. The Institute of Fiscal Studies thinks borrowing will end up over 50% of GDP (that could be an underestimate) and could soon exceed an incredible £700 billion. The last time we borrowed proportionately that amount (the mid-Seventies), we had to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund.
 
As the BBC's Business Editor writes this morning on his must-read blog, such levels of debt and contingent liabilities in Britain (and America and the Eurozone) "will probably dampen growth for years in the whole of the developed West, as governments may feel financially constrained from spending and investing on other services and projects, and the banks themselves are likely to devote all their spare resources to repaying their debts to taxpayers, rather than financing proper wealth creators."
 
We'll be speaking to an independent expert this morning to gauge just how deeply in debt the country is heading and we hope to have a Conservative perspective as well (is it really that different from the government's?). We also review the fallout from the ditching of the 42 days (and investigate the emergency legislation ministers still plan to keep up their sleeves).
 
The design critic Stephen Bayley will be here, along with former Cabinet Minister Clare Short, to discuss whether style or substance is most important in politics. And a new TV series is being launched which will see 10 teenage political wannabees put through their paces - culminating in a PMQs style debate in the House of Commons. We'll be catching up with two of the contestants, and the head judge of 'Election', Jonathan Dimbleby. All that on the Daily Politics on BBC2 today at Noon.

______________________________________

13/10/08

Momentus Monday

by Andrew Neil

Welcome to Momentous Monday. The American markets are closed today but on this side of the Atlantic there are developments of historic importance which are already making their way across the pond to you.

The British people woke up this morning to discover that they are now the proud owners or largest shareholders in some of the world’s biggest banks. The taxpayer is injecting around $75 billion into three banks – Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS and Lloyds TSB – and that’s probably just for starters.

I never thought I’d write this but, as someone with substantial deposits in the Royal Bank of Scotland, I’m relieved the government has taken it over. In the current financial crisis even an institution as big and powerful as the Royal Bank was in jeopardy. This morning we can breathe a little easier, whatever the long-term downside to state ownership might be.

The stock market seems to agree. As I write the London market is up 170 points.

London, not New York or Washington, has become the new laboratory in this financial crisis. The Paulson plan, as this Daily Beast blog predicted last week, is dead on arrival, despite all the political capital the Bush administration spent on getting it through the US Congress. All eyes are now on what Prime Minister Gordon Brown is doing in London – and every major financial centre, from Paris to Frankfurt and, yes, even Washington/New York is preparing to copy him.

Eurozone governments are today drawing up their plans to inject taxpayers’ capital into French, German, Italian and other European banks; and, as Mr Brown has done in London, to guarantee lending between banks. After treading water in the wake of Washington and the Paulson plan, London and the European Union are now setting the pace. Expect Washington to follow suit before the week is out.

The US Federal Reserve was working through the night and this morning, before the European markets opened, issued a statement promising to make as many dollars available as the global banking system required, ensuring liquidity. The Bank of England, the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank agreed to do the same, with the Bank of Japan probably about to join them. The degree of international cooperation in this crisis is now quite remarkable and underlines the scale of the threat. 
 
But all eyes are now on Washington. Officials there assure me that Treasury Secretary Paulson is now looking kindly on the Feds guaranteeing inter-bank lending in America, essential if banks are to lend to each other again. They also don’t rule out the partial nationalisation of American banks if that’s what it takes to recapitalise their balance sheets. Truly, we are moving into unprecedented and uncharted waters.

The US government is already playing a seminal role behind the scenes in helping Morgan Stanley salvage its $9 billion investment in Japan’s Mitsubishi Bank. But that is just the start: a right-wing Republican administration is about to insert the state into the US banking system to extent unheard of since FDR and the New Deal.

The prospect of financial disaster has buried long-held ideological beliefs. The head of the International Monetary Fund said in Washington at the weekend that the global economy faced “meltdown”. That kinda concentrates the mind: whether you’re on the left or the right, survival outpunches ideology, which is why a Republican government in Washington, a Labour government in London and a Gaullist regime in Paris are increasingly singing from the same songsheet.

______________________________________

The views presented here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of PFD.

Terms of Use

 

Peters Fraser and Dunlop are delighted to announce that through its new Print on Demand initiative it is making available again the work of many authors whose books would otherwise be out of print. The Print on Demand  programme has launched with a list of 24 titles, including those by Angela Huth, Storm Jameson and V.S Pritchett.

Angela Huth

Angela Huth has written eleven novels, four collections of short stories as well as plays for radio, TV and the stage. Two of her earlier novels - Virginia Fly is Drowning and Sun Child - she adapted for the BBC and Landgirls was made into the 1998 feature film The Land Girls.

Angela Huth says:

 

‘Print on demand! This is a brilliant idea by PFD, to end the frustration of readers who search for out of print books, and for writers, whose past works can come to life again at the press of a button’.

PFD has made available Angela Huth’s Sun Child and Monday Lunch in Fairyland and Other Stories.

Storm Jameson

Storm Jameson was an essayist, journalist, literary critic and political activist. After university Jameson moved to London, taught at the Working Women's College and dedicated much time to helping refugee writers. In 1939 Jameson became the first female president of PEN.

Christopher Storm-Clark, executor of the Jameson estate said:

 

‘I think your idea is absolutely brilliant’.

PFD has made available Storm Jameson’s Journey from the North Volumes 1& 2 and The Hidden River.

V.S Pritchett

V. S. Pritchett was knighted in 1975 for his services to literature and was awarded The Companion of Honor in 1993. His awards include The Heinemann Award (1969), PEN Award (1974), W. H. Smith Award (1990), and Golden Pen Award (1993). 

PFD has made available V.S Pritchett’s Marching Spain.

This is the beginning of an initiative that will see many out of print titles become available, with the final aim of encouraging mainstream publishers to republish these works while making them available to the general public in the meantime.

 

 

Scroll down for Books, TV, Film & Stage and Broadcasting. 

 

ADULT FICTION AND NON FICTION

 

 

 

We  receive so much unsolicited material from aspiring writers everywhere. New writers with great ideas are essential to what we do and that is why we read every  submission that we receive. And we don’t just want fiction. So we thought it might be a good idea to let you know what it is we’re looking for when we read your material so we’ve put together a few tips. 

 

• Write a careful, literate, explicit letter summarising exactly what you have written.
• Always know who your audience is. 
• Whether you are writing a thriller or a literary novel you have to know who will buy your book and why. 
• Try to keep in mind what it is it about your book that is different. 
• Don’t try and re-write Ulysses or a sequel to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. 

So, now you’ve read our tips, here’s how we accept submissions.

• We like to read the first three chapters of your book and we like to read a hard copy so please post these chapters along with a synopsis of the whole and a very brief CV about your writing career.
• Make it easy on us! Double spacing please, and one side only.
• Please be aware that we don’t acknowledge receipt of submissions. We’d rather spend our time reading them.
• Also it’s important that you include a stamped, self addressed envelope so that we can respond to you. If you want us to return your manuscript, make sure the postage is enough to cover the return.
• Our address is The Books Division, Peters Fraser and Dunlop, 34 – 43 Russell Street, London WC2B 5HA.
• Lastly, it can take around four weeks to receive a response from us so please don't expect something instantly. And also, because we receive so much material, we are unable to give feedback.

We will read whatever you send in and, if we like it, we will ask for more. More often than not though we do turn things down.  Don’t be disheartened. If you want to be a writer, you have to keep writing.

 

 

CHILDREN’S BOOKS AND ILLUSTRATORS

We are currently not accepting children’s and illustrators submissions. We will return any new material sent to us but will not be taking on new clients.    

 

 

TELEVISION, FILM AND STAGE

Unfortunately we do not currently accept unsolicited material from scriptwriters, playwrights or directors. Any unsolicited pitches, outlines, showreels or scripts will be returned unread if a stamped addressed envelope has been enclosed, otherwise they will be recycled.

If you are referred to one of the agents here by a producer, development executive or course tutor then you should email the agent directly, attaching a cv and giving details of who has referred you. 

Please note that we are not able to offer representation to writers or directors based outside Europe.

 

 

 

BROADCASTING

We are always on the lookout for inspiring new talent – especially those with fresh, well developed programme ideas in the pipeline. Those interested should contact Katie Rice at krice@pfd.co.uk .