‘Sir’ Nick Clegg? A true sign of how Britain’s elite rewards failure

Owen Jones in The Guardian







The establishment is a safety net for the shameful and the shameless. Once you’re in, you’re in: and even if you played a prominent role in plunging your country into crisis, and inflicting injustice on your fellow citizens, there are still baubles to be had.

Former chancellor George Osborne got his own newspaper, and ex-deputy prime minister Nick Clegg is reportedly to be made a knight of the realm. It has become fashionable in certain liberal circles to rehabilitate both as courageous warriors against the calamity of Brexit. But here are surely two architects of our crisis-stricken nation.

Nick Clegg to be knighted in New Year honours, say reports



Let’s start with Clegg. For those wonks who sifted through his speeches before he led his Lib Dem party into the coalition in 2010, there was ample evidence that Clegg would prove an amenable ally to a slash-and-burn Conservative government. Three years before Osborne began wielding his scalpel, Clegg promised to “define a liberal alternative to the discredited politics of big government”. Months before the banks plunged Britain into national calamity, he railed against “nationalised education, nationalised health, and nationalised welfare”.

But in order to get elected, the Lib Dems made cast-iron pledges to scrap tuition fees, and had students queuing around the block on polling day. “Students can make the difference in countless seats in this election,” said Clegg, which they did; and hiking fees to £7,000 (let alone £9,000) would be a “disaster” because “you can’t build a future on debt”. The Lib Dem’s flagship political broadcast was titled “Say goodbye to broken promises”, in which Clegg bemoaned the dishonesty of the political elite.
Clegg said after the election that he had no choice but to go back on his word: a national economic disaster loomed, national interest trumps party politics, amassing power and all its trappings through brazen dishonesty was actually an act of sacrifice! As former Liberal leader David Steel put it, Clegg could have met Gordon Brown first “instead of leaving talks with Labour to his acolytes later”, and used the prospect of a Lib-Lab coalition to extract “far better from the Tories”. But he didn’t.

Clegg claimed that new information about Britain’s economic plight from Bank of England governor Mervyn King was critical to his U-turn. But King himself said he had told Clegg nothing the Lib Dem leader didn’t already know.

So here is the truth. Clegg formed an austerity coalition because his socially liberal anti-state worldview was fundamentally in accordance with that of Tory leader David Cameron. “If we keep doing this we won’t find anything to bloody disagree on in the bloody TV debate!” as he was accidentally recorded cooing to Cameron in 2011.

So everything that then happened is on him, as much as anyone else. The longest squeeze in wages for generations; the ideologically driven privatisation of the NHS; a bedroom tax that disproportionately compelled disabled people to pay for the housing crisis; the humiliating and degrading work assessments forced on disabled people in a failed attempt to balance the nation’s books on their shoulders; the surging homelessness.


A man who uses human misery as a chess piece should, in a decent country, lose their privileged position in public life


But this is nothing compared with the indulgence of George Osborne, just because a dinner party friend has given him a newspaper to play out a vengeful grudge against Theresa May based far more on personal affront than political principle, like a toy catapult handed to a spiteful toddler. The bedroom tax, the £12bn pledged in social security cuts; the benefit cap; the systematic demonisation of benefit claimants. As Nick Clegg – once the voters had thrown him out of government – said himself, Osborne’s behaviour was “very unattractive, very cynical”; for him, welfare “was just a bottomless pit of savings, and it didn’t really matter what the human consequences were”, it was just a means to boost his party’s popularity.

This is grotesque behaviour, like a child who takes a magnifying glass to ants. A man who uses human misery as a political chess piece should, in a decent country, lose their privileged position in public life.

“Ah, but Osborne and Clegg oppose Brexit!” is a common comment. But no one who ever utters this has been a victim of the bedroom tax. Yes, this Tory Brexit is a national disaster. But the details of Britain’s relationship with a trading bloc is a secondary issue for those who spend their waking hours worrying over paying their food and energy bills.

In any case, if you want to understand why Brexit happened, look no further than these two individuals. Is it any wonder that, in a referendum on the status quo, so many opted for the Big Red Button?

These individuals are far from alone in being protected by the establishment, of course. Tony Blair is one of the most unpopular individuals, let alone politicians, in the country; but the man who helped lay Iraq to waste and works for torturing and murderous dictatorships is treated by much of the media as an oracle of wisdom.

If we are to have an honours system that is more than a sordid backslapping exercise, there are far more deserving recipients than Clegg, such as Maria Brabiner, a Mancunian bedroom tax victim who fought back. Surely those who struggle against injustice should be honoured, not those who impose it.

But let me offer some praise. Both Osborne and Clegg were in many ways also architects of the Corbyn project. They played critical roles in creating the army of the disillusioned who flocked to join the Labour party, and then in their millions voted against a bankrupt status quo. Thanks to them the self-serving, mutual appreciation society – otherwise known as the British establishment – may soon find its time is running out.

An ode to Gower

Rob Steen in Cricinfo

Exquisitely flawless, the former England captain was the Rembrandt of batting: all touch, timing and subtle depth; and never better than 30 years ago


David Gower: poise, fragility and ineffable beauty © Getty Images



"I found it strange that the 2005 team all found themselves with MBEs in the next Honours List. If I had been given an award every time England won the Ashes during my career, I would be in the House of Lords."

Tongue may have been caressing cheek with customary aplomb, but that isn't the sort of sound bite one associates with David Gower, being largely bereft of understatement and peppered with self-assertiveness. You can find it in Sex & Drugs & Rebel Tours, Dave Tossell's latest erudite, immaculately titled romp through the occasional ups and persistently numbing downs of Team England over the final quarter of the 20th century, a gruelling, gripping, excruciating slice of comical, angst-ridden soap opera - call it tailenders - that proved a handy weapon in the bitterly unscrupulous tabloid circulation wars.

David Ivon Gower doesn't do snide. Nor does he do haughty or sneery. Everything he did with a bat in his hands oozed natural elegance; honed through thousands of net hours at King's School Canterbury but still an extension of self. No world-class athlete this column has ever met has tried less to impress, or been so self-effacing, or rubbed so few up the wrong way. No sporting hero turned commentary-boxer has spent less time recounting past glories or waxing nostalgic. And no competitive artist has better embodied the spirit of that fabulous (if possibly mythical) Cary Grant one-liner: "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant - even I want to be Cary Grant."

Is there any more fitting coincidence than the fact that Gower rhymes not only with flower but power? On this topic more than any other, frankly, this column is resolutely and hopelessly myopic. Its adoration is so ardent that it agreed to be Gower's first biographer, even though a giggle-a-page autobiography, expertly ghosted by his soul brother Martin Johnson, had already sold by the juggernaut.

Two years later, less fortunately for subject than author, there was more to say. Hounded into premature retirement by those who vindicate Charlie Skinner's acidic adage in The Newsroom- "Hell hath no fury like the second-rate" - Gower deserved a more robust defence as well as a less restrained celebration. The most stinging volleys of righteous abuse were saved for Graham Gooch, the captain and friend whose own career Gower had once preserved with such compassion.

Just once during a meeting at his Hampshire home did the mood dip below exceedingly pleasant - when the interviewer, anxious to temper the idolatry with some journalistic dispassion, accused him of mental laziness. Cue a rambling but sound counter theory that made it easy to understand why he had gravitated towards a legal career, even if it did find him more or less pleading guilty as charged.

Few upper lips have been sturdier. He certainly appeared far more willing to forgive Gooch than his biographer was.


****


Imagine a gallery of cricketers as artists. David Warner as Jackson Pollock - the epitome of bold subversion, Mr Couldn't Give A Toss. Pietersen as Dali: a galling, irrepressible, un-ignorable minor genius. Tendulkar as Michelangelo, all smooth lines and sacred overtones. Warne as Picasso, all new tricks and piss-takes. Murali as Van Gogh, a sorcerer, earthy and soulful. For Gower, read Rembrandt, all touch, timing and subtle depth.

Gower cast spells like no other. Whenever he was on TV, so desperate was Tim Rice, the wordsmith behind Jesus Christ Superstar, to see his idol succeed, and so fearful that he might not, that he hid behind the settee. During his illustrious reign as editor of Wisden, Matthew Engel cited Gower's 72 in Perth in 1982 as the finest knock he'd ever seen, "an exquisite, flawless diamond". Knowing Matthew as this column does, it is as certain as it can be that this was the only time he has ever uttered or written the word "flawless" and not preceded it with "not" or "hardly".

Never, though, was Gower quite so exquisitely flawless as he was 30 summers ago. That the memories still glow can be attributed in good part to the fact that we sporty Poms were in such dire need of reasons to be cheerful. May 1985 had scored a horrifying hat-trick.

On the 11th, a blaze erupted in a wooden stand at Bradford City's Valley Parade, killing 56 spectators; many Yorkshiremen still blame the club's late owner for arson - a series of such "accidents" had befallen a number of his other business concerns - but the roots of the tragedy were embedded in the national game's contempt for its customers. At Wembley a week later, Manchester United's Kevin Moran become the first player to be sent off in an FA Cup final, for a so-called "professional foul", denying Everton a likely lead that would have decided the game in the regulation 90 minutes; Norman Whiteside's perversely wondrous extra-time strike ensured the sinner emerged a victor. Then, 11 days later, came the nadir of f***ball hooliganism, aka "the English disease": at a dilapidated stadium in Belgium, blatantly unfit for purpose, a horde of boozed-up Liverpool fans charged their Juventus counterparts, a wall collapsed and 39 died.



Gower, seen here with wife Thorunn, was at his mesmerising best against the Australians in 1985 © PA Photos

Summer brought balm. Not only did England reclaim the Ashes, they did so with style and vigour. Best of all, the man who sheepishly hoisted the replica urn between right thumb and forefinger on the Oval balcony harvested 732 runs - still the most by an England captain in a series against Australia, not to mention the most by any Pom in an Ashes debate at home. The second movie this column ever saw was Summer Magic, a Disneyfied yarn whose allure lay wholly in another blonde bombshell, Hayley Mills; here, more than two decades later, was the sequel. Vince Lombardi could go to hell: good guys really could come first.

Tanya Aldred was luckier than most: she broke her cricketing virginity that heady, often dizzying summer. "Delicate David - my father's hero became his children's hero too," she reflected in The New Ball Volume 4. "His batting was of a vintage so lipsmackingly tasty that even a Formula 1 driver would be loath to spray it around. Flick of the wrist - four. Eighty-nine of them in total. Stressed-out executives should be forced to watch videos of each one, every morning before work."

Awe sprang not so much due to those innately, inexpressibly handsome strokes as the serenity and stillness at their core. Here he was, captain of his country, facing the ancient enemy, and betraying not so much as a hint of a glimmer of anxiety (it helped, admittedly, that Allan Border's party was approximately the third-puniest ever to land in England). If Bradman was the white Headley, Gower was the white Sobers, in temperament and movement if not versatility. The miracle was that he was loved by so many who would normally be infuriated by one so resistant to emotion or visible effort. The vulnerability had much to do with it; the vulnerability that comes with performing on the highest wire of excellence, forever swaying between sublime and negligent.

As if poise, fragility, humility and ineffable beauty weren't enough, Gower offered something even more precious: dignity. "At least I've had a couple of years," he said shortly after the first of his two sackings as England captain, in the wake of India's maiden Lord's Test win in 1986. To his credit, marvelled Frank Keating in the Guardian, "he has not changed a jot since the selectors appointed him two years ago. He remains a laid-back charming goldielocks with a touch of genius at the crease, no histrionics or tantrums in the field, and an ambassadorial approach to the world." Having kept Ian Botham onside and succeeded where Mike Brearley failed by getting the best from Phil Edmonds, he'd have been just the chap to keep KP inside the tent.


The key to that constancy was not the diffidence or arrogance perceived by some but that acute sense of proportion. Sure, he loved the game, the cameraderie as much as the challenges, but winning was never everything. Who else could have had the brass balls to announce to the media, after a bad day against Border's vengeful side at Lord's in 1989, that he was off to the theatre? That he returned on the Monday to make a silkily defiant century, however fruitless, spoke of a will immeasurably stronger than commonly assumed. "It felt like the captain versus the press," he recalled. "In a sense it was quite good fun."

Ultimately his greatest asset was courage. The courage not to be cowed by Dennis Lillee, Malcolm Marshall, Wasim Akram or even Fleet Street's snarliest. The courage to attack in situations calling for grim defence and sobriety. The courage - notwithstanding those early efforts at de-elocution - to be posh during the heyday of inverted snobbery. The courage to be both man apart and man out of time. The courage, above all, to stay true to himself in the face of envy and ridicule.

That's why, 30 years on from his sunniest summer, at a time when there are hardly any reasons to be cheerful about so many of the elements that allegedly made Britain great, this column feels compelled to entreat its Queen: please, ma'am, do the decent thing when you finalise next month's Birthday Honours List and send your foremost sporting ambassador a text informing him he is going to be the first Englishman to be knighted exclusively for his on-field contributions since you tapped Len Hutton on the shoulders in 1956. Having approved yet another bloody Tory government, it's the very least you owe us.

A modern-day knight made to suffer a medieval punishment

The United States Constitution is one of the few really great documents ever compiled by politicians. It is crisp and short and clear, and it is on the side of the citizen rather than the state. I keep it by my desk.

Just after the news that Fred Goodwin was to be stripped of his knighthood, I happened to be riffling through it, and my eye fell on this sentence from Section 9: “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed”. A Bill of Attainder was a device of the powerful in pre-modern England. If the King and his government decided that they did not like someone, they would get him “attainted” (which means “stained”) by Parliament. The Bill would punish him for some supposed offence without giving him the chance to be heard in court. It stripped him (and sometimes his descendants) of his lands and titles. It was a political device.

An ex post facto law, of course, is a law that enables someone to be punished for an offence which, when committed, was not an offence. It is therefore blatantly unjust, and also, often, political.

Poor Fred Goodwin must wish he were an American citizen (although, since the US Constitution also states that “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States”, he would not have got a knighthood there in the first place). He has been, in effect, attainted. And he has been subject to ex post facto judgment. What he was doing with the Royal Bank of Scotland when he was knighted in 2004 was considered fine and dandy by the then British government. Now he is being punished, because the wind has changed.

Indeed, Mr Goodwin is being even more unfairly treated than those rebel earls who were attainted under the Tudors. At least they had a chance for their case to be debated in Parliament. Mr Goodwin’s good name was stained for ever by the Honours Forfeiture Committee, stuffed with senior civil servants (almost all of them knights or dames, needless to say). He had no right to be consulted, represented by lawyers, or considered by Parliament.

The committee is repeatedly described by politicians as “independent”, but since it is governmental, it cannot be so. In reality, it acted only because of pressure from the Prime Minister. It waived its own strict rules about the criteria according to which honours are withdrawn, and replaced them with much vaguer ones. Under the chairmanship of the new head of the Civil Service, Sir Bob Kerslake, supported by the new Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood – neither of whom, presumably, has any experience of this sort of thing – it decided that RBS played “an important role in the financial crisis of 2008-2009”, and therefore Sir Fred should revert to just plain Fred.

If that is the criterion, The Right Honourable Gordon Brown MP should not lose just his seat, his place in the Privy Council and whatever commemorative gold fountain pens he may have received for making boring speeches in Davos. Attainting is too good for him. Since we are reverting to medieval punishments, a bit of good old hanging, drawing and quartering would seem appropriate.
One must, I admit, be realistic. Governments often find themselves in tight corners, and the overhang of bankers’ pay, bonuses and gongs into the era of recession is one such for the Coalition. It is part of the role of senior civil servants inconspicuously to help their masters out of such corners. It is the job of the cabinet secretary, in particular, to be like Jeeves with Bertie Wooster. He must help his boss divert the indignant aunt of public opinion with the necessary fibs, flattery and brainy schemes.
So yesterday I asked Lord Armstrong, cabinet secretary under Mrs Thatcher, and the man who recommended that the traitor Anthony Blunt be stripped of his knighthood, what he thought. Picking his words with mandarin care, Lord Armstrong told me that, if he had been asked to consider Sir Fred, “I should have said that this goes beyond the criteria.” The Government would be within its rights to change the criteria, he went on, and the committee could help it do so. But this should happen before any individual case, and with the agreement of the Palace, to avoid embarrassing the Queen. Otherwise, the problem is publicly dumped on civil servants, whose committee then becomes – my phrase, not Lord Armstrong’s – a kangaroo court. Then I asked the same question of his successor, Lord Butler of Brockwell, and his answer was virtually identical.

Since honours are not jobs, and are conferred by the gracious pleasure of the Sovereign rather than any contractual process, it may be that Mr Goodwin has no legal redress. Besides, he may prefer to remain quiet. But if I were him, armed with his still considerable private collection of good old British banknotes and with no more reputation left to lose, I would try to go to law. I would seek judicial review of the process by which I had been attainted. I would invite Sir Bob Kerslake to tell the court what 10 Downing Street had said to him before the whole process got under way. And if the judges found that the committee had behaved improperly, I would then apply to the Honours Forfeiture Committee to have Sir Bob and his colleagues stripped of their knighthoods.

Maybe none of this matters. Maybe Fred Goodwin is such a disgraceful fellow that we are all entitled to kick him around as we please. But I cannot help thinking that the provision against attainder is in the US Constitution for a good reason. It is to stop whoever happens to be in power at any one time from taking it out on whomever he dislikes who isn’t. The fact that the victim may be unmeritorious is not the point. The point is that the rule of law is what distinguishes us from the beasts. Fred Goodwin got knighted because of crony capitalism. It does not make things better if he is un-knighted by crony anti-capitalism.

But let us look ahead, and think, as David Cameron has done throughout, politically. By shaming Mr Goodwin and creating the pressure that made Stephen Hester give up his bonus, the Prime Minister has placed himself on the side of pubic opinion. He has made it easier for him to attack bonuses in future. He has blunted a Labour attack which had tried to make him seem incapable of responding to public outrage. So far as it goes, all this will help him.

But one of the odd things about being populist is that it generally does not make you popular. It is often the way that the mob, seeing leaders who try to ape it, grows disgusted. The most successful politics is the unpopular action which is then proved right, not the popular action which later looks a bit tawdry.

The other question is one for what The Times, when it appealed to them, used to call “top people”. If, after all this, you are a chief executive wondering whether to locate your big company in Britain, will you feel welcome? If you are a businesswoman asked to rescue a government enterprise, a civil servant wondering whether to try to become a permanent secretary or leave for the private sector, or a scientist called on to run a quango, will you think, “Well, I may get less money, but I shall command respect, have the loyalty of ministers and be knighted if I do the job well”?

I think we know the answer.