The first organisation Michael Gove needs to ‘defund’, given his new definition of extremism is, of course, the Conservative Party but he won’t dare to go there because the biggest donor by far to their funds for the next General Election is – doh! – a misogynist, racist lumpen proletariat of a man, one Comrade Hester. With his addition £5 million already in Party coffers, he’s close to being responsible for nigh on half the legal amount the political party may use legally in a General Election (I’m informed it’s £34 million; he will have provided £15 million).
As for Supine Sunak, the extraordinary story out last weekend that Penny Mordant [my spelling; OED – 1601, now rare, definition: corrosive] is being touted as the Party’s saviour, if only she can oust Sunak, speaks volumes for the slough of despond into which the Government has fallen.
Sunak, who doesn’t ‘do’ politics very well, it seems, is a spineless chump, a schoolboy technocrat, who likes nothing more than to play with his spreadsheets while metaphorical Rome burns all around. He’d enjoy listening to Nero’s fiddling while – by his own admission – avidly reading the latest schlock novel by Jilly Cooper. I met Jilly, many years ago, when she agreed to be filmed while being interviewed by some of my journalism students. We invaded her home to do that one bright May morning. Happy days; she makes a mean cup of coffee while displaying charm and a serene dignity; something this rabble of incompetent losers might learn from.
Why can’t Sunak see his sorry shambles of double-speaking for what it is? Why, as Andrew Rawnsley asks, is he finding this so very hard? It could be because he recently invited himself on to everyone’s television sets on a Friday evening to call for tolerance and mutual respect while denouncing threats to parliamentarians which meant ‘MPs do not feel safe in their homes’. That’s rather hard to square with being bankrolled by a man who said an MP ‘should be shot’.
‘Michael Gove has just issued a new official definition of extremism and declared that the government will not fund any group it believes to be inciting hatred and violence. That’s rather tricky to reconcile with the Tory party being happy to trouser and keep shedloads of dosh from a donor who said that the sight of a parliamentarian aroused hatred and thoughts of violence in him.
‘Mr Sunak has taken shelter from his critics by saying that because he is prime minister and his cabinet is diverse this proves there is “no place for racism” in his party. That’s evidently not entirely true. It is accurate to say that we now have a parliament that looks more like the country it represents than used to be the case.
‘This transformation began with trailblazers. Ms Abbott was one of those pioneers when she became the first black female MP in 1987. The Tory leader might have acknowledged that for one of his donors to speak about her in the despicable way he did was all the more vile in the context of the vicious racist abuse she has had to endure since she entered parliament.’
It just may be one of those bizarre coincidences which are so weirdly common in the politico-business nexus that this munificent donor – Hester – owns a medical company that relies on substantial contracts from the National Health Service. To make Mr Sunak’s embarrassment the more excruciating, the Yorkshire magnate picked up the £16,000 bill for one of the helicopter flights that the prime minister is so extremely fond of.
At least we can say that this episode has brought clarity about the prime minister. Everyone now knows his principles have a price point. He’s for confronting racism whenever he sees it – unless there’s serious money for his party involved. I’ve written it before, but it’s worth repeating. The current levels of corruption in the body politic have not been witnessed for over 200 years. It took the great Reform Act of 1832 to begin the long clean-up.
There has been talk of the need to reform our politics and the way in which we conduct debate, these days more a screaming match between polar opposites, deaf, dumb and blind to any arguments save their own, increasingly shrill assertions.
According to William Keegan, the answer is a lot simpler: rejoin the EU. No argument with that from this writer. But, however you cut it, such a prospect is a long way off. Maybe, just maybe, the threats from Putin, growing more and more ominous, might provide the impetus for the EU, Nato, and the much diminished country once called the United Kingdom, to get their acts together and, for once, actually unite in a common cause: saving liberal democracy from its present bruised and battered state.
Deep Fakes: an update
If there was a better way to make my point about the real and present dangers of deep-fake images (and audio) I can’t imagine one more pertinent than the confected nonsense surrounding one Kate Windsor, as I shall call her. This woman recently had an operation, the details of which she wished to keep private, as most of us would. But, bearing in mind she has a prominent public persona – part of the job, apparently, but then if you depend on salience for authority and credence, tough – her absence from view created a vacuum. And, as we know, anti-social media abhors a vacuum so its hobgoblins, orcs and other twisted denizens invented their own stories.
As I write, a short video has emerged of Kate shopping locally, in an emporium my wife and I infrequently visit (too pricy by half). Personally, I’d deck anyone who tried to video me shopping, but I guess the point here was precisely that a member of the public would fall for the royal press office crude ploy, video a man and his wife picking up the turnips and, equally inevitably, sell it to that bastion of truth, The Sun. Rival redtop, The Star, ever for upping the ante (and failing to get said video) led with: World Goes Mad After Woman Goes Shopping.
But, the parallel universe of anti-social media is on to that. Their answer, of course, is that the woman shopping was a body double or, alternatively, the few seconds of footage has been deep-faked. And, here’s a thing. It could have been. It’s not helped that in the last week two photographs of ‘royal’ families have been shown to be doctored, and rather crudely. The real problem is that the experts at this would never allow even a professional to see the joins.
Of course, the real deep-fake news this week (viz Justin Webb and the BBC: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/radio/radio-presenters/justin-webb-trans-woman-complaint-bbc-meltdown/ ) concerns the miniscule cult of the ‘trans’. The deep-fake being attempted here – and all too often succeeding – is in demanding we accept gender is the same as sex. The first is nuanced and dependent on human culture (and choices). The second is fixed for life after the first cell division in the uterus. It’s the deepest of deep-fakes to suggest, let alone try to assert with menace, it can be anything other. The danger, as with deep-fake imagery and sound, is in the complete distortion of truth.
On both counts, these are fights we cannot afford to lose. They are existential threats and, like AI, we need to take them very seriously indeed. Don’t duck these battles, our future depends on reality trumping (no pun) arrantly stupid, but potentially lethal, lies.
This week: Tim watched The Drop Out on BBC iPlayer, the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, her once valued multi-billion company and its completely fabricated claim to be able to use a pinprick blood sample to test for hundreds of medical conditions. Amanda Seyfried leads and is highly convincing as a young woman, less in a hurry to become rich, more in a frantic scramble to grab her part of the illusionary American Dream. It’s a morality tale, through and through. It takes its time – about seven hours – and so it should because this kind of Capitalist crap has a stranglehold on far too many people. If it is a get rich quick idea, it’s bound to fail. Holmes is now serving 11 years in an open prison for her fraud. But, here’s a thing; she’ll bounce back because, despite all the lies, she’s a very intelligent woman, led astray less by greed, more by an insane self-belief, another aspect of America, more often than not, doomed to fail. Let’s hope she’s learned a valuable lesson, if by a hard way.