Michael White, PMQs and the Gordon-gasp: a day in Westminster

The sky was generously clear as I strode out of Westminster tube station on Wednesday morning, a slightly-too-large suit on my back and a pleasant soup of anticipation and nerves in my stomach. I was on my way to meet a true heavyweight of British journalism, the man whose stern face has looked out at the nation from pages of The Guardian for the past 30 years - former political editor and CiF blogger, Mr. Michael White.

Even more exciting was where Mike had proposed to take me - into the heart of power, the Houses of Parliament, to witness the weekly Punch and Judy show that is Prime Minister’s Questions.

There has always been something about Gordon Brown that puts the creeps up me, and perched up in the press gallery of the House of Commons (it’s rather like being in the upper reaches of a church, complete with intermittent sunlight cascading through ornate glass-work), I finally figured out what it is.

It’s the ‘Gordon-gasp’ – an unhelpful mannerism that in all but our most high-profile of public servants would be indecorous to mention, an open-mouthed chin-wobble that appears at the end of his every sentence as though the man is momentarily aghast at the very words that have tumbled out of his mouth.

Opposite, of course, was Cameron – a man-child with whom I share a poverty of facial hair (if precious little else). It’s hard to be taken seriously when your complexion is like the inside of an egg-shell.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed when the leader of the opposition used up his entire quota of questions to make the same futile request:

“Will the right honourable gentlemen please explain what he meant, when he said calling a general election now would bring about ‘chaos’?!”

The Gordon-gasp centred its self so the PM could counter: “Well a Tory government in power would certainly bring about chaos for this country!”

That familiar Commons laughter – not false exactly, but putting unnecessary strain on the diaphragm – rippled through the backbenches.

“Ah-ha!” retorted the shimmering chin, “So the right honourable gentleman finally admits he would probably lose a general election!”

As Mr. White informed me, this sort of baiting is the standard behaviour from an opposition on the front foot. Certainly of all the main leaders, Cameron has emerged the slightly-less sullied of the three having last week been first to strongly condemn his own MPs for their roles in the ongoing expenses scandal.

Nick Clegg on the other hand had led the mob in sharpening their pitch-forks for Michael Martin, the now lame-duck Speaker – making his Q to the PM something of a dramatic highlight. His attempt to pay tribute to the beleaguered Scot (Martin, not Brown) was met with a predictable chorus of jeers. In either a demonstration of the incompetency many feel has characterised his stewardship or a wily sense of revenge, the Speaker then appeared to forget to allow Clegg his supplementary question, much to everyone’s amusement. It helped break some of the tension that seemed to grip the House, rather like the affectionate teasing a parent might indulge in to rescue the atmosphere after a family row.

After PMQs, my first work experience experience (unless you count a week photocopying at Morpeth Council aged 13) continued apace. At one point I sat in The Guardian’s backstage office with several of Mr. White’s colleagues (listening to the equally formidable Simon Hoggart lampoon senior politicians live felt rather like seeing David Beckham practise his free-kicks in his backyard) attempting to strike that fine balance between being helpful and not getting in the way. It reminded me of our own little newspaper office here at The Courier, only I wasn’t in charge and no one was blasting rap music from youtube on any of the computers.

In the afternoon I was whisked off to the House of Lords – a rather more opulent and sedate version of the Commons, in which rows and rows of elderly politicians (average age: 69) are cocooned in preparation for retirement. They were caught up in the same rare moment of contrite introspection that had subdued the green benches next door, but the real thrill for me was in following Mike through the corridors of power on the way there, watching him navigate the labyrinth of Westminster like it was his home, stopping occasionally to exact details from lobbyists or subtly mine MPs for their insights. It was surreally reminiscent of the scenes in the West Wing in which one of the characters storms through the hallways of the White House firing on all cylinders with their secretary taking notes by their side, only rather than engaging him in witty banter I focused squarely on trying not to trip over or accidently shut any door behind me in some Right Honourable face.

To round the day off I accompanied Mike to the studios of Sky News where, with barely a glance at the briefing, he went live on air to millions in order to answer questions about the day’s events. While the public and journalists alike are losing their heads a little about the ‘quiet revolution’ currently taking place in British politics (Jonathan Freeland ought to have worn a beret for his comment piece in The Guardian earlier this week), Mike is consistently less excitable about what I guess after thirty years in the game doesn’t seem quite as extraordinary as it may to the rest of us. He quickly dispensed of a colleague Sky had drafted in from another studio who got a bit carried away about Labour ‘losing one MP for every day the election is delayed’, as I, inches off-shot to his right, could only really look on and marvel.

Back outside, and after a handshake and a goodbye, I was left strolling along the Thames reflecting on a day in which I had glimpsed both professional heroes (personally speaking) and professional villains (nationally speaking) in the bowels of building that has dictated life in Britain since the Middle Ages.

The Times politely rejected me today for a place on their graduate scheme so my own route into ‘proper journalism’ remains stubbornly, exhilaratingly, obscured. What a day in Westminster has ensured is that no matter how arduous the next few years prove to be, the motivation to carry on will be that bit easier to find. It was a vision of what I am striving for rendered in real time, rather than abstraction.

For very different reasons indeed, I expect aspiring politicians (if there are any left) can look at this week of accumulating scandal and say the exact same thing. Whether inspired to emulate or antithesize, let's hope we all get to where we're trying to go - and do a good job, once we do.

Chanting from the Brink

As I sit here on the precipice of the unthinkable, 90 minutes away from football’s equivalent of the Armageddon, the peak of St. James Park is only a brief shard woven into my view of the sky-line. I can see a single glistening jut of its metallic upper tendons, but like the tip of an iceberg, the sight betrays far more than that.

Built beneath is an endangered colossus that first took my breath away 15 years ago. Walking out into the belly of football, I expected to see it first but you never do – you feel it, a smack in the face. Air-shorn lungs bellowing tides of anticipation, rippling across and through you from every angle as you take dizzily to your seat. The awesome spectacle of uniformity, and in those days, Keegan’s heroes appearing as an echo of them all, minature men you’d pretended to be in the park.

A girlfriend asked me once: why do you bother with something that makes you so upset? She’d come along after the golden years, after The Entertainers, after even Sir Bobby’s fleeting renaissance. And I could see it through her eyes: the dejected slump, the bitter rebukes, the Sunday spoilt by melodrama. What a futile cause.

But football is and always has been a futile cause for all but the lucky few whose birth (or insincerity) gives them Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea or Arsenal. The Premier League is a microcosm of the fucked-up world we inhabit in which all the wealth, all the power and all the happiness has been distributed among a disproportionate few who have developed insurmountable methods of protecting it. Manchester United are America (quite literally now, of course): on top, out front, smug in their greatness and loathed for it across the world, while the remaining three might constitute the jostling superpowers of Europe. So what does that make Newcastle FC? A shell-seasoned and cowering corner of the Middle East, pulling its self to pieces while the rest of the world grows.

By the end of the day, relegation may have finally been all but conceded by the slowest, flattest, most dim-spirited Newcastle side of at least the last twenty years, in a stadium that is still the fourth biggest in the country. Another question bemused outsiders ask is simply: how did it get to this? Even they remember vaguely a period in the 90s when the club were England’s Girls Aloud rather than its Pete Docherty.

Pin-pointing the exact moment when we became an injured moth declining deliriously toward the relegation carpet is difficult: some would cite Bobby Robson’s unceremonious departure, some Kenny Daglish dismantling the squad before him, some would even go as far back to say it was King Kev himself doing away with our youth team and teasing us with false economy-glory.

For me, the rot truly set the moment, in the middle of a build-up toward the Aston Villa goal, Lee Bowyer’s fist connected with Keiron Dyer’s face in front of an astonished St. James’ Park in 2005. Two team mates brawling mid-match. The national press have been poking us in the ribs and laughing ever since, and who can blame them.

So why bother with an interest that for almost a decade has been a merry-go-round stopping alternately at shame, disappointment, anger and, at times, sheer horror?

Because your football club is, in many ways, your oldest friend. You’ve known it for longer than you can quite remember and you’re loyal to it, even when it’s acting like an insufferable twat. When something is so entwined with your sense of self and history, there’s very little it could actually do that would make you wash your hands of them. This is the humanity from which football’s vultures tear their lumps: loyalty vitiated by a £40 shirt.

But beyond that, football and sport in general offer humankind something wonderfully unique. It is a world in which we can revel in the excesses of irrational emotion, joys greater than joys and sorrows deeper than sorrows, because ultimately, it is a game with no real bearing on our health, our families, or our futures. It is a world in which a good result is a good result, plain and untainted by the grey tones of life in which both a blessing and a curse are manifest somewhere in every event. For every hammer blow like relegation, there is a moment even in a bad performance, a well-timed pass or a neat one-two, than momentarily illuminates the sublime, a fleck of art amidst a chaos of movement that reminds you precisely why you bother. And most importantly, even for those of us struggling in football’s developing world, there is hope. Against the odds, despite the run of play, in football you never quite lose that little part of you that believes that this could be our match, our season.

Bill Shankley is claimed to have said once that football isn’t a matter of life or death – it’s much more important than that. Perhaps his point was that what matters more than our mortality is what we do with our lives – the bit in between that is so easy to let pass us by. Strange though it might seem to the rational outsider, the dizzy heights and choking lows of football feed directly into an essential appetite for life, and make it taste, if not better, then stronger.

Let’s hope the boys manage to put on a spread for us tonight, and keep the hope alive a little longer.

St. Georges Day.

"Do ee kna what’s gan ern here?”

Asked a woman in the crowd as we looked out between the gang of rabid, Union Jack-waving white men and the five or six students nervously handing out Socialist Worker leaflets opposite them.

“I’ve got a rough idea, yeah.”

The woman frowned as the melodious mantras of the Glastonbury-survivors on one side continued to be drowned out by thundering chants of ‘EN-GER-LAND EN-GER-LAND’ of the Real Working Class TM on the other.

“Do them lot wanna ban St. Georges’ Day like?” she continued, pointing at the hippies.

Ah, St. George. Patron saint of Aragon, Catalonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece, Lithuania, Palestine, Portugal and Russia and the cities of Amersfoort, Beirut, Caceres, Genoa, Ferrara, Freiburg, Ljublijana, Gozo, Pomorie, Qormi and Moscow. Oh, and England.

“No no, I think they just object to the other lot, the National Front, on the grounds that they’re a bit racist.” I replied, but she’d gone.

Facebook was also alive that day with mentions of St. George, the Roman solider who never really killed a dragon (but if he did so today would almost certainly be locked up for hunting an endangered species). The status of many seemed to be calling for the introduction of a national holiday to mark St. Georges Day – a noble enough aim, getting an extra day off work – but then I wondered how many of them also shared the sentiments of the 365,642 members of the ‘STOP our Government from killing off ST Georges Day because it may offend!’ facebook group, the same sentiment peddled between belches and jeers by the intimating posse of sheared clichés that commandeered Grey’s Monument in Newcastle City Centre, April 23rd.

The question I ask of everyone who propagates this idea is simply: who? Who is ‘offended’ by St. Georges’ Day? The Left? The Attenboroughs? The Sci-Fi enthusiasts with a penchant for The Never Ending Story?

No no, of course we’re talking about immigrants. The ‘others’. The people who come to our country, take our jobs, resist our ways and refuse to flash any tit on a summers day. Them lot.

Has anyone ever actually heard an immigrant in this country say they’re object to St. Georges Day, or the English flag, or crumpets or Wimbledon or cups of tea or anything we’ve decided is ‘English’ for that matter? Obviously we can discount any that have came from Greece, Lithuania, Palestine, Russia et al because, hey, he’s their saint too, so why on earth would they object?

The answer is always no and that’s because it’s a myth, a tall-tale perpetuated by the far-right to stoke up the trembling nationalism that is their life-blood.

No body ‘objects’ to St. Georges Day, to the flag, or to the kind of innocent patriotism that - for example - the World Cup brings out in most people, it wouldn’t make any sense to. But what we should all object to is that St. Georges Day, the pride we want to feel in our place of birth, is being hi-jacked – not by immigrants who have probably never even thought about it but by fascists who want to exploit our disillusioned national self-image.

For me, it’s a symptom of post-colonial blues. England ruled the world and the seven seas once - we pillaged and pilfered from across the globe, constructing an identity that is at it’s very core multicultural, a good-old-cup-of-tea from China, a chicken tikka masala from India, three lions from the African plains – and now, in a blink of history’s weary eye, it has all gone. We aren’t England the Great anymore, we’re England the puny, the politically subservient, the lost empire. And with it, our sense of identity has evaporated.

Like a cuckolded man emerging from the debris of his once great romance, we are a sucker-punched nation, binge-drinking our way from one unprotected fumble to the next, reeling self-consciously around a diminished sense of worth. Some of us want to find reasons to object to the quiet, studious, self-respecting races of people who enter our shores and who, by any rational statistic, present no real threat to our way of life, because their behaviour shows us up as what we are: the drunken, STI-ridden, leary joke of Europe who once ruled the world.

For all I despair of (and contribute to) our social ills, I love England. I love our cultural brilliance, our contributions to art and music and literature. I love our national character: modest, resilient, good-humoured. I love our country-side in a way that, when I stop and look at it, overwhelms a place so innate I can’t touch it, something I can only suppose is my silly, simpering human soul.

But loving Britain is loving diversity. We’re a mongrel race and always have been, invaded more times than Paris Hilton’s knickers, a melting pot of Celts, Saxons, Vikings and Romans. By either accident or design, we are a nation that has absorbed its trademarks and traditions from other places and amalgamated them into something unique and this is our strength, not our weakness.

If St. George were alive today, and did indeed have to protect a princess of this country by slaying a dragon, the princess would be our tolerance and compassion, and the dragon would be the looming monster of fascism – each scale a freshy-suited skin-head – that inflames communities and takes as a sacrifice new, disillusioned youth each day. A dragon that, in the forth-coming European elections, could take a seat of real power to punish us for our apathy.

I didn’t see the woman again, but there were plenty there that day at Monument, trying to decipher whether they agreed with those shouting far out on the right or those shouting far out on the left.

All the while, in the space in the middle of them both, on their way to work or to the shops, from all manners of backgrounds and beliefs, passed the people of England.