Clement Attlee was the the leader of the British Labour Party 1935-55, served as Winston Churchill’s deputy in the WW2 Coalition and led the Labour government of 1945-51. A lawyer, he volunteered for the British army immediately war broke out in 1914 and saw action in Turkey, Iraq and France.

He was a man of few words and had little time for the media.

Just before the 1951 election he was badgered by a radio interviewer as he was on his way to a meeting

…and he walked away.

If only modern politicians were as terse – and honest….

Exit question – is Sarah Palin is doing a Clem Attlee on the US media but from a different side of the field?

We did a circular 5 mile walk from The Parrot Inn, Forest Green. On the return leg we walked out of a wood and came to the Buttercup Field.

It was one of those moments when you just wanted time to stand still. The peaceful tranquillity of the place drained away each ounce of stress, calmed every nerve.

We wanted to be there forever…

But of course you can never stop the clock so eventually we moved on but not until The Lovely Mrs P had captured the scene on her Blackberry.

Then, back at the pub we raised our glasses and toasted the Buttercup Field with a pint of Hobgoblin

Your President has come and gone. His State visit is over. Naturally the UK media went out of its way to be positive because
1. In 2008 they took their cue from your MSM and accepted the myth without expending any effort on shoe leather so it would be embarrassing to ‘fess up
2. He is a left wing politician and therefore our media and academic elite keep any criticism muted
3. Generally, like you Americans, though we find foreigners a little odd, we are polite to them

State visits are peculiar creatures because, unlike the day to day give, take and insult of raw international politics they are also heavy with symbolism – flags, banquets, parades and visits to the host nation’s icons.

When I was a callow youth I sneered at symbols as empty gewgaws designed to hypnotise the ignorant, like the cheap coloured beads offered to primitive tribal chieftains in the 19th century for a thousand square miles of arid landscape packed with enough mineral wealth to create a hundred western millionaires.

But as I grew through the stages of life and began to learn from experience rather than through text books I realised that symbols were emotional shorthand for a common cultural inheritance that stretches back to ancestors long unknown. It made me also realise that we as individuals can only be short term leaseholders of that inheritance which we must inevitably pass on to generations yet unborn.

So we treat them with respect.

And we treat the symbols of our friends with respect.

And before we venture into a friendly foreign land we do a little homework on those symbols – especially if we hold an office in our own country with its own symbolic constellation. Indeed most leaders of nations have diplomatic advisers and heads of protocol waiting on hand to guide them through what can be a an intimidating maze of expectations.

President Obama failed that test when he attended the banquet given in his honour by our Queen. He stumbled over the toast, did not even attempt to pretend he wasn’t using a cue card and had to be instructed in good manners by his hostess

Earlier that day he visited Westminster Abbey where England’s kings and queens have always been crowned and where, just a few weeks ago, millions throughout the world had witnessed the strange mixture of solemnity and joy that characterised the royal wedding. Here also lies the tomb of The Unknown Warrior, the First World War soldier who represents the sacrifice of all those other British service men and women who have no known resting place and on whose grave was placed Kate Middleton’s wedding posy after the pomp and ceremony of her marriage.

Mrs Obama, who had changed her outfit to a purple dress and blue coat, said: “It’s a pleasure to be here again”, to which her husband added: “She gets to come to all the fun places”, then “so nice to see you, how are you?”

He was there to lay a wreath on the Unknown Warrior’s grave. It is not a fun place. It is a place of dark and brooding majesty, a place where hard men are proud to shed tears of respect and remembrance for those who gave their blood and bone so that we may live outside war and terror.

He was then asked to sign the Abbey’s Visitors Book, a simple but meaningful act of symbolic recognition. He had to seek advice for the date and then got the year wrong.

But maybe the 2008 gaffe is understandable seeing that he already appears to be in full campaign mode. Perhaps he felt that Congressman Clyburn would be more impressed by a visit to a multi ethnic school in South London rather than meeting up with the brightest and best of Britain’s young scientists. After all we are contantly being told that Obama has a towering intellect – so what can he learn from a handful of test tube shakers….

Excused as “slips” these blunders appear to be manifestations of his real world view. That traditions and symbols and threads towards the past are the cobwebbed residue of meaningless images irrelevant to the vision of a socially engineered reconstruction of society where there is a place for everyone and everyone is in their place and woe betide any village Hampden who refuses to conform.

As for protocol – I guess the only protocol needed for any young politician on the make in Chicago at the turn of the century was to find the most suitable part of Mayor Daley’s posterior to kiss in order to get further up the ladder.

A sad day for both our lands.

During the late 1940s and early 50s my dad would sometimes buy a copy of the Saturday Evening Post from our local WH Smith in South London. It was a much better deal in terms of pictures and articles of interest than anything published in England at the time. I particularly remember being astonished at the advertisements for food and drink – this at a time when food continued to be rationed in a rather run down dilapidated post war London suburb, still pock marked with bombed out buildings.

As the years rolled by and prosperity returned Hollywood and Rock n’Roll crafted part of my own cultural outlook. As a history teacher and politics nut I developed a fascination for the American scene but never imagined crossing the pond for real, only in my imagination.

Then in 1990, browsing in a local discount bookstore I picked up a copy of “Exploring The West” by Herman J Viola and there, on page 240 was this picture, “Open Range”, painted by Maynard Dixon in 1942…..

‘

I was hooked. I just had to go out there and see that for myself – the big sky, the majestic mesas, the sandy, scrubby landscape. I wanted to sense it, feel it, drink it in with my eyes. Moreover I wanted to stand in front of that painting which the book said was part of a collection of western art near the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. So in the mid 90s we booked a fly drive and I took the car east across the Rockies to Denver, checked into the Brown Palace that night and, bright and early next morning, sauntered out of the hotel to where the gallery was supposed to be and – no gallery, no collection, no picture….apparently the whole project had been closed a few months before and the paintings scattered to the four corners of America.

So I have never seen the painting.

But we did see the landscape. We have driven all around Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. First year we drove from Flagstaff to Bluff, Utah and alongside Monument Valley and I saw it for real.

A few days later we drove to Moab and I stood at Grand View Point in Canyonlands – thinner and with more hair than now – and wanted time to freeze for ever……

….and I so much want to return.

Thank you, Maynard Dixon….

BTW – a few years later we did see many of his paintings at a glorious exhibition mounted at Brigham Young University…..but that painting, sadly, wasn’t there…..

Since they were founded in 2002 they have one of the best playing records in English soccer, gaining 5 promotions in 9 years. They have done this with one of the lowest budgets in competitive football – and also excellent onfield discipline. Above all the team is actually owned by its fans.

Too good to be true? Not if you are AFC Wimbledon.

The big difference between professional football in England and pro sport in America is that for the loyal supporters who go out in all weathers to watch their team through thick and thin dreams can sometimes come true. This is because, unlike the US where places in the top tier are allocated by franchise, there is much greater fluidity of movement since we have a system of promotion and relegation – at the end of each season the top 2/3 teams move up to the next level and are replaced by the clubs who drop down.

Top level English football operates with four tiers. At the top is the Premiership (Man U, Chelsea etc), then the Championship, then League 1 and 2. Below League 2 are the semi pro teams in an assortment of minor and regional leagues.

In 2002 the bosses of one top level club, Wimbledon in South London decided to move to a better stadium in Milton Keynes, on the northern edge of London. They renamed the club MK Dons.

The local fans in Wimbledon were furious. They straight away formed their own new club called AFC Wimbledon and managed, eventually, to get a nearby ground share. But they had to start at the bottom of the ladder in a very lowly local league amongst works clubs and teams that played in parks.

The fans formed a Trust to run the club and appointed officers to manage the day to day operations. The officers were all unpaid volunteers who regularly reported back to the Trust – and that is still the way it is done today. It must be effective because not only has the club been victorious on the field next year it will have the lowest operational costs in League 2.

But cost effectiveness does not mean a lack of professionalism. In an age when sportsmanship seems to be a thing of the past the team plays hard – but has been the cleanest this season in terms of discipline.

Most pundits thought the club would fold after a burst of initial enthusiasm and forgot about them. But as the years went by AFC Wimbledon moved steadily up the ladder gaining promotion to the upper levels of the semi pro leagues until they ended up in the Confererence, one step below the top four.

Now their dream has come true. Two teams from the Conference are allowed into the big boys at the end of each season – and AFC Wimbledon, with Crawley (my local club, for many years a joke team) have clinched it.

The move from semi pro Conference to pro League 2 is a very big jump and many sides, after one or two seasons, fizzle out and return to obscurity. So, for AFC Wimbledon it is in the lap of the gods.

But who knows – 2015 they could be in the Premiership playing Arsenal and, sweet thought, MK Dons who this season just missed out on promotion from League 1 to the Championship.

Now, however good they are, nobody in Allentown Pa. will ever see the Lehigh Valley IronPigs play major league baseball…

Sorry, Americans, only in English football will you ever have the chance to see your local small town team step out onto the field of dreams….

….but a cake for a recent wedding in Croydon. But I am sure it would have gone down well with William and Kate – and Pippa Middleton. It’s a cake with a difference. At the top is a single tier version of the traditional wedding cake for the bride, groom and nearest and dearest. Underneath are scores of richly decorated cupcakes for the guests. A neat idea and it went down well with everybody.

It was designed and made by Vicky who runs a very successful internet cake business, The Small Cake Shop. Originally based in Croydon it now operates from a country cottage in Somerset.

Orders are shipped for next day delivery in the UK. Regrettably no deliveries can be made outside the UK but Americans and others can order for family, friends and colleagues currently living in the UK.

Corporate orders are particularly welcome.

For further details go here

The cakes are delicious and I can vouch for that personally as Vicky is our daughter in law and always rustles plenty up when we visit. Indeed she rarely has to advertise because most of her business comes from repeat orders and recommendations. Nevertheless every small business can do with a boost so I am sure all inquiries will be welcome.

In her icy lair she waits while perplexed scribblers try to convince themselves that beside a distant northern lake there is no shadow roaming free beyond the parameters of their prescribed calculus and ingrained ritualistic incantations.

But it is only pretence because in reality they are ever glancing over their shoulders for although they publicly voice disdain they are privately nervous of someone who refuses to engage within the rules of their vaunted choreography

That is why in several of the pieces that emerged in the aftershock of Huckabee’s withdrawal the name of Sarah Palin was either left out or allowed but a cursory nod. Of course they might merely have been falling in line behind the grand panjandrum of prognostication George Will who returned from his visit to the Delphic Oracle and proclaimed that in 2012 the GOP nominee lacing up armour to enter the lists against Obama would either be Daniels or Pawlenty.

Time was, of course, when George’s diktat would have been enough to seal the deal. Pundits and their media masters controlled the slip road to the information highway and the most that any ordinary Jane or Joe could do was to splutter over their morning cornflakes and shout abuse at the cat in order to let off steam.

But now the GWs of the world are left preaching to an empty chapel as the world and his wife are surfing along the information highway themselves.

Poor George – how frustrating it must be to have your once booming voice reduced to a constricted squeak.

With all the other candidates and pseudo candidates there is blather about exploratory committees, raising money, hiring consultants and strategists, testing the waters in Iowa, fluttering their eyelids at an assortment of governors, politicians and celebrities and, above all, dancing to the musical pipes of the self proclaimed kings and queens of the media.

The result? Allahpundit goes orgasmic.

But, if she chooses to enter the GOP race, it is possible that Sarah Palin could decide to dance to her own tune.

Exploratory committee? A prayer, chat with Todd and the family and a couple of spiders who live in the Palin garage = job done!

Raising money? As one Hot Air comment pitched it

If Palin enters the fray, everything changes. Romney might be able to generate truckloads of money, but Palin can make it rain from the sky on demand.

Consultants/strategists? Here’s Matthew Continetti

Palin’s entry would completely scramble the presidential campaign. She’s quite simply the most famous Republican woman in the world, with shrewd instincts, charisma, passionate supporters, and no fear

Why would someone like that need a consultant? Why would anybody with an ounce of savvy need a consultant?

A consultant is a person who borrows your watch and then charges you to tell you what time it is

Iowa? Once every four years thousands of “consultants/strategists” parachute into Iowa alongside legions of media hacks and their support staff. For several weeks this international assortment of scribblers and voiceovers pretends to take an interest in ethanol subsidies and the Waterloo Black Hawks. Once the caucuses are over they all rush back to their big city apartments and forget about Iowa until the year of the next Olympics – including the candidates who have been pimping themselves to Iowans for several months.

But in Iowa, just as there is in every state, below the first and second tier of GOP apparatchiks who love to sound off to any out of state hack with a mike or a blackberry, there are probably more than a thousand lower level enthusiasts who will gladly crawl barelegged over fifty miles of broken glass to work for Palin.

As for endorsements, she is probably the only political figure in America who walks alone. If they come, then fine. But after the heavy lifting she did for so many candidates in 2010 the lack of reciprocity after the Gifford shooting was quite an eye opener. But then the mathematics of the GOP political equation became clearer. The Republican Party needs Sarah Palin. But perhaps she does not need the Republican Party.

Indeed, if she decides to stand she gave Sean Hannity a clue of how she might position herself towards the end of their recent interview. (10.00-10.55 in the clip)

When he asked her about her views on the current speculation of who might be throwing their hat into the ring she became rather dismissive of such antics so early on in the game. She used the phrase “both sides of the aisle”, talked of “fighting for Family, Faith and Freedom” and, the money quote, declared she was not a real fan of politicians.

This is trademark Palin. Though she wears the Republican label she really puts herself forward as being above party politics. This is how she won and governed in Alaska – and why she continued to be so unpopular with the official GOP establishment up there.

This is why the national GOP elite and their battalions of consultants, lobbyists and media drones loathe her as much as the liberal/left. Positioning oneself above the party disengages power from the cogwheel of the spoils system – the jobs for the boys, the waivers, the sweet government contracts, the backroom deals. The party structure feeds on this and for many it is the raison d’être for the whole mechanism of politics. She briefly broke that culture in Alaska and would do the same in Washington.

Quite a while ago, soon after the dust of 2008 had settled I wrote a comparison between Sarah Palin and the French leader Charles de Gaulle and I still stand by that.

As an Englishman I was always naturally suspicious of anything that de Gaulle did because I knew that he would never fail to place the interests of France above everything else. But I also admired him for it and yearned for the day when we might have such a leader (to my astonishment, in 1979 when the UK had sunk to its lowest depths, she came.)

De Gaulle was one of the most brilliant political operators in any modern democracy. But he achieved success by offering himself to the French people as an anti-politician, concerned only for the future of France.

De Gaulle was relatively unknown to the French people in 1940 but millions of them heard his broadcast from London at the moment of their deepest despair and in those few minutes he became the inspiration and hope for so many. Governor Palin walked onto the stage at the Republican Convention, electrified millions and stole their hearts forever with her grace, her honesty and her love of life sealing there and then a contract and covenant of support through fire and flood whatever may happen

I wrote that in March 2009 at a time when on both sides of the pond “those who know best” had her already shredded and dumped into the dustbin of history. But I had a sense that there were a lot of ordinary Americans who had sealed that contract and covenant – and I was right.

So now my American friends wait and wonder. The runes have been thrown but have yet to be read.

Who knows what the future holds….

Newt Gingrich on Sarah Palin January 2011

I think that she has got to slow down and be more careful and think through what she’s saying and how she’s saying it.

News item May 2011

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) is considering a return to the Sunday shows this weekend to help undo the damage caused by his appearance last week.

What is that phrase from Luke 4.23?

……Physician, heal thyself…..

Probably much consumption of valium at the Beeb this morning as the ONS reported a 36,000 drop in unemployment, the second consecutive quarterly fall. There are now 29.24 million in work against the May 2008 peak of 29.56 million, just before the Blair/Brown regime’s chickens came home to roost (sorry, Mr Balls, before the global banking crisis engineered by those furtive foreigners undermined the Styrofoam foundations of the Brown boom)

Moreover, though earlier today the BBC website told us that youth unemployment was expected to reach one million and had obviously lined up a complete rugby union squad of sorrowful teenagers ready to pin the tail onto the heartless coalition donkey, the latest figures show it flatlining at 935,000.

Imagine the gritting of those BBC molars as they had to include this quote

Some observers said the rise in employment was a sign the economic recovery was strengthening.
“The strong growth in full-time jobs is especially encouraging, as this is one of the key indicators of a sustainable recovery,” said Ian Brinkley at the Work Foundation.

That sound? David Dimbleby ripping up predictable Question Time favourite “Tories and their fat cat banking buddies love to grind the unemployed into the dirt”

Don’t worry, David, there will be plenty of poverty stricken pizza and beer guzzling students and whingeing public sector workers in the “randomly selected” audience to pour out their sob stories.

Remember this?

Am I out of sync with this 21st century world when I say the words of that beautiful song still send shivers up and down my spine. In this world of “relationships” rather than marriages, of “partners” instead of husbands/wives, is the sentiment behind it a curious relic of a bygone age?

I wonder.

We live in a society where certain political and commercial cartels appear to have an interest in engulfing our cultural antennae with a constantly recurring tsunami of sexuality until every taboo has been swept aside. So, is there room for that notion of romance – the sheer unbounding sense of exhilaration when a man or a woman wants to be by your side and where sex is merely one manifestation of that sweet surrender of oneself to another?

For many years western popular music proved a reliable and universally acceptable vehicle for expressing the magic of that moment, either via gentle, light hearted joy

…or with the the bittersweet emotion of parting

Sometimes we wanted to broadcast to the whole of mankind that we were together by going anywhere and everywhere arm in arm

On the other hand it could be a more wistful almost ethereal dreamscape where the rest of the world scarcely mattered

Romance could sometimes be a roller coaster of emotion marked by a deep sense of yearning when your other half was elsewhere and all you had was emptiness

A cascade of words could splash the canvas of love with shimmering, vibrant colours of devotion

But a love could also be so deep that being together in itself was sufficient and no words were needed

So do songs like these have no resonance with young (or even old) people today?

I would wager that they do but as a modern music of the underground, the new cultural samizdat, publicly disowned but privately treasured…

…and these words, easily mocked by a corrupt and cynical media, must surely still strike a chord across a million crowded rooms…

Once you have found her,
Never let her go.
Once you have found her,
Never let her go!