Recorded half a century ago – and it still knocks the socks off most of the stuff being pumped out today. Phil Spector might not be the person you would want to spend the night with but he was a musical genius – as for the Ronettes – wow – they…smouldered…..

Ronnie was the lead, backed by her older sister Estelle and her cousin Nedra….the beehives, the dark eye shadow, the tight dresses – they weren’t the girls you would take home to your mum (well, that was the image)

DP: The Ronettes have been described as the first bad girls of rock. How did you get that reputation?

NTR: It wasn’t that we were bad, it was just that we were the ones with the big beehives. We developed our hairstyle, the beehive, the dark eye makeup … We set the mode for the big hair, we set the mode for the dark eye makeup. Then, we were dancers, too. So we wore a lot of dresses that had a slit on the side. In the ’60s, a lot of the dresses were very tapered down at the leg. We had to have a slit for dancing. We were the first to do the shaking, with the fringe. We had the outfits that had the fringe. Also, our songs sang to boys, where other girl groups sang about boys.

Fame didn’t bring happiness to Estelle or, initially, to Ronnie. Nedra was more fortunate and looks back on those days with perspective. In 2007 the girls were reunited on stage for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame though Estelle was too fragile to sing and only came on afterwards to thank the audience. Just two years later she died in tragic circumstances.

But, whatever the highs and lows of life we can still lock into our memories that magical moment in 1963 when the world was ours….

The Ronettes – Nedra, Ronnie & Estelle

Interviewer: So, Rowena, as the Daily Telegraph’s highly trained ace political journalist, tell us how you got the UKIP story?

Rowena Mason: Someone from Conservative Party HQ sent me an e mail which I cut and pasted…….ermmmm, that’s it…

Interviewer: Thank you, Rowena Mason, the Daily Telegraph’s highly trained ace political journalist…

One of those clever young chaps at The UK Spectator has poured some cold water over speculation that UKIP could do well, even win, should a by election be held at in the Portsmouth South constituency of beleaguered Lib Dem MP Mike Hancock.
Young Mr Jones points out that the Portsmouth South demographics indicate a younger population and, as we all know, only old people, hankering over a Britain that never really existed, support UKIP.

But we can expect the average Portsmouth South voter to be at least slightly younger — and therefore less likely to vote Ukip — than the average Eastleigh voter.

Moreover the Lib Dems are deeply entrenched locally, as they were in Eastleigh

And, like in Eastleigh, the Liberal Democrats dominate at a local government level — they hold 17 of the 18 City Council seats in the constituency (the Tories have one).

Therefore, he implies, let’s stop fantasising over UKIP and get down to good old fashioned traditional three way party politics…..it’s all a bit of a fairy story.

What he conveniently ignores, of course, is that the Lib Dems only won Eastleigh through the rather dubious organising of postal votes. On the day real time voters went massively UKIP because, during the actual campaign, voters were impressed by the party’s actual messaging (as distinct from the usual media inspired caricature) and the quality of the UKIP candidate.

Eastleigh has given the party a tremendous boost by proving that voting purple no longer a Raving Monster Loony Party moment. The media has begun to take the party a little more seriously, Nigel Farage’s Common Sense tour has played to packed halls and the national polls has shown UKIP pushing ahead of the Lib Dems.

This is not to say that the party would win in Portsmouth but the fact that a high tory outlet like the Spectator is engaging in a little agitprop shows that Cameron & Co are worried..

And so they should be…..membership is growing fast and a lot of these are from the younger demographic. Moreover they are not all disillusioned former Conservative voters. Some are from other parties and a number are people who were previously apolitical and who see the party as giving a voice to ordinary folk outside the metropolitan cultural elite.

Instead of pontificating from his media perch why doesn’t Jonathan Jones get down to some real journalism and get out and about to find out why so many people are joining UKIP – and what they are doing to bring it closer to the corridors of power…

But then that would take expenditure of shoeleather and chatting with the great unwashed – and that would never do…..might miss a few cocktail parties….

Chris Bryant, a gay Labour MP who is a tireless crusader against homophobia and who once made his underpants famous,  is clearly not a fan of Estonians barmaids.….

‘It would be nice sometimes when you go into a British hotel if the receptionist was British. ‘We need to give our young people to have the skills and the opportunities to get those jobs. ‘There is a hotel in my constituency quite often it’s not been able to employ locally, it has ended up employing people from Estonia and Latvia, often people from Estonia and Latvia have so much get up and go they’ve got up and gone.’

That’s not only true about hotels around Bryant’s Welsh constituency – hotels and pubs around West Sussex and Surrey are often staffed by Estonians and other East Europeans. But it’s not about low wages as some of the comments at the DM piece have opined. The key is in Bryant’s last few words

“people from Estonia and Latvia have so much get up and go”

Fact is Estonians and other East Europeans are not afraid of hard work and are also cheerful and helpful whereas some Brits…….

Sorry, Mr Bryant, I’d rather be served by an Estonian barmaid any day……

h/t for barmaid here…

So the great Xi Jinping taxi story (new President of China jumps into a cab to show he’s just an ordinary bloke) proved to be a hoax…..

Red faced media big cheeses in China issued grovelling apologies and, natch, airbrushed the original story from their sites.

But one of the reasons the hoax gained legs was because it sounded exactly like the type of fairy story fantasy “man of the people” pumped out by the agitprop churners of every party based dictatorship.

Beloved Leader “suddenly” decides to leave office, go out onto the street and hail a taxi. A few minutes later the cab deposits said leader outside his humble abode where Mrs Leader is in the midst of cooking noodles…..and, astonishingly, media hacks are present throughout the whole journey.

Fact is these characters are as distant from the great unwashed as any medieval monarch. China, Cuba, North Korea and the jolly old USSR – any communist regime – is based on dynastic rivalries not on any truly democratic process. The party is a divine vanguard whose members know the needs of ordinary people much better than the ordinary people themselves. But, because they claim to rule in the name of the masses, unlike a medieval king whose power came from a hotline to heaven, They have to pretend to be “just like us”…..

Maybe next time his PR guys should suggest a swim……

“Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know’t”

Othello Act V Sc II

An estimated quarter of a million people lined the streets to St Paul’s to bid farewell to Margaret Thatcher. We turned up mainly, of course, to pay our final respects to one of the greatest political leaders of the western world. But we came also, I am sure, to demonstrate how  the tiny minority of bile spewing ersatz “revolutionaries”, eagerly  sought out by the well heeled chattering class hacks from planet BBC/Guardian did not speak for the ordinary folk of all ages and from every walk of life who came into London today.

A grey, damp day…

It was grey and damp as I walked from Southwark Cathedral along the bank of the Thames to the Millennium Bridge. When I reached St Paul’s at 8.00am the pavements were already crowded. I managed to thread my way through to get a reasonable position – and watched and waited.

The mood was quiet and restrained as fitted for the occasion. We watched the police as they went about their business and checked the arrival of the great and the good as they arrived in buses – the limos were only for a handful of the very top brass.

The one big cheer that rang out had me puzzled until my neighbour laughed and just said the one word  “Boris”  – and true enough there was London’s Mayor being interviewed by some hack. At the end of the interview he walked back to St Paul’s on his own with more cheers echoing round the streets….how our other politicians must grind their teeth in fury at the man’s popularity….

Later we cheered the service men and women as they took up their positions lining the route of the procession – and an even louder cheer and applause for the red coats of the Chelsea Pensioners, the old soldiers who took position on the cathedral steps, ready to act as guard of honour for the flag draped coffin as it entered the great doors.

Then finally we heard the muffled drums of the military band as the cathedral’s bells tolled their own doleful knell….and there it was, borne on a gun carriage drawn by horses and accompanied by an honour guard from all branches of the services.  Draped in the Union flag, covered by white flowers, the coffin of Margaret Thatcher passed before us and was greeted by the crowd with applause and cheers of warmth – not a protestor in sight or in sound.

We watched as the honour guard bore the coffin up the steps – and then the cathedral doors closed.

Some stayed on but I left with the intention of coming home and watching a repeat of the actual service on TV. But as I passed a nearby pub, The Rising Sun, I saw a big crowd inside – they were watching the service on the big screens usually reserved for football or cricket. So I joined them and there we stood, with our beers, the pub packed and silent as we watched the whole service –  the biggest tribute of all from men (it was mainly men) who probably haven’t seen the inside of a church for years, if ever. Only when the service was over did the pub revert to the usual noise of chatter, laughter and glasses being collected.

The Rising Sun

That’s the way we mourned and saluted Margaret Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter who brought a demoralised and divided country back off its knees and told us to stand tall….

This is, or was, Erika. She was a young student who was a real revolutionary. She and thousands of other brave Hungarians came out onto the streets of Budapest in 1956 to demonstrate against the communists who ran the puppet regime that governed Hungary on behalf of the Russian Soviet Union. She holds a gun because the regime’s secret police tried to break the demonstrations. When the Russian Red Army, flying the hammer and sickle flag carried by Romany Blythe, moved in to crush the uprising, Erika and her friends fought against their tanks with rifles, sub machine guns and petrol bombs.

They failed.

The Red Army’s hammer and sickle was triumphant and a new puppet communist regime brought back the secret police, the execution blocks and the prison camps. Erika was dead, killed in the last hours of the fighting while trying to help her wounded comrades. The dead hand of communist dictatorship gripped Hungary and the rest of Eastern Europe once again.

Western governments accepted the iron grip of Communism in Eastern Europe and Russia as a fact of life to be accommodated. Many voices in western academic and cultural circles, being of a Marxist bent, celebrated it.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the first western leaders to publicly denounce those communist regimes as evil and oppressive and, by implication, illegitimate. At a time when internal stresses and strains were beginning to distort the social and economic fabric of these tyrannies the impact of external condemnation from such influential voices were important factors in causing the red regimes to implode.

And in October 1989, 33 years after the uprising, Hungary became a free multi party democracy. How sad that Erika could not have been in the crowds celebrating that moment but, no doubt ,her spirit, and those of all those other courageous freedom fighters who died with her, was smiling down from above.

What would Erika have made of Romany Blythe’s theatrical posturing and ghoulish disrespect of Margaret Thatcher?

Not much, I suspect.

Probably with as much contempt as Lech Walesa and those of his Solidarity comrades who had welcomed her to Gdansk in 1988 when it was still under communist rule.

Those on the Left who still probably regard Thatcher as a hate-figure, have either forgotten the history of the Cold War or possibly never understood that Communism meant the virtual enslavement of millions of people in the East European countries, who loathed its ideology as much as Margaret Thatcher herself. It is simply not possible to imagine Thatcher visiting Russia in the 1930s, like certain Left-wing useful idiots from Britain, and being taken in by Stalin’s propaganda machine. Ordinary East Europeans took a different view of her to her critics in this country. For them she symbolised opposition to Communism; indeed she was given a tumultuous welcome by the shipyard workers in Gdansk when she visited them. She wept at the sight. The shipyard workers would have been puzzled to learn of the refusal of Oxford University, her old alma mater and one of the most prestigious universities in the world, to give her an honorary degree.

Amen to that, say I – and I am sure the spirit of Erika would agree….

I was very active in my local Tory Party during the 70s. With strikes and terrorism and inflation and constant economic crises within the UK and the US retreating in the face of an apparently unstoppable tide of communism the times indeed were black.

When Mrs T stood for the leadership most of the suits on our local committee were very sniffy about her.
“We need a chap, not a housewife” said one pompous pin striped pontificator.
“Au contraire, my old son” I said “we need a housewife to vacuum up all the old farts like you and get this country going again”

And that is exactly what she did. By sheer strength of will she inspired us to get up off our knees and take pride in ourselves and our country. Forget all that left wing rubbish about her being hated by working class people. She won three elections on the run with clear majorities and you don’t do that without working class votes. That’s why the left, especially the chattering classes of the BBC and Guardian, hated her – she dared to defy their conventional wisdom and proved them wrong time and time again with the support of ordinary folk.

As a young teacher I watched Winton Churchill’s state funeral with my students and they asked me why I had tears in my eyes. In a few days time I will be on the streets of London paying my final respects to one of the greatest leaders this or any other nation has ever had – and again there will be tears in my eyes.

God Bless You, Margaret Thatcher – the grocer’s daughter….

Review of “Heroes” By Gerald Sibleyras

Archway Theatre, Horley, Feb 2013

There is always a look of disbelief when I observe that annually there are more tickets sold for theatre performances than for football events. But why do we go to the theatre, a medium that requires a high element of imagination and tolerance of the “non reality”? It is not an easy activity – you are obliged to keep perfectly still, no rustle of sweetie papers, uncomfortable seats, large heads in front of you etc – but still we keep going. I know why I go. I love to be shocked, surprised, amused and to learn about the  human condition. I love to hear our beautiful English language (Tom Stoppard offers us the best) and, most of all, I love knowing that the artists are giving something of themselves to we, the audience.

Our “Heroes” and those mysterious ghosts who sorted out the set between each scene all certainly gave something of themselves to their audience in this production. It was a sweet and gentle experience for me.

The introduction music smoothly took us to the location of the play and as the curtain opened a sunny veranda was revealed. Gary Andrews, the set designer, tells us that “the hardest thing with this kind of set on such a small stage is to create a sense of distance”. Gary achieved that illusion with Liz Delafaille and Nicholas Merrick’s beautifully executed backdrop, the stone wall surrounding and lovely stone floor.

Eddie Redfern’s lighting and sound was subtle and appropriate. I was particularly impressed with the sound of the flying geese. I was able to “see” their flying route until they disappeared over the horizon. Not an easy task in such a small theatre.

The play itself is a kindly look at three WW1 veterans living in a residential home in France. We witnessed these elderly men trying to make sense of their narrow, restricted lives whilst plotting to escape the clutches of the Sisters caring for them. Their lives were made all the sweeter in their friendship,their bickering and the fact that they were the only users of “their” verandah. The knowledge that other inmates may soon occupy their space because of building works elsewhere was the impulse for the plans for escape (to Indo China or – maybe – just beyond the poplar trees).

On the evening I attended, the performances took some time to establish (never overlook the importance of a pre-performance warmup), but once the actors settled in, they told us a tender story with honesty and compassion. Tom Haddon’s Gustave was biting and verging on the vindictive.He made no effort to be liked, wishing his fellow retirees to know that he was superior to them. His brisk manner and beautifully cut suit camouflaged his internal anxieties. We gradually learned that he is fallible and afraid, but only at the end of the play do we actually see the physical manifestation of this. Tom handled Gustave’s breakdown as a man not used to showing his despair with enormous subtlety.

David Riddick as Henri, the eternal optimist, a man dressed for comfort played this character with great energy, did not overact. Henri’s age and physical fragility, and his kindness and empathy for his fellow inmates came through with charm and sympathy.

Philippe,performed by Clive Grieg was a jolly character and his fainting moments were convincing. It was a joyful moment in the play when we realised that his shouts when coming to from the faints did not relate to his activities on the battlefields but those at a local brothel – I half expected his bow tie to swivel at this revelation!

These three actors worked as a close and supportive team, comfortable with each other and their characters. This must have come from the expert direction of Yvonne Lee who will have worked to ensure that they understood their importance in the play. Yvonne moved her actors with quiet confidence and commitment and never “forced” a move or emotion that did not fit the roles or the play.

Hercule – well – I think the best description of his acting would be “wooden”. They say never act with animals – even those made of stone. How true.

Thank you to the cast and crew for a lovely evening. (PS: lovely cup of coffee too).

Sue Harrington

More about the original London production here