The problem with stupidity

Malcolm Walker – clever or very stupid?

Some years ago, great amusement was caused when Gerald Ratner, the boss of high street jewellery store Ratners, declared that his family firm sold tat.

Speaking at the Institute of Directors in 1991, he observed: “We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95.

“People say: ‘how can you sell this for such a low price?’ I say: ‘because it’s total crap’.”

Customers stayed away, shares plummeted, Ratner resigned and the group had to change its name.

And thus ‘doing a Ratner’ entered the lexicon.

If you believed that bosses would learn, you would be wrong.

For Malcolm Walker, the boss of the Iceland frozen food chain, has now just had his own ‘doing a Ratner’ moment.

As the horsemeat story continues to show that it has legs, he decided to weigh in, objecting to how the entire debacle was being linked to cheap, processed, supermarket food.

‘Neigh, neigh!’ he said (in effect). ‘It wasn’t us wot did it – it was those nasty councils. And the NHS. And, err, anyone else that I can blame!’

The premise appears to that these services are demanding that food be cheaper, so that is damaging the retail market.

Even assuming that the first part of this was true, it’s hard to imagine how that would somehow change the retail sector.

Supermarkets struggle to outdo each other in being seen as cheap.

When Asda, for instance, launches a TV advertising campaign saying it will undercut its rivals, it’s not because a hospital somewhere has demanded its suppliers give it a better deal on food, but because that is the core ethos of Asda’s owner, Wal-Mart.

And Tesco follows the Wal-Mart model absolutely.

It can hardly be considered a result of public service demands if Iceland – one of the country’s champions of cheap convenience food since it was founded in 1970 – has sold prawn rings and lasagne bites for a quid a piece.

This is a company that was obviously being so hammered by the same dreadful public sector that it could, in 1989, buy rival Bejam, having already spent the intervening years expanding massively.

Oh no – the public sector created the situation where Iceland sell shite at low prices – and where Aldi and Lidl could move into the very same market, and where every supermarket chain has some version or other of the ‘value’ produce.

There are a large number of factors at play in and behind this entire issue – which is largely why most news agencies opt for one simple approach – but the idea that councils and the NHS are to blame is utterly risible.

And anyone with an ounce of logic will be understand this too.

But, but …

While it’s nice to believe that this is Walker’s own Ratner moment, it could also be a somewhat cleverer ploy that will gain some traction with the easily persuaded. Or maybe the public discourse is so poor these days that nothing such a person says matters.

Let’s face it, there are plenty of people out there who still believe that the spending of the last Labour government was a) at record levels and b) the cause of the financial crisis and subsequent recessions.

And as the row over Hilary Mantel’s London Review of Books lecture on royal bodies past and present revealed, there is a swathe of the British populace that is very easily manipulated and doesn’t bother to look beyond what sensationalised headlines and selective reports tell them.

And then, in a state of high dudgeon, they decide that they can wage war on the likes of Mantel, defending the apparently wronged Duchess of Cambridge – in some cases by using social media to attack Mantel, including on the basis of her physical appearance.

On the Huffington Post UK, one reader, in a particularly stupid post, demanded to know whether Mantel – of whom she had not heard – was trying to get her “15 minutes of fame”.

You don’t have to like Mantel’s work – or even to have read it. You don’t have to agree with all the points in the lecture – but do at least try to read it before drawing conclusions. But Mantel is a double Booker winner and best-selling author. Just what “15 minutes of fame” could anyone really ‘think’ she seeks?

This is a bang-head-on-the-table moment that perfectly illustrates not only the dismal state of public discourse in the UK, but why it’s so bad in the first place.

The bulk of the media has dumbed down – at least a little – in order to appeal to the largest number of readers or viewers possible.

And the likes of the Daily Mail – which is now one of the world’s biggest online success stories – is a past master at whipping the unintelligent and unchallenging into a frenzy with its skilful misrepresentations of all manner of things.

In this case, it contorted Mantel’s lecture to suggest not that the writer was criticising the centuries-long, unflinching stare of the public on the monarchy, or the media that feeds that and profits from it, but that it was bitching about the Duchess herself.

Let’s not forget: when Diana and Dodi died in a speeding car in a Paris underpass, they were fleeing paparazzi that wanted to flog the pictures to papers and magazines and websites for that ravenous public to consume, pixel by pixel.

Mantel’s comparison of the attitude toward modern royals and that toward older ones is a salient reminder that, in this particular chicken-and-egg conundrum, the public demand for information (and gossip) preceded the commoditisation of that demand by (first) the print media.

On the other issues, however, we are left with the question of the relativism of pretending that all views are equal.

It’s entirely one thing to say that everyone has a right to air their views, but how should we react to those people who cannot be bothered to educate themselves beyond a tabloid headline, let alone those who, on that same basis, then launch into vile abuse?

The internet – and social media – does enable a democratisation of the public discourse, but it also facilitates the uninformed and the abusive, not just but not least by permitting anonymity.

However, setting the abuse aside, that doesn’t tackle the question of how society should include – or otherwise – those who cannot be trusted to make reasoned judgments that go beyond a headline that’s effectively attached directly to their knee.

Bringing things bang up to date, earlier today, the jury in the trial of Vicky Pryce for perverting the course of justice was dismissed by the judge after he expressed dismay at “a deficit in understanding” of some jurors.

And when you consider that the 10 questions posed by the jury to the judge included: ‘Can a juror come to a verdict based on a reason that was not presented in court and has no facts or evidence to support it either from the prosecution or defence?’ it’s difficult not to think that Mr Justice Sweeney was being overy polite.

There will now be a retrial. Hopefully, for the sake of both justice and the public purse, the 12 good men and true will be a tad more intelligent.

You cannot blame people for not being particularly bright – although willful ignorance is another matter – but how do you build a society that does not exclude those people, but doesn’t leave the rest of society at their mercy?

Do what we in the West routinely understand as ‘democracy’ mean an inevitable dumbing down, à la HL Mencken’s pithy 1920 analysis of US political life:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.

“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

It was a quote that gained rather more srecent attention when George ‘Dubya’ Bush was US president, but looking at the likes of Sarah Palin and Todd Akin and many, many more, it’s difficult not to worry – at least a little – that Mencken was not merely overly cynical but disturbingly prescient.

And, it’s equally difficult not to believe that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale could actually happen.

So how do we ensure that democracy does not become dominated by the intellectually-challenged?

That’s a question that leads, inexorably it would seem, to one of how we avoid government of the elite by the elite for the elite. Because that is the reality of what happens when governments are both fearful of the bulk of the media, and spend their time throwing out soundbites that seek to play to the populist view.

Thus both prime minister David Cameron and Labour leader Ed Miliband had comments to make yesterday about Mantel’s lecture. And both revealed, in those comments, that they had either not read it or not understood it or – worst of all – deliberately ignored the reality of that lecture to simply kow tow to the populist outrage whipped up by the Mail, the Sun and, even more shamefully, some of the broadsheets.

Perhaps Malcolm Walker is somewhat cleverer than it would be nice to believe on the basis of his idiotic statements – or perhaps he isn’t.

But increasingly it appears that we have a media that is not a fair and open one; that is determined not to present fair and transparent discussion and debate, but to promote agendas based on false representations of the facts.

And that the least intelligent members of our society are the ones whose views are afforded greatest credence by our politicians – a situation created (largely) or at least bolstered by our mainstream media – can hardly be seen as a good one.

History that leaves you begging for more

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winning tome – and checking in at 650 pages, it more than qualifies for the ‘tome’ description – has been sitting on my shelf since a few days before last year’s prize was awarded. A massive challenge awaiting me; recommended by many, but still the sort of fat book that you feel is going to tax your ability to really concentrate on a serious literary work.

So it says something that a not-very-fast reader like me has absolutely roared through it in a fraction over a fortnight – with a number of those days not providing opportunities to read much at all.

Set in the early 16th century, Mantel has taken the oh-so-familiar history of Henry VIII and the English Reformation, and worked wonders with it. What she does, rather than put the Tudors themselves at the centre of her stage is to give that role to Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s right-hand man – a Machiavellian schemer who could make Peter Mandelson look positively naïve.

Or at least, that’s how Cromwell has long been viewed – a perception most particularly created by Robert Bolt’s play about Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons: an unpleasant, bullying man that you would never trust.

What Mantel has set out to do here is, in some part at least, a riposte to Bolt. And indeed, while she does nothing remotely as clumsy as making her More some sort of cartoon villain, neither does she portray him as a gentle, otherworldly martyr and future saint.

Here, we have a Cromwell who fought to find ways to keep More alive; who respected and liked him. But here also, when More claims that he has never wished ill on anyone or done ill to anyone, Cromwell finally explodes, flashing back at More examples of those that he has had destroyed – up to sending them to burn at the stake.

While on the surface this is a tale of how Henry wanted to divorce Katherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn – partly because he was so desperate for the male heir that his first wife seemed unable to give him – it is also a very timely story of religious fundamentalism. And, partly because we know that this story did not stop when Mantel wrote the final words here, we know that that fundamentalism was seen on both sides of a Christian church that was splitting asunder right across Europe.

But while Henry’s motive for the English Reformation was less a theological one and more a political one (ending Papal authority over his realm), there is plenty here too to flesh out the theological arguments that were, for many people, very real.

Again, Mantel does well to convey how, for many of those people – including, to an extent at least, Cromwell himself – what arose were not the complaints of Martin Luther, but the questions of whether, for instance, the communion wafer really does become the body of Christ or whether relics and priests and popes and saints are even mentioned in a Bible that they are finally beginning to be able to see and read in their own language, however dangerous that is at the time in which this book takes place.

This is about the democratisation of religion, to an therefore, the democratisation too of thought, and freedom of conscience.

Luther himself described reason as “the devil’s whore” and saying: “Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God.” It is sometimes easy to forget that whatever Luther’s role in the Reformation from a theological perspective, the role of the printing press was paramount.

These were, of course, dangerous times, and Mantel creates an atmosphere of danger, of fear: a sense that you had to be very, very careful who you talked to and what you talked about; of what you read and of how you kept your books and your papers.

There is no shortage of executions in the book, but she never overdoes this. Having described in some detail one burning at the stake and one death by hanging, drawing and quartering, she leaves subsequent ones to our imagination.

In terms of that danger, here is More again: this time, at the centre of a spy network that seeks to catch out anyone who dares to disagree with what he believes is the divine truth – even to the point of having them burnt until nothing is left of their bodies but fat and grease: nothing left for God to resurrect; consigned to eternal damnation.

Mantel leaves no possibility that her readers will not notice the cruelty of the times and perhaps particularly the cruelty of a man who has been canonised since his death; hailed as a saint and a martyr to conscience. But here is a thing: if we hail More now – a religious fundamentalist, even by the standards of his own times – what do we say of religious fundamentalism today?

We also see Cromwell as a new figure on the political landscape; a politician as had never gone before. This is, indeed, the last absolute monarchy in Britain’s history. It is the end of the old and the beginning of a modern era in so many ways.

Cromwell, the merchant and the money man, represents the change in political balance; as well as by being a commoner with no noble blood at all; a man who rose by talent and luck, resented by so many of those who come to rely on his services.

And for Britons who still believe that somehow the history of these islands has not been inextricably bound up with the history of the rest of the continent that we are a part of, Mantel has also created a reminder that that is not the case: Henry might have wanted to break with foreign power, but whether it occurred to him or not, he could not avoid or break the links with everything else that was happening, in a variety of ways, across the continent.

There is an extraordinary cast of characters here, all fleshed out in a way that makes you feel that they are now etched indelibly in your mind: Cardinal Wolsey, Cromwell’s family, Anne Boleyn (scheming and nasty), Henry himself, the artist Hans Holbein and assorted diplomats and clergy. The London that is painted here is a brilliantly vivid one too, while Britain as a whole is a country where religion and ancient myth still mingle as the mist clings to a still un-mapped land.

Mantel is apparently working on the second volume in what she intends to be a trilogy. It’s a measure of her achievement here that one can hardly wait. Wolf Hall is beautifully written; an humane novel that is both very funny in places and very moving in others, and which fleshes the bones of tired history and makes it come fully and rounded to life. Stunning stuff indeed.