Marbury

foreign affairs

Shocking as it might seem, until the 1990s, homosexuality was an official bar to employment by the British Foreign Office. Charles Crawford, a former diplomat, recently made a Freedom of Information request in order to trace the slow evolution of the FCO's policy on this. He's written a really fascinating piece for the Independent about what he turned up. The main rationale for the ban was that homosexuality, or at least the supposedly more promiscuous lifestyle led by homosexuals, made them more vulnerable to blackmail. But of course, this was largely a self-created problem, with a self-defeating solution. It took until the end of the eighties for pennies to start dropping:

A turning point came in 1989, with the gradual realisation that the core security argument may in fact have created its own security problems, by exposing Foreign Office staff who were secretly gay to blackmail if a hostile intelligence agency discovered their "preferences".

At the same time, it was realised that homosexuals might actually have their advantages, as employees:

The official urged that the British look at other allies' laidback attitudes. "I was most impressed by the relaxed attitudes of the Spaniards," he said. "Because homosexuals have no domestic ties, the administration has a conscious policy of putting them in departments where long and unconscionable hours are the norm, eg. the Minister's Private Office. The system works admirably well."

Anyway, there's lots more great stuff, with more political context - do read the whole thing.

Particularly interesting in the light of the current struggle to repeal DADT.

blurting vs pandering

Marc Ambinder makes an astute distinction between those two gaffe-machines, Joe Biden and RNC Chairman Michael Steele:

Biden's problem is that his brain lacks a filter; Steele's is that his brain always tries to calculate what the audience wants to hear.

obama: romney is my inspiration

Barack Obama has just given Mitt Romney's opponents in the 2012 GOP primaries a key bit of video for their ads. From a TV interview yesterday:

When you actually look at the bill itself, it incorporates all sorts of Republican ideas. I mean a lot of commentators have said this is sort of similar to the bill that Mitt Romney, the Republican Governor and now presidential candidate, passed in Massachusetts.

I suppose he meant "now former presidential candidate" although perhaps this a Freudian slip, as Romney is pretty much running for 2012 already (having said that I hold to my early prediction that he'll end up passing on it).

Is Obama just using Romney to help make his plan seem centrist (which it is) or is he deliberately dropping Romney in it with his party? I suspect both and that the latter is part strategic part just-for-fun.

karzai vs the americans

Obama's visit to Afghanistan was in part to placate, reassure and steady the desperately insecure and wayward Hamid Karzai, who has lately been developing a rather alarming habit of giving anti-American tirades and flirting with Iran:

“He has developed a complete theory of American power,” said an Afghan who attended the lunch and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “He believes that America is trying to dominate the region, and that he is the only one who can stand up to them.”

Excellent (though dispiriting) NYT report here.

from the nuts to the bunghole

President Johnson orders some pants.

intimations of mortality

Of course, the joke is on us, really: 

must do better

Cameron, Osbourne (and Hilton) have always revered Tony Blair's political skills. They look to him for inspiration as they attempt bring their own party back from the electoral wilderness. Well, the master has returned, to give them a scathing - and horribly convincing - dressing down:

On Europe, they've gone right when they should have gone centre. On law and order, they've gone liberal when actually they should have stuck with a traditional Conservative position; and on the economy, they seem to be buffeted this way and that, depending less on where they think the country should be, than on where they think public opinion might be.

(Photograph: Rex features)

right of reply

Those of you interested might like to know that Samuel West, who I criticised for a quote attributed to him by the Evening Standard about politicians's reasons for cutting arts funding, has replied to my post. You can read his reply (and my reply to his reply) here.

the oscar elixir...or not

An interesting snippet from David Brooks' latest column:

Research by Donald A. Redelmeier and Sheldon M. Singh has found that, on average, Oscar winners live nearly four years longer than nominees that don’t win.

Interesting...but wrong. The paper he's referring to - which looked at screenwriters specifically - reached exactly the opposite conclusion:

A total of 850 writers were nominated; the median duration of follow up from birth was 68 years; and 428 writers died... life expectancy was 3.6 years shorter for winners than for nominees.

UPDATE: Brooks was referring to a different paper by the same guys, one that does indeed say what he says it does. So I got it wrong. I hate it when that happens. See comments for details. And follow link to the paper itself.

@margaretatwood

Did you know the great Canadian writer Twitters? I didn't. Well, she does and she's written a funny appreciation of her experiences:

I was told I needed “followers.” These were people who would sign on to receive my messages, or “tweets,” whatever those might turn out to be. I hummed a few bars from “Mockingbird Hill”—Tra-la-la, twittly-deedee—and sacrificed some of my hair at the crossroads, invoking Hermes the Communicator. He duly appeared in the form of media guru McLean Greaves, who loosed his carrier pigeons to four of his hundreds of Twitterbuddies; and with their aid, I soon had a few thousand people I didn’t know sending me messages like “OMG! Is it really you?” “I love it when old ladies blog,” one early follower remarked.

On her "followers":

They’re sharp: make a typo and they’re on it like a shot, and they tease without mercy. However, if you set them a verbal challenge, a frisson sweeps through them... they really shone when, during the Olympics, I said that “Own the podium” was too brash to be Canadian, and suggested “A podium might be nice.” Their own variations poured onto a feed tagged #cpodium: “A podium! For me?” “Rent the podium, see if we like it.” “Mind if I squeeze by you to get onto that podium?” I was so proud of them! It was like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!

(via The Browser)

editor-in-chief

This is a photo of Obama's edits of the speech he made to Congress on healthcare, last September (go here for the full monty):

James Fallows (who wrote speeches for Jimmy Carter) makes a few interesting observations, including this:

Has nobody ever heard of DOUBLE SPACE ?!?!?

self-loathing books

On Prospect's blog this week, I have a rant about books that hate themselves:

Welcome to a new genre: the book that is embarrassed it’s a book. That hates the fact it’s made of dull, dowdy old print and paper and is full of stinky old writing, that wishes more than anything it was a sleek, sexy tumblr blog or Twitter stream.

Daniel Pink’s Drive is one of 2010’s most high-profile non-fiction books. It has a timely thesis: that people are primarily motivated to work hard and achieve great things not by money, but by their own passion for what they do. It’s a good point, worth making. But I found Drive infuriating. This had nothing to do with its argument, or with Pink’s writing, which is fluent and lucid. Actually, it’s Drive that has the problem with itself, not me. 

Read on...

more factions

The Onion reports that Tea Partiers are splitting over just how angry to be about Obama's policies:

“This rift is absolutely irresolvable,” screamed red-faced events coordinator Daniel Hume, head of the movement’s apoplectic faction. “We believe that now is simply not the time to be irrationally furious about unprecedented economic policies that have had little more than a year to start showing any signs of effectiveness. Now is the time to be foaming-at-the-mouth, incoherently livid about them.” A third camp of angry protesters had reportedly emerged from the recent upheaval, but its entire membership tragically died from massive brain aneurysms shortly after the group formed.

fictional factions

Some Guardian columnists have a habit of seeing "Blairite" conspiracies afoot in the Labour Party, even though no such faction exists. Of course, there are MPs who worked for Tony Blair and who broadly agree on outlook, but they're so disparate and unorganised that to speak of them of as Blairites makes no sense anymore, if it ever did. But creating an imaginary malign faction is useful for some on the left (maybe a Protocol of the Elders of Blair will turn up during the post-election fistfights). Last week John Harris tore into an anonymous Labour minister who suggested the soon-to-be-unveiled manifesto is likely to be too "Old Labour":

(This attitude) smacks of the deluded arrogance of the political sect, and a mindset that has long since pulled away from the real world and become consumed with the dried-up stuff of faction-fighting.

Hurrah, I thought as I read this, and well said. The factionalist stuff is silly. Oh wait, there's another sentence coming:

Moreover, it encapsulates the Blairite pathology that gripped the government from around 2001 onwards...

Ah. So this factionalist talk is nonsense - and it's all the fault of the Blairites. Good to get that cleared up.

queen of spies

A great Telegraph obituary of Baroness Park of Monmouth (Daphne Park) a former spy, who has died aged 88 after an amazing, daredevil career that took her to Russia, Vietnam and the Congo.

“It's been a huge advantage during my professional career that I've always looked like a cheerful, fat missionary. It wouldn't be any use if you went around looking sinister, would it?”

More recently she was an active, campaigning member of the House of Lords.