Daily Archives: March 4, 2006

Common sense on l’affaire Jowell

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Martin Kettle in today’s Guardian…

I am more interested in a larger issue, which is whether left and liberal politics in this country can learn to be more honest, more modern and more consistent about the balance between individual and collective wealth in the kind of society we are all likely to live in for the foreseeable future. The elephant in the room in the Jowell affair is not really Silvio Berlusconi. It is the fact that a Labour minister is married to someone who moves with assurance, and makes a very large amount of money, in a world that is alien (though not necessarily unacceptable) to most Labour voters.

With his network of directorships, off-shore investments, tax avoidance schemes and hedge funds, Mills (and thus Jowell) appear to many to inhabit a world in which it can sometimes seem that taxes are for the little people, greed is good, and there are no proper limits to how much an individual can earn or possess. Many in the Labour party take the traditional roundhead view of such cavaliers, expressing outrage that any Labour person should have anything to do with them. For them, Jowell is literally sleeping with the enemy.

This is, though, a world to which very many people aspire in some way, including Labour voters.

Thanks to Pete for the link.

The persistence of music

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Today was a beautifully, crisp, sunny day in Cambridge. As I turned the car towards town and music lessons this morning, I sang the first line of “Oh what a beautiful morning” from Oklahoma. Without blinking, the kids (aged 12 and 14) joined in and sang the entire thing, word- and pitch-perfect. And the strange thing is that 1950s musicals are not part of their culture — they’re into Coldplay and U2 and James Blunt and Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. So how does a popular song from an old musical get embedded in the collective unconscious? Deep waters, Holmes.

Thanks to AA for pointing out embarrassing spelling error!

Google grapples with Wall Street

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After the share price drop, Google discovered that Wall Street has to massaged after all. Here’s an interesting transcript of the conference that senior Googlers had with analysts last week. The aim was clearly to reassure them that things are OK, honest. Confirms me in my belief that I’d rather eat flies than run a public company. Imagine having to be nice to these creeps.

Microsoft Re-Designs the Ipod Packaging

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Amusing spoof movie imagining how Microsoft would reconfigure the iPod packaging. Then, in a neat case of life copying art, someone got hold of a leaked promotional video for Microsoft’s coming mysterious portable product, Origami, that in some ways resembles the packaging parody.

Thanks to AA for the original link.

Oh, and while we’re at it, see movie of Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, in hysterical form.

Separation anxiety

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So Tessa Jowell has separated from her husband, the corporate lawyer and associate of Silvio Berlusconi, David Mills. What always surprised me was what Jowell, who seems a wholesome and intelligent person, was doing married to a cove who specialised in tax-avoidance (which, I hasten to say, is perfectly legal).

I’m reminded of something Nancy Astor said, in a reply to a question about why she had shacked up with her first husband, an alcoholic adulterer. “I married beneath me”, she said. “Women always do”. She also observed once that “the penalty of success is to be bored by people who used to snub you”, and that the only thing she liked about rich people was their money. Quite a dame.

Thumbs up!

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All those US Crackberry addicts can relax and go back to thumb-twiddling with a clear conscience. Here’s the Toronto Star‘s report of the outcome of the legal poker game between RIM and NTP:

More than two million Americans and the U.S. government are breathing easier today knowing that their BlackBerry devices, those highly addictive email gadgets invented and perfected in Canada, have escaped the horror of a nationwide ban.

Canadian tech darling Research In Motion Ltd. announced yesterday it has paid a whopping $612.5 million (U.S.) to patent nemesis NTP Inc., ending more than four years of hostile litigation and heeding the advice of a U.S. judge poised to trigger a BlackBerry blackout on the world’s largest economic power.

Shares in RIM surged nearly 20 per cent higher in after-hours trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Don’t you just love that phrase “Canadian tech darling”? Who writes this drivel?