Gadaffi’s ghost returns to haunt Sarko

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From Philippe Marlière’s wonderful rolling diary of the 2012 French presidential election.

After Marshall Pétain’s cameo earlier this week, Muammar Gaddafi’s ghost has invited himself to the campaign. Mediapart, a respected news website, has revealed today that Gaddafi’s regime had agreed to fund Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign to the tune of 50 million euros. Mediapart produced a 2006 document in Arabic which was signed by Gaddafi’s foreign intelligence chief. The letter referred to an “agreement in principle” to support Sarkozy’s campaign. All major media have mentioned the story. Will they hold the president to account? I wouldn’t hold my breath. Most French journalists are tame and deferential to powerful politicians. The most servile of them, smelling blood, have started to be a bit more combative of late. But this is too little and too late.

The problem for the Posh Boys: they’re not actually much good at running the country

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My Observer colleague Andrew Rawnsley has a very perceptive column about Cameron and Osborne in the paper this morning.

Once asked, while in opposition, why he wanted to become prime minister, David Cameron replied: “Because I think I would be quite good at it”, one of the most self-revealing remarks he has ever made. Shortly after he moved into Number 10, someone inquired whether anything about the job had come as a surprise to him. Not really, he insouciantly replied: “It is much as I expected.” In his early period in office, that self-confidence served him rather well. He certainly looked quite good at being prime minister. He seemed to fit the part and fill the role. Broadly speaking, he performed like a man who knew what he was doing. That is one reason why his personal ratings were strikingly positive for a man presiding over grinding austerity and an unprecedented programme of cuts.

So you can get away with being “arrogant” as long as the voters think you have something to be arrogant about. You can also get away with being “posh” in politics. To most of the public, anyone who wears a good suit and swanks about in government limousines looks “posh” whether their schooldays were spent at Eton or Bash Street Comprehensive. There may even be some voters who think – or at least once thought – that an expensive education has its advantages as a preparation for running the country. Though David Cameron and George Osborne have always been sensitive on the subject, poshness wasn’t a really serious problem for them so long as they could persuade the public that they were in politics to serve the interests of the whole country, not just of their own class.

Rawnsley’s right: one of the things that has become obvious in the last few months is how amateurish these lads are. Their self-esteem is inversely proportional to their ability — a classic problem for toffs.

Maybe this is really beginning to dawn on the electorate. Currently Labour has a huge lead over the Tories in the polls. And that’s despite having Miliband like a millstone round the party’s neck.

Running out of new ideas

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This morning’s Observer column.

We’re now at the stage where we should be getting the next wave of disruptive surprises. But – guess what? – they’re nowhere to be seen. Instead, we’re getting an endless stream of incremental changes and me-tooism. If I see one more proposal for a photo-sharing or location-based web service, anything with “app” in it, or anything that invites me to “rate” something, I’ll scream.

We’re stuck. We’re clean out of ideas. And if you want evidence of that, just look at the nauseating epidemic of patent wars that now disfigures the entire world of information technology. The first thing a start-up has to do now is to hire a patent attorney. I had a fascinating conversation recently with someone who’s good at getting the pin-ups of the industry – the bosses of Google, Facebook, Amazon et al – into one room. He recounted how at a recent such gathering, he suddenly realised that everyone present was currently suing or being sued for patent infringement by one or more of the others.

How have we got ourselves into this mess?

Murdoch and power: why Leveson is looking in the wrong place

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Like many hacks, I’ve done very little work this morning, because I’ve been glued to the live feed from the Leveson Inquiry. Why? Because the Dirty Digger, aka Rupert Murdoch, has been giving evidence under oath. At the heart of his questioning by Robert Jay Q.C., Counsel for the Inquiry, was Jay’s attempt to obtain from Murdoch an acknowledgement that he wielded political power. Predictably, Jay failed to elicit from the Digger any acknowledgement to that effect.

I suspect that — unless a smoking gun appears (e.g. a documentary trail proving that Murdoch obtained a commercial advantage as a result of a solicited political intervention) — Jay is on a mission to nowhere. Whenever the questioning strayed onto dangerous ground this morning — e.g. discussion of the Sun front-page headline saying “It was the Sun wot won it!” after John Major unexpectedly won the 1992 General Election — Murdoch went to great pains to point out that he had delivered a “bollocking” to the editor responsible, Kelvin MacKenzie. And the reason is obvious: if newspapers were claiming to exert such direct power over the electoral process, then they would be in trouble — even in such an enfeebled democracy as ours.

And yet it’s obvious even to the dogs in the street that Murdoch wields enormous power. The reason the Leveson Inquiry can’t get to it, though, is that it’s working with the wrong conceptual framework. If you want to understand the power that Murdoch actually wields, then a good place to start is Steven Lukes’s wonderful book, Power: A Radical View, the best analysis of the phenomenon I’ve every encountered. Crudely stated, Lukes’s view is that power comes in three varieties:

1. the ability to compel people to do things they don’t want to do;
2. the ability to stop people doing what they want to do; and
3. the ability to shape the way they think.

The problem with the Leveson Inquiry is that it’s looking for evidence of #1 and/or #2, whereas in fact #3 is the one they want. And cross-questioning the chief suspect is not the way to get at it.

Trailblazers, road-builders and travellers

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Peter Checkland and SSM7, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Last Friday, I went to Lancaster to take part in a symposium organised by the Lancaster University Management School to honour my friend and mentor, Professor Peter Checkland (seen here with a photograph of himself inspecting an ancient Indian locomotive). It was a stimulating, intriguing and enjoyable event. The pdf of my contribution is available here. (It explains the enigmatic heading over this post, btw.)

The dish best eaten cold

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Lovely piece by Professor Mary Beard, responding to the sneering of the Sunday Times‘s TV ‘critic’, one A.A. Gill, who focussed on her appearance rather than on her TV programmes, Meet the Romans.

So what of my revenge?

First, I’d like to invite him to a tutorial in my study at Cambridge and ask him to justify and substantiate his opinions. We could talk them through. Possibly then he would learn a little about the crass assumptions he’s making and why they don’t amount to anything more.

Next, for my Roman-style revenge on Gill, I’d force him to watch each of my programmes from start to finish. And to ensure he did so with appropriate diligence, I’d ask Clare [Balding — a BBC sports commentator who has also been abused by Gill on account of her appearance] to be on hand to enforce the penalty.

And as Gill is also a food critic —and I’m certain there is a veritable battalion of angry chefs and restaurateurs who would gladly volunteer to help with this bit — I’d force-feed him, like a goose destined for pate de foie gras, his least favourite dishes, while he sat and learned about the Romans.

And then we’d talk about them — and I mean about their substance, not just about my lack of lipgloss.

According to Wikipedia, Gill is a “recovered alcoholic” and has acute dyslexia, which means that all his ‘writing’ is dictated. I’d often wondered if this might explain his curious style.

Subliminal message

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From the Digger’s twitterstream:

Hmmm… I wonder who owns those Channel Island “billions”. Could it be a reference to the Barclay twins — owners of the Telegraph group?

Surely not.

Microsoft morphs into IBM/GE

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Perceptive TechCrunch post about what happened to Microsoft. It’s become a middle-aged company. Soon it’ll be safe for widows and pensions. And nobody will get fired for investing in it.

Five years ago, Microsoft reported revenue of $14.398 billion. They reported a profit of $6.589 billion. Last week, for the same quarter, Microsoft’s revenue was $17.407 billion. Their profit was $6.374 billion. The company is still growing, but not fast. And they’re actually making less money.Compare that with Apple. Five years ago, revenue was $7.1 billion. Profit was $1.0 billion — the first quarter with a billion dollar profit in company history. Last quarter, the company reported $47 billion in revenue. And they recorded $13 billion in profit.On the surface, an apples-to-oranges comparison, perhaps. But it points to something that has happened. Apple has completely taken over the consumer market, while most of Microsoft’s growth these days comes from the enterprise side of things. Apple has destroyed Microsoft as a consumer technology company.

Sure, Microsoft is still making plenty of money — billions — off of their consumer goods. But the decent quarterly numbers they reported last week in some ways mask what is really happening: Microsoft is slowing morphing into a full-on enterprise company.

Markets are always spooked. Period.

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Well, well. It seems that the collapse of the Dutch government and the prospect of a new French president has “spooked” the markets. Well, of course it has: markets are fundamentally irrational organisms — as Keynes pointed out many decades ago. One moment the bond market is spooked by the thought that governments might not be able to implement the ‘austerity’ programs that will push their countries into downward economic spirals. The next moment, the market is spooked by the thought that the prospect of economic growth is rendered less likely by austerity measures. So trying to run a country in such a way that the bond markets are satisfied is not only absurd, but impossible. Yet that is the essence of the Cameron/Osborne economic strategy.

The academic publishing racket: curiouser and curiouser

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My Observer column about the academic publishing racket has caused a bit of a stir, which is gratifying. Cory Doctorow gave it a great boost by picking it up in Boing Boing. And then, in typical Cory fashion, he added this intriguing sting in the tail, raising a question that had never occurred to me.

Here’s an interesting wrinkle I’ve encountered in a few places. Many scholars sign work-made-for-hire deals with the universities that employ them. That means that the copyright for the work they produce on the job is vested with their employers — the universities — and not the scholars themselves. Yet these scholars routinely enter into publishing contracts with the big journals in which they assign the copyright — which isn’t theirs to bargain with — to the journals. This means that in a large plurality of cases, the big journals are in violation of the universities’ copyright. Technically, the universities could sue the journals for titanic fortunes. Thanks to the “strict liability” standard in copyright, the fact that the journals believed that they had secured the copyright from the correct party is not an effective defense, though technically the journals could try to recoup from the scholars, who by and large don’t have a net worth approaching one percent of the liability the publishers face.

Of course, to pursue this line, you’d have to confront the fact that academics are sharecroppers to their employers, and that the works they’ve published, posted to their websites, licensed for anthologies, etc, aren’t theirs, which would have a lot of fallout beyond mere academic publishing circles. But it’s still provocative to consider the possibility that the journals (and their enormous, conglomerated parent companies) might owe something like 40 years’ worth of the entire planet’s GDP to a bunch of cash-strapped universities.

Gosh! It’d be interesting to see what academic employment contracts say about this nowadays.

The BoingBoing post attracted a lot of good comments, including this from Steve Runge:

The fact that academics don’t know what the library pays for journal subscriptions is well-known by librarians. In fact, that’s the basis for shifting the burden of payment to the author/funder, to avoid precisely that moral hazard. Believe me, librarians are working their kiesters off to make OA easier for the laziest of the lazy. It just takes a while to get everyone rowing at the same time and in the same direction. The trouble spots: 1. every journal has a different policy regarding copyright. If we’re going to help lazybones professors put their pre-prints in publicly available electronic repositories, we’ll need either a) unambiguous language inserted forcibly into all publishing contracts giving universities first rights or b) a whonking big updated database of publishers’ contract language regarding repositories. 2. Prof’s don’t know, for the most part, how close this system is to collapse, and just how thoroughly publishers have libraries over a barrel. 3. Tenure and promotion review policies that are based almost exclusively on impact factor are basically a sop to Elsevier and other big publishers. If T & P review policies were also to include download counts of repository articles or other measures of dissemination & influence, tenure-track publishing behavior would broaden into open access.