Nice change from the Downfall meme.
Where on Earth is Neville? The Met’s investigative zeal
Interesting excerpt from the interrogation of Assistant Commissioner John Yates by the House of Commons – Culture, Media and Sport Committee on September 2, 2009.
Q1891 Chairman: The evidence which the Guardian produced and indeed gave to this Committee actually came from you originally. It is evidence that was handed over to the court from the police investigation—
Mr Yates: Yes, it was unused material.
Q1892 Chairman:— which reached the Guardian. The key one, which you will be familiar with, is the email and “this is the transcript for Neville”. Why did you not think that it was sufficiently important to interview Neville?
Mr Yates: Well, again we took advice on this and it did form part of the original case and formed part of, what we call, the sensitive, unused material. There are a number of factors around it, some practical issues. Firstly, the email itself was dated, I think, 29 July 2005 and we took possession of it in August 2006, so it was already a minimum of 14 months old, that email, that is the minimum and we do not know when it was actually compiled or sent. We know from the phone company records that they are not kept for that period of time, so there was no data available behind that email. There was nothing to say that Neville, whoever Neville may be, had seen the document and, even if the person, Neville, had read the email, that is not an offence. It is no offence of conspiracy, it is no offence of phone-hacking, it is no offence of any sort at all.
Q1893 Chairman: Sorry to interrupt, but you say there is nothing to say whether Neville had read the email, but you could have asked him.
Mr Yates: Well, if I can finish, there is no clear evidence as to who Neville was or who is Neville. It is supposition to suggest Neville Thurlbeck or indeed any other Neville within the News of the World or any other Neville in the journalist community. Mulcaire's computers were seized and examined. There is nothing in relation to Neville or Neville Thurlbeck in those computers and, supported by counsel latterly and by the DPP, they both are of the view, as we are, that there are no reasonable grounds to suspect that Neville has committed any offence whatsoever and no reasonable grounds to go and interview him.
Q1894 Chairman: Well, it does seem an extraordinary coincidence though that somebody working for the News of the World sends an email, saying, "This is the transcript for Neville" when the chief reporter of the News of the World is called Neville and you think that this is not sufficient to ask Neville Thurlbeck whether he is the Neville referred to in the email.
Mr Yates: Well, there is no evidence of an offence being committed, which is what I said first.
Daniel Bell RIP
Daniel Bell, whose book The End of Ideology shaped the way many of us think about politics, has died at the age of 91. This nice anecdote comes from the NYTimes obit.
Mr. Bell liked to tell of his political beginnings with an anecdote about his bar mitzvah, in 1932. “I said to the Rabbi: ‘I’ve found the truth. I don’t believe in God. I’m joining the Young People’s Socialist League.’ So he looked at me and said, ‘Kid, you don’t believe in God. Tell me, do you think God cares?’ ”
How a bail-out works
From today’s Financial Times…
The rain beats down on a small Irish town. The streets are deserted. Times are tough. Everyone is in debt and living on credit. A rich German arrives at the local hotel, asks to view its rooms, and puts on the desk a €100 note. The owner gives him a bunch of keys and he goes off for an inspection.
As soon as he has gone upstairs, the hotelier grabs the note and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher hurries down the street to pay what he owes to his feed merchant. The merchant heads for the pub and uses the note to pay his bar bill. The publican slips the note to the local hooker who’s been offering her services on credit. She rushes to the hotel to pay what she owes for room hire. As she puts the €100 note on the counter, the German appears, says the rooms are unsuitable, picks up his €100 note and leaves town.
No one did any work. No one earned anything. Everyone is out of debt. Everyone is feeling better. And that is how a bail-out works.
The stallholder
Covent Garden, London, yesterday. I found myself thinking: does he really have to pack away all that stuff every night?
Going, going,…
Spotted in Covent Garden today.
Looks as thought the only thing Paul Smith had left to sell was a purple trilby.
Putting your shirt on it
Peston on 2011: like living in Pompeii
Obama’s Finest Hour
Further to my post about Obama’s Tucson speech…
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Gary Wills wrote a piece in the New York Review of Books in which he compared Barack Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race with Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union address during his own 1860 campaign. Wills noted that both men had had to separate themselves from embarrassing associations—Lincoln from John Brown’s violent abolitionism, and Obama from Jeremiah Wright’s black nationalism. They had to do this without engaging in divisive attacks or counter-attacks. They did it, Wills argued, “by appeal to the finest traditions of the nation, with hope for the future of those traditions. Obama renounced black nationalism without giving up black pride, which he said was in the great American tradition of self-reliance”.
On the NYRB blog Wills says:
The New York Review wanted to publish a booklet printing the Lincoln and Obama speeches together, but the Obama campaign discouraged that idea, perhaps to avoid any suspicion that they were calling Obama a second Lincoln. Well, I am willing to risk such opposition now, when I say that his Tucson speech bears comparison with two Lincoln speeches even greater than the Cooper Union address. In this case, Obama had to rise above the acrimonious debate about what caused the gunman in Tucson to kill and injure so many people. He side-stepped that issue by celebrating the fallen and the wounded and those who rushed to their assistance. He has been criticized by some for holding a “pep rally” rather than a mourning service. But he was speaking to those who knew and loved and had rallied around the people attacked. He was praising them and those who assisted them, and the cheers were deserved. He said that the proper tribute to them was to live up to their own high expectations of our nation. It was in that context, and not one of recrimination, that he called for civility, service—and, yes, heroism—in the country.
Denis Dutton, RIP
Denis Dutton, the philosopher-cum-scourge-of-mediocrity is dead at the ridiculously young age of 66. He was one of the joys of academic life, and a luminary of the early Web. I first got to know him when I was asked one Christmas for a list of my favourite web sites, and I put his Arts and Letters Daily at the very top because it was the opening page of every browser that I used. Shortly after that, I received a nice, sardonic email message from him, and thus began a sporadic but always enjoyable correspondence. Robert Cottrell has a nice tribute to him on The New York Review of Books blog.
Dutton’s genius lay not in his philosophy, but in his capacity to provoke intelligently. Look at him speaking at a TED conference last year, and you see not only a thinker, but also a charmer, a gentle bruiser, an ironist. Even more than an intellectual, he was an intellectual entrepreneur. In The Art Instinct he found a captivating idea that built on winning themes—evolution, beauty, sex—and he advanced it as if it were truth. At Philosophy and Literature, his great legacy was not so much the promotion of good writing, which all journals have as their object, but the destruction of bad writing, which few in the academy were brave enough to attempt. At ALD, he found his relative advantage not in the production of fine writing, but in the boutique retailing of it, to the benefit of everyone: writers, readers, Dutton himself.
At the end of his piece, Cottrell says “If only there were a ‘more»’ link at the end of Denis Dutton’s life, I would be clicking on it now.”
Me too.