Justin Richards has written more Doctor Who books than anyone except Terrance Dicks, and those I’ve read have included more hits than misses. However, this isn’t one of his more memorable contributions to the quasi-canon; at first it seems like an Eleventh Doctor rehash of The Seeds of Death but in fact the resolution is much closer to
I see that the three Eleventh Doctor books to be published in July feature Rory as well as Amy (for obvious reasons, this will not be news to
The autobiography of the activist daughter of America’s richest man, and how she moved from the rabid right-wingery of her privileged background to using her unearned wealth for philanthropy, particularly supporting women in public policy, which brought her to a four-year spell as US ambassador to Austria. But it’s also about her attempts to mix her messianic political drive with a decent family life for her husband and children, particularly when her daughter was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Swanee Hunt is obviously a believer in letting it all hang out. Knowing her a little from the Balkan circuit, the book rang true to my experience of her and explains her character, almost too well (it might have been just as good a book with one or two fewer accounts of her love affairs with her therapists). But she is of course in an extraordinary position; having been gifted with vast amounts of money but very little love from her father, she seems to have felt driven to prove herself by using what she had been given (whereas if I suddenly became a billionaire, I would mostly sit in the garden all day reading science fiction). Nancy Mitford fans will appreciate the similarities and differences between Hunt’s experiences in Vienna and Fanny’s situation in Don’t Tell Alfred.
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On June 13, Belgium will have its first federal level elections since I became a citizen, and as voting is compulsory, I have been giving some thought to politics here for a change.
The election has been called a year early because of the collapse of negotiations between the two main linguistic communites over electoral districting in the Greater Brussels area. I have considered this matter in some detail and have concluded that I don't really care. I don't have a dog in this fight; it seems from my skimming of media accounts that the Flemings are in the weaker position on this one, but my vote isn't going to determine the outcome. I think that Yves Leterme has handled negotiations with the Francophone community disastrously since 2007 (which is a criticism of style rather than substance), and would vote for the strongest party other than his if he were likely to be prime minister again, but he has ruled himself out.
More broadly, several of the parties on this side of the taalgrens include independence, or at least more autonomy, for Flanders as a major part of their platform. Again, after long thought about the issue, I have concluded that I don't really care. Belgium is my adopted country, and Flanders is my adopted region, and I expect to stay here one way or the other for a decade or two. I've seen separatism in many parts of the world, and I've seen good and bad ways of doing it; I won't vote for any party that I perceive as inciting violence, but I'm rather agnostic on the main issue.
I'm also not going to decide on economic grounds. We depend as a family very much on Belgium's welfare state, and I don't especially object to vast amounts of my comfortable salary disappearing in taxation when I consider how much worse off we would be if we lived in the USA and paid only the lower taxes there. There are enough safeguards (and confusion) in the Belgian system that no single political party is going to be able to make decisions that adversely affect my standard of living. There is a management style issue, but again as long as it's not Yves Leterme I don't have a strong view.
In fact for me the decisive question in this election is a different cultural hot-button – the burka ban. We've discussed this before (and see also
There were a handful of abstentions on the vote, and I contacted one of them, a Socialist MP from Brussels, to ask if any of his Leuven-based colleagues agreed with him that the ban would lead to more rather than less discrimination; he replied that unfortunately he didn't think so (though optimistically urged me to vote for them anyway). So I've emailed all the lijsttrekkers (the #1 candidates on their list) for each of the ten parties standing in the Leuven electoral district to ask them their position on the burka ban (using that wording), and will consider their responses; I am resigning myself to the possibility that I may have to vote for a rabid left-wing party, or possibly not vote at all, though I am hopeful that I'll be able to identify a sensible candidate from one of the bigger parties. (Come to think of it, I need to do the same for the Senate candidates as well, especially considering it comes to them next.) I shall report back if I get any interesting responses.
I was brought up as a middle-class Belfast Catholic, and though trainee teachers would occasionally bring in a few Irish phrases as their special project in primary schools (a h-aon, a dó, a trí), by the time I had the chance at grammar school I picked German with no regret (and considerable subsequent benefit). Later in my career I briefly became an Irish historian and probed the relationship of a hundred years ago between the Gaelic revival and scientific research (and found them to have been less mutually antagonistic than the received wisdom had it). More recently I’ve developed an interest in the 16th century, an era when Irish was more widely spoken than now. Plus, it seemed increasingly silly that as a person with an interest in languages I didn’t know much about the one closest to my own identity. So, despite my occasional scepticism (as recorded in earlier entries tagged language: irish) and armed with your advice I invested in the Teach Yourself Irish coursebook and CD, and have thus been seen on commuter trains muttering to myself in an arcane tongue and scribbling incomprehensibly in notebooks.
Although some things about Irish came naturally enough, the language had a number of surprises for me. Sometimes this was a question of false friends – “sa” means “in the” in Irish, but I’m used to it meaning “with” in Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, so have to mentally readjust every time I see the word (which is often). Likewise “mar”, which means “because” in Irish, but which I keep reading as the Dutch “maar” meaning “but”. The fact that “mé” means “me” is helpful; but that it also means “I”, since personal pronouns don’t decline, is somehow confusing. It is neat that “sí” means “she” and is pronounced the same, but I never quite worked out when one drops the initial “s”. And I will not quickly forgive the letter “f”. But as I worked through the final exercise on the use of the past habitual (bhíonn, bhíteá, bhíodh, bhímis, bhíodh, bhídís), I felt a certin sense of triumph.
Not knowing much else about Irish, it’s difficult for me to judge how well Ó Sé and Sheils cover the subject. I thought it was a decent and mostly engaging course of 21 lessons, and can only blame myself for the long time it took me to get through the final two, on the conditional and past habitual. (I turned to the BBC to keep my momentum going.) It is a bit irritatingly scrappy in places – answers which don’t match the exercises, illustrations which are too blurry or small to read, glossary which isn’t enough to match the lesson (you need to buy a separate dictionary as well). I could have done with more drilling on the basics (though outside a classroom environment I suppose again I have only myself to blame) and still feel very shaky indeed on the personal forms of prepositions (which should have been indexed or consolidated in one of the appendices) or on the questions of eclipsis and lenition (the modification of the first letter of the word, if it is b, c, d, f, g, m, p, s or t, depending on context). But at least I know the issues and have a place to look them up.
Based on other people’s recommendations I may now invest in Turas Teanga to take me a bit further, though I have a couple of DIY courses in other languages (mainly Asian) sitting on the shelves, which are a higher priority.
It’s the time of year when I am working my way through the Hugo nominees, and occasionally find myself looking at the bookstack (or, in these enlightened days, the folder of PDFs) and wondering which to read next. Last weekend’s Nebula awards saw two wins for books also nominated for this year’s Hugos, so I worked through them in the course of this week. One is a cyberpunk novel, one is a steampunk novella, and both feature women in the sex trade as title characters.
Emiko, the girl of the title, is an artificial human being of a near-future world ravaged by agricultural disaster, created as an escort for a Japanese businessman and abandoned by him in Thailand. She, like all her kind, is easily identifiable by her jerky body movements, and is subject to instant destruction at the whim of the law (not to mention the risks of metabolic overheating). Her personal dilemma, trading her body for self-preservation, intersects with a political and environmental crisis in Thailand, with fairly catastrophic consequences. It is a fast-paced book which beat out Miéville’s The City & The City for the Nebula, and I’ll find it difficult to choose; while Bacigalupi’s vision is less audacious, he carries it off rather more consistently. Some nasty sex and violence so not for all readers.
It was a bit odd to read this as the tense situation in Thailand continued to develop during the week – almost life imitating art, though no senior government officials have yet met sticky ends in dubious circunstamces.
The women of Nell Gwynne’s are high class prostitutes in a mildly steampunkish Victorian England, advanced technology limited to one or two mad scientists either in or out of government service. They are called to entertain a party of foreign agents bidding for a secret invention. High jinks ensue. Baker catches the Victorian idiom better than some who have tried (thinking indeed of Cherie Priest), and her Lady Beatrice is admirably spunky, but this isn’t awfully deep stuff (and neither really is the other Hugo nominee I have already read in this category). Still, God bless the Hugo Voters Package for making it available; it was published separately by Subterranean Press. Unfortunately the author is unlikely to be on future Hugo or Nebula ballots.
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This sprawling, verbose epic was written, according to the author, in 24 hours – NaNoWriMo-ers, eath your hearts out. It is a tale of family secrets, skullduggery and revenge, with added Dick Turpin, and the highlight is Turpin’s epic ride from London to York near the end of the book, which is told rather well even though it barely fits with the rest of the plot.
The most annoying thing about the book is the habit most of the characters have of bursting into song or reciting poetry without the slightest provocation. The second most annoying thing is the unbelievable verbosity of style – the river Don is described as “lutulent” when Turpin crosses it, and I have no idea what that word means. (NB this is the river Don of Doncaster rather than Aberdeen, Toronto or Rostov-na-Donu.)
Ainsworth says in his introduction that he wanted to write a Mrs Radcliffe novel; I haven’t read any of those, though I did rather bounce off Northanger Abbey which was a send-up of the genre. I was struck by the uneasy handling of heroism, virtue and social order. It begins with young Peter Bradley discovering that he is really the heir to the Rookwood estate, and appparently being set up as the hero; but he slips rather casually into the role of villain as the book progresses, without any decent signalling of the transition. The gypsies are individually quaint but collectively sinister. Ainsworth wants Turpin and the highwaymen to be heroes, and his pursuers buffoons, but can’t quite deliver. The book’s one memorable line is when Turpin and friends are drinking in a London tavern just before the ride to York. Turpin proclaims, “May each of us meet with the success he deserves,” to which one of his fellow-highwaymen replies, “Egad! I hope not! I’m afraid, in that case, the chances would be against us.”
My actual reason for reading Rookwood is that it appears in Jacqueline Rayner’s Doctor Who audio play, The Doomwood Curse, in which the Sixth Doctor and Charley Pollard are drawn into a world which seems to be based on Ainsworth’s novel – particularly recommended because of India Fisher’s bravura performance, and you don’t need to know anything at all about Rookwood to enjoy the play.
This has been my Blackberry ebook for several months, and a wonderful cure for insomnia in the small hours. I now have the contents of the Hugo Voter Package to replace it in the former category, but I hope not in the latter.
The Morning After The Night Before from Northern Visions/NvTv on Vimeo.
You don’t have to watch the whole thing – I’m on, talking very fast, from about 01:55 to 04:02.
Also here.
A grim but compelling tale of tough Japanese women working in a sandwich factory; one of them strangles her errant husband, her colleagues help dispose of the corpse, and as a result they become entangled with the yakuza and also the local psychopath. The detail of the interactions between the badly paid women, their resentful families, the loan sharks, the exploitative employers, and the distant forces of law and order, are all depicted in visceral detail. The climax is particularly well constructed. A real tour de force.
An interesting reflection from Andrew Muir, the Alliance Party candidate in one of the less promising seats in this months election, on the failure of NGOs to influence his views during the campaign. To which one might add that NGOs might do well to calibrate the amount of effort they put into influencing the views of a candidate whose party that gets around 1% in that constituency, which is a safe Sinn Féin seat.
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I had a record of acquiring this book years ago, but have been unable to locate it, and spotted another copy going cheap when in Ireland so filled the gap. Not really worth bothering with, as it turns out; Quidditch is a one-joke game, stretched here to over a hundred well-padded pages. I suppose that the detail of Quidditch history and technicalities may be a source of inspiration for fan fiction, but I would observe that most fanfic I have encountered features rather different leisure activities…
This is a follow-up volume to Ruijssenaars’ earlier Charlotte Brontë’s Promised Land, about the Pensionnat Heger where Charlotte and Emily Bronte lived briefly in the 1940s. Most of it is Ruijssenaars’ investigation of the demolition of the Pensionnat and the whole Rue Isabelle district of Brussels in 1910, with a couple of codas on the cultural life of Brussels when the Brontës were there (including the identification of the paintings mentioned in Villette) and on the best surviving photograph of the Pensionnat, suggesting that it is much older than had been thought. I hadn’t previously made the connection, but I have actually walked on the upper end of the Rue Isabelle which is now preserved in the Coudenberg museum. I hope this gets bound with Charlotte Brontë’s Promised Land for future editions; it’s not quite coherent enough to work as a standalone volume, but interesting for Brontë completists.
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, Catherynne M. Valente
The Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
District 9
Best Short Story
“Spar,” Kij Johnson
Best Novelette
“Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast,” Eugie Foster
Best Novella
The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, Kage Baker
Best Novel
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi
Yay for
Notes for my statistics: four first-time winners out of four in the written fiction categories (and none had ever won a Hugo either); three women out of four; none born in the 1942-51 period (Baker 1952, Johnson 1960, Foster 1971, Bacigalupi 1972); I think that Baker may be the first writer to win a Nebula posthumously?
A steampunk novel, set in an alternate 1880 where Seattle has been devastated by a mysterious gas which turns people into zombies; the wife and son of the inventor who caused the catastrophe 16 years before venture into the walled-off city to find The Truth. Lots of running around in poisonous fog wearing gasmasks while pursued by the undead. It’s entertaining enough, if not Great Literature; will be below The City & The City on my Hugo ballot (I have yet to read the other nominees).
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One of the administrative reforms rumbling around Northern Ireland for the last few years has been the proposed reduction of the number of local councils (26 unitary councils replaced the previous six counties etc structure back in 1972). This is one of those curious political projects that actually doesn’t benefit or harm either side’s interests very much, except in so far as the current 582 councillors would be reduced in number (on the latest proposals, to 462). The last local council elections were in 2005, and while there normally should have been fresh elections last year, these were postponed to 2011 when the 11 new supercouncils were supposed to come into force, thus giving those councillors elected in 2005 a six-year rather than a four-year term. (This isn’t especially outrageous – readers in the Republic may like to reflect that until 1999, local government elections there were held at the convenience of the government, which meant the gap between elections varied randomly between three years and eight.)
But now (see Slugger, the News Letter and the Belfast Telegraph) it seems that the green light for the election to happen on the new boundaries has not come in time from Stormont, and there is talk of postponing the whole exercise for several more years, while holding elections in 2011 for the 26 existing councils – probably on the same day as the Assembly election also due in the first half of next year. There is the usual muttering that the relevant minister, the DUP’s Edwin Poots, opposes the transfer of Dunmurry from Lisburn to Belfast. There are lots of reasons to dislike Poots, who is a fairly typical DUP activist, but I would note that his public utterances have always been sceptical on the need for the change in the first place, on the grounds that the cost is not justified by the savings. I would further note that since the immediate cost (at a time when the public belt is to be generally tightened) is projected at £118 million, in return for savings of £430 million over twenty-five year period, scepticism on those grounds is entirely justified.
So it looks now as if the entire project may be shelved for four to five years, and the elections next year will be to the existing 582 seats on the 26 existing councils.
I would propose, however, that in that case one modest reform should be adopted. Due to population change in the 18 years since the current electoral boundaries were drawn up, the electoral areasw are no longer proportional to the number of seats they hold. This was true even at the last eletions in 2005: in Belfast, for instance, the Court (=Shankill Road) and Upper Falls electoral areas each elected five councillors, though Court’s electorate was only 13,582 and Upper Falls’ 19,767, out of Belfast’s total 166,824; allocated proportionately to the 51 seats currently on Belfast City Council, Court should have had four and Upper Falls six. That of course explains also why my proposed reform will not be adopted.
I could probably get a vote in tomorrow’s special Lib Dem conference fairly easily; it has been called at such short notice that I doubt that all the voting reps of the Brussels branch of the party will be able to go, and substitutes will probably be welcome. I won’t go, as I am not sufficiently active in the party these days and also have other plans. But if I were going, I think I would be going as a neutral leaning to yes vote.
It took me several days to come around. I wasn’t especially shocked by the fact that the deal was with the Tories rather than Labour, as the arithmetic pointed that way; I have not been particularly surprised by the howls of outrage from Labour supporters who feel nobody else deserves to be in power. But I started as a coalition sceptic because the deal doesn’t go far enough on electoral reform, and it seemed to me a catastrophic error to risk the Lib Dems’ reputation without getting the most significant possible gain up front.
I came around partly as a result of reading the growing debate on the proposed 55% rule. First off, I’m amazed by the wrong-headedness of some of the commentary about this; if you want fixed term parliaments, you simply have to decouple votes of confidence from dissolutions in more or less this way. Of course there are going to be ways around it, as Helmut Kohl showed in 1982, but the point is to deter a prime minister from rushing to an election when the polls look right, and to raise the political price of doing so. The 55% figure is probably a bit low, but is basically high enough to ensure that neither of the current coalition partners can easily pull the plug on the other, and to provide an incentive to stable government.
Which leads me to my reason for switching from soft no to soft yes on the deal. In my write-up of last weekend I expressed certainty that there would be another election soon, so the Lib Dems would need to get their price for coalition out of their partners early. The fixed term parliament deal kills that worry stone dead. The referendum on AV will therefore go ahead as normal government business rather than as part of the run-up to the next election campaign. I am not a huge fan of AV, but I do buy the argument that it is a first step towards proper reform, and the removal of the prime minister’s power to run to the voters on a whim is sufficient compensation for me, for now.
There are other aspects of the package I don’t like. I’m a sceptic on electing the Lords, so I hope that the coalition parties implement the first half (appointing enough members now to reflect party support at the election) and forget the second half of the plan. Of course, I have the luxury of not living in the UK so I can pick and choose the bits I like to comment on – the economics will make very little difference to me.
I’m alarmed by the lack of reference to international affairs or Europe in the coalition agreement (keep Trident, stay out of the euro, that’s it). Also the Lib Dems have not done well on the international affairs portfolios – nobody in DFiD, and I’ve never heard of Jeremy Browne, the junior minister at the FCO who is still in his 30s. (Nick Harvey gets to be armed forces minister; I quite like him but have no idea of his suitability for the job.) But I can’t honestly say that the Lib Dems have had much of substance to offer on British foreign policy recently other than on cases which actually shade into civil liberties (where the coalition agend is much more robust, and Labour particularly awful), so perhaps it’s only to be expected.
I shall email my views to my local conference reps, as well as sharing them here. But I expect the package will get a thumping endorsement at tomorrow’s conference.
Once again I managed to wipe my draft of this post when I was halfway through watching the last of these six stories, so it’s not quite as fresh as I would have preferred.
The worst bit is the costuming of the Dulcians: the men are wearing what looks like a cross between a maternity dress and a small curtain, while the women’s tops obviously won a prize for combining the maximum of exposed skin while being not sexy at all. The Dominators were presumably meant to look threatening and also slightly tortoise-like, but this is a difficult trick to pull off and they just look like they are wearing giant shoulder pads. But there are lots of exciting bangs and blowing stuff up, and an interesting contrast between the passive Dulcians and the vicious Dominators which is probably deliberately reminiscent of The Daleks.
Bernard Horsfall is particularly memorable here as Gulliver, aggravating the Doctor in a world of the mind as he was to do again under David Moloney’s direction in The Deadly Assassin. And having griped about the costumes for The Dominators, those for The Mind Robber – produced by the same designer – are superb; particularly Zoe’s catsuit. The moment when she is shot from behind clinging to the console of the destroyed Tardis is a moment when Doctor Who starts to grow up. Or at least enter adolescence.
Given how little we actually see of the Cybermen here, it feels more like The Avengers, with the Brigadier trying to stop Vaughn’s plan, though eventually relying on Zoe to destroy the approaching fleet (seen only on radar) and on the Doctor to talk Vaughn into renouncing his allies. Taking a longer view, it’s the most New Who-ish story so far, with an alien threat to contemporary Earth (which never happened in the Hartnell era, and only three times out of 21 Troughton stories, though it was a staple storyline of both the Pertwee years and of RTD) combined with recurring characters and family dynamics among the Doctor’s allies.
It’s a very slashtastic story as well, with the strongly sapphic dynamic between Zoe and Isobel Watkins matched by the Doctor and Jamie playing around in canals and tunnels (the Brigadier being the gooseberry) and even the weird powerplay between Vaughn and his increasingly panicky security man, Packer. The music is also particularly good, with the notable exception of the jaunty military theme which destroys the tension of crucial scenes in the last couple of episodes.
Apart from the Krotons themselves, the rest is OK, particularly Philip Madoc’s Eelek, who has been displaced at the end of the story in favour of the younger, more stupid, hereditary leader; one senses that Eelek will be back in power in due course. It’s also nice to get some Doctor/Zoe time, with Jamie separated from the rest. (But why does Selris, and only Selris, have a Scottish accent?) But I do wish that the BBC had had the nerve to show The Mind Robber instead back in 1981.
The Ice Warriors are seriously vicious here, and Terry Scully’s terrified Fewsham is memorable as well. And the foam machine, which last starred in Fury From The Deep, gets another outing. Mild costume fail (though not as bad as The Dominators): the men of the future all appear to be wearing nappies.
The story has other weirdnesses. The Tardis team do not appear until almost two-thirds of the way through the first episode, and do not meet any other character until the start of episode 3 (and spend much of the rest of the time locked up). There’s a grotesque “as-you-know-Bob” moment from General Hermack in episode 1. Madeleine appears to have been working and living within a stone’s throw of her vanished father for several years without either of them moving to resolve the situation. There are a lot of comedy moustaches, Milo Clancy only narrowly beating Navigator Penn. But the incidental music is very good.
I liked all of these much more on this round of watching than I had before (with the exception of The Mind Robber, which was already one of my favourites). I think it’s partly that I have become more sensitive to and forgiving of late 1960s production values, partly also that these stories are much more varied and intesting in format than the previous season’s run of bases-under-siege, even if the experiment did not always come off. It is a bit ironic that Season Five rather accidentally hit on the base-under-siege formula, Season Six then successfully moved away from it, and Season Seven then consciously shifted again, adopting the Earthbound setting of the early Pertwee years.
I am very glad that Episode 6 of The Space Pirates is the last missing episode. The reconstructions are generally excellent efforts, but I still felt I needed to have an eye on the script while watching them. I know that not all of the Pertwee stories survive in their original form but it’s still better than the soundtrack only.
For the first time since the very first of these roundups, I have no obituaries to write for recurring characters. I will have to do four of them next time (Zoe, Jamie, the Second Doctor and Liz Shaw).
< An Unearthly Child – The Aztecs | The Sensorites – The Romans | The Web Planet – Galaxy 4 | Mission To The Unknown – The Gunfighters | The Savages – The Highlanders | The Underwater Menace – Tomb of the Cybermen | The Abominable Snowmen – The Wheel In Space | The Dominators – The Space Pirates | The War Games – Terror of the Autons | The Mind of Evil – The Curse of Peladon | The Sea Devils – Frontier in Space | Planet of the Daleks – The Monster of Peladon | Planet of the Spiders – Revenge of the Cybermen | Terror of the Zygons – The Seeds of Doom | The Masque of Mandragora – The Talons of Weng-Chiang | Horror of Fang Rock – The Invasion of Time | The Ribos Operation – The Armageddon Factor | Destiny of the Daleks – Shada | The Leisure Hive – The Keeper of Traken | Logopolis – The Visitation | Black Orchid – Mawdryn Undead | Terminus – The Awakening | Frontios – Attack of the Cybermen | Vengeance on Varos – In A Fix With Sontarans | The Mysterious Planet – Paradise Towers | Delta and the Bannermen – The Greatest Show in the Galaxy | Battlefield – The TV Movie >
This happened on Tuesday morning apparently. Wish I had been there – I pass through that hall almost every day!
(hat-tip to
PS: I do recommend Mr D’Hondt, should you ever need his sort of services in this part of the world.
I shall start by making a foolish prediction, which is that there is likely to be another election in October, so party leaders will need to manoeuvre now with that in mind. Clegg has to remember that even if he does a deal with Cameron or Brown, it is the Prime Minister who will retain the ability to decide to rush to the polls the moment he sniffs the chance of a majority. Occasionally (Ireland, 1989) the electorate will punish a move like that, but more often it is the smaller party that gets blamed and thus loses seats. Clegg should therefore ensure that he gets his deliverables as early as possible, because there may not be a later.
Given the arithmetic, the Lib Dems are right to talk to the Conservatives first. But the Conservatives have no recent experience of coalitions, apart from John Major’s attempts to preserve his majority in the mid-1990s. Labour and the Lib Dems have been in coalition in Scotland and Wales, and both Scotland and Wales currently have minority governments, but the Conservatives have been in opposition throughout the existence of the devolved legislatures.
Moreover, Cameron has demonstrated that he himself is particularly bad at negotiating coalition deals. In my last post I described how his alliance with the UUP has resulted in the electoral wipeout of both parties in Northern Ireland. From the Brussels end, I have watched gobsmacked as the Tories marginalised themselves in the European Parliament by finding peculiar fringe allies rather than remaining a key faction in the largest parliamentary group. In both cases, the impetus for the deal came directly and personally from Cameron himself. In both cases, opponents of the strategy (Sylvia Hermon, Edward MacMillan-Scott) were marginalised and ignored – with the result that both left and did better outside the tent than in. I see a pattern here: that Cameron chooses his allies on instinct, without much strategic depth to his considerations; though in fairness he also seems to stick to his guns. (Another symptom of this is his loyalty to colleagues even if they are not really up to it; I haven’t been following British politics closely enough, but this may explain why the likes of George Osborne and Owen Patterson have not yet been relegated.) I deduce from this that even if Cameron strikes a coalition deal, he probably does not have the political skills to implement it in the medium to long term. As I said in a slightly different context above, this means that his partners need to extract their deliverables early in the relationship (as the UUP and Poles did, in terms of getting money and parliamentary chairmanships respectively), since there probably won’t be a later.
Not that Gordon Brown impresses me as a potential political partner either; I’ve read Paddy Ashdown’s account of Brown’s rather poisonous contribution to the Scottish coalition negotiations of 1999, and his awful behaviour even to friends and allies, let alone potential rivals, is legendary. A different Labour leader might be a different matter, but I don’t think that the timeline allows for that option. (In any case, the numbers do not really work for a Lib/Lab arrangement.)
Clegg does have experience of coalition-building from his time in Europe, probably more than Brown and certainly more than Cameron. Probably also more than most of his own party, many of whom instinctively regard both Labour and Tories as evil and have difficulty in believing that either could be a necessary evil. I quite like Clegg, but his own internal authority has surely been tarnished by a bad election result. I certainly don’t envy him.
Well, the votes are now in, and I have been grinding through them to put them up on my elections site. And my conclusions, going from hard-line Unionist to Sinn Féin, are as follows:
So, unusually, I think I recommend all three of these, for different reasons.
It’s Hugo season again, and I have all of this year’s nominees piled by the bed (except The City & The City, which I have already read); but I am also continuing to work through those books which received the Best Novel award in previous years. My copy of Barrayar is bound with the first Vorkosigan novel, Shards of Honor, in a 600-page omnibus volume called Cordelia’s Honor. I must say that I enjoyed this, and last month’s The Vor Game, which won the year before Barrayar sufficiently that I may go back now and reread the whole lot, perhaps just in time for the new one before it comes out.
The other books up for the Best Novel Hugo in 1992 were Bone Dance by Emma Bull, Xenocide by Orson Scott Card, All the Weyrs of Pern by Anne McCaffrey, Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick and The Summer Queen by Joan D. Vinge. The only one of these I have read is the Swanwick, which won that year’s Nebula, though I wasn’t wowed. I seem to remember having been definitely warned off both the Card and the McCaffrey. Is The Summer Queen a sequel to The Snow Queen?
I was prompted to get hold of these by the author’s remark, in the extras track of last month’s Big Finish audio The Architects of History, that he had used the alien shark-like Selachians in a couple of Second Doctor novels some time back. They were easy enough to acquire second-hand, and I read them on my travels over the last week.
Both books feature Lyons’ characterisation of the jittery Second Doctor, thoroughly loyal to his companions but prone to wail in terror at odd moments; I’m coming to the end of my rewatch of the Second Doctor stories, and am impressed by how well Lyons has actually captured him, compared with most of the other books (including particularly the novelisations). The Second Doctor is a hero slightly against his own first instincts. It’s very entertaining.
I was very interested to hear about this treatment of the 1916 Rising as a graphic novel, combining as it does two of my interests. I am afraid I was disappointed with the result. My political sympathies are in any case closer to the dispassionate analysis of Charles Townshend, but I don’t think this books will change anyone’s mind about the Rising – it may perhaps confuse them with detail (one rather small map is provided at the very end), but the reader is basically assumed to be familiar with the big picture of the story. Compared, say, with Pekar and Roberson’s Macedonia, let alone the brilliant work of Joe Sacco, Hunt doesn’t really probe very far into the human side of the conflict – British soldiers are anonymous snarls, the civilians who mock and disobey the rebels merely rabble; only the rebels themselves are given full hagiographical treatment, including curiously iconic depiction of their faces taken from the classic photographs. The central narrative is framed by Grace Gifford’s wedding to Joseph Plunkett the night before his execution, but we find out little about him and nothing about her (which is a little ironic considering her later very successful career as a cartoonist). An interesting experiment, but not a completely successful one.
I will post separately about the actual results, but wanted to jot down my impressions from last night’s TV show before the memory fades.
I’ve been recording Northern Ireland election results online in one form or another since 1994, and set up the main online elections archive in advance of the first Assembly elections under the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Back in 2001, I came over to Belfast the day after that year’s Westminster election to cover the counts for RTÉ radio. The BBC approached me several months ago to check my availability for this year’s election, and after the necessary discussion with my employer and family I agreed to do it; quite a long stretch away from home, with rehearsals on Saturday and Sunday, then a few days off (which I used for historical research at the other end of the island) before the night itself.
The rehearsals required my presence but not much of my intellect; it was mostly about the production team practising on the studio set-up. That in itself was rather interesting to watch. Most of my previous TV work has been straight interviews, either with a single cameraman or (less comfortably) down the line with a remote interviewer. Many many years ago I appeared on University Challenge, but that is a well-established, pre-recorded quiz show where we contestants were simply slotted into our seats for an hour (a few minutes of rehearsal and then the half-hour take). So this was the first time I had seen the actual creative process of a live TV show at close quarters.
What really struck me was the sheer number of people coordinating – three or four (or was it even five) cameramen, the sound guys, the technicians, the floor manager, the make-up artists coming by every so often to dab more foundation on my face, and of course I could not see or hear the hidden voices in the gallery who were giving instructions to the three BBC journalists who were fronting the show. I did meet the graphics and computer people who were all based in a large marquee constructed in the BBC’s back yard, which was also where the production team held brief post-mortems on both days of rehearsals.
The studio was split into three sections; half of it was reserved for the BBC’s Noel Thompson hosting a discussion for representatives of the political parties, the other half had Jim Fitzpatrick managing two separate panels – in one corner, three pundits talking about the results from the rest of the UK, and in the other corner (nearest the door, which oddly made me feel safer, as if I could run away and seek refuge when necessary) myself and Mark Devenport crunching the numbers as they came in – me doing the more numerical stuff, Mark reflecting on the political implications.
I did not find this difficult. I have been breathing Northern Irish elections for a long time; and there are only eighteen results to analyse (and one of those has yet to declare at time of writing). Indeed, the worst problem was when several declarations came in close together and we had to remember to go back and give decent coverage to those seats that might have got lost in the flurry.
Like everyone else, we had a couple of hours of doing very little except talking about the exit poll (issued to us under conditions of strict secrecy at a quarter to ten; none of us believed it, but it has turned out to be right). After the first three results came in from the northeast of England, the next two were both from Northern Ireland (though neither wasparticularly exciting). Then came the one huge surprise of the evening, more or less out of a clear sky: rumours and reports started reaching us that Northern Ireland’s First Minister, Peter Robinson, was facing a closer race than expected in East Belfast; then that he was actually behind the Alliance Party’s deputy leader, Naomi Long; and abruptly we got the result, that she had indeed won by over 1500 votes. It was, as
After that, the next four hours were a matter of watching the results trickle in – I had access to the BBC’s election info software which meant I could also keep tabs on the rest of the UK, in particular the generally lousy news for the Lib Dems and the failure of the Conservatives to make the breakthrough. People who follow me on Facebook and Twitter (where I am nwbrux) will have noticed that I also had full access to the internet. Mark Devenport, sitting beside me, was churning out blog entries for the BBC site.
When South Antrim was declared, Sir Reg Empey (who I had done a radio show with on Sunday) became another main party leader to fail at the polls, and it became very clear that for the first time ever, the UUP – despite their alliance with the Conservatives – would fail to win any seats at all in Northern Ireland. The UUP’s representative in the studio, perhaps unwittingly, provided the show’s one real soundbite of the night by predicting that Sir Reg’s leadership was now over. He very firmly clarified that he was not calling for his leader to resign, simply stating the facts as he saw them; but really it comes to the same thing. (The DUP’s representative in the studio, Arlene Foster, had meanwhile left early to go to her home constituency of Fermanagh-South Tyrone, where early indications were already of a very close result.)
We finished up with East Londonderry – delayed by an attempted bomb attack – at about 4.45, and I slipped across the road to my hotel; had literally just got between the sheets when the BBC phoned again to ask me to come back for their 7.30 news programme. At that stage it was in for a penny, in for a pound; I got about two hours sleep, then went back for the show (seven minutes or so live with Jim Fitzpatrick; by this stage I could do it on autopilot) and then went on to the Slugger O’Toole / Stratagem election breakfast at the Europa Hotel, nipping back again to the BBC for one more interview (jointly with Mark Devenport, on Radio Foyle). Leaving the building for the last time I was pleased to bump into Naomi and Michael Long in the foyer so that I could congratulate them in person.
So, noww I have an afternoon flight to Heathrow and an evening flight to Brussels, and then my life is back to normal. I’m lucky; for me it’s only been a week, and the only stake I had was preserving my modest reputation as an expert on matters electoral. For many other people this election campaign has started, or ended, or fundamentally changed their careers. This morning, I feel for all of them, from all parties and from none. The democratic process is a cruel refining fire, and I’m not envious of those who choose to participate rather than observe.