Clegg , Vader and Snape: A discussion

After reading the excellent blog post "David Cameron is Voldemort. No seriously" by Mary Hamilton the other day, I mused in her comments section that Nick Clegg may in fact be Anakin Skywalker.

She had cast him as Professor Quirrell or Professor Snape but I wasn't quite convinced so leapt from one successful franchise to another.

Having thought long and hard about it, I am convinced I am right - particularly in the light of last night's vote.

You see, Snape was always a baddie - until it became very obvious at the bitter end he was a goodie. And Quirrell? Well Quirrell was just Quirrell until it was revealed that in fact he was a Quirrell/Voldemort hybrid hellbent on facilitating the murder of an 11-year-old orphan.

I never had great hope that Quirrell was one thing or another - I simply didn't care - whereas Clegg was full of Golden Boy potential in April. The mainstream media was full of the fact that the Lib Dem leader was changing the election dynamic who was taking support away from the Tories by the fistful.

A sneaky peaky into his background shows that he certainly had the potential to be the chosen one.

Yes he comes from a privileged background, yet his family has suffered at the hands of persecution. Everything he does, he does extremely well, which hints to me at a very high midi-chlorian count and he spent a brief period getting his hands dirty (although to be fair, working for the Financial Times, doesn't quite equate to being Watto's slave on Tattoine) before being tipped for greatness and apprenticed by a Master in the form of Paddy Ashdown who must, therefore, be Qui-Gon Jinn.

But of course, his political training went astray following the demise of Master Paddy, and the tutelage of the well-meaning but inexperienced Charles Kennedy was not enough to guide this volatile character away from the Dark Side just as Obi Wan Kenobi could not prevent Anakin's conversion to the Sith.

Just as it seemed that padawan Clegg would fulfill his destiny he was dealt a bitter blow and actually saw the Lib Dems lose ground in the May elections, which parallels The Jedi Council's refusal to grant Anakin Jedi Master status and so he wreaked a terrible revenge.

In last night's vote Clegg urged all of his MPs to break a pledge to scrap tuition fees and instead vote to treble them.

Such is the despicable nature of this deceit and treachery, I can only draw a parallel with Anakin's willingness to murder the Jedi younglings (below).

Clegg is now firmly ensconced in the Dark Side alongside Cameron (didn't Palpatine seem sincere and thoroughly decent during his rise to power?)

Of course, if my Anakin analogy is correct, we are likely to suffer decades more injustice at the hands of this tyrant until eventually he repents having saved the next chosen one, before dying on a distant planet covered in Ewoks; furry, tree-loving and largely peaceful creatures who could certainly be members of the Green Party.

Of course, I could be attaching too much significance to Clegg. In the grand scheme of Star Wars he may actually be Jar Jar Binks - a chirping, ineffectual, grating twat who'll gradually fade into the background under a torrent of negative publicity.

The Sun and me

It has recently been pointed out to me that I seem to knock The Sun and, more specifically, Rupert Murdoch on a regular basis.

The observation followed a recent Tweet about Richard Desmond's acquisition of Channel Five in which I wrote:

"Looks like Richard Desmond is bidding to be the Lidl to Rupert Murdoch's Waitrose in the evil media empire stakes"

It was a hilarious and cutting observation which spawned exactly no retweets and, beyond the confines of my own head, very few laughs other than politeness.

I then followed it up with a comment on a former colleague's Facebook page in which I (jokingly) advised him to make up some journalism for The Sun because that is what they all do. So far so cliched and borderline defamatory.

But looking back, I do appear to have a bit of a history in knocking The Sun, which is after all one of British journalism's great institutions. It is the country's most read newspaper and the technical quality of the journalism is superb. I'm not just saying that - it is far harder to write 250 words on politics for The Sun than it is to write 1,000 words for the Guardian.

Also, Murdoch has recently seen a slight upsurge in public opinion. An example of this would be the excellent David Mitchell's article in The Guardian recently in which he says that liberal society's dislike of Murdoch is leading to a blindspot over the paywall he has introduced at The Times.

But I still can't bring myself to like The Sun or prevent myself from making sarky comments about it so I thought it was time I buckled down and examined why that might be.

So here's the case for the defence (it's my opinion I am defending in case you were wondering):

1) Many of The Sun's most celebrated stories are fabrication. Take for example, Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster or Elton John has voice boxes removed from his guard dogs. When people talk about stories like these it is often with a chuckle and a roll of the eyes as if making this kind of stuff up is akin to a cheeky child being caught taking two biscuits when one was on offer. It isn't. It's wrong to make stuff up as I readily admitted recently in my silly season confession post. However, The Sun is so proud of its fabrications that if you like they have given permission for them to be reproduced emblazoned on a T-shirt.

2) The Hillsborough disaster coverage: "Oh no, not that again," I hear you groan. But yes that again. Not only did the paper accuse Liverpool fans of revelling the disaster, pickpocketing victims and urinating on those trapped in the mayhem, but it also took an obscenely long time to properly apologise (15 years since you ask). That apology only came about when it was clear that The Sun's circulation figures in Liverpool were never going to recover unless something was done.

3) The Sun is hideously self-important when it comes to politics. I've blogged about this before. Last week I was having a conversation on Twitter with David Dunkley Gyimah (@viewmagazine), who is a video journalist and lecturer at Westminster University, about the fact that modern journalism is ill-equipped to cope with modern politics. I summed up my views rather glibly with the phrase:

"Modern journalism is over-simplistic and modern politics is over-complicated"

Nowhere is this more obvious than at The Sun, which blatantly tries to sway the views of the electorate at every General Election. From being Maggie's lapdog and Kinnock's vanquisher to the uneasy alliance with the freemarket socialist Blair to backing the man-of-the-people/old Etonian David Cameron, The Sun has advised us who to vote for. But are we best served by having Murdoch's mouthpiece steering our vote? Do people know why the recession hit other than because Brown was grumpy and Alistair Darling's eyebrows are a different colour to his hair? There is a potential for astute political coverage in The Sun but it gets lost in the posturing and celebrity-obssessed diatribe we have to put up with.

4) Its coverage forced 10 seasons of Big Brother onto our screens. Admittedly I have little empirical evidence for this but I am sure that the interesting programme that was BB1 and 2 became the mud-wrestle at Aldi it is now because of the shallowness of The Sun.

I know, I know. That all sounds very po-faced and humourless. Believe it or not, I do like a bit of humour in my papers - I just don't want it to be made up or patronising.

Of course, it has been pointed out that I worked for a worse paper in the Daily Mail and that is undeniable. I would offer a critique of the Mail but Dan and Dan have done it better than I ever could.

Why the BNP gets coverage

Great article on the front of The Times illustrated by this superb picture:

It says it all really. Journalist attends press conference and is viciously attacked.

What is particularly strong is the lengths the henchmen are going to to ensure that not only is Dominic Kennedy of The Times ejected but hurt in the process.

The use of the nose grab highlights this perfectly, it being a move favoured more by Daniel Day-Lewis's psychotic character in The Gangs of New York.

Even when people are disaffected with many aspects of this country, you would hope they could not be tempted to vote for this 'party'.

But then who is providing a credible alternative?

The Greens can't be bothered to promote themselves beyond the perception that they are the political wing of Greenpeace , the Lib Dems are suffering from the Kennedy debacle and Campbell experiment and then general impression that it ain't worth the effort.

Why can't we have parties who believe in something and stand up for it?

Instead we get three main parties wooing voters by changing to suit the climate in order to be elected. That's not what I want.

I want people to stand up and say 'This is what I believe' so I can decide if I agree with them. But all I have, which exception of the BNP, is people saying 'What do you believe and we'll agree with you'.

Thing is, I would not vote BNP even if it were to guarantee that the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse could be persuaded to never to return to this mortal realm.

Oh Dear George

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/oct/09/george-osborne-budget-deficit

Let me get this right. We're in a recession, you're planning our way out and yet think that a £3bn error in a £13bn prediction is "presentational". My maths may not be amazing - similar to yours - but I would say that you were about 23 per cent out there.

I'm not confident. Come on Green Party make a bloody effort.

It was The Sun wot won it...

..for Labour in 1997. Or at least so they claimed. If I remember rightly the famously Tory paper switched sides just as the election propaganda was drawing to a close and claimed to have been the deciding factor when Blair stormed to Downing Street.

Now they claim to be doing it again for Cameron. But of course, anyone with any brains were putting their money on Labour in '97 - the Tories were tired and on the ropes long before The Sun changed colours. It was a miracle that Major had managed to see off Kinnock four years earlier (apparantly The Sun won that one too) and after four bad years the '97 election was a formality.

The Sun isn't a political leader as it claims, it's a follower but is shameless in its self-promotion. Are the editor deluded or calculated? Difficult to say but I have little doubt that top dog Rebekah Wade is a sharp operator having learned the trade under Piers Morgan and learned from his mistakes.

All I can say is get stuffed Sun. Labour may well not win the next election but that will not be down to your shameless editorials.