Commentariat

Independent

During his rounds of the new year talk shows yesterday, the Prime Minister was asked to say more about two ways in which the Government might tackle the fall-out from the economic crisis. In the light of the grim outlook for the coming months, the questions were entirely reasonable: they addressed job cuts and the continuing credit squeeze.

The conflict in the Gaza Strip has entered a new and still more dangerous phase with the start of Israel’s long-predicted ground offensive. Israeli tanks streamed into the territory on Saturday night and were swiftly engaged in fierce fighting that continued through yesterday. Regrettable though the latest escalation is, it was probably inevitable, once a week of Israeli air bombardment had failed to stem the rocket attacks by Hamas fighters. The certainty that Hamas now possesses missiles capable of striking 25 miles into Israel would have supplied Israeli politicians and generals with another argument for a ground assault. Until the threat from Hamas is at least contained, if not destroyed, there is little chance of either side heeding outside pressure to desist. To say that is not to be fatalistic or unimaginative; it is to be realistic.

Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labelling as “one of the great menaces of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell – and some justice on their side.

For a master of conflict and violence, Harold Pinter had a benign death. He was successful and honoured, picking up the Nobel Prize for literature in his last years and using the occasion as another opportunity to attack American foreign policy. He was revered even by those he attacked. American immigration officers welcomed him admiringly.

The story goes, which I have no reason to disbelieve, that the leaders of the opposition parties or their representatives have been having talks with civil servants about what might happen if a change of government came about in 2009. The “guidance” given to the press was that the practice had originated with Sir Alec Douglas-Home before the 1964 election.

We are just emerging from the longest Christmas holiday anyone can remember, and it’s not only waistbands that have expanded. On a drive through Britain last week, every lane had piles of smelly black sacks and ranks of over-stuffed wheelie bins. We might have sent fewer cards, but we didn’t make less trash.

Presidencies begin with a slate wiped clean and a first 100 days in which the new incumbent sets out to change the world. They end in the tawdry process in which George W Bush is now engaged: a final flurry of presidential dec-rees to prolong power beyond the grave, a concerted effort to regild a tarnished reputation – and, of course, pardons.

When the bombing of Gaza started last Saturday, the Palestinian journalist Mohammed Dawwas, looking from his seventh-floor window, saw his nine-year-old son, Ibrahim, rushing home from school near the police academy that was destroyed in the very first air raid. This is his diary for a week that was to end in invasion.

Another year, another anti-obesity campaign: this time the Government’s annoyingly named Change4Life strategy. The centrepiece of the latest campaign is a series of TV adverts, made by the team behind Wallace & Gromit, which shows cartoon characters gradually becoming flabbier as they leave the Stone Age and adapt to a sedentary modern lifestyle.

It’s rarely advisable for politicians to make pronouncements on the arts, but shadow Arts minister Ed Vaizey is throwing caution to the wind and calling for Harold Pinter to be commemorated at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. “This might seem an unorthodox suggestion from a Conservative MP,” he ventures, “Memorials to Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Noël Coward, Herbert Read and John Betjeman, to name a few of the 20th-century figures there, are already in place.” But as we all know, Pinter twice turned down a knighthood, and it seems unlikely he would have wanted to be canonised in that most establishment of mausoleums.

This is arguably the first week of the most important year in human history. The grandiose invites suspicion so that sentence was written reluctantly. Ideas do not seek permission before they enter your mind, nor are they always the most welcome of guests.

It was Helen Suzman at her very best: simply indomitable, as she helped stop a miracle turning into a disaster. April 27 1994, South Africa’s first democratic general election, and people queuing from dawn in their millions to vote for the first time in their lives. Hardly believable, the horror of apartheid was being exorcised in front of our eyes.

Israel’s invasion of Gaza comes hard on the heels of its massive air campaign which, it says, is a justified retaliation for the Hamas rocket attacks against southern Israel. Every rocket or mortar fired from Gaza into Israel is reported to the international media and, at the time of writing, more than 400 had been counted during the week. Details of the Israeli attacks are harder to find, but the week’s report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) states that the Israeli Air Force also dropped 400 bombs, not over seven days, but in just the first few minutes of its opening assault on Gaza. These and hundreds more bombs have killed over 400 Palestinians. The Hamas missiles have caused just four deaths.

One of the first by-products of a recession is a decisive shift in the nature of the big beasts prowling the financial jungle’s corpse-strewn floor.

Some 255 prisoners are held without charge in Guantanamo Bay detention centre. Barack Obama’s commitment to close the facility is one of the most important, symbolic elements of his agenda as president-elect. It represents the rejection of a disreputable element of US foreign policy. Asked by Time magazine about criteria by which he would measure his success in office, Mr Obama said: “On foreign policy, have we closed Guantanamo in a responsible way, put a clear end to torture and restored a balance between the demands of our security and our constitution?”

A dog is for life not just for Christmas – that’s how the saying goes, isn’t it? We had a very doggy Christmas. The kids pestered us to get them a FurReal Friend. This is a life-sized dog that responds to the kids’ commands. He can sit up, beg, lie down, pant and bark. Our two real dogs, Huxley and Oscar, can do exactly the same thing, and more, but were totally ignored on Christmas Day as the kids fawned all over this robotic replacement. Our hounds got their revenge, however. We came down to breakfast on Boxing Day to a strong smell of urine. After a little investigation we discovered that the FurReal dog (whose name is Biscuit) had been used as a dog loo all night.

Here’s a question. Who said, about whom, "It is a shameful spectacle to see how the whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor tormented Xs, but remains hard hearted and obdurate when it comes to helping them"?

Imagine, if you will, that you live next door to the Jones’, and that they in turn live next door to the Smiths. You discover that the Smiths have found a way of accessing your electricity supply (they use it, you pay for it) and that the Jones’ garden is being used as a conduit for this theft of your power. You ask the Jones’ to do the neighbourly thing, and cut off the supply of the electricity going to the Smiths you have paid for. They refuse. This is what it is like being a producer, writer, director or actor today – anyone, in fact, who owning any IP in the film or TV world today. Because our neighbours, the Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) are the Jones’. And they don’t appear to give a damn.

It was 40 years ago today – well, in June, actually – that Steve Winwood taught the band to play. Blind Faith, that is, who played the first ever free concert in Hyde Park in London in front of 100,000 people on 7 June 1969. And what a gig it was.

Three famous people to my knowledge had a deep and lasting hatred of Private Eye, the magazine I edited for more than 20 years. They were Kenneth Tynan, Jonathan Miller and Harold Pinter.

The director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny, is at it again. After taking up his post at the start of last year, he decreed that the age of the blockbuster was over. There was no point, he said then, showing people images they already knew. “The responsibility of a major gallery is to show people something they haven’t seen before.”

They enjoyed a Christmas Day lunch together at Chevening, the Foreign Secretary’s country residence in Kent. They send each other advance copies of their speeches for comments and text each other frantically when their government work overlaps. The Miliband brothers are close.

I am bemused by the name of Israel’s latest military operation against Hamas (and the usual cull of toddlers) in Gaza. The Israeli military calls it Operation Cast Lead. Come again? “Cast Iron” I might understand, though it would woefully misrepresent Israel’s policies since they will in due course talk to the “blood-soaked terrorists” of Hamas when it suites their purposes just as they eventually talked to the “blood-soaked terrorists” of the PLO.

I was technically an adult when I discovered that my background was embarrassing. “Gin and Jag belt!” the more sophisticated of my fellow freshers sniffed when I told them that I was from Guildford. Gin? Well, no, but perhaps, for guests, an occasional bottle of Blue Nun. Jag? Er, no, a Morris Marina. “Stockbroker belt,” they elaborated when they saw my baffled face. I didn’t have a clue what a stockbroker was. I’m not sure I do now.

Iran’s open support for Hamas, coupled with US and Israeli accusations that Tehran has supplied it with weapons, could harden Israeli public opinion in favour of military strikes against Iran whose nuclear programme is seen as an “existential” threat to the Jewish state.