Atomic Razor

Et Tu, Purnell?

Come on! It was just too good a pun to resist. Whether James Purnell is much of a Timothy Michael Healy to Gordon Brown's Charles Stewart Parnell is another matter. Whether Gordon Brown will survive the weekend is also another matter. Alan Johnson is now Home Secretary presumably to apply with the old political saw that one should keep one's friends close and one's enemies closer. Purnell, a weightless Blairite apparatchik, was figured in a Spectator article in May last year as the prospective Labour leader that Cameron fears most (it is perhaps not coincidental that they both have firsts in PPE). Presumably Purnell expects to be facing Cameron across the Dispatch Box next year. He'd surely prefer Johnson as caretaker PM on the grounds that he would surely reduce the Tory majority somewhat - or even leave Cameron with none at all. Of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that Purnell is an MP after the next election (plenty of Orwellian rewriting of his Wikipedia page has gone on: I had forgotten about the Liz Davies libel case and there is a definite whiff of controversy surrounding about both the use of his ministerial car and, of course - what would one expect of a Blairite? - over his expenses). If he isn't, I am sure that he will be found a cosy sinecure before he is parachuted into another safe seat.

After 12 years, the government needs a reboot if can't get, it seems, under Brown. But, of course, They are trying to force him from power because They want to make sure that nothing is done about the bonus (and expenses) culture that the neoliberal elite has benefited from in the City (more than Wall Street) over the past decade or so. Would Brown have done anything about the City culture? Well, two years, the notion that he would nationalise banks would have been unthinkable. (And yet Obama is allowed to nationalise GM. What are They thinking?) It is hard though to imagine that someone as hollow as Purnell will, any less than Cameron, offer this country anything other than the tired, stale, failed neoliberal nostrums. I can't see Britain being a pretty place to live over the next few years.

Moving and Standing Still

To my spiritual home, the London Review (of Books) Bookshop on Tuesday night for a launch event for The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie and Their Contemporaries, edited by the improbably named Zachary Leader. When I entered the shop, I spotted what appeared to the name "Amis" at the top of the guest list. Could it be? I was sat quite far back in the room, enjoying a glass of red, but against the books and pulled off the shelf a copy of Alice Hogge's God's Secret Plot. This was the Harper Perennial edition with the additional matter at the back including a Q&A in which Ms Hogge when asked which writers she admires name-checked only one writer, Martin Amis, citing his style. And then Anthony Thwaite (I think) gestured towards someone in the audience - and I looked across the room (I could have done that ages before) and, yes, it was he (here I use the nominative form here rather than the accusative one for emphasis). Yes, I was in the presence of personages that night (whether Thomas Pynchon was there was another matter, no matter how much Martin was influenced by him). I was hoping for some discussion of the Movement, what it was and how and why it continues to have such a major influence on British culture more than 50 years later, but instead we had people reading poems by various of the Movement writers and then some of their own, which was, I suppose, fine. My problem is that I have always tended to be more interested in the idea of something than the thing itself, but the poems were good (quite a lot of Larkin, not surprisingly), even if my natural sympathies are more to prose than poetry (yes, as I have said, I do have to do poetry at some point). So we had Robert Conquest (92!), Blake Morrison, Craig Raine, Anthony Thwaite and Clive Wilmer (who he? - a Cambridge don, it seems) all reading.

(I will have to save for another time my thoughts on the Movement, The New Men and the Angry Young Men, the Two Cultures, anti-modernism in the 1930s, 1950s and on, why all this sill matters in general and to me in particular. But I will say that I am sure there is a decades-spanning generational saga/Great British Novel  to be written about a grammar school boy from Preston who becomes a successful novelist and goes on to trace the literary, political and social vicissitudes of our nation over the next sixty years.)

 

I didn't manage to have a second glass of wine as Zachary Leader was standing in front of the bottles and I couldn't get at them and by the time he had moved, they were empty. I was not the only disappointed person - a chap plaintively enquired of me whether there was any wine left. By that stage, I would have settled for a glass of white. Martin Amis was outside in the courtyard sitting at a table smoking a fag with Blake Morrison and Craig Raine. I should have papped them, but I thought that might have been a career-limiting move, so instead I made my weary way home. I bet Martin got a second glass of wine.