Not-so-dumb blonde

by Alan Tyers

My favourite ongoing news story at the moment is that of the court case involving the squillionaire financier who is being sued for discrimination by a disgruntled former employee.

Jordan Wimmer, you may recall, claims that her mega-rich hedge fund boss Mark Lowe humiliated her by turning up to business events accompanied by scantily dressed hookers.

The case has now moved on with the news that Ms Wimmer is upset that he made a “dumb blonde” joke in a round-robin email. Even worse, she was suffering from depression at the time.

Mr Lowe doesn’t really seem like the sort of bloke a gal would be dying to take home to mum - and, judging from his picture, he might be well advised to keep his comments about other people’s appearance to a minimum.

But Ms Wimmer, for her part, sounds like she might be on shaky ground. How can you work in an environment like private equity - where short-term, aggressive, uncaring machismo is the name of the game - and not expect a bit of rough and tumble?

In an ideal word, we’d all treat our co-workers with respect and kindness at all times. But that’s a pipe dream, especially in a job that involves seeing the naked face of capitalism right up close and personal.

Jordan Wimmer joined Mark Lowe’s company in 2004 on a £50,000 salary; within four years she was making the best part of 600 grand a year. For that sort of money - and incredible salary increase - she should have been able to put up with a bit of argy-bargy.

Brown letter day

by Alan Tyers

The ignoble sport of bear-baiting is alive and well: Gordon Brown has lurched into yet another crisis and his enemies at The Sun are getting stuck in.

The PM hand-wrote a letter to Jacqui Janes offering his condolences for the death in Afghanistan of her Grenadier Guardsman son, Jamie.

Brown managed to spell her name incorrectly, and made several other spelling (or handwriting) mistakes in the letter. Then - cringe, cringe - he phoned her up to say sorry, she recorded the conversation and handed it to The Sun. Manna from heaven to the Tory-backing boys in Wapping.

Personally, I think it’s a low blow: he wrote to her and phoned her personally and privately. I couldn’t argue that it’s not a matter of public interest, but it still seems a bit mean to serve him up to the unlovely red-top attack dogs.

Still, it certainly reveals a lot about the Prime Minister and his current state of mind. A lack of attention to detail, the inability to admit a mistake - “I think I was trying to say Janes, as your right name” - a total failure to communicate.

A more gifted politician and manipulator than Brown - Tony Blair, say, or Bill Clinton - would have played the card that he too has lost a child; or maybe even alluded to his disability and failing eyesight. It’s arguably to Brown’s credit that he didn’t. About all you can say is that he shouldn’t have written the letter if he can’t write her name correctly. It seems a modest amount to ask from the leader of the country.

Instead of grovelling, Brown tried to debate her on issues that she obviously knows a fair bit about, but is never going to bend on. That her son died because of underfunding is fixed 100% in her mind.

It’s not an argument he could ever win, and even if he could - who wants to defeat a grieving mother with stats and policy detail?

Mock horror

by Alan Tyers

The surprising thing about the row between Olympic double gold medal-winning swimmer Rebecca Adlington and the BBC is not that people are queuing up to be offended by Mock The Week panellist Frankie Boyle’s jokes, but that Adlington herself gives a hoot what he thinks or says.

Imagine the sheer willpower and strength of character that she must possess to get up before dawn every day of the year, train her guts out and bring home two gold medals at just 19 years old. It’s amazing that a couple of gags on a TV panel show are anything but water off a duck’s back.

Anyway, they obviously aren’t, because she has made a formal complaint about the BBC Trust’s response to the situation. Just to catch you up, the Trust rebuked Boyle for saying Adlington had a face “like someone looking at themselves in the back of a spoon” and speculating that the fact her boyfriend is much more attractive (according to Boyle) proves she must be “very dirty”. Adlington reckons Boyle got off too lightly.

The jokes were a bit mean, but I’m glad Boyle has the freedom to make them. It is, after all, only a joke, on a show that’s flagged up for having adult humour. However, the BBC Trust found that, in essence, Adlington was not fair game because she has not courted celebrity or fame.

I seem to remember Adlington appearing on A Question Of Sport and The Charlotte Church Show, and I note from her personal website that the swimmer has signed a deal to be “an official partner” with British Gas, presumably involving the utilities supplier giving her money in exchange for access to her name, image, time or status.

And why the hell not? Good luck to the woman if she wants to make a few quid after all her hard work - but it’s debatable that she has “not courted celebrity or fame”.

This stand-off is further ammunition for the BBC haters who won’t be happy until the entire shebang is shut down, and also for the country’s self-appointed moral guardians who spend their days looking for comics to be offended by.

A joke’s a joke; let Frankie Boyle - and Jimmy Carr, with his squaddie gags - get on with what they do.

The wrong type of criminals

by Alan Tyers

You can say what you like about the Daily Mail, but its writers know how to push their punters’ buttons.

This headline is absolutely textbook: “How police are making criminals of the over-40s: Target culture fuels rise in first-time convictions for middle aged.”

It sits atop a classic Mail article: decent, middle-class people are being singled out for harassment by a nosy, arrogant regime of jobsworths who are only nicking them to meet their quotas.

Familiar bugbears - such as the “bin police”, and ordinary law-abiding sorts being punished for such “non-crimes” as speeding and refusing to wear a seat belt - all get a mention.

It’s the hypocrisy I like best: when it’s crimes that your typical Daily Mail reader might commit - speeding through a village, say - it’s the nanny state, Big Brother Is Watching You, a sickening assault on our rights as good stout British Yeoman, and not really a crime at all.

When it’s a non-Mail-reader crime - a puff of a spliff, say - then we should bring back the birch and teach these scum a lesson.

So which is it, Daily Mail hacks: rule of law, or “live and let live”?

Treat people ethically too

by Alan Tyers

Steven Barker, stepfather of Baby P, has forced animal rights charity People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) to take down a poster featuring a picture of him, on the grounds that it’s libellous.

The charity suggests that people who start off abusing animals go on to abuse humans, and indeed it does seem that various notorious killers did previously kill pets.

One factor in a libel case is that the victim’s standing is reduced in the eyes of reasonable people. Surely that boat has sailed for Barker? Could anybody in the world actually have had their opinion of him lowered by a poster?

That said, the original poster did call Barker a killer, and his lawyer points out that he was, in fact, found not guilty of murder.

Even scum like this get some protection from this country’s draconian libel laws, which probably seems crazy to a lot of people.

But it seems to me that Peta has shot itself in the foot a bit here. There can’t be anybody alive who didn’t already think that Barker was evil, but conflating his crimes with the mistreatment of animals seems a stretch of taste.

One struggle for animal rights charities is mainstream people thinking that they’re nutters who place animal life higher than human. Don’t campaigns like this reinforce that view a bit?

Cruelty to animals is bad and wrong, but it cannot be said to be as morally indefensible as killing a baby. Why would anyone even need to try to link the two?

Self-censorship won’t help the BBC or its viewers

by Greg McDonald

Mock the Week’s cruel jibe about Becky Adlington’s appearance was the sort of cheap bullying the “character” propping up your local bar would be ashamed to call comedy – but that doesn’t justify outlawing things simply because they offend us.

Yet the BBC Trust’s new guidelines on comedy do precisely that.

And while the Trust is surely right to lance as "humiliating" Frankie Boyle's squalid line that Adlington resembles someone "looking at themselves in the back of a spoon", the regulatory body has a difficult balance to strike.

For while thick-skinned celebrities may graciously forgive being called a “Paki” and hardened political leaders may laugh at being called a “one-eyed idiot”, it’s not such a giggle when these lines are repeated in the playground.

Yet as cheap as Boyle’s line was, perhaps the greater danger is that banning “offensive” routines sets us on a slippery slope to censorship.

For at its irreverent best, as in BBC shows like The Office and Have I Got News For You, comedy can undermine prejudice, challenge ignorance and open eyes – indeed, it’s a shame Rory Bremner won’t be sitting opposite the BNP’s Nick Griffin on Thursday’s Question Time, for if we need a reminder of the dangers of censorship we need look no further than Nazism.

The BBC Trust is right that Frankie Boyle’s joke was offensive rubbish we could do without – but censorship remains the greater evil.

Hang the semantics - let the BNP hang itself

by Alan Tyers

Peter Hain, the Welsh Secretary, is the latest to have his say on the BNP Question Time debate.

Hain reckons that last week’s court ruling, in which the BNP was hilariously told that it was not a proper political party because it didn’t allow non-white people to join, means that the group is “now an unlawful body”.

As such, he reckons, it does not have the right to be treated like a proper political party and therefore shouldn’t be allowed on the BBC for Question Time.

“Now that the BNP have accepted they are at present an unlawful body, it would be perverse of you to maintain that they are just like any other democratically-elected party,” Hain wrote to BBC director general Mark Thompson. “On their own admission, at present, they are not.”

This is a decent but misguided stab by the Welsh Secretary, who was in his day a courageous and determined campaigner against apartheid.

Rather than attempting to muzzle the BNP, especially via this neat but essentially semantic piece of legal interpretation, would it not be better to let “party” leader Nick Griffin take his turn on Question Time - and let the public decide?

An unpleasant man of moderate intellect, a former member of the National Front, a holocaust denier and an on-record anti-Semite… and Griffin is supposedly the acceptable face of the BNP!

A bit of exposure to the loony policies of Griffin and his thug mates can do more to discredit the BNP than any amount of legal cleverness. Give him enough rope.

Don't turn a blind eye

by Greg McDonald

Shame on the playground bullies in the media who have seized on news of Gordon Brown having an eye check-up as a weakness to be attacked.

As they circled to deliberately confuse Brown’s retinal tear with everything from “psychological deterioration” to “an excuse”, you didn’t need 20:20 vision to see these vultures for what they were - prejudiced hypocrites who should take the beams out of their own eyes before addressing a retinal tear in someone else’s.

Gordon Brown is not about to go blind. But cynical conflation of his disability with failure and weakness is an insult not only to the PM but to those like former US President Franklin D Roosevelt, who overcame the loss of the use of his legs to become arguably the most impressive political figure of the last 100 years.

Let’s be clear: attacking someone’s disability is bullying, plain and simple - and as the tragic recent case of Fiona Pilkington and her disabled daughter Frankie demonstrated beyond doubt, there are appalling consequences for our society when we fail to call such bullies out.

Yet too often we turn a blind eye - when Brown was recently called a “one-eyed Scottish idiot” by Jeremy Clarkson many were willingly blind to the playground thuggery at work.

There are justifiable reasons to attack Gordon Brown’s politics - but neither his eyesight nor his health are among them. So once again, let’s be plain: attacking someone’s disability is bullying - and shame on those who refuse to see it.

It’s The Sun wot withdrew it

by Alan Tyers

Britain’s biggest-selling daily paper has ditched the Labour party, trumpeting on its front page that ‘Labour’s Lost It’ and abandoning the party after 12 years of broad support.

The Sun will now champion the Conservatives in the run-up to the next election. The paper’s recently appointed editor, Dominic Mohan, will no doubt have been directed by Rupert Murdoch personally in this decision. The u-turn is the result of a cosying-up by David Cameron to News International that has been facilitated by the company’s chief executive Rebekah Brooks, the former Sun editor.

With three million readers, and a readership double that, The Sun obviously has a role to play. But perhaps Gordon should not be too down-hearted.

Not all Sun readers vote, and not all of them do what their paper tells them. In these days of the internet, user-generated content and all that gubbins, the reader is not just sitting there with his or her mouth open waiting to be spoon-fed an opinion.

So it’s not a disaster for Gordon - but it might be a barometer.

The Sun was pro-Tory up to and including Major’s premiership, then switched to Blair in 1997, and now it’s back to The Conservatives: Rupert, after all, does like to back a winner.

Forever young?

by Greg McDonald

If you’re planning on doing anything risky before 2028 you might want to reconsider, because those of us still here in twenty years are going to live forever.

Yes, according to American scientist Ray Kurzweil, technology is accelerating at such a rate that we’re just two decades away from immortality as nanobots first halt and then reverse the ageing process.

And if you imagine Kurzweil is a crack-pot whose mum still irons his Star-Trek pyjamas, beam this up: twenty years into our mortal past the world laughed at some of the professor’s other crazy predictions: mobile phones, the collapse of the USSR, and the internet you’re reading this blog on.

It doesn’t stop there either: Kurzweil’s immortal cyber-men run fifteen minute Olympic sprints without drawing breath and dash off novels in minutes.

And if talk of modified super-beings sounds crazy, look around you – from Madonna to dear old Anne Robinson, technologically modified eternally youthful immortals already walk amongst us.

And it’s not just celebrities: at the UN rumours abound that Gordon Brown’s Youtube smile was actually a programming error in early nanobot technology, while leading members of the EU fear Peter Mandelson has already drunk the blood of eternal undeath.

So there it is. Start saving ready to put your nano-feet up on Jupiter as we enter the immortal age. Just whatever you do, don’t get hit by a bus in December 2028.