About plausibility

I just unearthed an article I wrote for Prospect in 2009, in which I argued that we were living through an age of fleeting plausibility, where cool gimmicks like CGI offered us things that might just possibly be real, and we enjoyed them on that basis, until we quickly realised they were bollocks. But that initial moment was the important bit: 

Yet this was also the decade in which we allowed ourselves to believe, for a while at least, the silliest, most implausible narratives. Or to put it more clearly, we allowed ourselves the pleasure of half-belief—which, especially when a million people are doing it with you, is one of the most deliciously satisfying human emotions. 

And now we have AI, which offers us stuff that can’t possibly be real but we believe it anyway and keep on believing it and get grumpy with people who tell us otherwise. And are we deliciously satisfied? Are we?

About restaurants

Following on from last week’s celebration of musical meh-ness, here’s Marina O’Loughlin in the FT explaining why it’s OK for reviewers to say that a rubbish restaurant is rubbish.

The job of newspaper critics — film, TV, restaurant, whatever — is to sell newspapers, not proselytise for what they’re employed to critique. Opinions are just that, so we find voices we trust and follow accordingly. If not, if personality and preferences, tendencies and turns of phrase don’t matter, then bring on our AI overlords. There are some restaurant critics I find almost unreadable, but then I don’t have to read them, do I? But nor do I feel the need to announce their obsolescence from a standpoint that celebrates the vanilla.

About Uncut

This could become a habit. For the second time in a few months, I find myself picking up a real live music magazine. This time it’s Uncut, to which I was never particularly loyal even when I did read such things on a regular basis, but there’s a cover story about one of my favourite American bands, and a review of a box set by the other one, plus some other intriguing stuff, so, well, sorry, Mojo.

One thing that’s changed since I did regularly peruse Uncut (and Mojo, The Wire, NME, Select, Vox...) is that each review now carries a score, a mark out of 10. Journalists don’t usually like doing these, as it appears to reduce critical engagement to some kind of mathematical construct, but apparently the record companies do, so the advertising departments do, so they happen.

The odd thing is that, in this edition of Uncut at least, pretty much all the given marks occupy a small space on the scale, a critical cluster. They’re either 7/10, 8/10 or 9/10. Nothing’s truly dire, but nothing’s utterly brilliant either. Don’t frighten the horses, whatever you do. Even the album of the month (by Gorillaz), only gets a 9. Maybe it’s a quiet month, or maybe that’s what music’s like nowadays. In any case, it does make the whole process seem a bit pointless.

Wait, though – what’s this? Tucked away on page 33 is a soundtrack album by Jon Hopkins and Biggi Hilmers (of whom I have never heard) for a documentary called Wilding (of which I have never heard, again) and it actually manages to disappoint the writer so much that it only scrapes 6/10, three lesser than Gorillaz as Nigel Tufnell might have put it. Which surely isn’t truly bad, but possibly edges into being mediocrity-adjacent. Here’s a bit. Go on, you decide.

About The Wire (not the cop show)

I picked up a copy of The Wire for the first time in several years and, despite it being the 500th edition, it seems somehow diminished, as is often the case on the rare occasions I chance upon a print periodical and yes, I guess I’m part of the problem, aren’t I? An appeal for donations (as distinct from subscriptions) means it feels more like the journal of some Trotskyite splinter group being sold outside Brixton station in 1991 than a magazine covering strange music.

Maybe it’s not a coincidence that it’s more overtly political than I remember. An article by Mark Fisher’s biographer, arguing that hauntology was “concerned with the ways in which certain forms of fugitive music continue to resist recuperation by capitalism”; another in which Theodora Laird explains that “the solitude of my practice is a direct reaction to my experiences of racialised othering”. Moreover there appears to be an assumption that relatively new-fangled semantic orthodoxies need no further explanations. Two separate musicians are referred to as “they”, without the clarification that they (by which I mean the two of them, not either one individually using that pronoun and as I’ve said before the problem is not that non-binary people require a pronoun, it’s that they want one that’s already being used for something else) are (I assume) non-binary and this is their preferred pronoun; and a piece on using sign language to interpret music performances mentions “Deaf” (capital D) audiences, implicitly taking the side of those who refuse to acknowledge hearing loss as a disability. (For more on this see Ahmed Khalifa’s interesting post.)

There were some gems amidst the lectures, though. First, a quotation from the former Swedish PM Tage Erlander: “A politician’s job is to build the dancefloor, so that everyone can dance as they please.” Which is nice, even if I haven’t danced since about the same time I was buying Trotskyite journals in Brixton. And an article about the Chicago trio Bitchin Bajas, who are officially my new favourite band, even if I refuse to dance to them.

About the Orient Express

I’ve been responsible over the years for more than enough of what’s known as luxury lifestyle journalism, so I know the deal. You don’t bite the hand. And, as such, I’m not going to criticise Angela Giuffrida for what might seem to be an unduly gushing write-up of the relaunched Orient Express service between Sicily and Rome. I do wonder, though, whether anyone prepared to spend upward of €11,000 on a nostalgic trundle aboard said train will need to have it explained to them who Poirot is, the relevant book in which he appears, or who wrote it.

PS: And on the Today programme this morning (Wed 27), we had it explained to us what the Holocaust was.

PPS: And there’s more, there’s always more. Apparently there are people who don’t know what punk rock was.

About the death of fiction

Alwyn Turner argues that we are in a “post-fiction world” in which the death of any form of common culture means that any remaining common points of reference (Sherlock Holmes, Daleks and so on) are from the past. Nothing new is coming along that we can assume everybody, or even a healthy majority, will know and understand. (Turner also reminds us that you don’t need to have read a line of Doyle, or even seen a film or TV adaptation, to know who Sherlock Holmes is.) And what stands in their place is the mundanity of fact:

The need for a shared culture remains, but in the absence of fiction we have the dominance of ‘reality’, a social agenda dominated by news stories and sport, not by Morecambe and Wise or who was on Top of the Pops last night. Strip away major events – the Royal Family, Brexit, Covid – and what have been the shared moments of the last ten years? The fortunes of the various national football teams, dissatisfaction with politicians and politics, and a handful of hashtags (#MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter) that emerged from the internet to dominate conversation around the dinner-tables and water-coolers of the nation. It’s all factual. 

Coincidentally, I’ve been reading Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines, which collects short news items from French publications in the early 20th century, any one of which might be the starting point for some convoluted epic by Flaubert or Hugo. Or, indeed, to monopolise a water-cooler for a few minutes.

“To die like Joan of Arc!” cried Terbaud from the top of a pyre made of his furniture. The fireman of Saint-Open stifled his ambition.  

At Troyes, M.M.C., a hide merchant, was run over by a train. One of his legs rolled into a ditch.  

Accountant Auguste Bailly, from Boulogne, fractured his skull when he fell from a flying trapeze. 

The gendarmes of Morlaix were sent to Plougar to substitute lay teachers for the nuns who had barricaded themselves in the school. 

Frogs, sucked up from Belgian ponds by the storm, rained down upon the streets of the red-light district of Dunkirk. 

Nurse Elise Bachmann, whose day off was yesterday, put on a public display of insanity. 

And a few lines later...

A certain madwoman arrested downtown falsely claimed to be nurse Elise Bachmann. The latter is perfectly sane.

About Connie Francis

Clickbait, or the principle of clickbait at least, predates the internet by a long while. I remember those hoardings at the pitch of the Evening Standard sellers, declaring “FAMOUS ACTOR DIES” and if you were tempted to buy the paper you’d discover it was someone who was in Emmerdale in 1974.

What the web has done is to refine this technique, luring you in with something more specific, but often irrelevant, reductive and often plain insulting. An obvious example was when the double-Oscar winner Maggie Smith died and all the headlines mentioned was Harry Potter and Downton Abbey – the last-named being a show so banal that even Dame Maggie herself couldn’t be arsed to watch it.

But yesterday they were outdone by The Independent, which marked the death of Connie Francis, a performer who sold over 100 millions in a turbulent, incident-packed career, with this headline:

SINGER BEHIND VIRAL TIKTOK HIT DIES AT 87

About blown minds

I’ve remarked in recent-ish posts about the extent to which online journalism has become the province of a sort of performative artlessness, where the banausic details of an event (in this case a Bob Dylan concert) take precedence over any kind of critical analysis; and also how an individual’s own ignorance (in this case about a word coined in 1960) is set up as default state for the rest of humanity, and anyone who knows more is an object of suspicion and loathing.

These two trends have met and had a big, ugly baby in the shape of a Buzzfeed article by one Caroline Bologna, who claims to find her mind blown by the information that “a.m.” and “p.m.” don’t stand for “after midnight” and “past midday” after all. I mean, that’s not a passing comment, that’s what the article’s about. It has as much weight and value as one of those videos where a Gen-Z influencer gasps and ultimately bursts into tears upon hearing a Kajagoogoo album for the first time. And I wonder what exactly you would need to blow a Buzzfeed’s journalist’s mind. On reflection, a damp drinking straw would do it.

About Obama

In the light of the strangely half-assed military parade in Washington over the weekend, here’s something I wrote 17 years ago about how the American populist right perceives even a passing interest in anything foreign as weird and dangerous. The names have changed but very little else has.

Obama's weakness is not that he's black, or young, or left-wing, or that he used cocaine; it's that his background is dangerously cosmopolitan... Why would any sensible person go abroad, where they talk funny and you can't get Cap'n Crunch? What is he? Gay, or French, or something?... And this would explain the paradox by which the supposedly patriotic American right consistently attempts to undermine Vietnam veterans (John Kerry, Max Cleland, even John McCain), while lauding those who avoided serving (Bush, Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, the egregious Saxby Chambliss, et al). These guys weren't cowards, you see: unlike Obama, they just loved America too much to leave it...

About book lists

Of course the news that an AI-generated summer reading list for the Chicago Sun-Times was weighted heavily in favour of books that, er, don’t actually exist has embattled meat-and-mucus critics crowing over another thing that our new digital overlords have royally arsed up.

But hang on a minute. We don’t need ones and zeroes to invent new works from the likes of Isabel Allende or Percival Everett. Remember Jim Crace’s Useless America, which owed its (non-) existence to a mangled phone conversation with someone at Penguin? Or indeed my own Lady Gaga biography, which never progressed beyond a few weeks of research, but still garnered five stars on GoodReads. 

In any case, even when the product is real, do you really think the (human) author of such thumbs-up compendia has made a series of informed decisions about what should or should not be included? I spent several years on a strange planet called Lifestyle Journalism and, trust me, very often you have little to go on bar a press release and an advertising exec suggesting forcefully that it would be very helpful if specific products from her client might be included, or else. So, yes, this book (or holiday or necklace or vodka or cardigan or chi-chi gluten-free bistro or invasive surgical procedure) is good and you should buy it, because we say so, even if we’ve never been in the same room as the bloody thing.

Ultimately, AI succeeds not by doing things better than humans, but by doing them equally badly.

PS: Another example from the archives: in defence of the Black Crowes review that was more like an educated guess.

About Chris Jefferies

Interesting article by Patrick McGuinness in the LRB, flashing back to the case of his former teacher Chris Jefferies, who was spuriously accused of murder and dragged through the tabloid mire, apparently because he had strange hair, didn’t own a TV, didn’t like sport and, most reprehensible of all, appeared to have been an excellent English teacher. “Did they really think showing a Jean-Luc Godard film or reading Browning indicated murderous potential?” asks McGuinness. Well, yes, of course they bloody did. As always, these staunch defenders of Western culture run away screaming when presented with anyone who knows or cares about Western culture at any level deeper than a commemorative tea-towel from the V&A.

McGuinness also recalls the activities that Jefferies ran for boys who didn’t want to join the school Cadet Force: 

It was like a version of the Foreign Legion for misfits: the asthmatics and the diabetics, the boys with the hearing aids and the boys on crutches, the epileptic, the attention-challenged, the marginal, the sad and the emotionally combustible. We loved it.

PS: Now I’m reminded of the 1997 election and the deeply weird Tory candidate Dr Adrian Rogers, who declared that his opponent Ben Bradshaw “is a homosexual, works for the BBC, rides a bicycle, speaks German: he’s everything about our country that is wrong.”

About bespoke

I got into a polite exchange of views a couple of days back over an otherwise unexceptional story about, of all things, expensive mince pies. Or, more specifically, over the language used by the good citizens of Orford, in Suffolk, where the Pump Street Bakery makes delicacies that are supposedly the priciest mince pies going. When one of the locals described them as “bespoke”, I was confused, because there had been nothing in the article to tell us this was the case. In fact, if they really were bespoke, or what I’d define as bespoke, created to the precise specifications of each customer, then the price (£25 for six) wouldn’t seem so exorbitant.

And it was only when a second person used the same adjective to describe the pies that I realised what was going on. “Bespoke” doesn’t have that specific meaning any more, the sense of having a suit made where every detail, the measurements, the cloth, the precise diameter of the buttons, is decided by the person paying the bill. It just means something luxurious, something posh. Something that costs £25 for six. 

I wrote about this a decade ago, discussing how I no longer use certain words (“iconic”, “surreal” and so on) because I can’t be sure whether they’ll be understood to have (what I regard as) the correct, precise meaning, or a more fuzzy definition (“famous”, “odd”). I’ve subsequently learned that there’s a linguistic term for this; semantic bleaching, a sort of meh-ification of our discourse, where the meaning of a word loses its intensity and, ultimately, its usefulness. “Curate” is another example. What once suggested a discriminating expertise employed to select pieces (pots, poems, plesiosaurs) for public consumption now means nothing more than choosing.

Does this matter? Well, if you think that it’s useful to have some words with a precise meaning, even if we don’t deploy them all that often, then yes, it does. But if it matters that much, what do we do about it? That’s where discussions on Friday tended towards the full and frank. I suggested that even though this use of “bespoke” was what the interviewees actually said, it was the duty of The Guardian to find some way of indicating that it wasn’t an accurate use of language. The pies aren’t bespoke, any more than they’re purple or three miles high or made in Burkina Faso. Maybe a discreet “[sic]” after the word? Or just replace it with what they really meant, which is “posh”. This does run the risk of insulting or demoralising people who may not have all the cultural capital of the average Guardian journalist, or editor, or reader but to be honest we do it all the time. If an interviewee commits a grammatical solecism (“you was”, for example) it will miraculously become “you were” by the time it’s published. Nobody’s yet died. 

And, yes, language moves on and the meaning of words changes. Which is great when the language is expanded, and we get neologisms like “skibidi” and “rizz” and “brat summer” and most of these will sound positively archaic in five years time but while they’re here they define a generation and baffle another generation and that’s what they’re for. But taking a useful word like “bespoke” and giving it a meaning that can be served by a dozen other words – essentially making the original word useless – doesn’t expand language. It makes it smaller.

And there’s a practical, mundane angle to this. I teach English to people who don’t have it as a first language. I always encourage them to aim first to be understood, and only then to worry about speaking “correctly”. But at some point they want and need to know what the correct version is, the right tense, the right conjunction, le mot juste, even if they don’t always hit the target. And if my students come across the word “bespoke” and ask me what it means, do I just tell them it means “posh”, so as not to upset two people in Suffolk?

About Bob Dylan

A currently popular model for online content is what I call “I went” journalism, in which a cultural product (a stage play, a theme park, a restaurant, you name it) is covered in the form of a narrative, in which the writer’s own personal experience takes precedence over any explicit critical engagement. So the banausic details of the evening (how easy it is to park, the variety of ice creams available in the interval, whether there was someone unusually tall in front of the writer) get equal billing with such trifles as acting or direction or the provenance of the hispi cabbage. 

Consider, for example, Kayleigh Cantrell’s piece about Bob Dylan’s recent gig in Liverpool. Yes, she gives some idea what it was like. The band “performed elegantly”, assisted by “stage lamps, which simply added to the classiness”. And, fear not, Bob “played his signature harmonica”. Kayleigh does namecheck several songs, and observes that Dylan played them differently from the way he did them on his records, but doesn’t explain how, nor does she ever venture an opinion as to why.

Because if she did that, she wouldn’t have had time to reflect on her excitement at going to her first phone-free gig. (“It added so much more to the experience” – OK, but what exactly did it add?). Or indeed for an extended coda about a busker playing Dylan tunes outside the arena, who appears to have made lots of money from the punters and Kayleigh’s wondering how much he made. (So why didn’t she ask him? Like a journalist might?)

Let’s not heap any opprobrium upon Kayleigh, though. She’s just giving readers what they want, a bare description of what happened, alongside how it made her feel. Nothing to frighten the horses. No analysis, no inference, no theory. After all, more people watch Gogglebox than read what’s left of the music press, let alone anything with “CULTURAL” in the title. And what she’s doing is far from new, of course. Think back to 2012 and Marilyn Hagerty’s legendary appreciation of a new branch of Olive Garden. Keep it up, Kayleigh. Never mind what might be going on inside the head of the Nobel-winning harmonica-blower. Just remember the breadsticks.

PS: If you’re one of the half-dozen people who still give a toss what old-style critics think, here’s David Thomson interviewing Greil Marcus.

PPS: I suppose this week I should have been musing about what’s happened on the other side of the Atlantic. I’ve got form, haven’t I? But then, all the success of the populist right appears to be based on surface observation and gut reaction rather than anything deeper or more intellectually testing, so maybe Kayleigh in Dylanland and four more years of Trump are just two manifestations of the same thing.

PPPS: Ah, another one of those old-fashioned music hacks – in this instance Richard Williams, formerly of Melody Maker and Time Out, and the original presenter of Whistle Test – also reviews a Dylan gig, this time putting the experience in some sort of context, and even going so far as to suggest that he wasn’t all that great, actually. And he doesn’t mention a busker, or what happened to his phone. Or, indeed, breadsticks. That said, Williams, his own track record notwithstanding, is reduced to putting the review up on his own blog. One-nil to Kayleigh, I reckon. 

PPPPS: Yet another oldie weighs in, this time Toby Litt. And he actually mentions history. The very nerve...

About missing the point

Two examples of people who appear to be in the wrong job. A pub landlord who offers discounts to customers who order by app from their tables, thus discouraging the horrific prospect of bar staff actually having to engage with punters:

I’ve found that not having to be constantly serving people is way better for my mental health. Bar work can be really mentally tiring. This takes the stress away rather than having to constantly interact with different people for eight hours straight. 

And Adrian Chiles who, last time I looked, was still purporting to be someone who writes for a living, complaining about apostrophes and then

But, oh Lord, the agonising, circuitous routes around words you’d have to find to construct a bloody sentence.

Which sounds to me like a pretty good definition of Chiles’s chosen, and in his case, well-remunerated trade.

I don’t want to disturb anyone with an image of Chiles, so I’ll just leave this here, wondering whether in a year’s time we’ll have the faintest idea to what it refers:

About horses

The recent incident that saw horses from the Household Cavalry running loose in the streets of central London is surely open to all sorts of interpretations: musing on the place of such ceremony in a modern army; questions of the relationship between humans and animals; hints towards the Book of Revelation.

But Simon Duke of Chronicle Live wasn’t going to follow the herd, was he? Faced with these weird, almost dreamlike images, at once beautiful and terrifying, surreal in the true sense of the world, Simon knew instinctively that what his readers would want to know was how Ben Shephard and his colleagues were covering the story on ITV’s This Morning. No analysis, no context, no insight, none of that poncey stuff. Just the fact that Cat Deeley said “Wow”.

Inevitably we can paint this in Baudrillardian terms, where the reality (terrified, blood-streaked horses weaving between bemused Londoners) is eradicated by the image (Vanessa Feltz’s reaction); or just see it as the death of useful journalism, where one set of media hacks cannibalise the responses of another set, the whole circus consuming itself like a massive digital ouroboros. And, to be honest, I’m just catching scraps from the table as well, aren’t I?

PS: Another urban tale that surely symbolises something even if we can’t agree what: the sails fall off the Moulin Rouge.

About pop

Just came across something I wrote for The Guardian in 2008, offering a sort of “OK, boomer” sigh avant la lettre, suggesting that old people should stop appropriating pop music. Which in turn prompted this delightful response:

Presumably by ‘old’ the author means himself; he’s bald and looks very boring. Probably not intelligent enough for classical though; Andy Williams fan? Nana Mouskouri?

PS: On a happier note, I’m now in the dictionary. For context, go here.

About Brontez Purnell

I can’t claim to know much about the work of Brontez Purnell but it does seem to me that if you’re the subject of the New York Times’s By The Book feature, affecting not to read very much is an, um, interesting look.

About Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

In, of all places, a news item about the death of Stuart Organ, who for many years played the headmaster of Grange Hill school, I see Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead described as “a spin-off of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet”. And the phrase strikes me as totally wrong-headed but the more I think of it, it feels about right. After all, R&G isn’t a sequel, nor yet a prequel. It takes place in the same fictional universe as Hamlet, the action of which is progressing at the same time, and occasionally intersects. It exists in relation to Hamlet in the same way that Torchwood and The Sarah-Jane Adventures exist in relation to Doctor Who, sharing characters and narratives, but with a different emphasis.

But then I still wonder whether the author of the piece actually knows that, or just threw the sentence together after a brief Wikipedia check. And do you know what makes me doubt her? It’s the fact that she refers not to “Hamlet”, but to “William Shakespeare’s Hamlet”. Someone who knew about theatre would instinctively offer the title alone, assuming that everyone knows what Hamlet is, who wrote it, approximately what it’s about, even if they aren’t able to quote it by the yard. Which feels a bit harsh, because her definition of Stoppard’s play is ultimately correct. But it’s accidentally correct and I wonder whether that’s good enough.

About Gregg and Timmy

I mentioned a few years ago that the two best ever instalments of the Sunday Times magazine’s venerable A Life in the Day feature were both by actors called Tom. What I hadn’t realised, because like so many others, I’ve lost the habit of burrowing into the weekend papers, is that the Telegraph has for some time been running its own pallid simulacrum of ALitD and, unsurprisingly, it’s not as good.

Well, until the gurning greengrocer Gregg Wallace took his turn and, well, it still wasn’t good but at least it was funny.

The problem was that, unlike the Toms’ takes on their respective days, Wallace wasn’t trying to be funny, and the fact that his pride in being able to get into the gym half an hour before mere civilians, his staunch defence of Harvester, his wargaming, his lack of body fat, all speak of someone with such a total lack of self-awareness that Alan Partridge comparisons were inevitable. “Is this a parody?” we chorused.

No, it wasn’t. But this is:

This, Brian Blessed gong, Frazzles, the ghost of Patrick Macnee and all, is the work of Mark Bowsher but inevitably the whole thing developed a life of its own within hours and several people thought it was genuine. Well, genuine in the sense that Timmy Mallett himself had written it, not that it was in any way an accurate representation of his life.

Because ultimately all of the other articles are artifices, constructions hovering in a liminal space between objective reality and how the subject wishes to be presented. The difference is that the two Toms (and Jeffrey Bernard, who collaborated on Baker’s piece) were fully aware of what they were doing and Gregg Wallace wasn’t. And I’d like to think that if Timmy Mallett (with whom I once shared a lift, sandwiched between him and Tony Blackburn, which does demonstrate how easy it is to drift into Partridge territory) were to do a real article on these lines, it would be closer to the Toms than to what Gregg did. But a tiny bit like the parody version as well. Just to keep us guessing.

About the House of Lords

I try not to do too much politics (with a capital ‘P’) on this blog, but this piece, by Janice Turner, is just too good to miss. So let’s say I’m including it as an example of good journalism, good writing, good art, so we’ll allow it to circumvent the rules. Which is strangely appropriate...

“It has been quite the journey,” said Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge, beginning her maiden House of Lords speech. But “journey” has many modern usages, so which does she mean? Geographically, the red benches are but a half-mile from Downing Street where the noble lady was an undistinguished special adviser. Temporally, just eight years have elapsed since Charlotte Owen, now 30, graduated from the University of York.
Was it a social mobility journey? Owen spoke of her maternal grandparents who bought their own council house (yet not of her own private school). So her elevation, as the sadly thwarted Baroness Dorries of Anfield might have said, constitutes a one-woman levelling up. Or was it an “emotional journey”, the stuff of Strictly triumphs? Hard to tell, given that Owen declines all scrutiny about the exceptional talents that make her worthy of spending a probable half-century formulating British laws.
I used to compare the House of Lords to my freezer: where you shove all the pushing-its-sell-by-date stuff you can’t bear to bin. But lately it’s more an air fryer, which, with magical speed, turns raw into cooked or can give the stale and flaccid a palatable crunch. David Cameron, fattening in a fleece in his shepherd’s hut, curdled by dodgy lobbying dosh, writing rose garden memoirs about a milder political era he carelessly kiboshed, is now crispy Lord Cameron, foreign secretary: all kingly again in his Savile Row suit.
It’s awkward to say, given that my colleagues on these pages include nobility, but what a national disgrace is the House of Lords. (At a Times leaving do I realised too late I was scoffing about its corrupt appointments to a baroness: “Oh, sorry, I don’t mean you!”) But after decades observing the establishment at close quarters, I’ve seen how, with a few stolid exceptions, political appointees rarely bring a fine mind, specialist expertise or unique perspective to public life. They’re the mates at the Chequers barbecues, the solid backroom blokes, the big donors and brown-nosers, the clubbable, never the cussed.  
Most likely, the “journey” Baroness Owen refers to is through a flaming tunnel of tabloid speculation. Questions about whether she could be Boris Johnson’s daughter or lover would be purest sexism if she’d been appointed by any other politician. But with his unknown number of children, rackety love life and a nepotism so shameless he ennobled his own brother and tried to knight his father, Stanley Johnson, it seems perfectly fair to ask.
Youth in itself is not the issue: few would balk at Baroness Malala, aged 26. But you can look at Owen’s CV from every possible angle and find no clue. The House of Lords Appointments Commission (Holac) never shows its workings, so all we know is that Owen “is in good standing in the community in general” and her “past conduct” will not bring the upper chamber into disrepute. But does the Lords have any repute left to diss?
Johnson finally killed the golden goose, which for generations parped out lovely eggs, rich in attendance allowances, central London parking spaces plus the kudos born of our abiding deference to aristocratic titles, which secures other lucrative sinecures and places on boards. Perhaps we should be grateful he was so flagrant, doling out peerages to his partygate crew, so that the need for reform is so clear, and desired by 71 per cent of the public now.
After Owen’s speech, which kindly older peers indulged like a grandchild’s school play, another Johnson appointee materialised. This was only the second speech by Lord Lebedev, Baron of Hampton and Siberia. A bit ungrateful really, given the urgency and unusual zeal with which Johnson championed his peerage. That he ignored MI6’s explicit advice that Lebedev posed a national security risk is as creepily suspect as Jeremy Corbyn’s pro-Russian response to the Skripal poisonings, and has never been fully explained. It demonstrated too the powerlessness of Holac to constrain a PM’s most egregious patronage. Johnson overrode its ruling, so a KGB officer’s son swaggered into our democracy’s heart.
More even than the feudal obscenity of 92 hereditary peers or the cash for honours practised by every party, which has turned the Lords into a bloated 785-member Mr Creosote, Lebedev and Owen signal urgency for change. Labour has already published Gordon Brown’s constitutional review, which proposes the second chamber become a house of the nations and regions: fully elected but not synced to the Commons cycle to ensure a different political composition. But much small print is missing, such as the type of proportional representation by which peers (or whatever they’ll be called) are elected. If this is the European list system, the appointment and ranking of candidates will be just as driven by political patronage.
Besides, do we want a house of ex-councillors or local grandees, with none of the specialist knowledge that the best of the Lords brings to legislative scrutiny? Every year Holac itself recommends exceptional individuals for peerages. These have included the scientist Susan Greenfield, statistician Claus Moser, spy chief Eliza Manningham-Buller and Big Issue founder John Bird. Brown’s paper does not allow for any non-elected appointments but what nation wouldn’t welcome such diverse talents, or even wish to keep a few bishops, as long as other religions are represented too.
Every government for decades has promised Lords reform, but never got beyond tweaks. Constitutional change is always seen as dry, too time-consuming to be worth the political capital. Now it looks inevitable, thanks to Baroness Owen: a scandal, a mystery and a national joke.