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The Shard: London’s fat lady?
February 7th, 2012I can see its twinkling red lights from my bedroom window in north London, as it nears completion. By day I glimpse it from my bike sometimes on the skyline, sometimes in the middle distance.
Yesterday I happened much closer to the Shard – so close that I could feel the evolving cold wind tunnel that seems to be establishing in streets it overhangs.
From a distance the Shard is graceful, inflicting a kind of scale on everything that went before – from the BT Tower, to the Gherkin. But close up, as the sheath of glass spikes the freezing fog above, the emphasis is on the Shard below the waist.
From ground level, it is far from a thing of beauty. Fat billowing glass skirts mount the sides of the building, presumably rooting the great thing deep into the ground. It is so fat that it appears to occupy every square inch of land about it, butting hard on to buildings and streets.
Not an area of outstanding beauty I’ll confess, but an area nonetheless. And who can mourn the invasion of the erstwhile dominance of neighbouring Guys Hospital tower?
Is the trade off for distant grace, such a base? From the very bottom looking up, the Shard conjures the view of a three-year-old child standing outside a supermarket looking up fat ladies dresses as they put their trolleys back. Eventually there’s a rather beautiful head far above – but the in-between could do better!
And that implies no disrespect to fat ladies: from Botticelli to Stanley Spencer and Beryl Cooke, the beauty of the fat lady has been immortalised in art. But I’m not sure any artist will have much joy with the Shard’s bottom.
It’s – ugh, how shall I put it? Not as beautiful as its top.
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Feeling sorry for Fred Goodwin?
February 1st, 2012
We have all had a lot fun at the expense of Fred Goodwin. And it’s been a very nasty experience. In two previous Snowblogs I have raised the question of whether the titled bankers who were responsible for trashing the British economy and the UK’s financial integrity should lose their honours:
Snowblog: Is it time to feel the bankers’ ermine collars?
Snowblog: Should our bankers keep their titles?
But there is the stench of a witch-hunt and of scapegoating, in this politically led and motivated instance of knighthood stripping.
There appears to be little process, and certainly no wholesale review of who did what when and at what point such “punishment” kicks in. Indeed, a QC to whom I spoke last night advised that Mr Goodwin might well win a judicial review of the handling of his case by the Honours Forfeiture committee, on the issue of due process.
In the widely different cases of Stephen Hester and now of his predecessor there is the whiff of cant and hypocrisy in the air.
What started as anger over the mismanagement of a bank has now deteriorated to the Ruritanian absurdities of our continuing devotion to name-changing honours. The Honours system at the high end has long been seen to be in disrepute. Foreigners are perplexed by it, and those at home regularly suspect that something has gone on in the woodshed in the journey to the sword on the shoulder in Buckingham Palace.
The public is bemused that the criminal law has proved incapable of jailing a single banker for mismanagement of billions of pounds of their money. All the system is capable of is the removal of one greedy individual’s knighthood.
There is no transparency in all this and even less evidence of “due process”. When Knighthood stripping extends beyond odious dictators, the citizen deserves to be allowed to see what is going on, and why, and how. But then doesn’t the citizenry also deserves the right to know how such honours are arrived at in the first place?
A decade ago I made a Channel 4 documentary entitled Secrets of the Honours System. Nothing has changed since.
On the basis of what has happened to Fred Goodwin, there are many others who should be in the waiting room for similar action. But the playing field is now neither level, nor clean. The law is looking an ass.
The British deserve an honours system that does not change people’s names, but does respect exceptional activity that benefits wider society. In an age of cuts, the Honours Forfeiture Committee would seem to be one quick cut. The ‘Honours system’ itself, could be another candidate. A far more modest, believable, and transparent system could be put in its place. The money saved could go towards increasing the capacity of the Serious Fraud Office, and the Financial Services Authority finally to bring errant bankers to book.
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Feeling sorry for Stephen Hester?
January 30th, 2012Does one feel sorry for Stephen Hester? You may see this as a useless and irrelevant question. But when Labour got into the business of bust banks, ministers found that if they were to save the accounts, savings, mortgages, and investments of millions of taxpayers, they had to adopt the mechanisms and practices that in public, they said they most abhorred.
RBS already had Fred Goodwin to drag about the streets for taxpayers to throw rotten fruit at. But having sacked him they urgently needed a believable figure to drag the bank out of what was now a taxpayer-funded mire. The coming together of the state and RBS was the most emergency of shotgun weddings. There was neither the time nor the inclination to use RBS as a new model of moral banking and someone had to do the filthy job of sorting it out. Read the rest of this entry “
Hugh Cudlipp lecture: Poised for journalism’s golden age
January 23rd, 2012Channel 4 News Presenter Jon Snow gives the Hugh Cudlipp lecture at the London College of Communication on 23 January. You can read the full text of his speech below.
Thank you Lady Cudlipp, the Cudlipp Trustees, and Staff and Students of the London College of Communication for inviting me. I’m excited to be here tonight.
How timely that we should be celebrating the life of so legendary and pivotal figure as Hugh Cudlipp: a man who inaugurated one of the finest periods of tabloid journalism. The nearest I ever got to Hugh Cudlipp – beyond shaking the hand of his dear wife Jodi, present
with us tonight – was to be employed at LBC by his nephew Michael Cudlipp, who literally told me to get on my bike and become a proper reporter.
How apt then that we should be paying obeisance to an emblem of a Golden Age of tabloid newspapers in what is inescapably the darkest and bleakest moment this end of the industry has ever known. It is salutary to think of what Hugh Cudlipp achieved and to wonder what he would have made of today’s tabloid leadership…
And what a life! – Leaving school at 14: Becoming a peer less than fifty years later in recognition of his life’s achievement.
I feel hugely honoured to be allowed to speak in his memory here tonight – hugely honoured to follow in the footsteps of Michael Grade, Andrew Marr, Alastair Campbell, Alan Rusbridger, and Lionel Barber. (I may have left a couple out there…)
Tonight, I want to focus on the art, the trade, the power of journalism – in print, onscreen, online and beyond, and the breath-taking opportunity that is beckoning us on into a new Golden Age of journalism. Read the rest of this entry “
A visit to Cern is a journey to the beyond
January 20th, 2012What strikes you as you arrive at Cern, is just how old the buildings are that house this vast 21st century scientific brilliance. ‘Sixties jerry-built’ would not be unkind – peeling paint, faded colours contrasting with what lies beyond – vineyards, stately chateaux shrouded in the Swiss mist. You get no sense of the beauty and scale of what lies below.
What captivates at Cern, is not just the scientific daring – pushing out beyond any frontier physics has ever known – but the extraordinary anthropological circumstance in which it is carried out.
I’ll come to the science in a moment. But imagine 1,000 PhDs from 38 countries supported by 2,000 other physicists and engineers, from 174 universities, supported by thousands staff from 100 countries across the world.
Indian, Pakistani, Israelis, Saudis (including, in particular, woman scientists) work alongside each other. There is the most extraordinary cohesion. And the leadership is meritocratic: every section director we met was amongst the finest physicist or engineer of his and her generation.
I was particularly struck by Professor Fabiola Gionnotti who gave up her concert piano career (from Bach to Debussy) to concentrate on physics and now leads the Atlas team that generates and finally processes the findings of the Hadron Super Collider.
Cern is a European venture, hatched in 1954 to harness the science that had played so infernal a role in war, for peaceful purpose. Amazingly Europe has funded it (£6bn to build, £1bn annual costs), ever since. It is proof, if proof were ever needed, that Europe as a selfless non-nationalistic entity can work.
So to the science – this extraordinary 27km ring under the Swiss-French borders beyond Geneva plays host to the igniting and projection of the most powerful beam in the world – blasted at just under the speed of light, to collide with another beam hurtling at the same speed. From the combustion of that collision flow many secrets of the universe.
Key amongst them the question as to whether Professor Higgs’ theory that there is a particle that plays a critical role in shaping mass. The scientists declare that they will definitely know whether the particle, the ‘Higgs Boson’, does, or does not exist sometime this year.
If it does not, the consequence will be as exciting as if it does. Because it will mean that something else is in play – and no one will have a clue quite what. But if it does, it will finally confirm the basis upon which particle physics is currently predicated.
We were taken right into the tunnel to see the vast Barrel Toroid magnets that bend the beams around the circle. But the great climax was to visit the massive cathedral-like chamber in which the ‘Detector’ is housed.
It is in and of itself a complex of unbelievable beauty. Bronze, silver, gold sheeted panels – box like elements with blue, red, yellow, and copper black wires threaded between them. A part on the left is like a great Richard Rogers tower – looking like the Pompidoou Centre in Paris. To the right the construct looks like a vast water wheel stacked with graceful metallic contraptions.
We were lucky – it had all been stilled for its winter maintenance. Towering more than a 150ft above us, we were reduced to midgets. Inside it all, men and women worked feverishly to ready it for its next great test.
Make no mistake – particle physics is as exciting as rocket propulsion and space science were for the last generation.
I’m no scientist – I was turned on to Cern by Rolf Heuer the director-general of the whole shooting match. I interviewed him in front of 1,000 people at the Hay Festival last year.
From my zero gravity feed of no information he fuelled me with an enthusiasm that has not waned to this day. I cannot wait for the Higgs Boson resolution. Delving deep into the sumptuous beauty of the apparatus that will make that great discovery has proved one of the most exciting of days.
By the way, one of the engineers told me that isolating the either existent or non-existent particle is like fishing, save that instead of taking the fish out, you take the water out – and they have just about extracted every drop that there is. Make of that as you will!
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Did Cameron’s Saudi trip have to be so brief?
January 16th, 2012The prime minister made a quick and extremely low-profile visit to Saudi Arabia over the weekend.
One reporter’s Thatcher is another director’s Iron Lady
January 10th, 2012I’m haunted by her. Not by her in the flesh, but her as portrayed by Meryl Streep. Make no mistake, Streep does become Thatcher in celluloid. Let nothing detract from the scale of her achievement. An American woman of 62 becomes Thatcher at 48, and Thatcher at 80 – completely convincingly, vocally, physically.
It’s strange because I am myself the right age to have reported her from the beginnings of her power to her political end. As a cub reporter I caught her final year as education secretary and moved to TV reporting as she became Tory leader. By 1979, I was “live” outside Downing Street as she became prime minister – a snatch of my doorstep report makes it into the Iron Lady movie. Read the rest of this entry “
The Arab Spring’s forgotten pearl
January 9th, 2012
A friend of mine is just returned from Bahrain. He seeks to go back there so does not want me to disclose his identity. What he saw makes salutary reading.
In many ways the uprising in Bahrain, and its suppression, is among the most shocking and under-reported of the entire ‘Arab Spring’.
He describes the streets of Manama largely deserted. Many cranes on building sites are stilled. The few people out tend to be Filipino servants who scurry about running errands or purchasing goods from behind closed Bahraini shutters.
The centre of the uprising – the Pearl Roundabout has been uprooted and now plays host to troops from an indeterminate Arab force. Where Bahraini forces end and Saudi or Qatari troops begin is a moot point. The Saudi ‘occupation’ continues but, as far as possible, out of public view. The Qataris are more open.
One Bahraini blogger calls the Pearl roundabout – ‘the heart of darkness’. But the gloom is endlessly perforated by spray-painted slogans. One reads F*** (King) Hamadi’. There are many stenciled faces of those who have been killed by the Arab forces. Every morning new banners of protest sprout and then disappear. Tyres are burned in the Shia neighbourhoods. In all but the most contested areas, the spray-painted slogans (always in black) are crudely whitewashed. Read the rest of this entry “
Coriolanus rules, ok?
January 6th, 2012At last, my red carpet moment! Last night I attended the premiere of Ralph Fiennes’ remarkable film of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Fiennes directs and acts the central role.
Actually it was a very short carpet, constrained by the narrow streets of Mayfair outside the Curzon cinema. And I was an hour late anyway, owing to the “day job”.
But the film is a startling commentary on our very present times – the Arab Spring, the Tottenham riots – even the parlous state of global leadership are all there. So too is a mother’s love. Indeed it is the mother who, with all due respect to Fiennes, steals the show. Vanessa Redgrave is the triumphant, awe-inspiring and passionate climax to it all.
The scene in which she leaves Rome unarmed, striding with the wife and boy child of Coriolanus along the road out of Rome through rank upon rank of armed men, to plead with him not to attack Rome, is an exceptional moment even by her own high standards. It is in the end what makes this such a supremely special film. Read the rest of this entry “
What could 2012 hold?
December 27th, 2011It is, in the immortal words of someone much wiser than I, “the economy, stupid”.
As the New Year turns, it is still hard to determine which will come first: an individual massive bank failure that spooks the entire global financial system, bringing others crashing behind it, or the default of a sovereign economy, causing the disintegration of the euro altogether.
What is undeniable about 2011 is that the capitalist model ran out of road. What once was intimate and national – banking – has gone global, and the governance of financial activity that was once equally intimate and national has not gone adequately global.There is no global regulator. Hence extraordinary financial deals are conducted across borders in nanoseconds that are neither effectively regulated, nor, in many cases fully understood.
The horror of the sub-prime mortgage scandal in the US in 2008 that signalled the scale of what was going on has not been addressed.
In 2012 therefore the stage is set at many levels for financial and consequent economic disaster. Read the rest of this entry “
