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He looked as if he was not fed very well but he’s got the perfect haircut’, observed Russian MP Vyacheslav Nikonov after ‘whistleblower’ Edward Snowden, late of the United States’ National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, appeared before an invited audience of lawyers and human rights professionals inside the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport.

Snowden’s ‘perfect haircut’ is short at the back and sides, longer out front and on top – the classic High School ‘sports cut’ grown up, grown out and gone wrong.

Snowden himself is a ‘perfect’ representative of the West’s disaffected middle class. Fine features in a WASP-ish complexion. Spectacles for seriousness-with-self-consciousness: rectangular lenses (antidote to the Vietnam-era aviator-shape), coloured, ‘creative class’ frames that speak supposedly sophisticated North European (parlez-vous Ikea?) in contrast to the allegedly crude dialect of Middle America.

Now 30, Snowden’s carrying a couple of days of apparently adolescent stubble. More beard (six months’ more, at this rate) and he could pass for Harold Shrinks, jazz musician father of cartoon-boy George Shrinks, who woke up to find himself three inches tall. Maybe that’s how Snowy will eventually make his escape from Moscow airport – as a miniature manikin in the pants pocket or hidden in the hand luggage of a human rights lawyer. Either that or send in Hollywood’s Edward Norton as a Snowden lookalike: stick a mole on Norton’s neck and roughen his pearly whites; the CIA won’t know which one to track.

Edward Snowden speaks like technical experts do when they expect to be listened to – quietly, confidently, a tad self-righteously. His self-righteousness is truly remarkable, and not only because Snowden’s CV contains a couple of discomfiting quirks (the distance learning MA he never completed; the computing course at John Hopkins which took place in a university building but wasn’t part of the main University). read more

By nailing down the unions, the Labour leader seeks to make his name: ‘Coffin Ed’. He hopes the Sun’ssub-editors won’t get away with writing ‘Red Ed Miliband’ in future. Needn’t have worried: they’re long dead, the Labour Party members who sought to be ‘grave-diggers of the bourgeoisie’; along with the blood-red life they shared.

Here they are, in amongst the newly elected members of Coventry City Council, photographed in April 1928 – nearly three decades after the formation of the Labour Representation Committee, a group of MPs (mainly Liberal) representing the interests of working people; seven years after the constitution of the Labour Party; two years after the General Strike.

You can spot the Labour men (and one woman) because they are the ones not wearing robes like other councillors, nor the wigs that mark out the council’s legal officers: they wouldn’t do anything to differentiate themselves from their electorate, the undifferentiated mass of working people.

Among them is the maternal grandfather I never knew. Not much to go on here: another man in a dark suit; collar and tie; short back and sides, parted on the left. From this you’d say there wasn’t much to get to know; but getting to know you wasn’t the point. Individual appearance didn’t come into the picture; my grandfather appeared for the great unknown. He was there to represent the collective interests of people personally unknown to him. Yes, he had a name, but in those days for ‘James Latham’ you were invited to read ‘Everyman’; or – only 10 years after the end of the War he refused to fight in – ‘the rank and file’.

Today’s unions – Unison, Unite – are named after the idea of collective interest; but only in the same way that children are named after their grandparents. The name changes, even when it stays the same; the union stays a ‘union’ even though it has already changed beyond recognition. And what’s already dead is now being certified by Coffin Ed, who seeks to demonstrate – but not on the streets! – that individuality is paramount, even in the party of previously undifferentiated Labour. Thus Miliband’s Labour-union reforms are couched in the form of a personal invitation, designed to offer ‘a more active and individual choice’ to ‘individual trade union members’ because this is ‘better for these individuals’. read more

I am approaching this grisly story in the spirit of the Roman playwright Terence, who declared:

Homo sum: humani a me nihil alienum puto. In English, I am a man: nothing human is alien to me.

Abu Sakkar is the Syrian rebel who was filmed eating the body of a government soldier. That is, he is seen dismembering the soldier’s corpse and pulling out a body part – heart, lung, liver? – which he lifts up and holds in his hands before his mouth closes round it in a cannibal’s kiss.

Take, eat, this is my body….

Not merely unpalatable, Sakkar’s action was widely condemned as barbaric and inhuman: an affront to all human beings; the desecration of our common humanity. In response, Sakkar insisted that anyone who had suffered like the people of his home town, Homs, would be prepared to do as much. He also maintained that his was a symbolic act intended to humiliate and terrify the enemy.

…. this is my body which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.

In the ritual act at the heart of the Catholic Mass, bread and wine are transformed – transubstantiated – into the body and blood of Christ. In the outward form of unleavened bread, the priest holds aloft the body of Christ – tinga-linga-ling goes the sanctus bell; eats him and drinks his blood before inviting the congregation to make a meal of it.

The avowed aim is the direct opposite of Sakkar’s depravity: to dignify rather than terrify; and so an end to enmity.

Instead of appearing to desecrate our common humanity, transubstantiation serves to consecrate ordinary things and everyday people in the name of Jesus Christ. As bread becomes body so Christians come collectively alive in Corpus Christi. They don’t see it as such, but composing themselves as one body is the real substance of their ‘God’.

Yet in order to achieve this, liturgy is obliged to become mythology. And it turns out that the myth of the Catholic mass is the mirror image of Abu Sakkar’s ritual display: both are peddling a memorable line in sacrificial victims; each entails eating the Other. read more

The sound quality of the secret recording of Rupert Murdoch speaking privately to Sun journalists arrested as part of Operation Elveden, is predictably poor. The effect, unless you’re looking at a written transcript at the same time, is to reduce what’s said to a series of key words; explosive consonants and metallic vowels surfacing above the low murmurings of an elderly monarch.

Music of a concrete kind.

The way he says it, Absolutely (meaning: my unqualified sympathy for your unfortunate position) cuts through like a serrated edge; gleams like aluminium. I’m just as annoyed sounds similar to the rhythm in Ravel’s Bolero. You guys is Rupert’s crash cymbal. For example: you guys were thrown out of bed in police raids; whereas when police question people from the BBC, they’re asked to come in softly softly for a cup of tea at four o’clock. Tss tut-tut-tss tut-tut-tss: you guys.

Sometimes he will Slap papers or Boom his fist down on the table. On the One, Funkadelic’s George Clinton would have said. Then the words that follow perform an offbeat role: Boom, the left-wing get-even crowd of George Brown; Slap, what they’re doing (in revenge for 38 years of the Sun).

Rupert Murdoch talks about News Corp having been close to panic: over-reacting to police and media pressure; setting up the infamous Management and Standards Committee, i.e. Internal Affairs. The people’s he talking to on the tape – you guys – seem to have been volunteered; sent in as a kind of suicide squad, and Rupert the newspaperman makes out that within the company only the lawyers were really responsible for sacrificing these other newspapermen. Whether or not this is true, from the rhythms and cadences of his speech it is clearly what the Old King needs to believe.

Lying and Uprising, 2013: Whether dead or alive, in Pretoria, South Africa, Nelson Mandela is already lying in state. Meanwhile in Xingjiang province, indigenous Uighurs are rising up against state repression and the state-sponsored influx of incomers from metropolitan China – or that’s how it looks to the Uighur boys on motorbikes besieging the police station in Hotan; or was it that the police besieged their mosque and beat the biker boys as they tried to get away? In their ears, the name for China’s majority population – Han – rhymes readily with Afrikaan.

In Xingjiang, the two populations are so far apartheid they cannot agree what time it is: Han immigrants bring Beijing time with them; Uighurs maintain it’s two hours earlier than that.

‘One World One Dream’, 2008: The ‘official website of the 2008 Olympic Games’ explains that Beijing’s slogan ‘fully reflects the essence and the universal values of the Olympic spirit: Unity, Friendship, Progress, Harmony, Participation and Dream. It expresses the common wishes of people all over the world, inspired by the Olympic ideals, to strive for a bright future of Mankind, in spite of the differences in colours, languages and races.’

Officialese and florid philosophical formulations twirled and curled into sickly calligraphy; during Games Time, Beijing itself baked into eye candy. A whole army for keeping the city sweet, including platoons of imported labour, marched in to sugar it up when the streets have all but emptied out. The majority population defaults to man-attired-for-business-in-a-warm-humid-climate. But this is a different uniform; these are different faces; another ‘race’.

Games Over and it’s back to the Xingjiang Bantustan for you, bwoy.

Your number’s up, duck. Not your lucky day, chuck. They look like they come from the Midlands, those ex-pat Brits arrested and fined for playing Bingo in an English pub on the Algarve. A little bit blotchy and pasty (how do they manage it with the sun shining down on them most of the year round?), cigarette frowns on elderly faces (even if they’ve given up now, lines are etched on foreheads from all those years of sucking in smoke), and clothes that shout TK-Max-10-years-ago.

Not Essex nor even Estuary. Can’t have come from Newcastle or Glasgow: these careworn figures don’t have the measure of a metropolis; more like the crimplene half-town, pedestrianised half-city, nondescript half-truth that is Leicester or Coventry or Nottingham.

Photographed outside the courthouse in Albufeira, if they hadn’t been caught on the wrong side of Portugal’s strict gaming laws, you’d have said say they were auditioning for David Jason’s role in A Touch of Frost.

They make easy targets. It is laughable that the 70something winner of a packet of biscuits and a bar of chocolate (the only Bingo prizes given out on that fateful night), took the trouble to hide the bar of chocolate when undercover police stood up and shouted ‘it’s a raid.’ Except that he’s already chuckling at himself, duck.

Easy to complain that these middle-of-the-road types have exported a life of mediocrity to the Iberian Peninsula, so that only the external colour scheme – white stucco against blue sky – differs from Birmingham beige (does their English pub still stock Brew XI – For the Men of the Midlands?).

Except they had the pluck to come out here and make a go of it. They had the get-up to get out of all that drab, even if they brought a dose of it with them.

Eyes screwed shut behind her glasses. Her face, neck and shoulders are wet with pepper spray. Woman in a summer dress. Woman in the city on a warm night. Woman of a certain age. Old enough – sorry if this sounds rude – old enough to have grown a little fat; but no, our friend, the new friend we’ve never seen before, is growing thin and stringy instead. And this moment – with the pepper spray moist and prickly, condensing on her reddening skin – may be the moment that dries her out, thins and brittles her till the end of her days.

With so much frailty exposed, we can hardly fail to befriend her. She is to us like the tendons and muscles in anatomical drawings: raw and tenderised. Best not shake hands: hers might come away in ours.

Zap! Pow! A cartoon of vexatious particles aimed and fired at the woman of a certain age, the woman in a summer dress, in the city; streaming so neatly they could have been drawn on. Behind the thin straight line of pepper spray, a gloved hand holding the canister; and inside the glove, metal fingers? Or maybe no fingers at all: just the glove, and the padded sleeves, protective vest, over-trousers and over-sized helmet. Programmed from the outset but nothing inside except Robocop Till It Drops.

But look again at the narrow shoulders underneath the hard hat: you wouldn’t design Robocop to be so small. This is a case of Petite Police. A younger woman, perhaps; or a slim-hipped youth all booted up and set to go – who knows what human frailty that helmet is hiding?

We are at the cinema. On screen, the restaurant scene in which a villainous Mr Saatchi is seen holding the curvaceous Ms Lawson by the throat. There are shades of noir; echoes of Ace In The Hole (1951, with Kirk Douglas in the Saatchi position and Jan Sterling feeling his fingers around her neck); Beware, My Lovely (1952, Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino); Angel Face (1953, Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons) andThe Big Knife (1955, Jack Palance and, again, Ida Lupino).

Luckless Lupino – seemingly the girl most likely to find herself in a throat-hold – was really A Player in 1950s Hollywood, adding writer, director and producer credits to her acting roles. Ida’s position of strength is echoed today in Nigella’s show-making, deal-clinching status in foodie TV both for the BBC and now ABC (as seen in the new, piping hot show, The Taste).

Meanwhile her husband, Charles Saatchi – the ex-adman-turned-art-collector who’s never alone because he always has a cigarette to hold hands with, is such a dyed-in the-wool smoker he too might be described as taking a leaf out of the noir pack.

Yet for all the smoke signals of the past, the mise en scene has moved on from the 1950s. No morechiaroscuro; instead of a monochrome contrast between light and dark, the current scene offers a full spectrum of colour and texture.

Partly decorative, partly a screen to make the protagonists’ faces more elusive, more alluring, the restaurant is woven with pistachio green plants set against the incandescent copper-and-glass tubing which serves to warm this Mayfair terrace on an unseasonably cold day in June.

The tubing is smooth; so too is the suede of the villain’s shoes, but in a different way – one hairless, the other furry. And, somewhere in between, his immaculate, clinically white shirt made of the softest cotton: material that says ‘touch me’ even though you know you’re only ever going to see it on someone you don’t. read more

Closedown  The presenter wraps up the item, closes the show. Dyed blonde hair, she has that day-glow, daytime TV look. The next programme team – Sobriety’s the name, two men in suits, a woman with minimal make-up – comes into the studio and there’s a whole palaver of microphone unclipping and clipping; technicians assisting as usual, but also an abnormal amount of handshaking and embracing. Somebody’s last handover? Got a new job, or going on pater/maternity leave, maybe.

Studio’s off air; on air there must be titles/theme music playing out the old show, playing in the new. By now the new team is seated…..and Action: short intro from minimal make-up woman; cut to a split screen of talking heads.

Heads are cut off, never get to talk. It all goes dark; not even fade to black. At the flick of a switch, what was On has now been taken Off.

Was it ever that simple? The Greek government’s decision to pull the plug on its own state broadcaster prompted scenes reminiscent of Britain in the 1970s: mass mobilisations and long, lazy sit-ins; banners, beards and hours of waiting for something to happen.

During the day employees gathered inside ERT headquarters in Athens – a modernist, corporatist structure which looks like it belongs in Brussels. That afternoon – Athens in the middle of June – it rained. Clusters of TV people stood at the windows looking through raindrops at anti-government protesters getting soaked outside (among those inside and out, the relative absence of mobile phones adds to the impression of an earlier era). Some worked all-out to re-start and maintain programming on the Internet. Others paced the corridors or sat on the floor looking up at all those suspended ceiling tiles, all that strip lighting.

Were they waiting for Carl/Dustin Bernstein/Hoffman and Bob/Robert Woodward/Redford to walk in and get the real story? Nail it. Get to the bottom of it. Sort it out. Had they meant to keep the offices of the Greek state broadcaster looking like the Hollywood film set for All The President’s Men? Was it all a cunning plan to make the 1970s live forever? read more