Playing to the Gallery: Parliamentary Sketches from Blair Year Zero by Simon Hoggart

A quick review this Sunday, since I’m sort of in the middle of travelling at the moment.

Playing to the Gallery: Parliamentary Sketches from Blair Year Zero by Simon Hoggart

The craft of writing parliamentary sketches is a fairly longstanding tradition in the history of modern journalism. Charles Dickens even tried his hand at it, back in the day when several pages of the quality press were devoted to reporting the ins and outs of whatever had happened that day in the Commons and the Lords. But now that Hansard is available online, viewers can watch debates through BBC Parliament, and most newspapers have cut down the column inches devoted to parliamentary coverage, parliamentary sketches might well seem to be on the way out as well. But the art of capturing memorable moments in the alternating frenzy and dullness of the Westminster village is not easily acquired — and it would be a shame if some of the cleverest sketches of the Guardian’s Simon Hoggart were to be lost to the maze of microfilm and Internet archives without being collected somewhere for quick, easy reading.

Playing to the Gallery is a collection of Simon Hoggart’s sketches, a selection of the ‘best bits’ as collected works are so often touted. The sketches are not merely from 1997; the selected sketches begin with the pre-election coverage of April 1997 and run until well into 2002, giving a full range of the first five years of the Blair government. Plenty of familiar faces grace the pages, and some mostly forgotten faces crop up now and then, including perennial stalking horse Michael Heseltine, the ageing and now deceased rake Alan Clark, and the former Madam Speaker Betty Boothroyd. The index, for that matter, is one of the best parts of the book; the entries are pithy summaries that are almost complete sketches in and of themselves. The entries for Tony Blair include ‘helps William Hague into heffalump trap, 169-71‘ and ‘treats Parliament like late-night radio call-in, 107-9‘. Ken Livingstone, as it happens, ‘launches campaign for London mayor with high-pitched whining noise, 154-5‘. One of John Prescott’s many notable moments includes an incident in which he ‘blames Tories for rain, 188-90‘. There’s just enough truth to the exaggerations to make for fine and accurate parody.

Hoggart is quite skilled at deciphering the often unintelligible proclamations of John Prescott, and he takes pleasure in finding and holding up for ridicule some of the most vapid examples of New Labour prose — he actively points out how the New Labour speech style all but abandons verbs in its attempt to make promises without actually promising anything. I spent most of my reading time alternating between chuckling and wincing, for beneath the humour lies a certain amount of wry bitterness, a little voice that says, ‘Is this really what we’ve managed to dig up, push past the post, and stuff into that faux-Gothic monstrosity in SW1A?’ Playing to the Gallery is a collection made for politicos and political junkies, true, but it’s a sad trueism that no history is forgotten quite so easily as that of the recent past. Even those who are less than fond of the state of political reporting in this day and age would be able to spend a few worthwhile moments looking at one or two of the sketches compiled in this book.

A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash by Sylvia Nasar

I’ve been meaning to acquire this book for a while, but it was one of those books that tend to sit on the ‘to buy’ list for ages without any action being taken on it. Thanks to BookMooch, though, I received a nice (and pretty much free!) copy only a little while ago.

A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash by Sylvia Nasar

Game theory, the branch of applied mathematics that looks at strategic choices and interactions within social situations, is a key field of study in many different social sciences and other academic fields. One of the creators of the founding principles of game theory was an eccentric but brilliant mathematician who had made a name for himself among the young, up-and-coming scholars at Carnegie Mellon and Princeton in the late 1940s and early 1950s: John Forbes Nash, Jr. Nash’s publications and theories were (and still are) regarded as mathematical breakthroughs, but by the latter half of the 1950s Nash’s eccentricities began to reveal a deeper disturbance in his mind. Wild flights of fancy regarding secret numerical patterns and codes that only he could detect gave way to outright delusions of sinister worldwide conspiracies. In the frightening grip of paranoid schizophrenia, Nash all but vanished from academic life, drifting in and out of mental hospitals and fighting against his family’s attempts to get him to stay in treatment. A new generation of students who read his articles and studied his theories often assumed that he was either dead or locked up in an insane asylum somewhere. But as the years passed, Nash struggled to work through his mental illness and gradually regain his ability to function in society — and by the time his name was given as one of the winners of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics, he had recovered enough to work on mathematics once more.

Sylvia Nasar’s biography of Nash has won any number of awards and has been adapted for a well-known film, and it’s not difficult to see why; Nash’s story is by turns fascinating, sad, tragic, and powerful. The book has a light, conversational voice, almost chatty in tone, but the writing style by no means detracts from the solidly written prose and the easy flow with which she carries the narrative of Nash’s life — quite the contrary, in fact. Mathematics can be a daunting subject to approach even when the calculations involved are simple ones, and Nash’s work dealt with highly technical proofs and complicated equations that could easily frighten off a casual reader. One of the best aspects of Nasar’s book is how she handles the mathematics to ensure that the ideas remain comprehensible to a lay audience. She mentions the basic principles of the proofs and equations that Nash and his colleagues developed, but she generally avoids trying to delve too deeply into more technical language for her explations and descriptions. The overall effect seems to encourage truly interested readers to look to other sources for the actual mathematics, while at the same time allowing the rest of her audience to feel informed and aware, if not absolutely initiated into the details of Nash’s work. It’s a difficult balance to strike, and Nasar manages it well.

Fans of the movie starring Russell Crowe will note the many changes that the filmmakers made to adapt Nash’s story to the screen. The movie is more of a revisioning than a true adaptation — among the biographical details left out of the movie were Nash’s bisexual proclivities, his troubled relationships with his sons (one born to his wife, the other born to a girlfriend he had had before marriage), and some of the more unsavoury remarks he made during the worst times of his illness. But as far as biographies go, A Beautiful Mind is an intriguing story of a remarkable man, who even today works hard to keep the upper hand on a mental illness that nearly shattered his career and his life beyond hope of recovery.

How to Be a Civil Servant by Martin Stanley

Gerald Kaufman’s How to Be a Minister was a sly, satirical look at what happens to politicians who find themselves a few inches nearer to the top of the greasy pole. But for their counterparts in administration, the mandarins of Whitehall, the equivalent guidebook was a little longer in coming.

How to Be a Civil Servant by Martin Stanley

Martin Stanley is a former senior official in the Cabinet Office who then went on to head the Postal Services Commission. His book, How to Be a Civil Servant, is written primarily for an incoming civil servant who will be working in Whitehall — most of the information relates to how to deal with ministers and junior ministers, Parliament, and the EU. Far from being written in impenetrable bureaucratese, the text is clear and straightforward, very well-organised. And it is far from dull, as a few examples will illustrate:

…it is perfectly proper for our drafts to omit facts and arguments which might cast doubt on the appropriateness of [policies]. In doing this, we are not being unprofessional. Rather, like the barrister whose principal duty is to the court and who does not necessarily believe in the client’s case, we are simply providing the best possible professional service to our clients, without going so far as to mislead the Minister or Parliament. (11)

And on more specific subjects, such as individual jobs:

[Personal Private Secretaries] are on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and know where all the bodies are buried. For this reason, they are usually promoted when they leave Private Office…. (21)

And yes, it does mention Sir Humphrey Appleby of Yes, Minister fame, but only as a convenient shorthand reference when referring to the Cabinet Secretariat.

How to Be a Civil Servant is a delightfully witty but remarkably practical book for anyone who happens to be entering into a fast-track, high-flying Civil Service job. For that matter, the chapters about Parliamentary Questions and how to respond to them would be most enlightening for newly elected Members of Parliament, let alone a civil servant. The book is tongue-in-cheek without being overly sarcastic, which makes it more of an actual ‘how to’ book than Kaufman’s satirical study. And for those who’ve any interest in looking at Whitehall from a rather less cynical and scheming viewpoint, How to Be a Civil Servant is probably the most helpful text that’s out there.

In addition to the book, the author has created a companion Web site at http://www.civilservant.org.uk. The Web site is well worth exploring in its own right, not least because it has any number of files and pages that are worth looking at…in my opinion, this one in particular.