The Guardian / The Observer, UK
Oct 14 2007
Al deserves to be spared the curse of the Nobel
Jasper Gerard
Sunday October 14, 2007
The Observer
Celebrities have long warned of the ‘curse of Hello!’: you know, the
TV talent-show host grants the magazine a gawp at his beautiful new
hacienda near Chingford and his wife’s even more generously appointed
new breasts; then within days, he is caught auditioning Becki and
Nikki, a pair of local beauty therapists, and – bang! – he can’t even
get a gig on Strictly Come Dancing. The Nobel Peace Prize is becoming
a slightly posher version of this.
If there is a curse of Nobel, we should fear for Al Gore. American
and British climate-change deniers heckle and tell us just to look at
earlier recipients. Aung San Suu Kyi banged up under house arrest.
David Trimble, FW de Klerk et al could feature in that column ‘Where
are they now?’
The rest – Betty Williams, Rigoberta Menchu – would struggle to make
it into a feature titled ‘Who were they then?’ As for Yasser Arafat’s
peace prize – well, the award can seem more like a desperate plea
than a deserved reward.
The former Vice-President is certainly easy to mock. He looks like
he’s eaten too much lobster thermidor on the elder statesman circuit
and surely must be the first Nobel Prize winner to be berated by a
judge for factual inaccuracies. He has not apologised for
exaggerating, as if being on the ‘right’ side somehow frees him from
the need for rigour.
And you don’t have to be a climate-change denier to balk at all this
intercontinental back-slapping. Swells are never happier than doling
out baubles to their own, be they Nobels, Orders of the Garter or
stupendous book advances (penned your thank you note to Rupert yet,
Tony?). And if Gore is largely right, what’s to celebrate? Always one
sighs; why didn’t you do more when in power? On Kyoto, he never
persuaded Bill Clinton, let alone America.
Yet despite all that, sometimes we should accept received wisdom is
basically right. Isn’t it better Gore got people debating sea levels
and melting icecaps?
An Inconvenient Truth might contain convenient untruths and global
warming might be a greater chimera than global cooling. If so, we owe
deniers an apology. But to assume they are right and Gore wrong is
pretty brave, isn’t it? Where is the insurance if, by some miracle,
virtually the entire scientific community is proven right? I’ve read
countless books on this, yet wouldn’t dare pontificate on the
science. But the politics are obvious: with the stakes so high, Gore
is right to denounce those who say: ‘Carry on gas-guzzling.’
As a presidential candidate, Gore was a bit of a bore, not very
Hello!. He was cursed long before this prize and there seems little
chance of his following The West Wing’s Josiah Bartlet, a fictional
Nobel winner, into the White House. But even many of his fiercest
critics quietly wish the leader of the free world was President Gore,
not President Bush. So, finally, let’s applaud the man who refuses
merrily to kiss the world goodbye.
Oh dear, Donald’s been bunkered
Donald Trump’s Scottish golf course is being bunkered by a thoroughly
curmudgeonly farmer who refuses to sell his scruffy smallholding hard
by the second fairway. Good for him. There is something evil about
golf and, as for Trump, well, civilisation could probably take his
disappointment on the chin.
Trump, whose luxuriant thatch could surely stand in for a stretch of
gorse in the heavy rough off the long 14th should he be shy of the
odd acre, refuses to accept a polite ‘no’. Instead, he responds in
the only way he knows how: offering more money. He calls Michael
Forbes’s land ‘disgusting’, with ‘rusty tractors’. Well, yes, Donald,
it’s a farm. In a choice between rusty tractors and gleaming golf
buggies, give me tractors.
Yet increasingly, farmland is viewed as dead space waiting to be
turned into something useful. We hear this in the call to develop the
green belt; much of it, we are told, is ‘nondescript agricultural
land’. What is it meant to be? A giant, pornographic art
installation? An outdoor leisure facility to assist the al-Qaeda
youth training scheme? A polar bear sanctuary with dancing girls? If
only England had its Michael Forbeses so we could trump all the other
cynical little Donalds.
Accept the utility premise to determine land use and you can kiss
your countryside goodbye. Any development will always be judged more
‘useful’ than farmland, even a golf course.
Even if green-belt land never sprouts another turnip, it is still
worth keeping, because otherwise it will sprout concrete. Farmland
should be preserved because it is beautiful – rusty tractors and all.
Quick, screen the nurses …
Belief in the NHS is the nearest Britain comes to a religion and to
criticise nurses is blasphemous. Yet 90 people have died in my Kent
NHS Trust from a ‘superbug’ (bugs, like supermodels, are subject to
grade inflation), so could this be the time to question our faith?
Clearly, it would be grossly unfair to lay all blame on nurses, but
would you leave patients to wallow in excrement?
Florence Nightingale made ‘angels’ of an entire profession. Her image
of the sainted nurse is bolstered by Keira Knightley in Atonement; a
fresh generation of nurses stoically tending the wounded from yet
another war. Sentimentalising nurses continued in peacetime, but
strangely, this warm glow doesn’t extend to others who treat us,
dentists, say. To nurses, we ascribe the fibre of Mother Teresa and
the foxiness of Kylie Minogue. Think of a dentist and it’s Josef
Mengele meets Olivier’s psycho in Marathon Man.
Just the other day, at one of the now notorious hospitals, the Kent
and Sussex (‘Kent and snuff it’ to locals), my toddler wedged a
carrot so far up his nose we couldn’t retrieve it. The nurses were
keener on chatting than fixing my son’s admittedly minor ailment.
In a restaurant, we would complain; in a hospital, we shower our
obsequies. The Lady with the Lamp has much to answer for.
…because hospitals need a fast cure
The hospital, by the way, looks like one of those places where germ
warfare experiments took place in the Fifties. While hospitals I’ve
visited up north look so improved you could almost be somewhere first
world – Portugal, say – many down south resemble the stage set of a
disaster movie.
And this is why ministers must take ultimate responsibility. In a
sane country, hospital managers would be accountable to patients
rather than to Whitehall targets and money would be raised locally. A
new report shows taxpayers in the south east subsidise the rest of
the country by £2,400 each.
Redistribution was clearly necessary, but it’s no surprise that four
of the five primary care trusts with the lowest per capita spending
are in the SE. Voters are starting to notice they are paying, but
there is no pay-back. The middle-class labrador has rested
somnolently by the fire these new Labour years. No wonder it’s
starting to bark.
Remind me, what is the war on terror for?
The world is viewed through the prism of a war on terror. President
Bush dismisses the attempted slaughter of a people as a ticklish
detail. He rejects a historic Congressional decision to call Turkey’s
murder of 1.5 million Armenians ‘genocide’. And not because he denies
butchery took place; rather, Turkey is a key ally, so best let
sleeping Armenians lie. One sees his point, naturally. The friendship
of a Muslim nation provides cover. Plus nationalist Turks, successors
to the ‘young Turks’ who nearly snuffed out the Armenians, are
itching to invade northern Iraq. So best placate Turkey…
But what is the war on terror for? Isn’t it a response to a war of
terror, whose first shot was fired in 1915, when Turkey’s interior
minister ordered Armenians to be ‘terminated’? Why does the death of
3,000 in New York weigh heavier than 1.5 million? And if the war on
terror possesses moral as well as military force, shouldn’t it be
about principle as well as pragmatism?
Otherwise, aren’t we just the other side’s enemy combatant?
Guantanamo, rendition, detention: staring through the prism, we’ve
lost perspective.
So long and thanks for all that bigotry
Had Vlad the Impaler been British, by the time he toddled towards his
dotage, he would have been hailed as a national treasure. There is
nobody, it seems, over whom we won’t sigh: ‘Ah! They don’t make ’em
like that any more.’ Even Ann Widdecombe. The announcement of her
retirement has inspired profiles of ‘Dear Doris’. But in her time,
she has supported hanging, opposed equalising the age of consent for
‘buggers’ and pretty well anything done by single mothers, and
thought it humane to keep prisoners handcuffed while undergoing
surgery, though conceded it was a bit much when wardens chained a
woman who was giving birth.
A Conservative party with John Redwood at its heart evidently still
has far to travel, but let us celebrate that never again is someone
as intolerant as Widdecombe likely to be elected.