Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy

by David Mitchell

  This, in turn, caused Rudd to clarify that all this was just part of a “review” and “not something we are definitely going to do”, but also to assert that “people want to talk about immigration, and if we do talk about immigration, don’t call me a racist”. I don’t think I can agree to that. We’ve all long since wearily acknowledged the old Nigel Farage cliché that mentioning immigration doesn’t necessarily mean you’re racist. But, let’s be honest, if you could take out an insurance policy against being racist, mentioning immigration would put your premiums up.

  But, obviously, whether Amber Rudd is racist (or, perhaps more pertinently, xenophobic) or not depends on what she’s actually saying about immigration. And she’s basically saying that, for a British company, employing a non-British national should be a last resort. Companies should do all they can – with advertising and training – to fill jobs locally, in the knowledge that if they fail too often, the percentage of foreigners they employ will be made public. In short, they shouldn’t employ a foreigner just because he or she happens to be the best person for the job. Given time and effort, they should be able to find someone British who’ll do.

  So, no, I don’t really think Amber Rudd is xenophobic. It’s not foreigners she despises, it’s the British. I can hardly think of a more damning slur on the British workforce than this proposed policy. It takes British workers’ inferiority as a given, as its premise.

  It is already harder for firms to employ foreigners than locals. Foreigners either have to get here or, if they’re already here, be allowed to stay. That’s not an issue with a British worker. English may not be their first language, which can cause problems. That’s not an issue with a British worker. Laws already in place mean that companies have a considerable incentive to employ locally if they can. But Rudd has looked at the British workforce and decided they need much more help.

  A fair criticism of foreign labour is that it can undercut the cost of British workers – that it drives wages down; that, frankly, people from poorer countries are willing to work for less than the British are. If that’s the concern, a sound government response would be to raise the minimum wage, not to threaten to expose companies as unpatriotic if they don’t voluntarily inflate their own labour costs.

  This threat of exposure is what illustrates Amber Rudd’s anti-Britishness most shockingly. She is convinced that revealing to the public that a firm employs a high percentage of foreigners will be disastrous to its image. She thinks this nation, which so many peoples over the centuries, from Celts, Romans and Angles to Jamaicans, Bangladeshis and Poles, have made their home, will no longer stand for the employment of immigrants. She may not be racist, but she certainly thinks we are.

  Jeremy Clarkson

  November 2015

  At times of crisis and doubt, we crave certainty. I really envy everyone who’s certain that the best way of countering the threat of Islamist terrorism is definitely to bomb Isis. Equally, I envy everyone who’s certain that the best way of doing that is definitely not to bomb Isis. The two groups’ total certainty is all the more inspiring for the fact that they must surely know about each other.

  So I’m going to try to provide a bit of certainty here. That’s what columnists do in those newspapers that lots of people still buy, so it’s obviously what readers are looking for. And there are some things I’m certain about. I am certain, for instance, that it was a mistake for that hotel in Yorkshire where Jeremy Clarkson punched a meat-platter-bearing producer to put up a plaque commemorating the event.

  “We were presented with this plaque from one of our guests last night!” Simonstone Hall exclaimed on social media last week. “We think it would be quite appropriate to put it on the patio where the fracas took place!!” It seems like quite a shouty hotel. Perhaps it was making itself heard over high wind or the noise of another hungry TV presenter helicoptering in.

  This decision may have grabbed it a few column inches (and counting), but knowingly installing an indelible physical record of a dissatisfied customer seems foolish. TripAdvisor, immortaliser of a billion unsatisfactory meals, is scourge enough to catering establishments without them daubing their own public spaces with anecdotes of disappointed celebrity clientele. The dining rooms of the grand old hotels of London would otherwise be peppered with commemorations of where various statesmen and national treasures have sent back soufflés or contracted the shits.

  This isn’t to say that Clarkson’s dissatisfaction was justified; still less that his response was proportionate. Even so, the unavailability of hot food at 10pm is not exactly a selling point for a country-house hotel. It’s fair enough, but it doesn’t bespeak unimaginable luxury. So it’s an unusual decision for the hotel to use it so prominently in its marketing. “Don’t expect miracles – it’s not the bloody Ritz!” is not a phrase on its website. Instead, it went with “From the moment you arrive you feel welcomed and indulged.” Sometimes, I’m sure – but as the plaque on its own patio proclaims, not always.

  With all these downsides, what are the plaque’s positives? Are there people who might come to the hotel purely to view the site of Clarkson’s transgression? Well, maybe a few – the real Top Gear hardcore, those who totally model themselves on their pugnacious no-nonsense hero. But are they really the clients the hotel wants to attract? Particularly as they’ll probably be annoyed to discover you can’t get hot food after 10 o’clock.

  Time for more certainty: Jeremy Corbyn is great news, we need to get out of the EU sharpish and the shooting down of that Russian plane by the Turks is totally going to blow over. Or the opposite – I haven’t got a clue. My certainties are more focused on the hospitality industry: I am extremely certain, for example, that when a hotel or restaurant says it stops taking orders at a particular time, that is the time at which it should stop taking orders, and it is an act of incomprehensible perversity to actually stop taking them eight to 15 minutes earlier than that.

  I mean it: incomprehensible perversity. It really is like cutting your nose off to spite your face, except that basically never happens, and if it does, the person involved gets sectioned, whereas this happens a lot (although not, I’m sure, at Simonstone Hall – if it did, they’d doubtless stick up a plaque boasting about it). I’m not saying restaurants shouldn’t stop taking orders as early as they like. I just think that the time they do that and the time they say they’re going to do that – whether it’s 9pm, 3pm or 75 seconds after they’ve opened – should be identical.

  And I’m irritated by references to “the kitchen” having shut, as if “the kitchen” is an untameable force of nature – like “passenger action” or fog at an airport, a capricious phenomenon we’re all afflicted by – rather than just another part of the restaurant. Why would the kitchen unilaterally close before the time agreed with the other rooms, leaving them a pointless husk, just a relatively uncomfortable place to sit, full of people remembering the good times when food used to be available?

  It irks me because I suspect it to be an attempt to draw me in to the whole restaurant-planning operation. So the time cited as “last food orders” is actually when they’re hoping to close the kitchen – get the ovens cooling, empty the dishwashers – because obviously the chef wants to get off home at a decent time. Much as I respect his or her aspiration, I resent being involved in these details because a key advantage of a restaurant over cooking your own dinner is that you don’t have to think through the logistics of cooking your own dinner.

  If “last orders” isn’t really “last orders”, but “ovens turned off” or “closing the kitchen”, then you might as well just give the time by which everyone who works there is hoping to get to bed, and then customers can calculate backwards from then when estimating their chances of successfully placing an order.

  Another certainty: the text of the Clarkson patio plaque is terrible. It reads: “Here lies the BBC career of Jeremy Clarkson, who had a fracas on this spot, 4th March 2015. The rest is legend.”

  “Here l
ies” is not the traditional wording of a plaque, but of a gravestone. It implies decomposition, which is not a good feel for a hotel and restaurant – or a patio, if you don’t want the police to dig it up in search of missing hitchhikers.

  “The BBC career” is not a phrase that works. The plaque’s authors wanted to say it was the death of Clarkson’s career, then he got the Amazon gig, so they couldn’t. That would have been a good moment to abandon the whole plaque plan. They must have realised that referring to the non-renewal of a contract didn’t really feel plaque-worthy, or even ironic-plaque-worthy.

  Finally, “The rest is legend” is more suitable as the tagline of a B-movie. And it’s not true anyway. Difficult though it may be for some to believe, the great Clarkson fracas of the Simonstone patio will, unlike Helen of Troy’s beauty or the slaying of Grendel, soon be completely forgotten. Of that I am also certain.

  Gerald Grosvenor, Sixth Duke of Westminster

  August 2016

  Let’s take the sanctity of human life as read and get down to brass tacks. Who matters most? To you, that is. Who are the important ones? If you say you feel everyone’s equal, you’re lying. That’s not feasible. There are seven billion and counting. To like/love/hate/be indifferent to them all to the same extent is impossible, unless you’re a supercomputer. A supercomputer that can feel.

  And while you’re at it, Empathbot-Maxilove, why do those currently alive have the monopoly on mattering? What about the dead? And the not-yet-born? If you’re factoring in the latter, your unavoidable implication is that those currently alive who are capable of reproduction count for marginally more than those who aren’t. That’s dangerous territory and shatters the egalitarian premise that got you into this mess.

  It’s no good: some people count for more than others – that’s clear. You only have to watch the news. “Thousands killed, a Briton grazed – we’ll bring you live pictures of the graze.” We all care about the people around us, and the people not around us, to wildly varying extents. The only hope for equality lies in everyone being someone’s priority. Which they’re not, which is awful. Our route into caring about people we don’t know is via imagining how we’d feel if their problems were afflicting those we do.

  People we know are more important to us than people we don’t. And the better we know them, the more important they are. There’s a word for this. Friends! That’s it. And family, of course. Family, friends, friends of the family, family of friends, friends of friends, acquaintances, acquaintances of friends, someone you met once, someone a friend met once, someone an acquaintance met once, the rest of humanity. That’s the rough order of priorities, for most of us.

  Where in that list would you place someone not yet born whom you will never meet, and indeed no one you will ever meet will ever meet? In fact, no one you will ever meet will ever meet anyone who will ever meet them. How high up does that person come? This is not about the environment, by the way. I’m not talking about billions of people you will never meet; almost anyone would say they’d matter more than one person you know. I’m not referring to “our children’s children”. I mean your child’s child’s child’s child’s child’s child’s child’s child. If it’s a boy. And then his child. If it’s a boy. How high up your Christmas list are those chaps?

  If your answer is “not very”, this is one way in which you differ from the late Gerald Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster. For the sixth duke, and most of his predecessors, it’s absolutely all about those little guys. This strange fact struck me last week amid all the chatter about the unjust ramifications of the duke’s sudden death.

  In case you missed them, here are those unjust ramifications again. (1) Of the late duke’s approximately £9bn, approximately £0bn goes to the taxman. I’m sure the Treasury gets some money, but nowhere near a billion quid, let alone the £3.6bn that would be owing if the estate were liable for the standard 40% inheritance tax rate. But it isn’t, obviously, for reasons that are as literally legal as they are figuratively criminal.

  (2) Of the late duke’s approximately £9bn, approximately £0bn goes to his three daughters.

  (3) Of the late duke’s approximately £9bn, approximately £9bn, and the titles of Duke of Westminster, Marquess of Westminster and Viscount Belgrave, go to his third child, and only son, Hugh (25).

  A lot of people don’t like inheritance tax. It feels like stealing from the dead. It isn’t, but it feels like it. The reasoning goes: I worked hard for my money, I paid tax on it when I earned it (not all of the above quite applies to the late duke), so why shouldn’t I be able to leave it all to my children? Why should the taxman get any?

  The answer is that, in order to pay for public services, the government should take money out of the economy where it’ll be least missed, where its absence is least likely to plunge people into poverty or reduce consumer spending. The money of the dead is therefore ripe for taxation: the owner no longer needs it, and his or her heirs have been doing OK without it up to now. Inheritance tax doesn’t discourage earning, it discourages dying, which I think we can all get behind.

  But I understand why many people balk at that tax. I find it harder to understand where the late duke is concerned. What if £3.6bn were paid in tax? That would still leave unimaginable wealth for the next generation. Even at the same rate of tax, their children would also be stratospherically well off. The financial wellbeing of his family would be assured as far into the future as he could meaningfully look. Meanwhile, his country would benefit from a significant windfall that would help millions today. That’s just not the same as bereaved kids having to sell the house they grew up in to meet a tax demand.

  The late duke doesn’t strike me as greedy. “Given the choice I would rather not have been born wealthy, but I never think of giving it up. I can’t sell it. It doesn’t belong to me,” he once said. And I believe him. This was not a Philip Green figure, cavorting on a yacht. He was a quiet man, obsessed with the Territorial Army and duty. But what duty? A duty to humanity, a duty to those he loved? No, a duty to the longevity of the Grosvenor family’s prominence.

  So he denied both his country and his daughters significant portions of his wealth, just to keep it all together, to increase its chances of lasting, like one big ice cube instead of several smaller ones – to maximise the length of time for which people of his name will still be rich, even though they are as distant strangers to him as his ancestor, the original “Gros Veneur” (fat huntsman), who came over with William the Conqueror.

  Those remote, theoretical Grosvenors with whom he’ll share a fleck of DNA mattered more to him than his own daughters, never mind the patients of the NHS. That’s not insincere and it’s not selfish. But it is bonkers.

  Theresa May

  November 2014

  What are we going to do about “not-spots”? Have you heard of not-spots? Do they ring a bell? Well, no, they absolutely do not ring a bell! A bell will not ring in a not-spot for love nor money. Unless you’ve set an alarm, I suppose. Anyway, even if you haven’t heard of not-spots, you’ll certainly have experienced them. They’re places where you can’t get any mobile-phone reception and, according to culture secretary Sajid Javid, they’re “unacceptable”.

  I find them pretty unacceptable too. As an expression, I mean. It’s clearly a pseudo-humorous take on “hot spots”. You must have heard of hot spots. They’re where cats like to sit, usually caused by a warm pipe under the floorboards. And to bring things bang up to date, a hot spot is also what my phone will rather heroically create to allow my laptop haltingly to get online in the absence of proper wifi. The phone uses whatever 3 or 4G it’s enjoying to create some proper non-phone internet access, albeit at extortionate cost in terms of my monthly data allowance. I love doing it, though – it makes me feel like I’ve reversed the polarity of the neutron flow. Then, if I can just reroute the data-inversity spectrum using the copper in that nearby telegraph pole, I should be able to turn my iPad into a rudimentary hoverboard.

 
So hot spots are where there’s some sort of signal, so someone obviously thought it would be neat to call an area that lacks this invisible infrastructure a “not-spot”. And it’s annoying because its feeble comic force is left there in common usage, getting worn down over time, like an old poster for a Jimmy Cricket gig that has been marched over by a retreating army.

  Sajid Javid hates not-spots even more than I do, and wants phone companies to eradicate them. He’s even suggested some ways it might be done: sharing masts, letting brands such as Tesco or Virgin sell contracts that can access all four networks, or allowing “national roaming”, whereby your phone can use all the suppliers’ signals, like it does when you’re abroad (and like abroadsters’ phones do here – grr!). “I would prefer a voluntary solution from the mobile network operators …” he told the Today programme; failing that, the government “won’t hesitate to take mandated action”. So it’s the same kind of voluntary action as when the Nazis offered Rommel a pill.

  It’s not just mobile operators for whom Javid’s proposals rankle. Theresa May also considers not-spots to be a necessary evil – a concept to warm the cockles of any Tory home secretary’s heart. In a letter leaked to The Times, she complained that national roaming “could have a detrimental impact on law enforcement, security and intelligence agency access to communications data”. She wants the police to be unhampered in their access to “information that is crucial to keeping us safe”. By “us”, I assume she means the public, not just the government.

  Couched though it is in sober, responsible language, this is a truly shameful thing for her to say. The extent to which the security services should be allowed to listen to, record and analyse everyone’s private communications is a fraught issue. Many would contend that our loss of privacy in the face of an organisation as powerful as the government is, in effect, an enormous and unacceptable curtailment of freedom. They look to Benjamin Franklin’s warning that, by sacrificing liberty for safety, we forfeit our right to be either safe or free. Others say that, in a functioning democracy and these violent times, it’s prudent to grant the security services more investigative licence. Reasonable points can be made on both sides.