by Clive James
REPUTATIONAL DAMAGE
Dates of show: 17 and 19 April 2009
A new phrase got into the language this week: ‘reputational damage’. People high in the Labour Party have warned the Prime Minister, Mr Gordon Brown, that the next election might be hard to win because the party suffered reputational damage after it was revealed that Damian McBride, a senior aide of Mr Brown, had it in mind to spread misinformation on the Web in order to make life uncomfortable for Tory politicians.
Though called a senior aide, Mr McBride is only thirty-four years old, but in a short career he got plenty of practice at spinning the press against Mr Brown’s original enemies, who were all in the Labour Party, before he moved on to greater glory as one who might spin the press against the Conservative Party. At first blush, the inventions he proposed to circulate this time were merely infantile. He was only going to suggest that there were photographs in existence that might embarrass a certain front-bench Tory. He wasn’t going to suggest that the same front-bench Tory had begun his career as Osama bin Laden’s mistress. But when you think about it, it’s the seemingly innocuous vagueness of the suggestion about photographs that makes it dangerous, because it could so easily be true.
I should say at this point that there are photographs of me in existence that would cause me embarrassment if they were published. In the photographs I am semi-naked. There is a rug involved, and a bottle. By the time the photos were published, it would be getting a bit late for me to protest that I was less than a year old at the time they were taken.
What Mr McBride was after was the opportunity to stir things up. We don’t have to believe that Mr Brown knew what Mr McBride was up to in order to wonder how he, Mr Brown, could ever, in the past, have had anything to do with such a man. That the incident had caused the Labour Party reputational damage was the least the Labour bigwigs could say. That it was also the most they could say opens up another question which we might get to later, after further examining this government’s gift for coining original language.
For now, let’s celebrate the fact that the government is yet again the source of a whole new phrase. It has a reputation for giving us new phrases, and if it ceased to do so it might suffer reputational damage. So far there has been no sign that it will cut back on the supply. This government brings us a new phrase almost every month, usually to deal with the consequences of fresh disasters happening at the same rate. The poor become the socially excluded, and a prison riot becomes a challenging incident. After the collapse of the stock market, the government gave us the new phrase ‘quantitative easing’ as a term meant to cover the complex business of putting money into the economy so as to offset the effects of the economic crisis. There were some who said that quantitative easing was actually a term covering the simple business of printing more money, a process which was bound to exacerbate the effects of the economic crisis.
Perhaps because there were at least two interpretations of what the term might mean, the term quantitative easing has been slow to catch on. ‘Reputational damage’, however, could have a more solid career, because there is not much doubt about what it means. There is only doubt about whether people who find it necessary to use such language are really very wise. If they ever had a reputation for wisdom, should they be allowed to retain it after they are caught using a phrase like reputational damage? Before getting to that crucial point, we should define the term reputational damage as clearly as possible, by stating forcefully that in order for reputational damage to occur, there must first be a reputation.
From that angle, the case of Assistant Commissioner Quick, a case which hogged the media for several days recently, will not quite do. A/C Quick, you will recall, was to play a leading role in a large-scale police operation meant to foil a suspected Al-Qa’ida threat against this country. A/C Quick, however, inadvertently modified his leading role by getting himself into a position where he could be photographed holding, in plain view, a document listing the key details of the operation. The mere possibility of this information ceasing to be secret was enough to ruin the timetable of the operation and his career along with it.
But we should be careful, here, about saying that reputational damage had occurred. In the eyes of journalists, anyone who does any job at all is always called a mastermind up until the moment when he puts his foot in it. Indeed he usually goes on being called a mastermind even afterwards, and so it was with A/C Quick in the eyes of at least one newspaper. The newspaper was suitably enraged at the size of the pension that the A/C would take with him into the private sector, but the newspaper strangely added the following: ‘He will also expect to find lucrative work advising both the private and public sectors on security which could give him an extra six-figure income. His expertise in counter-terror operations will make him a valuable consultant to the organizers of the 2012 London Olympics.’ These later statements depended on the assumption that A/C Quick’s reputation as a security mastermind – a reputation which he had undoubtedly possessed, or he would not have attained such rank – had somehow survived his achievement in blowing security entirely on the most serious counter-terror operation currently in the works. The assumption seemed very large. Surely the poor man’s reputation had not been damaged in a way from which it might recover. It had been destroyed entirely.
If your job is to keep secrets and you are caught conspicuously not keeping them, your reputation is over. The question shifts focus: from you, the individual, to the institution you belong to, which in the case of A/C Quick was the Metropolitan Police Force. Here indeed was a case of reputational damage. The Met suffers damage to its reputation every time the wrong person gets shot, or a man in the vicinity of a demonstration is struck from behind and ends up dead, or even when an innocent person merely gets humiliated, because to that person and those who know him there is no ‘mere’ about it.
When the police mess up, there are always two main critical views, the reformist and the revolutionary. The reformist view is that everything should be done to make the police perform better, so as to guard society from breakdown. The revolutionary view is that everything should be done to ensure that they perform worse, so as to reveal the true nature of a repressive mechanism without which society would flourish in freedom. Which of those two views you take is really the decisive question about your personal politics.
But if you really deplore police mistakes instead of welcoming them as evidence that your radical views are correct, then you must believe in the concept of an institution’s reputation, and in the possibility that it can be damaged. The question then becomes one of how much damage is too much. The different branches of the Christian Church all cultivate a reputation for mercy, in keeping with the charitable personality of the Son of God. At various times in history, less frequently of late, the reputation for mercy has been compromised by a tendency to persecute disbelievers, but one way or another the reputation survives. Almost always the recovery of the reputation involves the repudiation of past excesses on the part of zealots. When it comes to the activities of Mr McBride, the Labour Party is in the position of repudiating a zealot. It won’t be enough to say, well, everybody does it, even though almost everybody does.
Among the Watergate conspirators whose activities doomed Richard Nixon’s presidency, Donald Segretti was a clever young fellow who had been making mischief since college. He had a reputation for being an especially clever dirty tricks merchant, but his reputation for being especially clever did not survive his getting caught. When President Clinton was in the White House, the Republican National Committee did their best to surround him with a cloud of rumour even more dense than the one he would have generated naturally all by himself. Those involved had learned the lesson taught by Donald Segretti: they didn’t expect to retain their reputation for cleverness if their names became known.
What we have here, in the case of Mr McBride, is one whose reputation was for being a clever manipulator. But he was caught at it, so, although his reputation as a m
anipulator might survive, his reputation for being clever is gone. I saw one newspaper report in which it was confidently asserted that Mr Brown found Mr McBride valuable because of his political astuteness and his gift for economics. We are now free to wonder if Mr Brown’s trust in those qualities was ever very well founded, but whatever we wonder, we won’t be wondering about Mr McBride’s reputation. Only a very small child, after the ice cube melts, wonders if the ice cube is still in existence somewhere else.
But for the government, the question of reputational damage is real. The government might find it easier to get some of its reputation back if it could avoid coining silly new language in the attempt to soften each new setback. The phrase ‘reputational damage’ is meant to have a scientific air, as if it referred to something that was bound to happen. But there is no such thing as reputational damage. There is only reputation, which can indeed be damaged, and can be restored only if somebody talks straight.
Postscript
Under New Labour the English language suffered from the kind of inflation in which the banks control the Mint. It was a time of phrases fine yet hollow. ‘Reputational damage’ was only one of them, and unusual in being easily decoded. ‘Sustainable growth’ was more typical: it meant nothing at all, but seemed to promise a sense of responsibility. A/C Quick’s folder marked SECRET was a symbol for the age, as pointlessly self-publicizing as the legendary sign at the golf club that said nothing except ‘Do not lean golf bags against this sign.’ After a lifetime of trying, and finally forced into extreme compression through lack of space, I achieved, with my brief paragraph about the difference between the reformist view and the revolutionary view, an evocation as neat as I could ever get of the political gulf lying behind Lenin’s famous statement: ‘The worse, the better.’ Lenin was the revolutionary and Kerensky was the reformist. Perhaps partly by nature, I have always been a Kerenskyite, even when I was young, foolish and fulminating about the machinations of the System. Surrounded by clever Leninists, I had to get used to being patronized, but I could already see a basic difference in attitude, and even in personality: whereas Kerenskyites would like to see Leninists locked up, Leninists would like to see Kerenskyites dead.
Apart from its efficacious ruthlessness, one of the chief advantages of the Leninist disposition is that it lasts longer. The Che Guevara beret is never really discarded. Though it might be taken off the head, it continues to be worn internally between the skull and brain, thus to heat the thoughts. In the period under review, the successor to the Che beret was the Hugo Chavez sweatshirt, which heated the heavy breathing. Western mouthpieces of surprising seniority were quick to tell you that Chavez was the saviour of his nation. Even worse, they were slow to stop telling you. My references, in this and other broadcasts, to the depredations of the Republican National Committee will tip off the attentive that I had read and admired The Clinton Wars, by Sidney Blumenthal: the kind of book that the Americans do so much better than we do there is no contest.
BRITAIN HAS TALENT
Dates of show: 24 and 26 April 2009
By now every media commentator in Britain on every subject including global warming has delivered his or her opinion about Susan Boyle, the woman of unremarkable appearance who went on Britain’s Got Talent and proved to have such a remarkable voice that an aria from Les Misérables acquired the celestial overtones of a solo passage from a cantata by Bach and even such exalted arbiters of taste as Piers Morgan and Simon Cowell were reduced to helpless protestations of awe. Limping along a week behind the action, I can only hope, as I add my groat’s worth of opinion to a mountain range of accumulated wisdom, that I have something to say which might prove useful. All the obvious things have been said. But it is sometimes worth asking whether all the obvious things that have been said are quite true.
Barely had the last ringing note of Susan Boyle’s beautiful voice faded in the air before the first media commentators were out of their box to lash Piers Morgan and Simon Cowell for their coarseness in having concurred, with their facial expressions, in the loutish mirth of the studio audience that had greeted Susan Boyle before she began to sing. I looked at the footage carefully and I’m bound to say that I didn’t find either Mr Morgan or Mr Cowell looking any more crass than usual. They seemed to me to be striving to be polite while they contemplated her admittedly unshowbizlike appearance, just as she seemed to me to be striving to be polite while she contemplated them: two men whose faces are surely fated to inspire laughter, in the way that faces do when they belong to the kind of man who is deeply, sincerely concerned with the impression he is making.
Mr Morgan, at some stage early in his career, decided that an air of irrepressible shrewdness should be basic to his image, and after many hours of training before the shaving mirror he managed to perfect such a look of penetrating scepticism that if he had been in the front of the crowd when Jesus Christ delivered the Sermon on the Mount he would have put Our Saviour off his stroke.
Mr Cowell, for his own part, has a set of teeth so uncannily perfect that you can see why he has to spend so much time in America, the only country that will admit such a display of radiant gnashers through Customs without X-raying the rest of the body they are attached to, to see if any part of it is made of enriched uranium. Yet Susan, face to face with these two improbably refulgent paragons, was unfazed, and launched without hesitation into her song.
Within four bars she had established herself as a talent. As Seamus Heaney, a great critic of his art as well as a great practitioner, has told us, we recognize a true poet’s voice immediately by its inherent strength, its integrity, its coherence and its clarity. We recognize a true singer’s voice in the same way. Susan Boyle has got it, and even the more oafish members of the studio audience, who could have come by time travel straight from the Roman Colosseum on a day when children were being fed to the lions, were instantly won over. When Susan finished, there was a fitting tumult.
The next bit, however, was harder to interpret than some of the commentators let on. They assumed that Mr Morgan and Mr Cowell had no advance knowledge that Susan would have a voice. I suppose it’s possible, although I must say it seems unlikely to me. I spent twenty long years working in the front line in television studios and I seldom saw circumstances in which a surprise of such magnitude could be kept secret. But really it doesn’t matter much whether the two men were choosing their words of praise on the spot, without acting, or whether they had had time to think the words up. What mattered was what they said, and it was very instructive. Mr Morgan was the more blatant in letting the world know that he was stunned. The message from both men was that they had expected Susan’s performance to be as nondescript as her appearance was lacking in glamour.
By emphasizing these previous low expectations, they underlined their subsequent large-heartedness in praising her to the skies. Many commentators were able to spot that both men were suffering from an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, in which, while expecting the rest of us to admire them because they were so ready to admit they had been wrong, we would not despise them for having held such low expectations merely because the lady was not a glamour-puss.
With those commentators I was in agreement. The conceit shown by Mr Morgan and Mr Cowell was deeply off-putting and if I had been on a special judging panel to judge the judges I would have told both of them to beware, because a name made from giving opinions in a television studio is a name written in water. There is no more perfect recipe for self-delusion than to suppose that being a television personality is some kind of achievement in itself. The best insurance to stop it happening is to keep a recording of, say, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony nearby in order to remind yourself of what an actual achievement is.
Susan was a lot closer to the world of achievement, as opposed to the world of mere celebrity, than the two men. But right here is the area where the commentators have not yet gone, and ought to. Because the laws of nature had not been repealed, only momentarily jolted, and it remains a
law of nature that appearance is a factor even in the world of serious singing.
The judges of Britain’s Got Talent know quite a lot about the technicalities of putting a song over in a way that Ant and Dec might say wow to, but they don’t know much about serious singing, which is a different thing. The facts, alas, say that in every opera house in the world the chorus contains at least half a dozen people with voices as good as Susan’s, and most of them won’t become stars, so all the hoo-hah about Susan’s sudden stardom was at least partly illusory, based on the dangerous notion that overnight prominence on television will always change reality permanently.
In the opera house, music ought to matter more than anything but it remains true that one of the reasons people flock to hear Anna Netrebko and Elīna Garanča singing together is that they look the part almost as well as they sing it. Things shouldn’t be that way, but strangely enough they have become more and more that way in the last forty years, during the very period when feminism as a train of thought has done so much to educate us about the restrictive nature of expectations based on pulchritude.
When I first started attending Covent Garden in the early 1960s it was still quite common for the soprano to be an unlikely stimulus for the tenor’s cries of passion. Today, most of the sopranos look like film stars. It could be said that the more our primitive male prejudices are broken down, the more we all become free. But one of the consequences of freedom is that ticket-buyers are free to choose, and it is likely to remain a fact that ticket-buyers of both sexes will choose to see the imported dreamboat.
