The Wintle Blog

I wish I could open, “on a mid-December afternoon, in a grey and grainy light...” But I can’t. It happened on one of this year’s bright May mornings. And I wish I could say I was feeling particularly whimsical, romantic, suggestible or dreamy. But, tell the truth, in a grim mood, I was trudging to meet an erstwhile colleague to talk about my difficult relationship with a third party in another organisation, a dim-witted brute with an over-partiality for red tape and tight trousers. So, heading towards Newgate Street, I go through the rose garden in the ruined nave of Christ Church. On the other side of the road, a man is sitting on a low wooden stool, painting. He is in early middle age, robust and square jawed. He wears wide leather boots, the colour of fresh-shelled chestnuts, with navy trousers tucked into them; a big blue canvas shirt, a tan leather waistcoat and a black leather pillbox hat. I cross the road. He looks up at me – piercing dark eyes – and I smile. He doesn’t. Passing...

I don’t know if you read the story about poor Paul Hopes? Why do I call him poor? In three years he spent nearly £4-million on fast cars, fast girls and five-star hotels. Big problem: it wasn’t his money. So now he’s in custody waiting to be sentenced after pleading guilty to 18 charges of theft. Paul managed the purchase ledger at Toys ‘R’ Us in Maidenhead, Berkshire, UK, a chain whose exchequer he clearly saw as his personal plaything. His story is well told by Ben Marlow and Robert Watts in The Times . What jumped at me was this: The 58-year-old accountant, with greying hair and a double chin, appeared to live a life of suburban normality... “It’s all been a big surprise,” said one of his colleagues. “We just knew him as ‘Paul from finance’. He was a quiet, likeable chap. He just didn’t strike you as that sort of person. Look, in all the time I’ve worked in the same building ... getting arrested is the one memorable thing I can remember him doing.” And why did that portrait leap ou...

I fear I may be turning into an avatar of Gabriel Betteredge, the venerable house steward in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone who has an eccentric dependency on Robinson Crusoe . “When my spirits are bad – Robinson Crusoe . When I want advice – Robinson Crusoe . In past times, when my wife plagued me; in present times, when I have had a drop too much – Robinson Crusoe . I have worn out six stout Robinson Crusoes with hard work in my service.” In my case, the oracle is an Oscar-winning documentary called The Fog of War , which has become for me and its other students a significant educational resource . The film, made in 2003 when its protagonist was 85, is subtitled “eleven lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara”, and if you want to know briefly what the lessons were, I’ve précised them into a short slide-show . In a way, the doc is a factual version of Dr Strangelove . McNamara, the once-vilified Secretary of State to J F Kennedy and L B Johnson, had grandstand places for the fire- ...

Out of nowhere this month there erupted onto the media stage the figure of Phillip Blond, until recently an unnoticed lecturer in theology at the University of Cumbria, now installed as “Philosopher King” of the Tory party, guru to David Cameron, and founder of a new think tank called ResPublica . Armed with a social theory called “Red Toryism” (a bit of a cocktail out of Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott and Catholicism) Mr Blond believes he has the right prescription to fix Britain’s so-called “broken society”, but first, he wants to tell us what’s gone wrong. He writes pungently. In an essay called The Ownership State he denounces the modern economy’s fixation with: “...a purely market driven approach, whose domination of the speaking parts [in the corporate narrative] is so complete that in the middle of the greatest management meltdown in history, management responsibility for the financial crisis is entirely shielded from question. Resource allocation, risk, product design, accoun...

Four doors down, someone often flings his windows open late at night or in the early hours and plays I am the Walrus , repeatedly and very loudly. You know the song? Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the van to come. Corporation tee-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday. Man, you been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long. I am the eggman, they are the eggmen. I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob It doesn’t really bother me. The nights have got cold, so now we have our doors and windows shut. And anyway, after about half an hour a nearer neighbour starts shouting obscenities in such a rage that the broadcast stops. Before that, as the Walrus chugs along with the velocity and resonance of an old steam locomotive, I tick off various background choruses: “oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper,” which my Dublin grandmother would have recognised, and “smoke pot, smoke pot, everybody smoke pot,” which she wouldn’t. These were added by an easy-listening group of the time called the Mike Sammes...

He sat unshaven at one of the bar’s outside tables, in sunlight, nursing a beer and a cigarette. Sometimes he trembled. It certainly looked as if this wasn’t the day’s first drink, nor its last. This was Sascha Anderson, perhaps the most extraordinary exhibit in the gallery of extraordinary characters portrayed in the BBC’s feature-length documentary, The Secret Life of the Berlin Wall . In East Berlin, when the GDR still reigned, he was a poet, a radical, a firebrand – among the most influential figures in the city’s subversive underground. He was also an informer for the secret police, the Stasi. “Were you a good spy?” he was asked. He laughed shyly. He sighed and swallowed. He looked everywhere but at his interviewer or the camera. For a quarter of a minute he said nothing. And then: “In the place that I was, I was the top informer. I have the feeling that I wasn’t just an ordinary spy.” Now a confessional moment – he looks straight at the interviewer. “Of course, I told them everyt...

In the first week of July, 1980, the world would have been destroyed if computer systems had been left to their own devices. Here’s the novelist Christa Wolf, writing her diary in what was then East Germany, on the very brow of the face-to-snarling-face confrontation between capitalism and communism: “Meteln, July 8. Twice in the past week, the US computer has sounded the alarm: Soviet rockets are flying towards the United States. In such a case, we are told, the President has twenty-five minutes to make a decision. The computer (we hear) has now been switched off. The delusion: to make security dependent on a machine, rather than an analysis of the situation possible only to human beings”. From the fact that we’re still here one can deduce that human intervention – probably a red-phone call between White House and Kremlin – overrode the intentions of the machine and prevented our annihilation. But now fast-forward almost thirty years to the recent RSA Europe 2009 Conference in London,...

How far the one-eyed squint of journalism has seized the perspective in almost every public conversation became clear when you read reviews of “The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus”. Even serious critics treated the death of Heath Ledger as if it was the story of “The Imaginarium”, rather than a story that was incidental to the film. For there is only one way that Ledger’s unexpected and – perhaps – unscripted departure from the stage could be the story, and that’s in a way that none of the critics or commentators have suggested. “The Imaginarium” is a work of genius, I think, which confirms Terry Gilliam as one of the very few directors working in and out of Britain who makes films for the big screen, rather than pumping up television dramas for a brief excursion into cinemas before they subside more comfortably onto TV and DVD. Dr Parnassus runs a travelling theatre – a sort of superannuated Foots Barn – the centrepiece of which is a mirror. When individuals pass through its pane, their...