The Wintle Blog

If I were going to make a TV documentary about the Cadbury-Kraft affair, I’d certainly want to include footage of Margaret Thatcher’s visit to the English confectioners’ home in Bourneville, just outside Birmingham (that’s Warwickshire, UK, not Alabama, USA). She went there in April, 1979, at the start of her victorious battle to become UK Prime Minister. This campaign has been described as Britain’s first “television election”, and Mrs T and her advisers understood exactly what was entailed: instead of talking about politics, she travelled to picturesque places and did vigorous, picturesque things in picturesque costumes, simply because this is what television needed her to do. She wore a white coat and hat. So did the parliamentary sketch writer, Frank Johnson, “and about a hundred television and press photographers and reporters,” as he remembers in his delicious memoir, Best Seat in the House : “the whole effect resembled a lunatic asylum in which the doctors had themselves gone be...

We live in an age of ludicrous hyperbole. I just pushed a supermarket trolley with a banner on it for an instant coffee which didn’t say “good coffee”, but, in gold letters, “GLOWING WITH POLYPHENOL ANTIOXIDANTS.” What? As trolley, banner and I moved along a gently-sloping travelator outside the store, loudspeakers shouted warnings at us which would have been apt had we been roped on the Old Man of Hoy. (I just googled Old Man of Hoy to make sure he wasn’t Hoye and got a sponsored link offering to “Find the Best Results for Pictures Of Old Men!” - What?) You too will have encountered the assistant who stares at you with weary indifference or borderline hostility beneath a sign assuring you that he or she is “passionate about customer service.” My journeys on the C2 bus in London NW1 and NW5 were recently enlivened by signs urging me to “Love Your Local High Street!” Now, Kentish Town Road has a certain, time-warped idiosyncrasy and charm: the Owl Bookshop, sticking two literate finge...

The redwings swept in from distant countryside, birds I hadn’t seen since I lived on the edge of Dartmoor, twenty or so years ago. They swarmed onto a chestnut tree behind my back wall before stripping a nearby hollybush of all its berries, and moving on. (Driving across the moor at Christmastime we had every species of weather in an hour: December sunshine, clear and bright as brass, a snowstorm, sleet, rain, and a giddy ascent into the clouds near Vixen Tor. Lapwings, yes, but I never saw a redwing, although at that moment I’d forgotten I remembered them, if you see what I mean.) Now I briefly got one of those Shakespearean fits: what did it portend, this surge of country birds into the middle of London? The fall of the House of Windsor? The return of Edgar Allan Poe? The re-election of Gordon Brown? It was the freeze that brought them, of course, a matter of survival. But, as I watched through binoculars, their presence connected me to half-forgotten bits and pieces of my past: a ch...

As we UK citizens surfaced through the ice into 2010, British politicians began wheeling out and firing their heavy artillery. Actually, that’s how they want to make it seem, but isn’t really the case. What’s happening is, the politicians wheel out big, gun-shaped tubes of cardboard and the media take turns to shout “bang!” Then you get a long shrapnel crackle of voters jabbering on the radio phone-in shows. Can we stand four months (or more) of this? Of Punch Brown and Judy Cameron stertorously and inanely claiming and counter-claiming, maligning and counter-maligning, with intermittent yaps from Toby Clegg? Four months (or more) in which the media collude and pretend that all this meaningless vapour is real smoke and ordnance in a textbook case of what Jay Rosen memorably described as the “lame formula” of “ he said, she said journalism ” – as opposed to reporters and commentators saying “look, the economy is prone and blue, so it doesn’t matter who says what or who wins, because wha...

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- ...