Umpire Darrell Hair vs PM Tony Blair: Bring on Cash For Resignations!

The last week has been a turbulent one in the usually placid waters of that most gentlemanly of sports, cricket. After one Australian Umpire, Darrell Hair, decided (with seemingly little proof beyond his Aussie intuition) that the Pakistani team had been cheating, the ensuing furore led to Mr Hair, in his own inimitable way, offering to resign.

But this was no typical offer of resignation; he sent an e-mail to his boss, a man named Doug Cowie, asking for $500,000 in return for his being willing to "retire/stand down/ relinquish my position." This, on the face of it, is a breathtaking course of action however you look at it. Either the man himself had decided that his time was up, and it was worth covering his back in case he is left with nothing, or he simply has had enough of pussyfooting around the law-makers of his sport and wants to get out; offering his resignation in exchange for cash seems to be the action of a man not especially enamoured with the sport he has devoted his life to.

Yet perhaps there is more in this; a precedent that could be applied to our own frenzied political landscape. Image, if you will- Party Conference time comes around this Autumn, and PM Blair is about to take the stage. The audience and throng of assembled media is wondering just what he is going to say. Will he make any pledge to withdraw troops from Iraq? Surely not. Will he, then, make a clear indication of his exit strategy? Possibly, although it could render him even more of a lame duck; all of these have crossed his mind.

Instead of either of these options, PM Blair strides on to the stage, grinning slightly wider than usual, and with a twinkle in his eye that has been AWOL for at least the last two years. His hair even seems less grey, his face ever-so-slightly less wrinkled, as if a great weight has been lifted from his shoulders. He addresses his once-adoring members:
"Friends. Members. Colleagues. Gordon. I stand here today willing to give what most of you seem to want most." The anti-war lobby's collective heart leaps.
"I will retire/stand down/relinquish my position with immediate effect, in return for the sum of £500,000. If paid directly into my account in the Cayman Islands- (don't worry Gordon, you know I've never stopped you borrowing to pay for things, this is no exception) I will be out of your hair. All those in favour, say 'Aye!'"

A fantasy, perhaps, but, as Umpire Hair has shown us this week, a "cash for resignations" scandal could be the next big thing on the political horizon. Cash for peerages fizzled out, cash for questions is just old hat; surely the successor to these two noble scandals is apparent?
Perhaps at the future Coronation of Prince Charles, he could do the same- "I know probably very few of you want me. And quite frankly, I'd rather be somewhere else too. So what do you say? A couple of million and a country estate or two, and I'll happily bugger off. Now, the price would depend on whether you just wanted Wills to take over or whether you're after a complete abolition. That'd cost you extra..."

Yes indeed, a fantasy. But probably no more of a fantasy than something really interesting being said at a Party Conference. Blair's clinging on by his fingernails. Brown's saving all his ideas for when he takes power, lest Tony steals them. No, perhaps we'll just have to dream. And take our conference entertainment from the unfortunate pensioners being jostled by security heavies at the back for sucking too loud on Murray mints in the Auditorium.

Animal Wrongs

Today, the Daily Telegraph reports that at a fly-fishery near Lancaster, "A gang on masked animal rights activists attacked a group of anglers", spreading their web of intimidation now into purely recreational territories.

Has this done their cause any good? Are animal testing facilities going to close their doors and set free all the creatures within, because of this group of thugs masquerading as crusaders for a cause. I wonder if they're proud of themselves, knowing that they successfully set upon and threatened a body of fishermen and women including several families. Would they have spared the toddlers with their nets, splashing around near the waters edge? By the sound of things, this group, which found it morally justifiable to chase a young woman (a nurse, no less) with wooden bats shouting "Get her!" while punching another woman in the face, have no grasp whatsoever of what would help their cause.

These pathetic wannabe guerrillas paraded around shouting things like "It's the easy way of the hard way....You've been sabbed!", which sounds more like a cartoon battle cry than the rallying call of genuine dissidents; but the fact that such a rag-tag, frankly pathetic group of people could become violent towards women simply for fishing, says something about the desperation the animal rights cause evidently now must feel.

The real animal rights lobbyists, and it must be acknowledged that there is a genuine lobby to be listened to, somewhere within the melee of masquerading idiots, tirelessly petitioning Parliament for the improvement of animal welfare standards must be ashamed to see their beloved cause taken on by such snivelling, cowardly amateurs.

In a year where animal rights protestors in the city of Oxford have largely been laughed off the streets and treated with widespread derision due to their objections to the new building of an animal testing laboratory, you would hope that the Animal Rights lobby might keep their profile low for embarrassment; all they seem to have achieved is assaulting a young woman angler (who presumably would have been throwing back whatever fish were caught anyway) and necessitating the builders on the Oxford project to wear balaclavas to prevent their being identified and targeted.

This is a group of, though I hesitate to use the word again, "wannabes". They dress as though they're an offshoot of a Paramilitary organisation, wielding bats, presumably attacking families of anglers because it's much easier than the early mornings favoured by the activists of old when attacking testing centres and laboratories. One would hope that some of them would think of examples close to them, where relatives or loved ones have been saved by medication tested safely on animals- but, judging by their apparent braindead recklessness, that might be a forlorn hope.

Everybody Loves Kate....But Why?

To continue the vaguely pop-culture train of thought started earlier in the Blog with my post about Pete Doherty, I now move to consider his muse, the model Kate Moss. To get straight to the point- why does the nation love her so? She is drug-tainted, tainted by association with scurrilous men, a seemingly often absentee mother to her put-upon toddler daughter, and yet nothing, it seems, can dent her popularity.

In the last year, Kate has been "exposed" as a user of hard drugs in the Tabloids (though the Police "asked her a few questions", it seemed entering a munti-million dollar rehab clinic was deemed hardship enough for her to avoid any trouble). She has been one half of the most ludicrously on-off celebrity relationship in recent memory, with a man for whom public sympathy seems to have run almost dry; yet for Kate, it does not.

Throughout the whole tabloid storm of the past year, Kate Moss attracted, in real terms, very little publicity for herself that turned out to be genuinely negative. She went through rehab (a luxury hardly available to your average run-of-the-mill Council Estate addict) and immediately then was painted as a Great British Survivor. And trebled her income; all those snooty labels that dropped her when the story broke were replaced in a piranha feeding frenzy for her face to adorn new and exciting products to be marketed.

I was fortunate enough to catch a short feature on TV in the last couple of weeks which dealt with exactly this issue; and the guests they had on to discuss it were illuminating in themselves. Three sycophantic "fashion-types"- a stylist, a photographer, and...well, probably another "stylist"... sat around nodding sagely discussing with the venerable hosts, Richard and Judy, how Kate inspires loyalty in her friends, and commenting on how none of her friends would ever discuss her in the public domain.

Exactly-which tells us that these three wise folks aren't Kate's friends, but people who may have met her once or twice; they probably know little more about her than we do. One of these three fashion oracles proudly, and with the air of a fashion guru, assured us that Kate had told him several years earlier that she never did any drugs harder than marijuana. Or maybe he'd seen in on a documentary. Or heard it second-hand... you get the idea. Their presence there did illustrate the point that none of Kate's friends would go behind her back in the public doman, which was a bonus- but the feature came rather unstuck when trying to show us "the real Kate Moss". There simply isn't one- she doesn't say anything, except through publicists. She goes about her daily business, suspicous or otherwise, with an air of mystery that is constantly cultivated by tabloid photos speculating, and she herself saying (and therefore confirming) nothing.

She knows that she is a model; operating in the most shallow of worlds, where face-value IS everything, and evidence substance or moral fibre can do little more than put people off. By stayling silent almost all of her career, she has managed to ingratiate herself as the fashion muse of a generation; any female between the age of 12 and 32 seems obliged to adore her, never stopping to criticise her decisions or attitudes. She knows her primary function is as a clothes horse, and style icon. For those twin roles, she doesn't need to speak.

She spoke once, a long time ago, in a TV Programme Model Behaviour, in her reassuringly normal Croydon accent, giggly and youthful. Now she speaks as the face of Virgin Mobile, with a rather more polished and artificial accent- again, to put people off would be a tragedy in a career like hers- and in between, even in the press, her public statements have been mostly limited to agents and acquaintances.

There is probably not a male equivalent, because it is only a small circle of manhood that considers fashion in the same exalted manner as the female population at large does; I would guess she is a female-only phenomenon. Few males would be able to keep their mouth shut for quite so long, even if they were convinced it was for the best; Kate Moss has become the master of being in the public eye without seeming like she totally wants to be.

She is, paradoxically, one of the most recognisable faces on the Earth, and at the same time a blank canvas; and, it seems, a commercial genius.