Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (34 page)

In the past week I've been mildly startled by the attitude of many women, who've said they cannot understand why someone would take photographs of a girl sunbathing topless, why a magazine would pay money for the right to publish them and why Buckingham Palace should have used the courts to try to prevent further images from reaching a wider audience. All have said the same thing: ‘Breasts are no big deal.'

On the face of it, that's true. How can they be a big deal when half the world has them? Well, I'll tell you how. Because the other half can't really ever think of anything else.

In a list of stuff that matters most to a man, breasts appear at No. 4, between oxygen and food.

Breasts fascinate us. We cannot imagine why women don't spend all day at home playing with them, because if we had them, that's what we'd do. It's why we were all so keen to have a look at what sort the future queen has. Would they be angry, sad, milky or pointy? Would they look like deflated zeppelins or dried fish? Or would they not really be there at all?

Often we are told by women that when at work or out socializing, they are heartily fed up with men who talk to their chest rather than their face. Well, I would like to say here and now that men do not do that. I would like to. But I cannot. Because on occasion we do. We can't help it.

In the same way that women could not help having a quiet moment with their laptop if they thought the internet was hosting a full-frontal picture of George Clooney.

Of course, since the invention of clothing there have been many attempts to desexualize the breast. In the 1960s,
National Geographic
magazine was undoubtedly seen as a weighty and learned tome full of many interesting facts about the world and its people. Not to me, it wasn't. It was a girlie mag.

Later, women's liberationists argued that by burning their bras they were freeing themselves from the shackles of history and propelling themselves through the glass ceiling. And this received a great deal of support from male observers, all of whom were equally keen for bra-less women to be seen anywhere.

Today new mothers are often to be found in crowded places breastfeeding their infants. They could go behind a tree or to a quiet spot, but by popping one out in public they send a clear message: This is not a sex toy. It's a food dispensary unit, so stop staring.

Yeah, right. Telling us to stop staring at a breast is like telling us not to stare at a burning airliner. It isn't possible.

The Duchess of Cambridge is probably fearful that she is the first senior royal to be seen in public in such a state of undress.

Not so. Queen Mary II was painted topless, and in France, scene of the current brouhaha, Charles VII's mistress would constantly swan around court with her breasts on show. It was the fashion then.

You might like to think that things changed in Victorian times but evidently not. The Victorians were idiotically prudish and got it into their tiny minds that the ankle and the shoulder should be concealed beneath many layers of velvet, steel and wood. Despite this, it was absolutely fine to turn up at a Brunellian reception for the monarch herself in the sort of top that even Kate Moss would find ‘too revealing'.

So men have been exposed to breasts for centuries. Many of us were brought up on them. We see them every day in the nation's bestselling newspaper, on the internet and on even the coldest Saturday night in Newcastle. We see them on the beach when we go on holiday and in the office on a hot day. Breasts are simply everywhere. They should be about as sexual as moths. But they aren't.

Let me pose a delicate question. In the sort of exotic South Sea societies that used to appear in the
National Geographic
magazine, it is still completely normal for women to be topless as they go about their daily business. So does this mean that during lovemaking sessions, their boyfriends and husbands treat their breasts like their noses and ignore them? It's possible, I suppose, but I very much doubt it.

What's more, if breasts are no big deal, why do women buy bras that lift and separate and do all sorts of other things besides? Why queue round the block to have your breasts reupholstered?

It's because you know that, in fact, your breasts are a big deal. Mrs Mountbatten-Windsor knows it too and that's why she was so mortified to find them in the press and plastered all over the internet.

Those pictures should not have been taken and they should not have been published. And it is stupid to claim that she's to blame because she was in full view of the public road. Because that's only true if you were looking at her through a two-million-millimetre telephoto lens.

Happily, though, the argument brings me on to a solution. Doubtless one day the photographer who took the offending snaps will be identified, and when that happens he will become a public figure. According to his rules, that will make him fair game.

So someone should wait for him to go to the lavatory and
then snap away. If he chooses to complain about having a private moment appear on the internet, then we will simply argue that, at the time, he was clearly visible to anyone who happened to be on a stepladder peering over the top of the cubicle. And that he should have known better.

23 September 2012

In the past couple of weeks everyone in the country, except me, seems to have decided that Andrew Mitchell, the government chief whip, is a potty-mouthed snob who goes through life gorging on swan, goosing his housekeeper and shooting poor people for sport.

Last week the police released details of exactly what was said between officers and Mr Mitchell after he'd been told he couldn't ride his bicycle through the main gates at Downing Street. Mr Mitchell demanded that he be allowed to exit through the main gate whereupon it was explained to him this was not possible.

A police officer on duty said: ‘I am more than happy to open the side pedestrian gate for you, sir, but it is policy that we are not to allow cycles through the main vehicle gate.'

At this point Mr Mitchell seems to have become angry, telling the officers they had best learn their effing place, that they were effing plebs and that they hadn't heard the last of the matter.

Hmmm. While his choice of abuse seems a bit weak, I sympathize with his sentiments absolutely. Because what petty-minded pen-pusher made this policy and why? What possible difference can it make which gate people use when leaving work? Why should bicycles use one gate and cars another?

These are the questions that matter. Except, of course, we already know the answers. ‘It's security, sir.' Or maybe: ‘It's health and safety, sir.' These are the catch-all responses from
anyone in a uniform who thinks if he uses the word ‘sir' as often as possible, we won't notice he's being a complete arse.

Only very recently I arrived at a department of the BBC, where I engaged in the usual good-natured banter with a security guard I've known for many years. I asked how he was. He asked after my family. We chatted momentarily about the weather and then, after I explained that I'd accidentally left my pass at home, he said he couldn't let me in. ‘Security policy,' he said, with the good-natured shrug of a small cog that has never asked a bigger cog: ‘Why?'

I felt it immediately: a hotness surging into my head and threatening to sever my tongue from its mountings, leaving it free to call the blithering idiot many cruel and unusual names. I began to imagine what he might look like without a head. And the noises he'd make if I staked him out in the desert with no eyelids.

This happens all the time. With traffic wardens who somehow can't see that I only popped into the tobacconist's for a moment; with airport security guards who think my youngest daughter is a dead ringer for Abu Hamza; and most recently in America with a moron who wanted photo ID before I could rent a luggage locker.

Then you have the imbeciles at the post office and various other large organizations who explain their company's stupid policy and, when they see you're about to boil over, point at a sign on their desk that says: ‘The company will not tolerate physical or verbal abuse directed at our employees.' In other words: ‘If you complain about our small-minded idiocy you will go to prison.'

So you stand there and you say, as calmly as you can: ‘Why can you not deliver my parcel/fridge/important document?' And invariably you are told it is for security reasons. Or health and safety.

Actually, neither of those things is the reason. No. The reason the police officers in Downing Street, the nation's traffic wardens and the counter staff at the post office do not bend the rules even when they can see you're making sense is simple: they fear for their jobs. They've been told by their line manager what the policy is and they know that if they bend it even a little bit, just once, they will be sacked.

Things are different in Italy. Last week I flew back to Britain through Milan's Linate airport. And it was plainly obvious that the X-ray arch machine had been set to such a level it could detect tiny fragments of zinc in a lady's vajazzle, or bits of nickel in those hard bits at the end of a man's shoelaces.

We see this a lot with airport scanners these days and we know what the response will be. You'll be sent back to take off yet another item of clothing until you are butt naked. And even then, thanks to the cardamom in the chicken casserole you ate the night before, a man will want to rub his wand over your genitals. It's humiliating and disgusting.

In Milan, however, they do things rather differently. Someone would walk through the machine. It would beep. The security guard would note that it was a businessman or an old lady and would simply wave them through. I beeped. He looked at me. Saw no beard. Saw I had hands rather than hooks. And that was that.

Of course, he will have been told loudly, and usually by the Americans, that every single person getting on every single airliner is likely to explode at any moment, but Luigi uses his nous. And he has obviously worked out that if a terrorist organization is going to go to all the bother of blowing up a plane, it probably won't be the 11.30 a.m. commuter shuttle from Milan to London.

So why is Luigi allowed to use the power of reason when
Mr Patel at Heathrow is not? Simple. Because Luigi cannot be sacked.

Well, he can, but under the terms of Italian employment law, his employer must continue to pay his wages, his mortgage, his children's school fees and the grocery bill of his descendants forever.

I have no doubt at all that Mr Mitchell, a Tory, would fight tooth and nail to stop such communist laws being introduced in Britain. Which is why he will continue to be told by knees-knocking policemen that they can't let him cycle through the vehicle gate because using their common sense is more than their job's worth.

Simple solution. Introduce a system where it becomes less than their job's worth.

30 September 2012

While on a tour of a factory in South America recently, David Cameron appeased the nation's meat-eaters by saying that at some point in the next parliament there might possibly be a referendum on whether Britain stayed in the European Union.

Isolationism is very popular at the moment. Not just with middle England but with the Scotch, too, and the Corns – everyone. If you gave people in Leicester the chance to form their own government and their own state, I bet you any money a majority would say, ‘Ooh, yes please.'

Certainly the idea of Chipping Norton breaking free from the shackles of Westminster and Brussels is very appealing. There is little crime, so we wouldn't need a police force. Or an army. Many people own guns, so we'd easily be able to hold out should we be attacked by Stow-on-the-Wold or Moreton-in-Marsh. We have meat, trout and vegetables. We could trade jam for oil. And we have wind for power.

Taxes would be very low, since we would only really need a school, two doctors and a fire station. And we could introduce some new laws relevant to our way of life. We could make it illegal to be Piers Morgan or to harbour a badger. Campanology would be outlawed, too, along with motorcycles. On the face of it, then, life would be peachy.

To understand where all of this might end, you need to go back to the 1850s in what at the time was known as ‘darkest Africa'. British explorers stumbled on a tribe living on the tranquil northern shores of Lake Victoria. People had been
living there for tens of thousands of years, assuming that they were the only people on earth. They had never met anyone from another tribe, let alone an Arab or a white man. And it was interesting to see how their society had developed.

They had not invented the wheel or the plough. But they had invented beer. And they could carry it around in vessels woven exquisitely from reeds. They also had fine cloth and knew to wash their hands in the lake before eating. They had also come up with the idea of extreme violence.

If a child was making too much noise over lunch, it would be beheaded. If it got up without clearing its plate? That was a beheading offence, too. Beheading was their society's equivalent of the naughty step. It was also a cure for snoring, nagging or looking at someone in a funny way.

It could be worse, though. You could have ended up as one of the king's wives. They were kept bound on the floor and forced to drink milk for eight hours a day, non-stop.

This ensured that when the head honcho fancied a spot of rumpy-pumpy, the girl he selected would be nice and fat. Kate Moss? She would have been beheaded before she'd reached puberty.

Now remember, this was the middle of the nineteenth century. Elsewhere in the world there were steam engines and ladies with parasols taking tea in the park. People in India wore clothes made in Huddersfield. People in Louisiana drank tea from Ceylon. And yet in the middle of it all was a civilization in which you could be beheaded for talking with your mouth full.

What stopped it was the arrival of other people. People who said, ‘Yes, cutting your daughter's head off is certainly one way of teaching her not to use her fingers at meal times. But have you tried a stern word, or a smacked bottom, because where we come from that works quite well, too?'

This argument is still relevant today. What do you think stops American police forces waterboarding pretty much everyone they take into custody? The answer has nothing to do with the inner goodness of a man's soul. It's the sure-fire knowledge that other people are watching.

Why do you think Robert Mugabe is such a monster? Because Zimbabwe is cut off. He can do as he pleases because he doesn't have people from other places raising an eyebrow and saying, ‘Are you sure?'

Closer to home we have the Isle of Man. Because it's not really in the EU and not really part of the UK and because people from abroad are viewed by locals as Romulan stormtroopers, it was 1992 before they stopped birching homosexuals in front of a baying mob. And why? Because that's when satellite TV from other countries showed them that homosexuality wasn't a lifestyle choice and that birching was a bit last week. Maybe one day soon its idiotic government will also learn that it can't just go around confiscating people's gardens.

Most governments in the civilized world are constitutionally bound by checks and balances to ensure they don't do something idiotic. And what are those checks and balances? They usually have fancy names but, actually, they all boil down to the same thing: other people.

In Britain every single poll on the death penalty suggests that the vast majority of us would like to see the gallows reintroduced. And, of course, if we weren't in the EU, a government would be free to bring it back.

But what for? At first, it would be for premeditated murder and rape. However, with no one looking, how long would it be before we were hanging people for having a beard, or for shouting at meal times, or for being Peter Mandelson? How long before disaffected Muslim youths started disappearing?
And before child molesters and bell-ringers were hung from lamp posts by lynch mobs?

Take the case of Abu Hamza. Every fibre of your being wanted him gone and you didn't really care where. If he'd ended up becoming part of a new flyover on the M6, you'd have been relieved. But would that have been a good thing? Really?

We need to be in Europe, to trade with the Germans and holiday in France. We need to be Spain's checks and Sweden's balances. For the sake of decency and the advancement of science, we need to share ideas, to compromise, to be a team. We need to look after one another. Not the Greeks, though. They can get lost.

7 October 2012