Wally of the Week........ Is Not Mike Ashley

AN UPDATE TO THIS EARLIER POST (BELOW):
Contrary to press reports throughout this afternoon, it appears that Kevin Keegan has not been sacked as Newcastle manager.

A statement from Newcastle released shortly before 7pm included a denial that the board had axed Keegan:

"Newcastle United can confirm that meetings between members of the board and manager Kevin Keegan were held both yesterday and today.
"Kevin has raised a number of issues and those have been discussed with him.
"The club wants to keep progressing with its long-term strategy and would like to stress that Kevin is extremely important, both now and in the future.
"Newcastle United values the effort and commitment shown by Kevin since his return to St James' Park and wants him to continue to play an instrumental role as manager of the club.
"For the avoidance of doubt, the club has not sacked Kevin Keegan as manager."

So, the award of Wally of the Week to Newcastle chairman Mike Ashley is hereby withdrawn! That can only be bad news for David Miliband........

EARLIER POST

Back in January, I wrote in The Guardian:

Sometimes you hear news that makes you want to jump for joy. The release from jail of Nelson Mandela. The news that Tony Blair, after the longest farewell tour since Frank Sinatra, had finally vacated Downing Street. England regaining the Ashes.
Yesterday's announcement that Kevin Keegan was returning to English football to manage Newcastle United was another such occasion.

Today, just eight months on, Kevin Keegan was sacked by Newcastle chairman Mike Ashley (above). Instead of giving Keegan, a man with a proven track record, 100% backing, Ashley undermined him- appointing Dennis Not-So-Wise as Director of Football with responsibility for transfers. Ashley also allowed James Milner to go to Villa, despite Keegan's opposition. Kevin Keegan can leave Newcastle with his head held high, having done the best he possible could in such a short period of time. But one thing is for sure after today's news: the club will never make a challenge for honours so long as they have a wally like Mike Ashley at the helm.

The Mystery of Flight KAL007

This article of mine appears in The First Post.

The EU leaders gathering in Brussels today to discuss the growing tensions with Russia have chosen an ominous day on which to meet. It is exactly 25 years since Soviet fighter planes shot down a Korean Airlines Boeing 747, with the loss of life of all 269 passengers and crew.

It marked the nadir in East-West relations in the 1980s. President Ronald Reagan called it "a crime against humanity (that) must never be forgotten". And even a quarter of a century later, important questions regarding the incident remain unanswered.

Flight KAL007 was en route from New York to Seoul when, 10 minutes after a refuelling stop in Alaska, it started to deviate from its course and head north towards Russian airspace. The plane continued some 200 miles from its planned flight path. Off the Soviet island of Sakhalin, home to several Soviet military installations, it was shot down by Russian fighters armed with air-to-air missiles.

The Kremlin maintained that the plane had twice violated their airspace. They insisted the airliner had been on a spying mission and their fighter pilots had fired warning shots, but the Korean Airlines pilot did not respond.

Amid international outcry at the Soviet action, it was suggested that a mistake must have been made when programming the plane's inertial navigation system. But if the pilot was genuinely unaware that he was over Soviet airspace, why did he not respond to the Soviet warning shots?

Other mysteries remain: not least, whatever happened to the bodies of the flight's passengers and crew? There was a total absence of human remains - or luggage and
other belongings - on the surface of the sea in the 225 square miles of probable impact area, and when divers eventually located the wreckage of the aircraft weeks later, the remains of only 10 passengers were found.

The 'decompression theory' - that passengers had been sucked out of the plane and scattered over a wider area - appeared the most feasible explanation for the absence of bodies, until the black box recording revealed that the rupture caused by the Russian missile would have been too small for anyone to be sucked out.

It seems that both the Soviets and the US had good cause to keep the background to the tragedy shrouded in mystery. On the very same day that Flight KA007 was shot down, it transpired that the Soviets were secretly test-launching their new SS25 missile, in violation of the SALT2 arms treaty. The missile was launched from northwest Russia and was due to come down in a target range on the peninsula of Kamchatka, over which Flight KAL007 had strayed.

At the same time, a US spy plane was in the area - just 75 miles away from Flight KAL007's route - with a mission to capture the telemetry of the SS-25. In short, if KAL007's deviation into Soviet airspace was a genuine navigational error, it could not have picked a worse day for it.

The incident proved a turning point in the Cold War. The US broke off its arms treaty negotiations and the widespread disgust at the Soviet action paved the way for the deployment of a new round of US Pershing missiles in Europe. By shooting down Flight KAL007, the USSR provided its enemies with a huge propaganda coup - and helped bring into action a chain of events which contributed to its own demise.

Cyril Hare: On Home Ground

This article of mine, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of the great crime writer Cyril Hare (the pseudonym of Judge Alfred Gordon Clark), appears in The Spectator. If there are any other fans of Cyril Hare out there, I'd be delighted to hear from you.

"The best detective story that has appeared for some time and at the end of the year will undoubtedly stand as one of the class leaders in the English school" was how The Spectator described Cyril Hare’s Tragedy at Law, when it first appeared in 1942. ‘A detective masterpiece’ was the New Statesman’s verdict. Others were even more generous in their praise: the crime writer and critic, Julian Symons, included the book in his survey of ‘best, anywhere, ever’.

Tragedy at Law is a detective story like no other. There can’t be any other murder mystery in which the killer strikes so late — on the 221st page out of 252. In fact, to label Tragedy at Law a ‘detective story’ does it an injustice. It’s a wonderfully well-crafted and brilliantly characterised novel which just happens to have a crime in it. Agatha Christie presents great puzzles, but if you don’t like puzzle-solving, her books have relatively little to offer. Hare’s work, by contrast, while featuring ingenious mysteries, can be read even by those who don’t particularly care for the genre: even if Judge Barber didn’t get stabbed to death outside the Old Bailey in chapter 21, Tragedy at Law would still be a cracking read.

The book is set in that strange, twilight world of the autumn of 1939 — a world of blackouts but no bombs — and portrays in great detail wartime life on the Southern Circuit, with its curtailed pomp and ceremony, but far from curtailed rivalries and jealousies.

It was a world that Hare — or rather Alfred Gordon Clark — knew well. Clark was born into a family with strong legal traditions and after schooldays at Rugby (where he said he was ‘starved of food and crammed with learning’) and three years at Oxford (where he obtained a first in History), he made a beeline for the Bar. He learned that his first novel, Tenant for Death had been accepted while on his feet defending a larcenist at Maidstone Assizes. Living in Cyril Mansions in Battersea, and working from Hare Court, Inner Temple, gave Clark the idea for his pseudonym.

Hare, the crime writer, certainly put his day job to good use. During the war he worked as a Judge’s Marshal —- providing the inspiration for Tragedy at Law. A short spell at the Ministry of Economic Warfare spawned the wonderfully atmospheric With a Bare Bodkin. Returning to the Bar after the war, Hare reached the pinnacle of his legal career in 1950 when he became a County Court judge.

While points of law play a large part in Hare’s books, you don’t have to be an LLB to derive great enjoyment from them. Hare is no show-off, boasting of his superior legal knowledge; his style is easy and fluent, and his books are eminently readable.
Four of Hare’s nine novels feature the far from successful, but extremely likeable, defence barrister, Francis Pettigrew. When we first encounter Pettigrew in Tragedy at Law he is leaning back in counsel’s seats in the Shire Hall at Markhampton and reflecting on how little he has achieved.

Looking back at the confident — and he could fairly say it now — brilliant young man who had opened his career at the Bar beneath that self-same flaking plaster ceiling, he fell to wondering what had gone wrong with him. Everything had promised well at first, and everything had turned out ill.... Some time he was going to be successful and make money. Some time he would take silk, become a Bencher of his Inn. Some time he would marry and have a family. And now in a sudden rush of disillusionment, from which he strove to exclude self-pity, he saw quite clearly that ‘some time’ had become ‘never’.

The transformation of Pettigrew from down-on-his luck Circuit barrister, staying in budget hotels and wearing shabby overcoats, into a fulfilled and happily married man, is one of the delights of the Hare canon.

Hare wasn’t only a great novelist; he was a master of the short story. Some of his short stories are very short indeed: in ‘The Rivals’ he manages to construct an intriguing whodunit in a little over 1,000 words.

In his introduction to a collection of Hare’s best short stories, Michael Gilbert recalls his first encounter with the great man at London’s Detection Club. Hare appeared to come

straight from the pages of the Strand magazine and Paget’s illustrations of the Sherlock Holmes stories. The thin, inquisitive nose, the intellectual forehead, the piercing eye, the Oxford common room voice.

Although the description implies a certain austerity, there was nothing chilly about Hare or his writing. He was a kindly and compassionate observer of human failings his work is full of humorous insights and devoid of the snobbery which mars much of the detective fiction of the ‘golden age’. Sadly, Hare was cut off in his prime, dying suddenly at the age of 57, exactly 50 years ago this week.

While his books have regularly been republished, most recently by House of Stratus at the turn of the decade, the great mystery is that, save for a 1975 Soviet film version of An English Murder, there have been no television or film adaptations of his work. Dramatisation of his novels would, I’m sure, make for wonderful Sunday night viewing. Half a century on from Hare’s untimely death, what better way could there be to bring the work of one of Britain’s finest writers to the attention of a wider audience?

The End of the New World Order

"If there were any doubt that the rules of the international game have changed for good, the events of the past few days should have dispelled it. On Monday, President Bush demanded that Russia's leaders reject their parliament's appeal to recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Within 24 hours, Bush had his response: President Medvedev announced Russia's recognition of the two contested Georgian enclaves.

The Russian message was unmistakable: the outcome of the war triggered by Georgia's attack on South Ossetia on August 7 is non-negotiable - and nothing the titans of the US empire do or say is going to reverse it.

That this month's events in the Caucasus signal an international turning point is no longer in question.

What is clear is that America's unipolar moment has passed - and the new world order heralded by Bush's father in the dying days of the Soviet Union in 1991 is no more. The days when one power was able to bestride the globe like a colossus, enforcing its will in every continent, challenged only by popular movements for national independence and isolated "rogue states", are now over."

You can read the whole of Seumas Milne's brilliant Guardian article on the significance of recent events in the Caucasus here.

And then, folks, it's time to pop the champagne corks.

A Question for Dave

"They cannot behave in a way that they invade a neighbouring country – completely against international law … and get away with it".

says the wannabee British Prime Minister, a propos of Russian action against Georgia. Does his statement mean that he now opposes the illegal invasion of Iraq?

And if not, why not?

A Serbian view of life in modern Britain

There's a wonderfully frank interview with Manchester United's brilliant Serbian defender Nemanja Vidic in today's DT.

"I will never stay to live in England, that's for sure. You get only a brief glimpse of sunlight before it's all cloudy again. The winters are mild, but in summer the temperatures seldom go higher than 20C. And it rains, rains, rains. "In Russia and Serbia the people's way of life is similar. In England it's totally different. Here they just don't have time to feel the joy of life."
"Throughout the week they all work so hard. They only talk to people at lunch break. Then in the evening they come home and watch the telly, so they can get up early for work the next day. The only time to meet friends is at weekends, but for football players it's the busiest time of all. It was much easier for me to adapt to Russia than England. In England I had no one to talk to. The first month was especially hard. I lived alone in a hotel, which I left only for training. I thought I would go crazy inside those four walls."

Well, I'm not a Serb but I agree with much of what Vidic says. Turbo-capitalist Britain is a country where money-making comes before social interraction and feeling the 'joy of life'. Moving to a neoliberal, privatised economy may have given us more material goods, but it's also made us less friendly and sociable. None of this has happened by chance- the big corporations who control our lives don't want sociable, affiliative people taking delight in the simplest of pleasures, but materialistic and perenially dissatisfied consumers. Britain is probably the hardest country in Europe for newcomers, like Nemanja Vidic, to forge deep and lasting friendships and that's because we have by far the most rapacious and profit-obsessed economic system.
And the worst thing of all, is that it's this dehumanising turbo-capitalist model that Britain, and America, are trying to impose on the rest of the world.

Neo-cons are hoist by their own petard

Back in December, I wrote:

"Recognising an independent Kosovo will push Serbia from the Western orbit as well as creating a real chance of war. And it will set a precedent: if the rights of self-determination for Kosovan Albanians are to be acknowledged, then what about the rights of self-determination for Serbs in Bosnia, who wish to join Serbia? "

And of course, what about the rights of self-determination for the citizens of Abkhazia and South Ossetia? Russia's formal recognition today of the independence of those two breakaway republics has been met with an angry response by the neocons and their lackeys. US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, said Russia's move was regrettable. She said Abkhazia and South Ossetia were part of Georgia "and it will remain so". The British foreign secretary, David Miliband, said Russian recognition of Georgia's breakaway regions was "unjustifiable and unacceptable", while German Chancellor Angela Merkel called it "absolutely unacceptable".

Sorry, chaps and chapesses. YOU were the ones who played the 'self-determination' card in your drive to break up the former Yugoslavia. YOU were the ones who championed the cause of Kosovan independence. So really, you don't have a leg to stand on when you denounce Russia's recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.