Events | 2010.03.13
Hugh Muir's diary
The show won\'t go on. The actors have upped and left. But then that\'s showbiz
• It would have been great, but libel trial aficionados will be disappointed that this year\'s star attraction at the high court theatre – Alex Mardas v the New York Times – has been cancelled. Mardas, aka Magic Alex, was the man at the Maharishi commune in 1968 who reported that the Holy Man had been getting rather too physically spiritual with his female meditators, causing the Beatles to pack their bags and leave. "Why are you leaving," the Maharishi asked John Lennon. "If you are so cosmic, you will know," was Lennon\'s reply. The New York Times described Alex as a charlatan, so he sued for a million euros in Greece and as much as he could get in London. But when the defence produced a witness statement from Sir Harry Evans attesting to the paper\'s journalistic responsibility, Mardas agreed to withdraw without damages if the paper would merely clarify that by calling him a charlatan, it didn\'t mean that he was a conman. That it did. Unfortunately, the settlement leaves a gaping hole in the summer season at high court, where stars of the libel circuit such as Judge Eady, Desmond Browne and Geoffrey Robertson were to have trod the boards along with Sir Paul McCartney, Mike Love of the Beach Boys, Cynthia Lennon, Ringo Starr, Mia Farrow and others big in the 60s. Boo, hiss. Sob. Bring back libel tourism.
• The sweat is over at London\'s City Hall following last night\'s Question Time appearance of Mayor Boris Johnson. Always watchable, he blusters through unscathed. And should David Dimbleby have been unwise enough to take him on about matters of poshness, education, etc, he would have been ready. For in recent days, members of Boris\'s team have been finding out what they could about the questionmaster. "Dimbleby was a member of the Bullingdon Club as well," trilled one triumphantly. Doubtless they know where he buys his socks, too.
• So Michael Foot has gone, and the impression persists that he was a wonderful orator but an inept leader. Not so, says our man on this inside, Richard Heller. "He was brilliant at working the internal politics of the Labour party. Above all, Foot regularly prepared initiatives in secret and announced them in public without consulting Denis Healey, who was then stuck with supporting them." A nice man true enough, but canny.
• Winston Churchill junior , who also died this week, never impacted to the same degree, but he had that surname. It was a blessing but it could also be a curse. Journalist Alex Finer recalls that Churchill, while reporting at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, tried to remonstrate with a police officer who was clubbing a protester. "The riot cop paused, baton raised, to bark, \'Who do you think you are?\' ... \'Winston Churchill, of the Evening News,\' came the unwise reply." Whack, whack. The snarling cop walloped Churchill. "Pull the other one," he said.
• Changing the name of Whitehall departments to give them dynamism has been a trait of New Labour. One official devised a bold new title for which the acronym turned out to be Penis. The education department is now the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), but with all the changes, how to remember the component parts and the correct order? Minister Angela Smith (pictured) uses a mnemonic: department of children with smelly feet.
• Finally, in Persian it means "curtain" and refers to the practice of preventing men from seeing women. Here the term purdah has long been used to describe the weeks before an election. But never again, because the Cabinet Office has decreed that the word will be banned to avoid possible offence to religious groups. Henceforth, we will refer to the "pre-election period". Richard Littlejohn, over to you.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/mar/05/hugh-muir-diary-michael-foot
