Follow the Politics

In a recent discussion on the resignation of David Petraeus as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) I made the following observation;

Honestly, in this day and age, I’m surprised at such big fuss over something as minor as sexual indiscretion. But always, always follow the politics. I have a hunch that there is more to this story; that Caesar, not just Caesar’s wife, should be above suspicion. 

Well, then, there is indeed more to the story, and yes, it touches more on politics than personal morality.  The story of Petraeus, his biographer and inamorata and the third woman would be difficult to make up, even in the most farcical sex farce.  The toing and froing between the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also looks ridiculous, intelligence work that might have been conceived in the mind of Inspector Clouseau.  The whole thing would be risible in the extreme if it was not for the tragedy; if it was not the horror of Benghazi.

During the recent presidential campaign not enough was made of the murder of the American ambassador and three others in Libya; not enough was made of the present administration’s intelligence failures.  There are those who still wish to hide the inconvenient truths.  The suggestion – one I find wholly convincing -  is that Petraeus was effectively forced out of office because of potentially damaging revelations he might have made before today’s Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. 

What happened in Benghazi in September must count as one of the most serious breaches of security in recent American history.  The mother of Sean Smith, one of the diplomats killed alongside Ambassador Chris Stevens, said recently that that President Obama had effectively “murdered her son.”  And so he did, by simple negligence.  Obama’s reaction was ‘not very optimal’, to use his own peculiar and tortured English.

Consider the facts.  First the fuss over The Innocence of Muslims was no more than a silly smokescreen.  There was evidence that the attack on the embassy was planned well in advance by Al Qaeda, a 9/11 celebratory bash.  The administration had received hundreds of warnings but did nothing to improve security.  Contrast that with the British, who closed their own consulate after the failed assassination of Ambassador Dominic Asquith earlier in the summer. 

Quite apart from anything that Petraeus might have revealed about the Benghazi fiasco, as a political animal he was suspect, a horse of a Republican colour.  Con Coughlin says in the Telegraph that the general’s friends suspect that his political enemies in the administration simply used his sexual indiscretions as a convenient way of ejecting him from the CIA.  It certainly looks like it, the speed of the whole thing adding to the suspicion. 

Do you believe, does anyone believe, that if Petraeus had been an ‘insider’, if he had been ‘one of us’ these inconvenient facts would ever have come to light?  Even if they had, some kind of effort would have been made to stop the ship sinking.  After all, the Democrats are used to sexual scandals; they know how to manage sexual scandals, even so far as the Oval Office.

There are indeed serious questions as to why Petraeus gave a brief to the House Intelligence Committee that contradicted those of the agency he headed over the events in Libya.  Victoria Toensing of Fox News has written;

For some reason DCI Petraeus backed the Obama unsupported theory that the video made the attackers do it rather than his own Chief of Station’s assessment that it was a planned military attack. Why do the shifting stories and misplaced theory of cause matter?  Because if an administration pushes a political agenda that applauds the killing of Bin Laden as the ultimate act for eradicating the radical Islamic threat, then that same administration ignores its Ambassador’s urgent pleas for more security for fear it will appear Bin Laden’s demise was not the answer to that threat.  Our country’s chief spy is supposed to know which theory is held up by the evidence.

Indeed.  But now he has been silenced.  The guilty may never be put on the spot.  The mystery remains and the questions, the real questions, may never be answered.  Forget the sex.  Follow the politics, always follow the politics.  

Jim Fixed It: the Real Savile Scandal

The Jimmy Savile scandal, presently erupting day by day like a volcano, is another story I caught in part when I was abroad.  What, Jimmy Savile, the Jimmy Savile, Sir Jimmy Savile, the great British cultural icon, was a paedophile?  Now then, now then, guys and gals, what next?  Morecambe and Wise were into devil worship, perhaps?

Please forgive the conceit but I was wise before the event.  I never liked the man; I always thought him creepy, not the sort of person I would want in the same room with me.  Paul Merton highlighted this once on Have I Got News For You, the comedy news quiz, when he drew a comparison between Savile and Norman Bates from the movie Psycho.  It was in the context of his unhealthy attitude towards his mother, whom he referred to as ‘the Duchess.’ 

I have a transcript from this show, one which never made it on to the telly screens.  It was recorded some years ago when Angus Deayton was the host.  Savile was the celebrity guest on Paul Merton’s team.  Allow me to give you a small sample from the opening;

During the headline round:

DEAYTON: You used to be a wrestler didn't you?

SAVILLE: I still am.

DEAYTON: Are you?

SAVILLE: I'm feared in every girls' school in the country.

(Audience laugh)

DEAYTON: Yeah, I've heard about that.

SAVILLE: What have you heard?

DEAYTON: I've...

MERTON: Something about a cunt with a rancid, pus-filled cock.

(Huge audience laugh; Awkward pause)

SAVILLE: I advise you to wash your mouth out, my friend...

MERTON: That's what she had to do! (Audience laughs)

Don’t get too excited.  It’s a hoax, dating back to 1999.  But it revealed a truth that dare not speak its name.  It was based on rumours about the man’s sexual conduct, rumours that now appear to have been based on fact.  I say appear because the matter is still sub judice, so to speak, a consideration the popular press has, in the usual style, put to one side. 

I should add, for those not familiar with Savile and all his work, that he began his TV career as a DJ on a chart show called Top of the Pops. Latterly he hosted Jim’ll Fix It, in which he ‘fixed it’ for children to have their dreams come true.  It now seems he made their nightmares come true also.  

There are so many aspects to this evolving story.  It touches on the semi-religious nature of modern celebrity, on the creation of false idols, on the sublimation of suspicions and on the attitude of a major public Corporation.  The Corporation, of course, is the BBC and the creepy Savile was their star.  It comes down, if you like, to a question of priorities.

Savile died last October.  In the usual manner the BBC scheduled a tribute, to be broadcast at Christmas.  Rather inconveniently the right hand did not appear to know what the left hand was doing, the left-hand in this case being Newsnight, a current affairs show.  While the glittering tribute was being assembled, Newsnight gathered the dirt.  As I’m sure you know – who could not know? – senior management allowed the cloying celebration to go ahead while binning the Newsnight exposé. 

It came out.  These things can’t be hidden, and Savile is not around to threaten and silence with super injunctions.  The Great British Public, in true Mark Anthony style, has turned on their hero: they want to bury Savile, not to praise him.  Rather, they want to heap his memory in dead dogs.  But if Savile is a Frankenstein Monster – and of that I have not much personal doubt – he is their creation.  Always beware the passions of the multitude. 

Scapegoats are being sought and the BBC has them aplenty.  Writing recently in the Spectator, John Simpson, the Corporation’s world news editor, says that the organisation made, in his words, a fearful mistake in not broadcasting the Savile exposé at the end of last year. 

No, that’s wrong; the ‘fearful mistake’ was allowing the tribute show to go ahead, knowing full-well that questions were being raised about their star’s past conduct.  This looks to me like the worst kind of opportunism and hypocrisy, qualities that now seem typical of the BBC. 

I return to Savile himself.  The celebrity of this talentless, fumbling and inarticulate poseur is a wonder and a mystery to behold.  I agree with Charles Moore - also writing in the Spectator - that Savile’s popularity was a symptom of a wider cultural sickness, an inability to probe below surfaces.  It’s rather nauseating to see the press in their daily demolition, when it did so much to build up this mediocrity in the first place.  A country that once marvelled to the wit of Oscar Wilde latterly marvelled to the inanities of Jim Fixing It.  Perhaps that’s the real scandal.  

Carry on Sex

I take pleasure in new discoveries, of books, of movies, of places, of ideas and of people. Thanks to a fellow blogger called Glen, who, amongst other things, writes about individuals and events associated with Kent, his home county (Kent Today & Yesterday), I became aware of Hattie, a biopic about the late Hattie Jacques, a British comedy actress, broadcast earlier this month by the BBC.

I confess the name meant nothing to me, though in fact I recognised her from watching occasional appearances in episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour, a classic comedy show which I bought on DVD last summer with the intention of reviewing. In contrast I remembered John Le Mesurier, her husband and fellow actor, quite clearly from television repeats of an old sitcom called Dad’s Army, focusing on the comic antics of a Home Guard unit during the Second World War. In this he played Sergeant Wilson, a rather louche, languid sort of chap, obviously public school, a sharp and amusing counter-point to Captain Mainwaring, the pompous and pretentious lower-middle class commander, so obviously discomforted by his subordinate’s effortless social superiority.

I finally managed to see Hattie on BBC iPlayer, followed by a brief spot of research on Jacques herself. A fat, matronly sort of figure, she clearly played up to this, making her name in a long run of British comedy films with the title of Carry On this, that or the other. I mean no disrespect when I say that these movies are prime examples of British working class humour, lots of double entendres and sexual references of a sort of naughty seaside postcard variety, the kind of thing that does not, I imagine, travel all that well.


Hattie, which I take to be a true account of part of the actress’ life, focused principally on a love affair she had with one John Schofield, such a contrast in every way with Le Mesurier, lower class and roughly spoken, not at all the gentleman.

Now, I should say that I’m not easily discomforted when it comes to matters concerning sexual relationships. I’m tolerant of others and I’m adventurous myself. Having said that, I found the relationship between the three people depicted in the drama risible and oddly bizarre. If I say that Schofield, by his own demand, moved in to the master bedroom with Hattie in her own home, while Le Mesurier was shuffled off to the attic, all while their two young sons were living under the same roof, you may have some idea why I felt like this.

She wanted John to stay; he did not want to go; he did not want to damage her career by the scandal of a divorce. But, my goodness, surely the persona of the unflustered gentleman can be pushed too far? What kind of man, I have to ask, would tolerate such a situation in his own home; what kind of woman would find such an arrangement tolerable? Am I being naïve; are there people like this; is there some kind of vicarious sexual pleasure in humiliation? I felt both sorry for Le Mesurier, for his discomfiture, and angry, for his lack of assertiveness, at one and the same time.

In the end, for all the sexual novelty, the whole silly ménage a trios was just so chintz curtains, furry lavatory seats and mock-Tudor suburbia, all so vulgar and petty-bourgeois, a farcical and comic slice of real life that might very well have served as a script for a Carry On movie.

King of the swingers

If I mention the word ‘orgy’ what comes to mind? Writhing bodies, perhaps, acres of unprepossessing flesh performing the absurd dance of desire? Not for me, because orgy immediately suggests fruit - grapes, vines and laurel wreaths. Clearly this arises from modern depictions of Roman frolics, where sex, such as it is, comes served with grapes!

Still, there is a residue of exoticism, fruit and all. This was a pastime for the decadent Romans, to be found in the hedonistic courts of Caligula and Elagabalus. But my illusions have been shattered. For the orgy has been brought to us in a modern form by socialists and Marxists, as joyless and as unerotic as is possible to conceive, accompanied not by grapes but by haggis!

I don’t suppose too many people down here have heard of Tommy Sheridan, the one-time leader and Member of the Scottish Parliament for a group called the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), a movement that wanted to turn Alba (the Gaelic word for Scotland) into Albania. Anyone who advocates the virtues of some form of proportional representation for Westminster elections could do no better than have a look at Scotland, where it allowed the aforementioned SSP to send six members to the devolved parliament in the election of 2003. It might have sent more but for one thing: Sheridan emerged, according to some, wearing the tawdry tartan toga of a modern Caesar. Some, unkind observers, of course, might very well say he’s far less the people’s tribune more the king of the swingers.

Oh, there is a story here, a story that’s come to me from contacts in Scotland. Sheridan and his wife are currently on trial in Glasgow on a charge of perjury, arising from a successful case he pursued several years ago against News International, publishers of the News of the World, the yellowiest of the yellow British press, who alleged in a series of articles that he liked a spot of extramarital sex in swingers clubs in Sheffield and Manchester. Then every one of his fellow MSPs testified against him; now every one of his former party colleagues is testifying against him. It seems to be a kind of pantomime trial, with Sheridan conducting his own defence, along the lines of “You are lying”. “Oh, no, I’m not”. Oh, yes, you are!” and so on.

I don’t want to dwell on the shabby detail of the Haggis Caesar’s alleged exploits. Let me just say that sex has never looked less appealing. One female witness described the venue for a nine-body gathering (a spare on hand?) as ‘mingin’, a good Scottish word which seems to mean smelly, grotty and in questionable taste all at the same time! Yuck, is the one world that leaps to my mind.

The SSP is no more, well, that is to say it is no longer represented in the benighted Scottish Parliament. The trial proceeds and the outcome is awaited. Perhaps Sheridan will make something of a political comeback. If so, it might be a reasonable political strategy to add bread and circuses to the party programme or, to give it a Scottish flavour, haggis and swinging. What a distraction that would be from a bleak economic outlook.

Von Sexy

Picture a late imperial court, picture, if you will, the decadence, the excesses and the orgies. We are in the realm of decline and fall, are we not, in the land of the Caesars? Yes, indeed, it’s the land of a Caesar except it’s not Rome, as you expected, it’s the court of Kaiser Bill, hitherto known for Victorian prudery rather than physical frolics.

Alas, nothing is sacred, for Wolfgang Wipperman, a German historian, has been burrowing away in the Prussian Secret State Archives in Berlin, there discovering that swinging is not a modern invention, or the sole preserve of the lower middle-classes. No, the German aristocracy were the pathfinders here, with a taste for late night sex parties, turning to blackmail.

Now imagine yourself in Jadgschloss Grunewald, a hunting lodge in the woods of western Berlin belonging to Princess Charlotte, the older sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II. It’s the early 1890s; there you are among the select guests, among the vons, drinking, dancing and experimenting in all sorts of sexual games. The details of these japes are currently being revealed in Der Spiegel, a taster for Wipperman’s Scandal in Hunting Lodge Grunewald, scheduled for publication later this month,

These gatherings may have remained hidden but for the fact that one of the participants – Wipperman suspects Charlotte herself – saw them as a way to make a spot of extra cash. Blackmail letters were sent out to the participants, with some rather helpful illustrations of their sexual preferences, provided, I imagine, just in case they were too drunk to remember. The author further speculates that Charlotte, who died in 1919 after lengthy psychiatric treatment, may have organised her orgies specifically with a view to entrapment.

Even in those days it was impossible to keep a good story down; and there is no story better than aristocratic sex. The attempted blackmail became public and, this being Germany, resulted not in laughter but in a major political scandal, going so far as the Reichstag.

The Kaiser, true to the humours of his grandmother, was not amused. I, in contrast, am; I simply can’t help but laugh to read that the Duchess of Hohenau was repeatedly described as a “randy tart.” It’s not really a surprise. After all, the poor woman needed some outlet for her sexual energies, given that she was married to the openly gay Friedrich von Hohenhau. Even before the Jadgscloss scandal her liaisons were notorious, including Herbert von Bismarck, son of the Iron Chancellor, and Max von Baden, destined to be the last Chancellor of Imperial Germany.

The blackmailer, whoever it was, possibly Charlotte, possibly not, has a go at others including Alide von Schrader who enjoyed lesbian affairs, Prince Aribert von Anhalt, who is accused of having sex with other men. It seems odd, though, that despite the scandal, despite the involvement of both Reichstag and Kaiser, the heart of the labyrinth remained unpenetrated (oops, sorry, perhaps not the best word to use in this context!) I’m not sure why and the report I read offers no explanation. It may be that it was Charlotte, which for Brother Bill would have been a scandal too far. To have a randy tart in the imperial family is one thing; to have a randy tart and a blackmailer quite another.

KIss and Tell, so what's new in the World?

Sex scandals, yea, so what’s new? The topic brings to mind a paper I wrote as last term on on social and sexual mores in Georgian England. Harriette Wilson was one of the people I touched on, a couretesan who attempted to extort money from her former lovers with her Interesting and Amorous Adventures. It was all rather sad really: her looks had faded and her annuities had stopped. Her book was little more than a desperate attempt at a pension scheme.

Sally Salisbury also deserves a mention here, for the simple reason that the 1723 An Account of the Tryal of Sally Salisbury is the first example of hack reporting of a sex scandal, demonstrating that the public had a taste for this sort of thing.

Margaret Leeson, whose real name was Peg Plunkett, published her own autobiography, Memoirs of Mrs Leeson, Madam, in 1795. Her clients included the high and the even higher; bankers, judges, merchants and noblemen, the Duke of Rutland being the highest of all.

She had the example before her of Fanny Murray, whose lovers had included Beau Nash, John Wilkes, Sir Francis Dashwood and the Earl of Sandwich. Her autobiography, Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Fanny Murray, published in 1759, is particularly revealing, because she attributes the beginning of her 'downfall' to being raped by the disreputable Jack Spencer, grandson of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough.

Julia Johnstone's story was just as unfortunate, though her social origins were quite different to those of Fanny Murray. The grand-daughter of Lord Carysfort, she was seduced by one Colonel Cotton, by whom she had several children before being abandoned. Thereafter she moved in with Harriette Wilson and, impressed by the success of her memoir, wrote her own Confessions of Julia Johnstone. But poor Julia was far too priggish, and her sexual secrets too tame, to cash in on the public mood.

These memoirs and confessions came at just the right point in history. In the past revelations of this kind would have been impossible because of the social and criminal penalties attached. The Georgian period was not only one of far greater sexual licence but publishing was becoming ever more important, with a new public, literate and prurient, eager for scandal of all sorts. You see; not much changes!