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With respect to selling postcards of hangings (Perugia versus Bristol redux)

July 30, 2011

Chris Jefferies case: exquisite psychological investigation wrong again...

Chris Jefferies. Photograph: Tim Ireland/PA

Here is a salutary outcome from the Bristol murder case highlighted in my Perugia versus Bristol post of January 2011. Eight tabloid British newspapers have been swiftly and efficiently hit with substantial defamation damages after they attempted to convict Chris Jefferies on the basis he looks a bit odd. (And he wears an anorak. And he’s a teacher.) It is going to be very interesting to see how many Italian newspapers are hit with substantial damages for their reporting of the Sollecito-Knox satanic ritual murder trial after it turns out Sollecito and Knox aren’t satanists after all. Will Italians also realise that it is not necessary to have a criminal libel law in order to sort this kind of thing out, just a functioning judiciary?

The damages award as reported by Roy Greenslade in the Guardian on 29 July:

…

Eight national newspapers have made public apologies today to Christopher Jefferies for the libellous allegations made against him following the murder of Joanna Yeates,

The titles – The Sun, Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, Daily Record, Daily Mail, Daily Star, The Scotsman and Daily Express – have also agreed to pay him substantial libel damages, thought to total six figures.

The solicitor for Mr Jefferies, Louis Charalambous, told Mr Justice Tugendhat in the high court hearing that the newspapers had acknowledged the falsity of the allegations, which were published in more than 40 articles.

Ms Yeates, a Bristol architect, was killed in December last year. After her body was discovered, Mr Jefferies, who was her landlord, was arrested by police.

In subsequent days, into early January, the newspapers ran a series of articles about Mr Jefferies that were inaccurate and defamatory.

Charalambous, of Simons Muirhead and Burton, said after today’s hearing:

“Christopher Jefferies is the latest victim of the regular witch hunts and character assassination conducted by the worst elements of the British tabloid media.

Many of the stories published in these newspapers are designed to ‘monster’ the individual, in flagrant disregard for his reputation, privacy and rights to a fair trial.

These newspapers have now apologised to him and paid substantial damages.”

Bambos Tsiattalou, the solicitor who advised Mr Jefferies after he was taken into police custody, said that the media were given a fair warning to be careful about what they published.

He said: “We warned the media by letter, immediately following Mr Jefferies’ arrest, in the strongest possible terms to desist from publishing stories which were damaging or defamatory.

“We were dismayed that our warnings went unheeded and are pleased that the newspapers in settling Mr Jefferies’ claims have acknowledged the extent of the damage to his reputation.”

The papers’ publishers – News International, Trinity Mirror, Daily Mail & General Trust, Express Newspapers and Johnston Press – will now have to fork out substantial sums in damages and legal fees.

But Charalambous pointed out that once the rules over conditional fee (no win, no fee) agreements change next year, “the victims of tabloid witch hunts will no longer have the same access to justice.”

via Eight newspapers pay libel damages to Christopher Jefferies | Media | guardian.co.uk.

And there’s more:

Plus the two best-known UK tabloids have been found guilty of contempt of court (a charge that is filed against them too rarely). This is what italian papers should go down for, having leaked the Perugia investigation before it was complete, in brazen contravention of Italian law. Problem is that Italy doesn’t apply the law, most obviously because it is the police and the magistrates who do the leaking. Or did I misunderstand something?

Here is the Guardian again:

Joanna Yeates murder

Christopher Jefferies was intially declared a suspect and arrested in Joanna Yeates murder case, but was released later without charge. There was intense media speculation about his life. Photograph: Tim Ireland/PA Wire/Press Association Images
…
The Sun and the Daily Mirror were found guilty of contempt of court for publishing a series of “extreme” articles about a suspect who had been arrested by police investigating the murder of the landscape architect Joanna Yeates.

The Daily Mirror was fined £50,000 and the Sun £18,000 after the high court ruled that the papers posed a “substantial risk” to the course of justice in their reporting on the arrest of Christopher Jefferies, Yeates’s landlord, who was later released without charge and was entirely innocent of any involvement.

The Daily Mirror fine is the biggest against a British newspaper for contempt since 2004, when the Daily Star was fined £60,000 for revealing the identities of two Premiership footballers at the centre of high-profile gang rape allegations.

In a separate legal action eight national newspapers, including the Daily Mirror and Sun, collectively paid six-figure libel damages to Jefferies following allegations made about him in January, when the police hunt for Yeates’s killer was at its height.

In a written judgment on the contempt of court action handed down at the high court, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Owen described the Daily Mirror articles as “extreme” and “substantial risks to the course of justice”. The judges said the Sun’s coverage of Jefferies created a “very serious risk” that any future court defence would be damaged.

Lord Judge said: “The articles in the one issue of the Sun were written and laid out in such a way that they would have conveyed to the reader of the front page and the two inside pages over which the stories were spread that he was a stalker, with an obsession with death, who let himself into the flats of other occupants of the building where Miss Yeates lived, and that he had an unhealthy interest in blond young women.”

The court gave the Daily Mirror publisher Mirror Group Newspapers extended time in which to launch a petition for permission to appeal to the supreme court.

Vincent Tabak, a 33-year-old engineer, pleaded guilty to manslaughter but has denied murdering Yeates, who was found dead on a roadside verge in Failand, Somerset, on Christmas Day 2010. Tabak, who lived next door to Yeates, is due to go on trial accused of murder at Bristol crown court in October.

Tabloid media coverage at the time of Jefferies’s arrest was intense, with speculation about the suspect rife in newspapers and the internet. Dominic Grieve, the attorney general who brought the court action against the two papers, issued a rare warning to the press at the timeabout their reporting.

Two of the three articles found in contempt of court were published the day after Grieve’s warning, on New Year’s Day. The attorney general welcomed Friday’s judgment, saying: “[The Daily Mirror and Sun] breached the Contempt of Court Act and the court has found that there was a risk of serious prejudice to any future trial.”

Ken Clarke, the justice secretary, echoed the attorney general’s warnings in March when he said that media focus on suspects in recent criminal cases had been “startling” and “far removed” from what it was just a few years ago.

Contempt of court proceedings are infrequently issued against newspapers. It is more unusual still for the attorney general to take action in defence of an individual who has not been charged.

Eight national newspapers separately issued a public apology to Jefferies over libellous claims made about him in the aftermath of his December arrest. The Sun, Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, Daily Record, Daily Mail, Daily Star, the Scotsman and Daily Express agreed to pay the retired public-school teacher damages.

Lawyers acting for Jefferies said he had been the victim of “regular witch hunts” in more than 40 articles in the tabloid papers. Bambos Tsiattalou, the solicitor who advised Jefferies after he was taken into police custody, said that the newspapers had ignored warnings to be careful about what they published.

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Lawyers, by a mile

May 24, 2011

It is said that estate agents are worse, but at least the average estate agent has the moral (if not legal) defence that he or she is ignorant. Lawyers, by contrast, have all had the chance of a university education, and so will surely have more to answer for when they arrive in hell (presumably to be greeted at the door by a lawyer). The latest antics from Italy’s legal profession beggar belief, so utterly selfish are the lawyers in putting their personal interests ahead of society’s interest. This country really has become one whore-story after the next.

No other rich nation can hold a candle to Italy’s professional classes, but lest the British be accused in the Umbrian expression of beingmosche bianche (white flies), take note also of the British Director of Public Prosecutions’ performance this week. Keir Starmer should have decided to prosecute policeman Simon Harwood for manslaughter last July. He is now being forced to do so because of the outcome of a public inquest and makes the most pathetic attempt to construct an argument that the evidence produced in the inquest could not, or would not, have been brought out in a criminal trial. You know that a lawyer, like Starmer, is on the back foot when he starts using verbs like ‘adduced’. It is tantamount to saying: ‘Please take it for granted that I am very clever and doing the right thing, and not at all the stereotypical yes-man who is given this job.’

People like Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, or Gareth Peirce are the Halley’s comets of the legal profession. You are lucky to know one lawyer who cares about more than their new Audi and their holiday in the Maldives in a lifetime.

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Lush places

March 31, 2011

The Star, The Express, The Times, and The Telegraph. Are there any other British newspapers that are now run for less than five quid a week? This, from The Telegraph, is a collector’s item. Evelyn Waugh could not have made it, or indeed the photo of the 13-year-old author, up. (Apologies that the typeface becomes WordPress standard.)

 

 

For pics you likely have to go to the Torygraph original, here. But the text is a feast of itself:

David Cameron out of stride with wife Samantha

Huffing and puffing, a red-faced and heavy-legged David Cameron plods along a pavement on his weekly jog, forcing one foot in front of the other on the unforgiving tarmac.

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Both David and Samantha Cameron have enlisted the help of personal trainer Matt Roberts (Right) Photo: STEVE BACK

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By Nick Collins 7:30AM BST 28 Mar 2011

Meanwhile his wife Samantha breezes through a leafy park accompanied by personal trainer Matt Roberts, looking confident, relaxed and brimming with energy.

Perhaps Mr Cameron was feeling drained or short of sleep, but a careful look at the recent photographs leads to a different conclusion – that while his wife would be well-equipped to tackle a marathon, the Prime Minister is simply not as adept at running as he is at running the country.

In fact, if Mr and Mrs Cameron decided to take exercise together or compete in a race, Samantha would be likely to comfortably outpace her husband, according to an expert analysis of their respective running styles.

While Mrs Cameron’s relaxed upper body enables her to make the most of her energy, the Prime Minister appears rigid, uncomfortable and exhausted – hardly a surprise given his primitive technique.

Despite having recently given birth, Mrs Cameron’s wider stride means she covers almost a third more ground each time she puts her foot down than her husband, and is at much lower risk of injury.

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By taking too narrow a stride, lifting his toes too high and running in an upright position the Prime Minister is not only slowing himself down but risking shin splints, knee problems and arthritis, according to analysts.

Sam Murphy, a running coach and author of Running Well, said: “I would say Samantha needs a bit of tuition – but compared to her David has appalling technique.

“The first thing I noticed about the Prime Minister was the straightness of his leg on landing – he should bend his knees to dissipate the shock and aim to land with his foot below the knee rather than ahead of him to decrease the impact force.

“People tend to think running is like walking, and that if they want to go faster they should put their leg out further, but actually it is more like cycling. If you want to go faster you want to turn your leg over more quickly.”

To add to Mr Cameron’s embarrassment, he ought to be better at running than his wife because his masculine frame gives him an innate head-start, she added.

“Women biomechanically have more issues to overcome, for example their pelvis is wider, so their thighs are more likely to roll inwards which can put excess force on the knees. There isn’t any advantage that Samantha Cameron would have over David – quite the opposite in fact.”

Both David and Samantha Cameron have enlisted the help of personal trainer Matt Roberts – whose clients include supermodel Naomi Campbell – to help them stay in good shape.

But while Mrs Cameron appears to be benefiting from the fitness expert’s guidance as she jogs alongside him, Mr Cameron may not have taken quite so many lessons on board.

Bob Pritchard, an Olympic trainer with 40 years’ experience of analysing and improving athletes’ technique, said Mr Cameron’s stride width of 50 degrees, compared with his wife’s 65 degrees, is one of the lowest he has ever seen.

In a blog posted on the website of the California-based Somax Performance Institute, Mr Pritchard wrote: “David Cameron recently led some of his Afghan troops in a run and provided an excellent example of how not to run.

“David Cameron is covering 40 per cent less ground than the average, slow marathon runner. Good marathon runners have a stride angle over 100 degrees, which means that Cameron is covering 60 per cent less ground than they are.”

The difference in the couple’s stride angles may not sound like much, but even an extra degree of width can make an enormous difference to the amount of ground a runner is able to cover.

Mr Prichard said in an interview: “The Prime Minister’s wife has a bigger stride angle than he does, though not by much.

“But since you cover two per cent more ground with each stride for every degree you increase your stride angle, she covers 30 per cent more ground with each stride than her husband.

“As in governance, it is not how much you do but how efficient you are that counts.”

The key problem behind Mr Cameron’s awkward style, Mr Pritchard said, is tension – hardly surprising in a man with one of the most demanding jobs in the country.

“Basically, he is tense and stiff. You can see evidence of this tension in his toe lift, which is a phenomenal 27 degrees. Good runners don’t bother to lift their toes when running, as it is a waste of energy.

“Plus, when the toes are lifted like Cameron’s, it forces the runner to land on his heel, which slams the foot flat on the ground, violently stretching the very muscles that the runner is contracting to maintain toe lift.”

Mr Cameron could face worse than the humiliation of being overtaken by his wife if he fails to adapt his style because a short stride can lead to the softening of the cartilage around the knee, long-term knee problems and even arthritis in later years.

Forced stretching also tears fibres in the shin muscles, which can lead to problems as severe as shin splints and stress fractures, the British-born coach said.

However, Mr Cameron is unlikely to change his running style any time soon if he heeds the advice in the official London 2012 Olympics running guide, according to the expert who wrote it.

John Brewer, professor of sport at Bedfordshire University, said: “I have seen lots of top runners and many of them have styles which on the face of it look slightly ungainly, but these are elite runners and that in itself must suggest that they are doing something right.

“In my opinion, the more you try to change someone’s running style through analysis, the more likely it is that you will cause an injury. Naturally the body will need to adopt a running style that suits the individual.”

The danger of comparing the two pictures, he said, is that they only capture a moment in time – but even that is enough to draw some conclusions about the Camerons’ respective running styles.

Mr Brewer said: “Samantha looks fine. The key thing when anyone is running is to stay relaxed and she certainly looks as if she is doing that. The Prime Minister looks more tense, so I would recommend he stretches more before running to improve the flexibility of his hamstrings and calf muscles. That will help him push off more firmly, take a longer stride and make each stride seem that much easier.

“His head is looking more upwards and his neck and shoulders are tensed, so he certainly looks more rigid than Mrs Cameron. His hands are also clenched – that makes you tense and also prevents you losing a lot of heat from your palms, which is important when you are running.

“A lot depends on how tired he is – as people get tired they tend to tense up. But on the face of it Samantha Cameron is certainly the more aesthetic looking of the two.”

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Come the revolution

March 7, 2011

The Liberal Democrats keep sending me emails complaining that opponents of voting reform in the UK are running outrageous and unethical advertisements. Perhaps it is just my naive faith in the average person, but it really doesn’t worry me if some inbred Tory eejit or some equally self-serving Nooo Labour eejit is  suggesting that babies will die because of the alternative voting system (referred to ‘instant run-off’ in the US and ‘preferential voting’ in some other countries). Much more likely, the ads will have the same effect Winston Churchill engendered in the 1945 election when he said that a Labour victory would mean communism in Britain. People looked at Clem Attlee and thought: ‘I’m not so sure, Winnie.’ And they voted Labour.

The truth is that people get dangerous idiots in charge of them not because they are conned, but because they choose self-evidently dangerous idiots to be in charge of them.  This explains why they vote for dangerous idiots again and again, the only mitigation being that the stupidity is much easier to spot than the danger. Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi are classic examples. What is interesting about them is not some supposed con, but why people repeatedly vote for a Tone or a Sil despite the mounting evidence that they are absolute plonkers, incapable of running their own lives, let alone anyone else’s. Anger, frustration, the hopelessness of the opposition, the different voter pattern of female electors (who always, I am sad to mention, vote disproportionately for reactionaries) — this is the stuff of psephological analysis, not some tripe about how clever advertising convinced us all to tick the wrong box.

So the political message is: state your case with maximum clarity to the maximum number of people. And what better opportunity to put this into practice than the AV referendum, which is surely an idea whose time has come. It is an almost-no-risk improvement to the voting system in a country where 35 percent of votes now go to  parties other than the biggest two, compared with less than five percent after the Second World War. AV doesn’t favour small and silly parties. It keeps MPs answerable to geographic constituencies. Above all, it makes politics more competitive, which is why indolent and self serving people do not like the idea one bit. Martin Wolf in the FT (subscription needed) likes it, and though he is called Wolf, he is not exactly Wolfie out of Citizen Smith. Here’s the nub of what Wolf has written:

‘Why, then, might the switch to the alternative vote be justified? The answer is that over time the present system has become increasingly unrepresentative, to the point of threatening its legitimacy. We have, above all, seen a huge decline in the share of votes going to the two leading parties, from 97 per cent in 1951 to 65 per cent in 2010, a record postwar low. Under the current system, parties with less than 40 per cent of the votes are potentially able to win large majorities in the House of Commons. Thus, the House risks becoming so unrepresentative of the preferences of electors as to lose its legitimacy. Ultimately, that threatens the effectiveness of government, as well. Under the alternative vote, however, candidates would need to obtain the support of a majority of constituents. That is highly likely to increase the representation of currently under-represented voters.’

The case is so compelling that I write to the Liberal Democrats in Cambridge asking for 100 pro-AV badges and some pens to boot. Their web site says this stuff can be had for free, though I told them I was quite willing to pay for it. I have to be in the UK to attend a exclusive actors’ party on the roof of the National Theatre and there seems no better place to undertake some effective propaganda work. I will pin an AV badge on the lapel of Maureen Lipman, or someone even more famous…

Unfortunately, there is just one hitch. It being the Liberal party that backs the AV, they don’t get it together to send me the badges. You just know that if you had phoned Tory HQ and asked some random Sloane for 500 Shoot the Badgers stickers, they would have been sent round the same day. If the revolution goes pear shaped on 5 May, my liberal comrades, do not blame me.

More:

This wikipedia entry on the Alternative Vote system is helpful, and tells you all the places where the system is already employed.

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Beloved irony

February 8, 2011

Isn’t life a bitch? Just when you have good use for a few tens of billions of dollars to support a bit of old-fashioned modernisation in north Africa, it turns out you spent your whole budget for the next decade on a pointless war in Iraq. Dang, America’s Mr. Obama be kickin’ himself under the table.

It is the fifteenth day of protests in Egypt and the Arabs — despite much media conjecture to the contrary — show no sign of going home and being quiet. Cash-strapped Washington doesn’t know what to do. Hilary Clinton has said she would like the (ex-intelligence service boss) vice-president to run the country until scheduled elections in September. Obama’s special advisor on Egypt says that Mubarak must stay until the election. The crowd appears to be backing outlandish demands for a representative transitional government.

Cripes. ‘Representative’ in the country that is the intellectual birth-place of Islamic fundamentalism and al-Quaeda? ‘Transitional’ in the country that has ‘Remember Algeria’ written all over it in CIA spray paint? No wonder we backed a dictator and encouraged economic policies that consign Egyptians to poverty and to an 80 percent youth unemployment rate. Why can’t we just have the same deal again?

It is really very tedious how unprincipled foreign policy comes back to bite you in the arse, like some whacked out dog you once threw a bone to. Much more of this and the Arabs will start to resemble the Persians, who are still hung up on us getting rid of their silly Mr Mossadegh, who thought he could nationalise our oil companies.

I am not terribly well read on Arab history, particularly the modern stuff, but if I were to recommend a single, highly readable and well researched tome to put contemporary Egypt in perspective it would be The Looming Tower. The Guardian contains a brief history of the main Islamic opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood; it isn’t great and contains a very taciturn interview with a current MB leader, but it is readily available.

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Obama versus Osborne

January 27, 2011

If you would like a bit more compare and contrast (in the wake of Perugia versus Bristol, try Barack Obama and George Osborne in the sphere of economics. The former just gave a State of the Union speech (video or text in which he made a forthright case for America to expand fiscal expenditure in order to invest in infrastructure, in new commercial technology and in education. He grounded the case in the context of a rising geopolitical challenge from China (following the recent visit of Thunderbirds cameo Hu Jintao) and a US unemployment rate of 10 percent. He indicated the requisite funds ought to come from (in relative international terms) a less absurd fiscal subsidy for US oil companies and reduced tax breaks for the distinctly rich (following 40 years of decisions in their favour). Perhaps most important, he said all of this in the country which already has the world’s most competitive large industrial companies.

Over to Blighty. George Osborne, our to-the-manor-born Chancellor of the Exchequer, this week greeted the news that the British economy shrank in the fourth quarter with a promise not to entertain any expansion of investment. Instead, George’s plan for economic rejuvenation and job creation is to suck a boiled sweet and see what happens. Britain has fearfully few world-beating corporations outside of finance and legal and accountancy services (which largely serve the finance sector), but George can’t see a case for investment to nurture more of them. New world-beating corporations will arise from the vapours, according to the 101 neoclassical economics that George was spoon-fed at school and university. He says the Q4 shrinking economy was the result of bad weather, and one assumes he thinks the unemployment rate is the result of indolence and immobility among the lower classes.

Still, methinks it won’t much matter that George understands little about the world. The British government does need to cut recurrent expenditure after the excesses of Blair’s champagne socialism. Meanwhile, my bet is that George’s failure to make strategic investments in infrastructure and technology will be remedied later this year when Britain follows in Obama’s wake and increases capital spending. Where America leads, we follow. When was the last time that Britain influenced US policy? Keynes?

Worth reading: Robert Reich makes some good points about the pieces of the puzzle that Obama did not address in his SOTU speech in the FT (subscription likely needed):  Reich, who was part of a government that as I remember did sfa, is a little too harsh: Obama did touch (lightly) on the income distribution question.

After writing this, I see that in the FT Martin Wolf seems to have reached the same conclusions about George.

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Fit for a King

October 21, 2009

Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, finally comes out and tells it (more or less) like it is. Bless him. In a speech to businessmen in Edinburgh, Mr King observes that the Anglo-Saxon financial system has so far been bailed out, to the tune of trillions of dollars, with no fundamental change in the way the banking system operates. Huge bonuses will again be paid to bankers this year-end, despite the fact their earnings depend on a limitless supply of almost free taxpayer money. We give them free money, they make a profit: clever stuff.

Mr King suggests this is unfair, paraphrasing Churchill: ‘never in the field of financial endeavour has so much money been owed by so few to so many,’ he says. The solution turns out to be the same one that people like the governor figured out 80 years ago, in the wake of the Great Crash. The retail and investment functions of banking need to be separated, so that speculative activity by investment bankers faces a serious prospect of punishment by bankruptcy when things go wrong. When every kind of financial function is merged under one roof, this does not happen. In the latest crash: ‘Banks and their creditors knew that if they were sufficiently important to the economy or the rest of the financial system, and things went wrong, the government would always stand behind them,’ says Mr King. ‘And they were right.’

Of course Mr King does not mention America’s Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which split banking functions in order to ring-fence speculative activities. That would be tantamount to admitting that banking regulators have not learned anything for the best part of a century. But his logic is exactly that of Glass-Steagall when he describes banking functions that are necessary to the community and those which are simply a matter of private speculation: ‘The banking system provides two crucial services to the rest of the economy: providing companies and households a ready means by which they can make payments for goods and services and intermediating flows of savings to finance investment,’ says Mr King (he could have put the second point more clearly by saying that banks, uniquely, provide working capital to industry). ‘Those are the utility aspects of banking where we all have a common interest in ensuring continuity of service,’ he goes on. ‘And for this reason they are quite different in nature from some of the riskier financial activities that banks undertake, such as proprietary trading.’

Mr King’s reflections on the financial crisis are about as candid and thoughtful as anyone connected with government in the UK or the US has managed in the past year. He is quickly supported by a forceful opinion piece from Martin Wolf in the Financial Times. Sadly, however, it is highly unlikely that there will be a new Glass-Steagall Act on either side of the Atlantic. The senior economic advisers to the Anglo-Saxon governments, whether Fat Larry Summers or Alastair ‘Hello’ Darling, are far too spineless and mired in the mathematical drivel of ‘modern’ economic theory. There will be an incremental regulatory ‘solution’ to the financial system’s instability, involving new rules relating to capital adequacy. This has been tried for decades, and does not work because banks’ prudential requirements for capital vary over the economic cycle and cannot be reduced to a workable regulatory formula. Still, there will be lots of new jobs for regulators until the next financial crisis.

A simple, radical solution, as Mr King recognises, is what is actually needed. It should not be embarrassing to admit that what people figured out in the 1930s is better than what their successors thought in the 1990s (when Glass-Steagall was finally repealed under Bill ‘Mind-On-Other-Things’ Clinton).

 Moreover, there is one new thing that governments could do to stop the cycle of ever more severe financial crises that has afflicted the world since the end of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system in 1971. There is not a hope in hell that this change will be discussed, let alone happen, but it is worth mentioning. The change is simple: end the absurd tax treatment of corporate debt, whereby interest on debt is deductible as a business expense before taxes are paid. This is not the case with equity, where dividends have to be paid after tax. The contrasting, and logically indefensible treatment of debt and equity in contemporary tax systems first encourages companies (including banks) to load up on debt, and second discourages the creation of more employee-owned firms. It is one of those things that is so dumb, so fundamentally wrong, that it is not even discussed.

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England versus Italy

August 12, 2009

It turns out to be necessary to do one more week in Cambridge, wandering the towers of the gargantuan University Library and photocopying a 10-centimetre wedge of research material, which I now know is close to the maximum that my back-pack can carry; it has to be over a thousand pages, though I don’t want to think about this because I have to read them.

The week gets off to a good start with breakfast with Tim Clissold, author of the excellent Mr China, the stranger-than-fiction tale of investing several hundred million dollars in China in the mid-1990s. Tim trained as an accountant, then learned Chinese, then teamed up with a high-flying American investment banker who had raised (what was) the single biggest fund for buying businesses in the Middle Kingdom. I wrote about this in The China Dream, but Tim’s warts-and-all inside story turned out to be perhaps the best insider tale of China business that has yet been written. And in the meantime, he drew a good salary, invested wisely, went on to do a stint of investment banking with Goldman Sachs, and then launched his own entrepreneurial investment career buying and turning around small-ish industrial businesses. I live and learn.

For me, the remarkable thing about Tim is his ability to see the most outrageous, grasping, brazen scams as intellectual curiosities. In his first career in China he was threatened, kidnapped and daily deceived. His response was that of an astute provincial accountant confronted by a loutish child on a bus: faint bemusement and a simple determination to deal with the situtation, with or without the conductor’s help. He is very good at seeing the other person’s point of view; but also rather principled.

Tim’s latest adventure is carbon trading in China; he maintains an office of about 20 people. It is, he says, at least as scurrilous as anything he has dealt with before and more than likely the basis of a new book. Pay-offs, forged signatures, phantom projects — all are par for the course in securing cash for supposed pollution reduction under the UN-sponsored global carbon trading scheme. The evening before we meet he had dinner with one of the top executives at China’s largest thermal power firm whose (almost certainly) forged signature, Tim gleefully observes, has been attached to a deal he is currently reviewing.

The Clissolds have moved back to the UK from China, although Tim still spends much of his time there. In his own moment of weakness, he bought a large pile in Richmond in North Yorkshire, only to find it infested with rats apparently immune to all known poisons. The family moved out and were surprised to find another family of expats from the East willing to buy the rodent colony. The Clissolds have reined in their delusions of grandeur and now lead a more modest life amid the bizarre sociology of North Yorkshire: inbred RangeRover driving eejits on the one hand, a thankless rural proletariat on the other, nothing in the middle. Tim takes modest comfort from his local status as the stand-out eccentric. He paces the town with a dog called xiong xiong which, having been brought back from Beijing, responds only to commands in Chinese. The scene he describes when barking commands at this dog in a local shop or pubs is what you would expect.

Clissold tips me off to interesting goings on in the world of ultra super critical boiler technology and, thus enthused, I read three of the best PhD theses my supervisor has seen (trying to figure out what I am supposed to be doing) and copy the aforementioned chunk of clever scribblings. When I take the early Friday flight back to Perugia after four days full on in Cambridge, it is one of the rare times going back to Italy that I am not quite sure what the point is: for a moment, England (and abroad) seems terribly serious and interesting and grown-up by comparison. I supposed this is the conclusion that thousands of Italians who are now leaving to work overseas have reached.

Landing in Perugia, I am exhausted. This is the problem with doing four 12-hour days; I cannot be productive for a fifth. Also, it seems, I am on the wrong side of the plane. Instead of one of the most beautiful airports in the world, I see only the capannone — the concrete industrial blocks — of the Tiber valley. What, as one Italian friend asks, is going on with all these new structures in an economy that is currently shrinking more than the UK’s and at the best of times barely grows?

I decide to drive up to Moravola, which as I said before is the best restoration project I have seen in Italy, and get in the way of Seonaid and Chris. They are working like lunatics, trying to run their boutique hotel themselves while guest numbers build up. This appears to involve a 5am to midnight shift, seven days a week, but they remain in good humour. We chat in the kitchen and are soon joined by a charming, designer Swiss couple. These are the kind of clients you want at this stage: relaxed, appreciative of the extraordinary quality of the project and unworried by somewhat slow service as Moravola builds up its business and hence its staff. We set about a bottle of white and talk about Europe, Italians and children. Looking at the surroundings and at Moravola, the Swiss wistfully conjecture how nice it would be if they had a place in the Umbrian sun themselves. Of course they don’t know how much work was involved and how unbelievably expensive the project would have been if Chris, a trained Norman Foster architect, hadn’t become a builder, fabricator and carpenter and done much of the construction work himself. After six or more years he has even acquired a sort of idealised builder physique. Not that the wife is complaining.

Seonaid, on a topic close to my own heart, causes much mirth by relating a recent exchange with a Danish architect who is using Leo Petturiti as his geometra for a client project in the Niccone valley. According to the Dane, the clients are not entirely convinced that Leo ‘gets’ their project vision. So the Dane gamely suggested to Seonaid that he bring the scrofulous one up to Moravola to give him a few ideas about quality restoration work. Large mistake. Unknown to this Scandinavian, Seonaid has already had her fill of Little Leo. When she and Chris first came to Italy to look for a property they wanted to buy a ruin on the west side of the Tiber that was being handled by Petturiti and James Stephens. They agreed a price, signed a contract, and made the compromesso downpayment. Deal done. Driving back to the UK, however, they got call from Stephens’ office to say they couldn’t actually have the property unless they paid a lot more money. Petturiti and Fat Boy had gotten a better offer. To cut a long story short, the illegality of what the agents did was so cut and dried that under threat of legal action Seonaid and Chris were eventually compensated. But it tells you plenty about the way certain people do business. And so when the Dane mentioned bringing Leo up, the response from Seonaid was that Leo will not set foot on her property so long as she breathes.

We finished the bottle. And the sun shone.

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Light blues

June 18, 2009

There is a not entirely satisfactory end to the Cambridge academic year. Rooting around the main University Library I receive a call from the director of the PhD programme in the Business School. He needs to see me as a matter of urgency. So I grab a yard of books, make it half a yard through an hour-and-a-half’s diligent photocopying, cut short a meeting with a nice teacher in East Asian Studies, cycle at speed and arrive panting at the director’s door. I enter to find the director, the deputy director and the administrator seated around a conference table with stern faces. Uh oh.

The issue at hand is mandatory work I was required to do on ‘quantitative research methodologies’ (in essence, turning life into numbers and asking a computer programme to tell you what is going on and what to do next; this more or less caused the current global financial crisis and is deemed to be an essential competence in contemporary academia). If you don’t pass Quants, you can’t stay in the Business School. And as I look down at the unhappy faces, I am failing because my submission is short of two exercises.

It is a minute to execution time as I pull out my aging lap-top. On it we find one of the two missing exercises. We look under properties and see that the last date on which the file was changed pre-dates the submission deadline. ‘Don’t resave,’ comes the cry; this would overwrite today’s date and leave me with no hard evidence to put before the PhD degree committee, which will have to rule on my case. At this point it looks like I can plead to have one of two missing exercises considered; but this might not be enough to save me. The three officials witness the saving of the first exercise onto a memory stick, soon to become Exhibit A at a formal hearing. I am then accompanied by the PhD administrator (lest I quickly bang out the missing exercise on the fly – hardly likely for someone who says things like ‘Remind me which one is the x-axis’) while we see if I can strengthen my defence.

Looking through my files I am relieved to see that I printed a back-up copy of the material I handed in. This is interesting because it contains missing exercise one. And this puts into play that most embarrassing of university possibilities – that work was handed in and the examiner, or (less likely) an admin person, lost it. Perhaps sensing an interesting outcome, the PhD administrator adds the back-up hard copy to the memory stick, and now has Exhibit B and Exhibit A.

But what of missing exercise two? On that I am surely bang to rights. Since I have no electronic copy of the exercise, it must have been one where I missed the class, because otherwise I would have done the exercise during the class. The exercises for which I missed classes (through teaching, so a reasonable excuse) were done at Easter. I took them off the university intranet where all coursework and materials are supposed to be posted.

We have a look on the system. Sure enough, there is no template for the missing exercise on it, at least not where it should be. There is one unexplained folder in the relevant part of the system, but it proves unopenable. Images of the intranet file directory are printed off as Exhibit C. It rather begins to look like missing exercise two may be the result of a departmental cock-up, and I subsequently hear that investigations are being launched.

So what will the degree committee decide? To throw me out anyway? To issue a groveling apology for what appear, on balance, to be university mistakes? Or to do a bit of coughing, give me a pass, and pretend the whole thing never happened? I know which one Slumdog Millionaire would go for.

The brush with the Inquisition aside, Cambridge is far from an upleasing experience. The weather is fine, it is May Ball weekgirls trinity ball 2 (don’t ask me why it is in June) and lots of slightly plump girls are wearing those deeply unflattering English ball gowns. girls trinity ballMy eldest daughter, six, is with me to meet her granny and, seeing a fleshy young lady in a shocking pink outfit outside Trinity, demands: ‘What does she think she’s wearing?’

We take granny and my stepfather out in a college punt down the river and past the main colleges. My stepfather, with broad Yorkshire accent, makes the same weak joke about being promised galley slaves half a dozen times to people on the banks and in other punts. The southern bourgeois intelligentsia, however, has dealt with far worse, and shrugs off this provocation from the Barbarian Northerner. trinity_ball_queueMeanwhile, in the queues for the balls, one suspects there must be the next generation’s David Cameron, perhaps about to have that embarrassing photograph taken which will haunt his political career (the photo can no longer be published, but here is a painting of the photo, with Our Dave second left, back row). newsnights_bullingdon painting

The only crumb of comfort for the young Tory who is about have that photo taken is that the opposition is likely to be an even bigger titty, like Tony ‘Harry Potter’ Blair (seen here in a 1970s colour photo of his Oxford dining club, third from right, back row, possibly making a childish gesture with his right hand).blair photo

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Psycho killer, qu’est que c’est?

March 16, 2009

Cambridge: The term is done. To celebrate, and inspired by the ongoing Umbrian struggle against freemasonary, witchcraft, sexual perversion and other matters diabolical, I attend a talk about psychopathy given by world-renowned psychopathy expert James Blair (no relation, though it is an interesting coincidence that various people have speculated — perhaps trying to make him seem more interesting than he is — that Tony Blair is a psychopath).

I make several learnings from the talk:

1. Psychopathy is correctly pronounced with the stress on the ‘o’, not on the ‘a’.

2. Contemporary neuroscientific research suggests that psychopathy is connected with insensitivity/low response in the amygdala and other parts of the brain that process emotional (as opposed to rational) response. This results in psychos not noticing the fear/distress/pain they cause to others. Mr Blair highlights an example from his own work of a psychopathic mugger who reasoned it was best to hit his victims over the head with a brick from behind, because this minimised the chances of them fighting back. The psycho failed to notice it also left his victims with stoved in heads.

3. Psychopathy is not to be confused with sadism. It is not part of the psychopath’s essential make-up that he enjoys causing suffering to others. He tends to be neutral on the question of the enjoyability of inflicting pain, and is afflicted instead with a sort of moral and emotional failure to empathise. The sadist is a different animal. An individual like sadism legend Jeffrey Dahmer, suggests Mr Blair, would likely fail to score the requisite 30 out of 40 points on the standard Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist.

4. If my children do not respond to my imprecations, and do not grow up as I intend, it could be because they are psychopaths. The news that there would have been nothing I could do is almost as comforting as the two glasses of red at the drinks reception after the talk. Of course, since only an estimated 20 percent of the prison population would score 30 on Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist, it is unlikely that all of my children are psychopaths. Nonetheless, I have dozed through enough quantitative methodology classes to know that it is not impossible.

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