kenny hodgart


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A View from Dundee

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald

I’ve just stepped off the train into Dundee’s lunchtime smirr, and the first guy I’ve asked for directions to the Doghouse, the bar where I’m due to meet The View, the city’s most successful recording artists since the Average White Band, is telling me a story about someone he knows who had to stop on the M90 and phone for an ambulance after the stitches from a recent vasectomy burst open. I thank him for his help and head on, reflecting that his bizarre, scabrous tale would not be out of place in one of The View’s songs.

Dundee, so we’re told, is all abuzz with new-found vibrancy and confidence. Its booming creative, cultural and biotech sectors ensure that it is one of the first cities mentioned in dispatches on regeneration; and like other regenerated cities – Manchester, Bristol, Glasgow – it now boasts a music scene that is the envy of other more boring places. Of course, the irony is that much of the best music in these towns tends to come from their unregenerated underbellies, and so it is with Dundee. For Oasis and Burnage, read The View and Lochee, for it’s this particular neighbourhood we have to thank for producing one of the UK’s most interesting guitar bands of recent years.

I’ve met The View before, in early 2007, just after their debut, Hats Off To The Buskers, had gone straight to No 1 in the album charts. They were on that year’s NME Tour, shockingly young, even shorter than I’d imagined and clearly determined to enjoy as much free booze as they could snaffle, lest perhaps someone came and took it away.

Two years on and with their second album about to come out, what has changed? The new record is more reflective and more rounded than its predecessor, and departs from the punky, anthemic indie script with string arrangements, bluesy strains and even a hint of Two Tone colouring the mix. In other words, it doesn’t sound like a band who can’t get into the US because frontman Kyle Falconer was caught with cocaine in 2007, are banned from every Travelodge in the land and had to abandon a gig last year because they were too drunk to perform.

And neither is there much rousing of rabbles going on at the Doghouse. Kyle, the only member of the band who no longer lives in Dundee – he has moved in with his girlfriend in London – is asleep on a sofa when I arrive, wakes up for Vimto, some loud burping and the interview, then resumes the foetal position as I’m leaving. In his upright phase he shrugs when I put it to him that album number two has the whiff of a new maturity. “Done a lot of growing up this last year,” he sings on one track, Glass Smash. And then there’s the line on One Off Pretender: “To be 10 different people, that’s easy / It’s easier than being yourself.”

“That’s about getting wrecked, and stuff,” he reveals. “How you play at being somebody else.” Doesn’t that come with the territory of being in a band and being successful and being schmoozed by a lot of people you don’t know? “Aye,” he says. “But that’s alright. Success hasn’t changed us. I don’t feel different to what I was. It’s more that people treat you differently. People might say you’ve changed or whatever, but it’s people that never knew you in the first place. I like it, being in a band. You see a lot of bands that don’t look as if they’re having a good time, and you think What’s the point?’ A lot of the stuff in the press about us is true, so you can’t really complain about it; but they deliberately make us out to be off the wall. We’re just getting up to the same things as any other band.”

Glass Smash, a slick blast of new wave, and Covers – more of which later – might both be construed as love songs. Both contain lines of understated beauty and tenderness, rendered, as ever, with a locution that is entirely the singer’s own. Yet there seems, at times, to be a mismatch between Falconer’s almost honeyed Celtic intonation and the kind of tabloid coverage of the band that might have put, if not The Stooges, then certainly Oasis in the shade.

Like the Gallagher brothers, The View share a penchant for the greyer areas of political correctness. The album, after all, is called Which Bitch? and Falconer’s explanation of Gem Of A Bird, its skiffly closing track, suggests a certain antagonism at work as regards womankind. “It’s about a bird I was going out with who was a wee bit older than me and was dead intelligent,” he says. “She knew a lot of words that I could never remember; but there’s a bit of irony in it, because it’s about how I knew better than her.” Not for me the role of feminist inquisitor to a bunch of 21-year-olds from Lochee revelling in their rock’n’roll inheritance, but you wonder if there’s just a hint of an attempt to wind people up.

The parallels with Oasis are instructive. Rumours that The View are now banned from the remote Welsh studio where they recorded Which Bitch? are enthusiastically scotched, and, if needed, producer Owen Morris could come to their defence. Morris worked with Oasis from 1994 until 1997, and it’s arguable that the two albums he has now made with The View gesture at the sort of music the Gallaghers could and should be making were it not for the fact they disappeared up their own backsides after Britpop. Which Bitch? has new layers of instrumentation and a broader musical canvas than Hats Off To The Buskers, but its melodies still soar and delve with working-class vim and vinegar. “We’ve still got the big tunes with choruses and tracks that go down well at gigs. We didn’t make a conscious decision to make a new sound or anything like that,” says Kieren Webster, the band’s bass player and co-songwriter.

Guitarist Pete Reilly fills me in on the Doghouse and its importance to the band’s story. “We practically lived here when we left school,” he says. “We’d rehearse for hours then nip across the road to buy 12p noodles from Lidl. One minute we were on the dole, and the next we were top of the album charts.”

I wonder what ructions they might have experienced, four lads from a scheme stepping out into the limelight armed with nothing but catchy songs about their native city. “If you’re born and bred working class, it’s always going to come across. It’s ingrained in you,” says Webster, who has just bought a new flat in Dundee. “But it’s not like we have chips on our shoulders.” Falconer adds: “Where you’re from is where you’re from, and that’s what you write about. It’s just that the majority of bands aren’t from where we’re from, but bands from London write about the same things we write about.”

There is, nonetheless, a ring of authenticity to the rebel yell of One Off Pretender. “It’s about being flung in the jail in Aberdeen,” explains Webster. “Me and Kyle were DJing in a club, and things kicked off on the dancefloor and we went to jump in for our mates.”
“Actually,” Falconer butts in, “we split the f***ing fight up. We f***ed off from the gig and jumped on the bus to go back to Dundee, but the police caught up with the bus and arrested us.”

On Thursday, the band are set to play a special one-off gig at London’s Hard Rock Cafe. It’ll be the first time they’ve performed two gorgeous new tracks, Distant Doubloon and Covers, with live strings and brass. The former twines snatched references to “Robbie Stevenson” and Treasure Island with street-wise Dundonian vignettes; it’s surreal, funny and possibly the best thing the band have ever done. Covers, meanwhile, is a charming duet they recorded with Paisley crooner Paolo Nutini, who just happened to be making his own album in a studio along the road from his fellow Scots in Wales.

Given Nutini’s heartthrob status, this collaboration might help his new mates get back on-side with the ladies. Because, men’s men or otherwise, and for all their swagger and front, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that there’s more to The View than they want us to see.


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It’s tough being ginger

A version of this article appeared in the Sunday Herald magazine

NOT so very long ago I was sitting on a train trying to read an article by the journalist Brendan O’Neill. I say that I was ‘trying’ as across from me sat a group of teenagers who did not appear to have considered the idea that train journeys might afford other passengers the opportunity to read. Their conversation was loud though not especially obnoxious; not at least until it veered onto the topic of someone called Lindsay’s new boyfriend. “He’s that ugly ginger guy, is he not?” guessed one of the boys, correctly as it turned out. All were agreed that the lad in question was indeed “well ginger”, a “minger” and, further, “a ginger bastard.”

O’Neill’s article was about race. As far as I recall he was arguing that the issue, in the west, is now one of etiquette: the white liberal establishment is more bothered about getting everyone to use the correct race language than striving towards anything as tricky as actual equality. It was a view I have time for, but, in that moment, as a red-haired person on that train, another line of thought occurred to me. Gingers, I reflected, have never been seen as less than human; we have never been enslaved, rounded up and massacred or even denied our basic legal rights. There’s no real question of inequality. And yet, and yet: maybe we could be doing with more of a look-in when it comes to this business of etiquette.

People being rude about ginger hair is never all that surprising but hearing such obloquy from adolescent mouths again was a reminder that kids are generally nastier brutes than adults. I don’t have any particularly feverish memories of having been bullied as a boy, but I do remember around the age of six or seven earnestly wishing I did not have red hair anymore and believe I even went some way to convincing myself that indeed I did not.

This involved no small measure of cowardliness. My older brother, also a redhead, also adorned with freckles, was my advance party. Being a fairly rugged infant he had worked out that the best way of dealing with unhelpful epithets was to strike back at others with impunity, shot-across-the-bows style. In the sibling context, that meant picking on me on account of being both scrawny and ginger. Clear as day, I saw that if he could get away with this then so could I; and to my shame I duly set about taunting a girl who lived nearby and whose hair, we decided, was “orange”.

There is a recent novel, written by Laura Marney, called Nobody Loves a Ginger Baby. Ginger babies with loving parents will have baulked at this – and, given the chance, thrown Marney’s book in her face – but there is little doubt that, growing up, redheads fall prey to more slings and arrows than their less radiantly-bonced peers. What displacements, what hurts, one wonders, will fester in the minds of the two red-haired sisters who were attacked at school in Alberta, Canada in November following a campaign on Facebook to start a National Kick a Ginger Day? Down the way, Americans are supposedly kinder to redheads – standing out from the crowd is, perhaps, something to which Americans instinctively warm – but the campaign was seemingly inspired by an episode of the animated US TV show South Park in which the clinically obese Cartman decides people with red hair are soulless and evil.

Over here, a red-haired family in Newcastle were in the news in 2007 after being terrorised into moving home, twice. Kevin and Barbara Chapman’s four children, all aged between 10 and 13, had been routinely kicked and punched in the street, they had had their windows smashed and at one address thugs daubed “ginger is gay” on the outside of the property. It is all very well surmising that people bent on being thuggish will reach for any excuse and that the Chapmans’ neighbours therefore targeted the family simply because they were somehow different and not because of their hair colour per se. And it is all very well (though it might land you in bother) explaining such behaviour away by clutching for bromides about Geordies being uncouth or indeed Canadians backwards. The Chapmans’ story is a shocking one and a rebuke to the idea that people with ginger hair are simply over-sensitive to jokes and gibes.

In 2002, a Big Brother contestant was held up for ridicule when it emerged that he dyed his red hair black, a revelation that somehow licensed sundry tabloid hacks to wonder whether or not he also dyed his pubic hair. Some – including the auburn-haired editor of this magazine – have wondered whether this kind of public ‘dissing’ of red hair is evidence that attitudes towards it in Britain have ossified or regressed over the last 20 years or so. Perhaps they have. And yet it may be that what has regressed – as the BBC has been finding to its cost of late – is popular culture and its idea of what is actually funny.

Two years before that, in 2000, 219 complaints were made to the Advertising Standards Agency after the electricity and gas company npower ran a poster campaign featuring a photograph of a ginger-haired family along with the slogan: “There are some things in life you can’t choose.” The ASA decided not to uphold the complaints as “the light-hearted humour of the ad was unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence.” I find it difficult to get hot and bothered about this sort of thing – and yet I wonder how such humour would have played had the family been, say, brown-skinned.

A redhaired girl I knew at school and who is now a teacher, believes she knows the answer. A couple of years ago she was verbally abused over a sustained period by a group of pupils. She believes epithets like “ginger cow” were chosen merely as the most obvious route to undermining her authority, but adds: “Other people, even other teachers, thought that was funny more than anything else. If it had been something of a racial nature, it would have been a much more serious matter in the eyes of the local authority or the police.”

The comedienne Catherine Tait poked fun at attitudes towards ginger hair – from the betwixt and between of strawberry blond to siren red and deep russet – in a series of television sketches in 2005. Ginger “freaks”, it turned out, were being terrorised by hate mobs and had congregated in a refuge shelter, away from the loathing of “normal” people. As a portrayal of victimisation it pushed the limits of comedy to the wall, and probably wouldn’t have been seen as funny at all if the joke hadn’t been built around the exaggeration of what most people see as trifling, low-level prejudice. Tait was able to carry this off precisely because she is a redhead.

Others, one would suppose, might take a more cautious approach. Not so Zadie Smith, the chick who put multiculturalism on the post-colonial literary map – and someone you’d rather expect not to make appearance part of a character assassination. In her breakthrough novel, White Teeth, she introduces her readers to Horst, “an enormous man with strawberry-blond hair, orange freckles, and misaligned nostrils, who dressed like an international playboy and seemed too large for his bike.” There’s nothing particularly nasty about the description but neither is there a point to it. We do not meet Horst again. Elsewhere, in Smith’s short story The Trials of Finch, Ruth Finch is a misfit, unloved and unloveable. Her visible traits are afforded no little delineation: Finch is “stout, orange-haired, and stacked front and back like the Hottentot Venus; she wore a big red face that looked always as if she’d been fishing in a storm.” She has “an unfinished face, boneless and round, dominated by hulking spectacles” and “wore an unfortunate red jumper paired with a more unfortunate pair of orange dungarees.” Smith’s idees fixes about redness seem too incontinent to be merely incidental.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission – formerly the Commission for Racial Equality and a body, incidentally, no longer as enamoured with the ideology of multiculturalism as once it was – does not monitor cases of discrimination against redheads and has nothing to say on the matter of ‘gingerism’. In any discussion of how the phenomenon compares or relates to racism, it will be pointed out firstly that red hair comes from mutations of a particular gene, the melanocortin 1 receptor, and isn’t necessarily directly inherited from parents; and secondly that redheads have not suffered centuries of systematic abuse. Yet if we accept that black people are capable of being racist towards whites, or that whites of one nation can be accused of being racist towards whites of another, then definitions of racism become somewhat less watertight.

Helen Cuinn, a young performance artist from Glasgow, believes being unpleasant towards ginger-haired people has become “the last legally acceptable form of discrimination”. And she knows a thing or two about that unpleasantness. “It sounds really stupid,” she says, “but a lot of people really don’t like red-haired children. I had a lot of negative experiences when I was younger. I had very thick, tight, dark red curls and people would spit on me at school and in the street. When I stopped being an adolescent and got older suddenly I was considered sexy, which really crept in without me noticing. When I worked in a bar guys used to tell me I looked like Nicole Kidman, which just isn’t true, but there’s this notion of red-haired women being sort of beacons, sirens even, which I think you can trace back to some of the red-haired Hollywood icons of the 30s and 40s.”

Now, Cuinn says, she’s happy with the way she looks, though she still contends with insults from strangers. At the RSAMD, where she studied Contemporary Theatre Practice, she developed an interest in identity politics and queer theory – yet more than being gay, interestingly, it is her experience of growing up with red hair “hanging over me” that informs her work. Her current project, The Hair on My Head is Dead – a reference to the wig she had made of it in all its former glory and which she now wears only when she wants to – has so far involved “performed installations” at festivals around the UK, including the Arches Live! event in Glasgow, and is to be developed into a piece of theatre, “part stand-up, part one-woman play” that will run as part of this year’s Glasgay festival.

“Through drawing attention to my hair, I’m hoping to examine the assumptions people make based on the way others look,” she says of it. “I’ve been thinking about this my entire life. Hair is a multi-million pound industry – people really do care about it. It’s seen as something women care about more than men; but we’re told it’s a superficial thing and it’s our personality underneath that counts. In actual fact, the image you present is the first indicator of who you are and people absolutely make judgements.

“Your race or your creed or the way you look is exactly who you are. Bizarrely, in Scotland – where we’ve got more red-haired people than anywhere else in the world – it’s completely fine to sort of slag that off. My work is quite tongue-in-cheek – I think I’m entitled to have a humour and negativity about it. Making jokes at your own expense is quite a Scottish way of dealing with things, actually.”

Cuinn is interested in drawing out some of the stereotypes that inform contemporary attitudes towards red hair. On mainland Britain, anti-Irish sentiment dating back to the pressures brought about by mass migration in the wake of the potato famine may have had an impact, yet many believe the most durable slurs date from mediaeval times. Certainly in early morality plays colours tended to be used to signify good and evil and red was like to be associated with the devil, his associates, werewolves and the degenerate.

Even before then, Judas Iscariot was believed to have had red hair, and the ancient stereotype of the Jews was that they all had it – even on the Elizabethan stage this held currency, with Shakespeare’s Jewish money-lender Shylock in the Merchant of Venice tending to sport a red wig. Shakespeare, indeed, called red “the dissembling colour.” Lilith, Adam’s first wife in Jewish mythology, and the personification of lust, turned out to be a redhead somewhere along the line, too, and was later painted in that guise by Gabriel Dante Rossetti, but sales of hair dye among god-fearing redhaired women must surely have bottomed out when not one but two of their own – Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots – ruled entire kingdoms, albeit the English queen subsequently had her French cousin killed.

The Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, is seen as having been a moderate, sensible sort of a monarch – at least when held up against her father, Henry VIII, another redhead – but Mary’s fiery temperament was more in-keeping with the idea of redhaired women being flighty and sensuous. It was by the 16th Century common for artists to paint Mary Magdalene – another biblical figure associated with sin and desire – with long red hair, while over in Venice Titian was busy painting so many red-haired women he eventually lent his name to a shade of the colour.

Even into our own age redhaired women, from Rita Hayworth and Katherine Hepburn to Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Kidman are seen as sultry and glamorous. That glamour has tended to escape ginger men. The journalist James Medd, though not a redhead himself, wrote in the Guardian last year about being the father of redhaired sons. He now believes ginger to the best hair colour going, but suggested a little positive discrimination might go a long way towards increasing its popularity. Forget Christopher Columbus, Napoleon and Churchill – a few new ginger role models, Medd believes, are what we need now.

“Movie stars like Robert Redford and Damien Lewis have that kind of strawberry blonde shade that’s always been quite popular,” he told me. “The test is darker red hair and freckles – I don’t know how people would respond to that being more visible on television or in movies. Proper red hair is still kind of stigmatized, or else it’s the geeky side-kick who has it – Biggles’s mate, or Ron Weasley in Harry Potter. Weasley is such a kind of cliched, geeky redhead, although he does get the girl (Hermione) in the end, doesn’t he? Maybe she’s doing her bit!”

Medd lives in London where school playgrounds are full of every skin colour and creed imaginable but there are, proportionally, fewer gingers than here – three per cent of people in the British Isles have red hair but that rises to 13 per cent in Scotland. He admits to being slightly worried about bullying, but adds: “It’s been really good so far. No-one has said anything negative about my boys in public and they’ve had nothing at school, although the eldest is now eight so I guess this is about the time it would be likely to start.

“When I grew up it was seriously bad luck to be a redhead. You were bullied; it was considered ugly, straight off the bat. But when I grew up racism and homophobia were also rife and people would use words like ‘spazz.’ Those things have changed. It just seems that anti-gingerism is still socially acceptable in a way that political correctness hasn’t reached it yet, but I do think things have improved.”

Regardless of whether this is mere wishful thinking, Medd and I are agreed that any sort of monitoring of people’s behaviour around redheads would not be constructive. It may be that the proscription of other forms of discrimination has made slights towards gingers more common, or at least more conspicuous, but it is unlikely that the badging up of yet another minority group would do anything much for social cohesion. Everyone has the right – and sometimes it is a duty – to be offended; but it would be difficult to argue that we have the right not to be offended. Charles Kennedy for the next James Bond, anyone?


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Political books of 2008

This article appeared in The Herald

Many of the books on the politics shelves this year have been overtaken by events. As crisis became crash, the realisation that political economy is to politics what money is to banks was a little late in dawning, but there were at least one or two lonely voices who claimed to have seen the whole thing coming in time to dash off guides to where it had all gone wrong.

Robert Shiller’s The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened and What to Do about it (Princeton, £9.95), a short expose of the lax borrowing that led to America becoming the world’s first subprime superpower, falls into that category. Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money (Allen Lane, £25) does too but isn’t just a paean to capitalism’s convulsions: it’s also a thorough-going history of the rise of capital (the foundation, Ferguson believes, of human progress).

For anyone who takes fright at mention of stocks and bonds, securities, bears, bulls and hedge funds, it is essential reading. Ferguson’s lessons are that sooner or later every bubble bursts and that human greed and ignorance, rather than the financial system itself, created the current crisis.

There’s something atavistic about AN Wilson’s Our Times (Hutchinson, £25), an indictment of Britain’s national collapse. Wilson is a cultural conservative, yet there’s nothing rigid or canonical about him: neither the old establishment nor the new, the Britain of aristocratic humbug nor of health and safety tutorials, is spared his vituperation.

Britain’s shared sense of identity and purpose has been undone since the war, he believes, by political elites, mass migration, yoof culture, the demise of organised Christianity and the replacement of trains by cars. He can be contradictory, factually wayward, even scurrilous, but he is always entertaining and always illuminating.

China’s story over the last two decades – thanks to its economic reforms – has been one of rise rather than demise. Philip Pan’s Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of New China (Simon & Schuster, £14.99), challenges utterly, however, the notion that democracy will be the inevitable corollary. In a sobering, saddening study he narrates the stories of men and women, dead or imprisoned, who dared to break rank. Their heroism, obscured and written out of history by the Party, a de facto “mafia”, deserves to be honoured everywhere.

Left-wing commentators lobbed so much mud at Martin Amis this year that even his virtuoso prose style was filed as a charge against him. Too clever, not self-effacing enough, crowed one reviewer, a marginally more coherent remonstrance than the view, expressed by the Marxist academic Terry Eagleton, that one should no more listen to a novelist talking about Islamism than a window cleaner.

The Second Plane (Jonathan Cape, £12.99), a collection of essays and short fiction written in response to 9/11 and all its consequences and bifurcations on the world stage, is a brilliant riposte to that view. Literature, for Amis, is “reason at play”; religions are repositories of “ignorance, reaction and sentimentality.” Islamism (“an ideology superimposed upon a religion – illusion upon illusion”) is a death cult every bit as pernicious as Nazism or Stalinism and the novelist – for whom morality and reason are, in the end, all – has in fact a duty to say something about it.

When confronted by Islamist terror, Amis believes, too many on the liberal left evade the truth: they see not a desolate and implacable ideology but misguided liberators whose cause is fundamentally righteous.

Where Amis’s eloquence is trained on anti-Americanism as an ideology, Simon Schama proffers instead its antidote. His The American Future (Bodley Head, £20) is both a history and a treatise on that most nebulous of constructs, hope. Our television don assumes a triangular perspective – daydreaming about the future as the past looms like a gently stirring branch at the window of the here and now. America’s history of violence is explored in considerable detail: from the obliteration of the Cherokee, to Gettysburg, to Vietnam. The liberty so prized by the early settlers, then, came at a cost to others; on the other hand, the country’s enduring racism and paranoia should be understood as inevitable by-products of being the world’s melting pot.

Convinced of America’s ability to reinvent itself once more in the 21st Century, Schama hoped for an Obama victory, and he got it. In the president-elect he sees a Jeffersonian figure salving the wounds of the bedraggled republic and renewing a sense of “common purpose.” Others tend, similarly, to see what they want to in Obama. One hopes he can be something more than that: his own man.


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Review: The Thin Blue Line, by Conor Foley

The article appeared in The Herald

There is little denying that most armed conflicts and humanitarian emergencies are messy affairs in which rights and wrongs are often inseparable. There are books on the such topics which avoid becoming equally messy but this is not one of them.

The problem with Conor Foley’s The Thin Blue Line, How Humanitarianism Went to War is that he can’t decide whether to make it a memoir, an essay or a polemic. He dwells for large chunks on the niceties of international law without explaining much more than the fact that it is ambigious, while the huge cast of humanitarian colleagues and UN officials to whom he introduces us seem incidental to his overarching argument. He is at his best when describing specific crises or relating first-hand the difficulties faced by humanitarians in Kosovo or in lawless Afghanistan. Like an Antipodean backpacker determined to see the world in his gap year, however, he hops around far too much to sustain the narrative.

The effect is disorienting, but does not disguise the fact that his basic thesis is neither sustained nor convincing. The book describes the journey over the last 20 years towards ‘humanitarian intervention’ – as a way of holding states accountable for they way treat their own populations – becoming the new norm in international law. Human rights and humanitarian aid organisations have drawn closer together and Foley shows how their neutrality has been compromised as they allow themselves to be manipulated to promote explicitly political objectives.

Perhaps this could have been avoided but Foley does not venture to explain how. In the early 90s the weakness of the international community’s response to genocide and human rights violations in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina was such that there was a clamour for the doctrine of non-intervention in the affairs of autonomous states to be set aside. As Foley acknowledges, UN soldiers were mere bystanders in the Balkans. Elsewhere he supports the argument that most humanitarian activity in Africa is ineffective in terms of reducing poverty, and even damaging.

Aid agencies, wise to this new appetite for intervention, have become adept at influencing public opinion in their parent countries. They know that the best way to raise money and get things done is to stir consciences. Human rights and humanitarian NGOs are often the first to report atrocities and suffering, but this creates a dilemma for them: by calling on governments to protect people, they know that force may be required. Foley sees this as an abandonment of the humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality, yet is unable to counter the argument that these are not worthy sacrifices in the interests of preventing bloodshed.

NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, Foley says, made a bad situation worse. He neglects to offer an opinion on whether the west was right to take the fight to the Taliban after 9/11, but much of his discussion of the perceived abuses of humanitarian ideals focuses on operations in Afghanistan. He bemoans the fact aid agencies there have become part of the wider counter-insurgency effort and dismisses political objectives such as rebuilding governance and judicial structures and the “promotion of philosophical convictions associated with western liberal values”, as neo-colonial.

The west, indeed, comes in for no end of criticism – westerners in general for their idealistic partisanship, their short attention spans and “out of sight, out of mind” attitude to many of the most serious crises; America in particular for not supporting UN missions enough in the 1990s then seeing itself as above the law in Iraq and Afghanistan. Foley reserves particular contempt for the Bush administration but, it would seem, more for having ridden roughshod over the international body politic and declared the UN to be ineffectual than anything else.

In his section on the war in Iraq, Foley is incisive in cataloguing Blair’s dishonesties. He doesn’t tell us anything new but the PM’s repackaging of the invasion as a ‘humanitarian intervention’ after the WMD claims were blown sky high, resonates in the context of a book about betrayals.

Foley does draw some fairly sensible conclusions, albeit tangential to his main gripes. In particular he believes Britain should abandon its slavishness to the US, that so-called liberal interventions this decade have shown democracy is unlikely to be imposed from the outside, and that we need to realise the international community cannot conjure peace and prosperity out of total chaos.

One more inconsistency: humanitarian organisations, writes Foley, should not be mobilised in support of particular political agendas or philosophical convictions; yet they have an important role to play in the arguments for “global economic justice”. What could be more political?


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Review: Alpha Dogs, by James Harding

This article appeared in The Herald

It seems a little incongruous, even in this day and age, to find a book written by an Englishman – the editor of the Times, no less – so obviously couched in American phrasing and idioms. Yet not only is Alpha Dogs written for the American market, it is about the rise, in America, of a caste of professional strategists in politics and how they came to wield power in political campaigns around the world. Ultimately, it is about the homogenisation of the electoral process. The non-American reader might puzzle over a term like “lunch-bucket Democrat” but as Harding states, we are all fans of the West Wing now.

Whether that’s true, literally, the point is we all get what’s going on in politics. As citizens, we may absorb political messages but we also recognise the ways in which they are spun. The calculation behind each political move is analysed by journalists perhaps more even than policy itself. We see the hand of the image-maker and, by and large, we disapprove. Politics is a grubby business and the men of whom Harding writes, the pioneering “alpha dogs” of the firm Sawyer Miller, now feel guilty for having helped to make it more so. Disenchantment with democracy is the backdrop to their tale. As Scott Miller, an erstwhile copywriter and one of the founding partners in the group alongside David Sawyer, originally a documentary film-maker, comments: “We helped to make politics more crass.”

Yet as the men who would coalesce around Sawyer Miller in the 1980s honed their trade in the preceding decade, they were driven not by cynicism but by idealism. They believed in a new “electronic democracy” which would empower voters and challenge old party elites. They were thrill-seekers and adventurers, drawn by the lure of making money and making a difference; clever raconteurs and bon viveurs who were convinced the spunk of advertising and the wisdom of psychology could be applied to winning elections.

Sawyer Miller – monogamously Democratic in America – never once backed a candidate who made it to the White House (although several of its staff would go on to work for Bill Clinton in 1992 and then help the Labour Party to get elected in Britain by persuading it to eschew the doctrinaire left). Nonetheless they helped forge a prodigious modern industry, had greater global reach than any of their rivals and, importantly, reached deep into the world of business.

It was Mark McKinnon, a Sawyer Miller staffer who went on to run the advertising campaigns for George W Bush in 2000 and in 2004, who coined the phrase “alpha dogs.” Harding pinpoints its ambivalence, hinting as it does “at the brilliant and the dastardly, the inspiring and the manipulative,” and he betrays both relish and revulsion as he introduces us to a cast of men adept at qualitative polling, drafting simple messages and “going negative.”

The central figure is Sawyer, a suave New England aristocrat and New York clubman who we first meet cutting his teeth on television spots for the opposition Social Christians in oil-rich Venezuela in 1972. Sawyer and his associates learned their trade as they went along, both at home and abroad. In 1978 they engineered the re-election of Boston’s unloved mayor Kevin White by portraying his opponent, Joe Timilty, as lightweight. In 1984, the Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale proved to be unelectable as he refused to respond to the revolution in leadership wrought by Ronald Reagan. And Shimon Peres was another politician who failed to grasp the new personality politics being urged upon him.

Sawyer Miller’s breakthrough overseas was to come in 1985 with the ousting of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. The successful portrayal of Cory Aquino, in her own words “a housewife”, as a totem of peaceful democratic revolution, opened doors for the firm around the globe and in 1988 they assisted in the overthrow of Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

Ultimately, however, the company lost its way as it became less and less scrupulous about who it supported. In the early 1990s it was tarred by association with governments in countries with records of serious human rights abuses, including Nigeria and Panama. It had also lost its soul, according to some staff, by involving itself in time-consuming work for corporate clients, often companies being investigated for fraud. Miller left and Sawyer was ousted by a group of four senior executives, who then went on to sell the company into a merger with an advertising firm. And they went on merging it with other agencies until they had built the biggest public relations company in the world: Weber Shandwick. As Harding notes, in little over a dozen years, Sawyer Miller made the journey from the idealistic to the banal.

Spin doctors have long since joined our political elites. If Harding teaches us anything it is that they are also now incumbents of a sort. The nature of what displaces them may well dictate the future of democracy.


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Recalling Robert Millar’s breakthrough Tour de France

This article appeared in The Herald

Twenty-five years ago this month the cult techno-pop hit Tour de France was riding high in the British charts. Europhiles may have been taken by Kraftwerk’s cycling-themed EP; the race itself, however, was nowhere to be seen on British television screens.

Here, the sport will never be entrenched in our culture like it is in France , Belgium or Italy , but at least these days one can follow the Tour – and the progress of our own David Millar, currently holding up well in this year’s overall classification – on Eurosport. On July 10, 1983 , another Scot, Robert Millar, won the Pyrenean mountain stage, Pau-Bagneres de Luchon, on his way to finishing 14th overall and third in the King of the Mountains competition, in his first Tour de France, aged 24.

Despite going on to become arguably the greatest British road cyclist of all time – his first trainer Billy Bilsland calls him Scotland ‘s “most successful Scottish athlete ever” – Millar was never properly acclaimed for his achievements.

Anonymity at home may have suited him. Now, certainly, he absents himself from any publicity – following his retirement from cycling in 1995, he wrote for a while in cycling magazines and had a spell as GB team manager, but is now believed to be a recluse.

Much has been made of his retreat from the world, but in 1983 the young Glaswegian was not averse to a little showboating. As he recounted to a journalist after that Tour stage win: “I looked round at three kilometres to go, and I could see the guy [ Spain ‘s Pedro Delgado] coming. So I put myself on the rivet again. And then at 500 metres, I took the hat out for publicity, put the hat on nice. And put the arms up. Always have to remember that.”

In the 1984 Tour Millar won a stage at Guzet-Neige and assumed the King of the Mountains throne, becoming the first Briton to win any major Tour classification. He also finished fourth overall, surpassing Tom Simpson’s British record of sixth in the 1960s. He would also finish second, twice, in the Tour of Spain – ceding victory in the penultimate stage in 1985 when his six-minute lead was eaten up following a puncture – and in the Giro d’Italia in 1987. His greatest win came in the Dauphine Libere classic in 1990.

Where his achievements were treated with indifference in Britain, Millar and other English-speaking riders who emerged in the 1980s were regarded with some suspicion at first on the continent. These included the great Sean Kelly, who in the 1983 Tour was busy winning the second of his four maillots verts – the green points jersey awarded to the best overall sprinter.

Having won the first of those in 1982, during which he also took the bronze medal at the World Championships, Kelly’s home town in Tipperary, Carrick on Suir, renamed its market square the Sean Kelly Square.

Kelly only won one Grand Tour – the Vuelta a Espana in 1988 – but was one of the finest classic riders in cycling history. He won the Race to the Sun, the Paris-Nice, seven times in a row, from 1982-1988, and following the introduction of world rankings in 1984, topped them for the next six years.

In the 1983 Tour Kelly finished seventh overall – his highest position was fourth in 1985 – and on his way to winning 33 races in 1984, earned the nickname “the new cannibal”, the original cannibal, Eddy Merckx, having retired in 1978.

When he retired in 1992, following a final classic victory in the Milan-SanRemo, and having won 193 professional races overall, he returned to Carrick on Suir for its annual Hamper race – accompanied by other greats of the sport such as Merckx, Bernard Hinault – the last Frenchman to win the Tour, in 1985 – and Laurent Fignon, who won it in 1983, and once more in 1984. There was no way Kelly, certainly a more congenial fellow than his Scots peer, would fade quietly into obscurity.


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Review: The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria

This article appeared in The Herald

A certain shock value attends the title of this book. John McCain’s friends might think twice, at any rate, about buying him it as a Thanksgiving present, although both he and Barack Obama would do well to read it. Any divining of anti-American sentiment would be wide of the mark, however. The American imperium has been bitterly savaged by authors in recent years, but in Fareed Zakaria’s work there is, sensibly, nary a hint of glee at its convulsions. Zakaria grapples with the impending shift away from American dominance in the world as new, emerging powers – China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico – begin to assert their interests with greater confidence, but, crucially, he does so without resort to scaremongering or hyperbole and with a keen understanding of his adopted country’s real strengths and real interests.

An Indian emigre, he believes America’s openness remains key among those strengths. That he arrived in the States as an 18-year-old student in 1982 and was last year named as one of the world’s 100 leading public intellectuals by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines, is perhaps as good an illustration as any of his point that immigration is part of what gives the country its edge. Equally his Indian childhood and adolescence burnish his account of the “rise of the rest” with an authority forbidden a more Waspish scholar.

The new reality is that while, for the time being, America remains the world’s only politico-military superpower, in almost every other sphere – industrial, financial, educational, cultural – the global distribution of power is shifting. By 2040, the five emerging powers mentioned are expected to have a larger combined economic output than the G7 countries. Zakaria devotes chapters of his book to the two fastest-growing of these new powers, China and India; by his reckoning the former is already “the second most important country in the world.”

Over the last two decades the Chinese Communist Party has, he says, flouted the general rule that autocratic governments are “insular, corrupt and stupid.” Not having to respond to an electorate has helped Beijing carry out reforms on a scale unimaginable in the west and while suspicion of widespread corruption lingers, the country now has one of the most open economies in the world.

While many industries in China are still under state control, the backbone of the Indian economy, expected to be the world’s third-largest by 2040, is its private sector. India has emerged a clear winner from globalisation: its exports include software and services as well as cars and steel. Consumer spending, meanwhile, makes up a massive 67 per cent of GDP. The country’s extant political class, suspicious of change, muddles along improvidently – nearly a fifth of Indian members of parliament have been accused of crimes, including embezzlement and corruption as well as murder and rape – but in its favour India has sound democratic institutions, bequeathed to it by the British, and “a vibrant model of secularism and tolerance.”

Many in the west are scared witless at the prospect of rivals to America’s might deciding to flex their muscles – a serious US-Chinese rivalry would doubtless set back growth, trade and globalisation – but Zakaria argues there is little to suggest this will happen, and certainly not imminently. As he notes, “Indians are extremely comfortable with and well disposed toward America,” while “Beijing tends to avoid picking a fight with other governments,” preferring to focus on growing its economy.

His rationalisation of Chinese involvement in Africa is not wholly convincing, however. Beijing’s policies of selling arms to Robert Mugabe, in return for platinum and ore, and Sudan, for oil, in addition to its general disinterest in anything to do with human rights around the world, are, Zakaria postulates, the result of a foreign policy based on pragmatism rather than idealism. China is not a Protestant, proselytising power, he says; Confucianism doesn’t hold to “universal commandments or the need to spread the faith.” Far worse behaviour than that of the Chinese has been explained away with religion, but the idea that they’ve been getting up to no good because they didn’t go to Sunday school requires quite some leap of faith.

Zakaria’s contention that the threat of Islamist terrorism is overhyped is more compelling, although his claim that much of the Muslim world is “modernising” does seem a jot counter-intuitive. He does not seek to deny that the threat exists, but argues we may be winning the war on terror with greater ease than we are led to believe: “since 2001 governments everywhere have been aggressive in bursting terrorist networks, following their money, and tracking their recruits – with almost immediate results.” He adds that sectarian conflict within Islam itself and the desire in many Muslim societies for stability has made jihad increasingly unpopular.

This book, indeed, does rather a nice job of allaying a number of other fears about the “post-American world” it is supposed we are entering. Zakaria’s outlook is fundamentally optimistic: as he points out, while the last ten years are perceived as having been ridden with wars and global strife, in actual fact organised violence has declined dramatically since the 1980s and by the end of 2004 was at its lowest level since the late 1950s. It may be simply that the immediacy and intensity of the 24-hour news cycle makes us believe the world is a more dangerous place than it actually is. Moreover, these years have seen most economies experience unprecedented growth. Due in large part to capitalism, poverty is falling in countries housing 80 per cent of the world’s population; China’s growth alone has already lifted more than 400 million out of poverty. In all but the world’s 50 or so poorest countries, “basket cases that need urgent attention”, the poor are being absorbed into open, productive and growing economies. And while growth may now be slowing somewhat, “the diverse new sources of growth and massive quantities of capital have given the global economic system as a whole greater resilience.”

More exclusively American fears are allayed too. The American economy has its problems – the loss of key industries, the credit crunch – but it remains the most competitive in the world, according to the World Economic Forum. America has most of the very best universities in the world, while American companies are better than anyone else at turning ideas into marketable and lucrative products. The country’s relative economic weight may fall, says Zakaria, but if it resists the temptation to become insular and it does not turn its back on free trade, it can respond to the new reality.

“For all its abuses of power,” he writes, “the United States has been the creator and sustainer of the current order of open trade and democratic government – an order that has been benign and beneficial for the vast majority of humankind.” After Iraq, that reputation is “sullied”, but Zakaria believes Washington can be the world’s honest broker once more, provided it can also reacquaint itself with bi-partisanship and multilateralism, and assert itself against ideological attack groups, vested interests and a sensationalist media. His book – measured, erudite, thrilling in its breadth of reference – is a timely reminder of why the world needs a strong, engaged America.


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An interview with ‘soixante-huitard’ Daniel Cohn-Bendit

What a singulier month it has been in France: strikes in education and public transport; pupils at school gates branding teachers who work “scabs”; anti-government demonstrations in Paris over public sector job cuts and pension plan reform. The impression is of a nation derailing at the prospect of economic reform, kicking against the sudden pricks of change.

It is no wonder there has been such nostalgia for 40 years ago. This year’s upheavals have taken place against a backdrop of no little soul-searching with regard to the legacy of les evenements of May 1968, when student protests at Nanterre over claims for greater sexual freedom brought about general strikes and sparked a cultural revolution. Symposiums, television specials and some 120 exhibitions have contributed to a blossoming industry already served by more than 100 books on the subject.

Inevitably, parallels have been drawn between ’68 and 2008. President Nicolas Sarkozy is more unpopular now than General de Gaulle ever was then, perhaps for the simple reason that he was not elected by either of the old loyal blocs – Gaullist right, Socialist left – but rather swayed voters from across the spectrum with a political philosophy somewhat akin to Tony Blair’s ‘third way.’

Danny Cohn-Bendit, the anarchist figurehead of ’68 and now co-president of the European Green-European Free Alliance in the European Parliament, has his own views on the differences between then and now, however. “In 1968 we had a feeling to make history,” says the man born in France to German-Jewish parents then expelled from the country as a “seditious alien” for his agitational efforts. “We smelt freedom and we won cultural change. The legacy is the autonomy of the individual, and the idea that collective emancipation must be linked to individual autonomy. There was a revolution in society – at that time a married woman had to have written permission from her husband to open a bank account, education was authoritarian. After this, people became freer.

“The political climate in France today is a strange one, because people who voted for Sarkozy are now upset about him, but it’s not that they are looking towards the alternative. It is a country in between – in between the left and the right, between reform, but nothing will change for the individual.”

His analysis is accurate insofar as those who have taken to the streets of Paris this month are seeking not revolution but stability and the maintenance of the status quo. The kind of revolution they should be fomenting is anyone’s guess. Society – not only in France but throughout the western world – has changed unrecognisably since the 60s. There exists greater equality between men and women, people are allowed paid holidays, gay-bashing is no longer tolerated. But whether such developments are traceable to a generation of baby boomers thumbing their noses at the post-war world in which they had been raised is highly dubious. The enmities of the Cold War have long since vanished. So too the endlessly-splintering radical political groupings of the European left.

And yet, many of those 60s Marxists – including many in the British Labour government over the past decade – are now running things. The Frankfurt School, certainly, is revered in our universities, while in most spheres save from the economic – from immigration and welfare to abortion – the ideas of the left are prevalent. It is tempting to suggest that the aims of the soixante-huitards have all but been achieved. In France, Mr Sarkozy came to power pledging to “liquidate the legacy” of May 1968, a legacy he believes is responsible for soaring divorce rates and more crime, “intellectual and moral relativism” and a breakdown in social cohesion brought on by hedonistic individualism.

Cohn-Bendit, now 64 but still with flecks of red in a full head of hair which once earned him the moniker Danny le Rouge, is having none of it. “It’s madness,” he says. “1968 made people free, there was a revolution in society. Now we have new problems, other problems, but if schools don’t function today it’s not because there was a revolt 40 years ago, it’s because socio-economic reality has made those problems and politics has not been able to find an answer.”

Perhaps Sarkozy has found for his purposes a soft target in the political radicalism of the past, but equally, it is characteristic of the left, in its teleological way, to suppose it can only be the cause of betterment and progress. Perhaps, too, it is an unkindness to bring up the matter which has long been Cohn-Bendit’s greatest gift to his political opponents, yet it seems so inescapably relevant. That gift is a passage in a book he wrote in the 1970s describing the “erotic” nature of his contact with children at an “alternative” kindergarten in Frankfurt. “Certain children opened the flies of my trousers and started to tickle me,” he wrote. “I reacted differently each time, according to the circumstances, but when they insisted on it, I then caressed them.”

When accusations of possible sex abuse were brought against him in 2001 prosecutors decided there was “quite clearly” no case to answer. Most certainly he is not a paedophile, yet given that many intellectual leftists in the 70s were advocating the decriminalisation of sexual relations with children, his phlegmatic insistence that “you have to put it in the time” would suggest Sarkozy’s point about “intellectual and moral relativism” holds true.

Cohn-Bendit is also known to have sheltered the German terrorist Han Joachim Klein, who was involved in the 1975 attack on the Opec meeting in Vienna, in which three people were killed. Gradually, though, he veered towards political respectability: in the 80s he was elected as a Green MEP and became a market-friendly pro-European. Now there are new enemies, new tyrannies to confront. “A lot of things which must be changed in the world we can only do it through Europe,” he states matter-of-factly. “The main problem we have today in the world is to tackle climate change, and we must tackle the socio-ecological effects of globalisation. We have to create a multi-lateral world government to do this, which is one of the main tasks of the European Union.”

Meanwhile, in France, grumbles mount over inflation, rising property prices, static wages and gridlocked job markets. Faced with economic downturn, people want more government intervention; the government says its coffers are empty. A generation of 20-40 somethings are realising they can expect lower standards of living than their parents have enjoyed.

Nostalgia rides high for the month when the babyboomers enjoyed sticking it to authority and having lots of sex. They, it seems, were the lucky ones.


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Ebbsfleet United and the great ownership experiment

IT is a quirk of democracy that people aren’t often given the chance to vote on whether they actually want it in the first place. People power might be the least bad way of running a country but whether it’s any use in making a football club tick is something the people of Kent are due to find out over the coming months.

Opinion among the thousand or so prone to regular attendance at Stonebridge Road in Northfleet, home of Blue Square Premier League outfit Ebbsfleet United – who were until last May known as Gravesend and Northfleet – was inevitably wide-ranging when it emerged in November that the club had found new owners. In an era when England’s finest clubs are being sold left, right and centre to (in many cases somewhat disreputable) foreigners, it will ever be thus. Yet aside from the obvious point that Ebbsfleet aren’t even in the Football League, this was a takeover with a difference. The club are now owned not by one man but by the 29,000 and counting who have each paid a £35 subscription to the web-based venture MyFootballClub, founded by 36-year-old Fulham fan Will Brooks.

The buyout was finalised last month and structures are now being put in place to allow members to vote on decisions relating to team selection and transfer activity. There is – in a very real sense – a Blairite notion of empowerment to the whole model: the idea that by giving people a sense of ownership results will improve. Meanwhile, long-term supporters of Ebbsfleet – a club the size of, say, Clydebank – who were happy following a local side never likely to trouble even the middle echelons of English football, might have to get used to a bit of progress. Or at any rate to people from all over the UK, in addition to 1500 in the States, 500 in Australia and 400 in Norway, making decisions affecting their club.

Former Coventry City and Republic of Ireland defender Liam Daish remains as head coach, with MFC backing, while members are due to elect representatives to sit on the board. The manager will be asked for his ideas on selection, tactics, transfer targets and the like, but decisions – so long as they do not jeopardise the club’s stability – will ultimately be made by members. Any profits will be reinvested, as opposed to being paid out to shareholders.

Brooks, a former football journalist and advertising copywriter, knows perhaps better than most what it will take to keep MFC members engaged and interested enough to re-subscribe when their year’s membership runs out. “There is no guarantee that people will re-subscribe,” he admits. “If we keep getting people signing up at the rate they have been, however, then we’ll be at 40,000 this time next year. If we retain half of them then there will be the money to take the club forward. It’s part of our job on the website to make sure people do stay on. We’re confident of being able to boost the club’s marketing profile as well as revenues through gate receipts, the sale of merchandise and all the other traditional avenues.”

One way of keeping the ball rolling – as at any club – will be improvements on the park. Having advanced as a club in each of the three years of Daish’s management before going full-time at the start of this campaign, Ebbsfleet are still in with a shout of making the play-offs for promotion to League Two, English football’s fourth division, this season: although they currently sit tenth in the table they have games in hand over most of the sides above them.

Brooks says the club had been losing around £30,000 a month before the takeover, which should give it a cash injection of around £1million from subscriptions. Key among plans for the future, meanwhile, is the building of a new stadium in the nearby Ebbsfleet Valley. Last year’s name change, which brought Eurostar on board as the main sponsor, was intended to align the club with that area, where 10,000 new homes are being built in the vicinity of the new Ebbsfleet International Station – a major rail hub linking London to the south-east and France.

Conference league sides tend not to have much in the way of transfer budgets at their disposal but that may be about to change at Ebbsfleet, as Daish senses. “We’ve never had any money to spend, so anything that comes in will be an improvement,” he says.

The democratic urge, to return that theme, is, however, clearly something which motivates Brooks. It is his conviction that football supporters are capable of making the right decisions for their club. “I would never say fans are better than managers at making decisions but I think it can be beneficial to have the fans’ views taken into account,” he says. Whilst he admits that the level of influence MFC members decide to grant themselves is now out of his hands – and that they may ultimately decide to revert to the more traditional model of allowing the manager free rein – he asserts that voting on team selection will be in place before the end of this season.

Now, we only need look at the example Hearts to realise a lack of managerial control over team affairs can be problematic to say the least. Daish’s responses to questions on the matter suggest a degree of unease. “I pick the team and I’ll continue to do that until someone tells me differently,” he says. “I’m quite happy for supporters to make my job easier by going and looking at players I should be signing but I believe a majority of people on MyFootballClub won’t want to pick sides as they won’t feel qualified to do so.”

Alex Leach writes about sport for the Gravesend Reporter. He believes that while most people who care about the club are glad to see the investment, there is widespread scepticism about the extent to which members will actually have a say. “The principle of people controlling the club via a voting system would seem open to interpretation,” he says. “If the experiment is nice and transparent then everyone will be happy. If not, then who knows?” The hardest job on Brooks’ hands could well be in convincing members of that transparency. Otherwise they might all just go back to playing Football Manager on their Nintendos.

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald


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In praise of Arsene Wenger

This column last week praised Arsene Wenger for the dignity of his climbdown after proposing the metaphorical rendition of Birmingham’s Matthew Taylor to nearby Coventry following the latter’s horrifying tackle on Eduardo. On Tuesday the Arsenal manager was in rapture as his young side put European champions AC Milan to the sword at the San Siro.

The 2-0 result may only have secured a quarter-final place in the Champions League, but it was arguably one of Wenger’s finest moments and the surest sign yet that the team he has been rebuilding over the last couple of years is ready to upset the established order in European football. Too young, too fancy by half, the naysayers have chided, but this win will have lit quixotic touch-papers. Wenger’s five-man midfield swamped Milan, with Mathieu Flamini and Cesc Fabregas getting forward whenever possible in support of the lone striker Emanuel Adebayor, and it all proved too much for a defence averaging 33 years of age. Even the sole Englishman, substitute Theo Walcott, could not be contained.

Received wisdom has it that Wenger is an arrogant and temperamental individual, to cavil about which is a bit like disparaging British women for dressing unsuitably for the weather. He is, after all, French, which may or may not explain why English football has found him so difficult to take to its heart. That and the fact he has a master’s degree in Economics.

There is something irresistibly marvellous about Wenger’s story: how he left the family auto-parts business to pursue a coaching career; how he rose from being an amateur footballer to win the French title as manager of Monaco, parking his knackered Renault alongside the Porsches and Benzes at training; how he ended up at Arsenal in 1996 after having impressed the club’s chairman David Dein when they first met at a game at Highbury almost a decade before.

Wenger is the kind of guy writers love to write about – lucky the authorised biographer who is afforded not only a fuller appreciation of tarte tatin and how to deal with tawdry men like Jose Mourinho, but a glimpse into the mind that has been able to spot genius in young, relative unknowns such as George Weah, Patrick Vieira, Nicolas Anelka and Thierry Henry, in many cases turn them into different players around whom he is able to build a winning side, then sell them on to other clubs where they’re never quite as good as they were at Arsenal.

They may yet win nothing this season, but for the age of Wenger’s side and his comparatively tight budget, Arsenal are punching well above their weight. That record might tend to justify a certain arrogance.

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald