Irregular verbs

The independence campaign is becoming characterised by its irregular verbs.  Last month, it was I disagree with you.  You shout me down. Alex Salmond behaves like Kim Jong-il. Today, the Secretary of State for Scotland serves up another stoater in the Herald: I remind people of what it means to be British. You try to make political capital from the endeavour of sportsmen and women. David Cameron. Um. Has an admirable enthusiasm for the colour palette of the Union flag. 

For Alistair Carmichael is fearful that the imminent Commonwealth Games celebrations, funded to the tune of 80 odd per cent by the Scottish Government, will be malevolently manipulated by the First Minister to promote his divisive separatist code. "People in Scotland will," he argues, "react badly to anybody who tries to make political capital from the endeavour of sportsmen and women." Which is splendidly good advice. It is just a pity that Carmichael's own government and his No campaigning colleagues can't stick to it. There is more than a whiff of psychological projection here, which would be more amusing if it wasn't such double-dealing, sanctimonious cant.  

For manipulating major sports events for political ends: that is one thing which UK government would never countenance. Who could fail to notice or be impressed by the jealous integrity with which the Prime Minister has maintained a rigorous firewall between politics & the Olympics? Trawling the internet, one struggles to find Carmichael, heroically swatting at David Cameron's egregious politicisation of sporting endeavour, when he toddled along to London's Olympics Stadium in February to make the positive case for the Union, proclaiming:

"But for me, the best thing about the Olympics wasn’t the winning. It was the red, the white, the blue. It was the summer that patriotism came out of the shadows and into the sun. Everyone cheering as one for Team GB."

You'd have to be awfully cynical and ungenerous to detect a germ of politicisation there. I'm sure British nationalist fellow travellers like Fraser Nelson were cheering Cameron on, thoughtless of any referendum impact, innocent of the political implications which the Prime Minister was none-too-subtly inviting his listeners to draw from his moistening e'en. Nor, despite my best endeavours, could I find Carmichael ticking off his colleagues back in 2012 for taking gleefully to the airwaves to proclaim that Danny Boyle's Olympics opening ceremony had shot Salmond's fox, along with sundry other commentators contending that "Team GB's Olympic triumph has been to suck the air out of Salmond's Scottish balloon." 

For myself, I'm not terrifically interested in the games, Olympic or Commonwealth. I'm a sporting grinch. I wish them well. I hope the mighty endeavour which has gone into planning them is reflected in a grand couple of weeks. I hope others have joy of them. But parking the vexed and vexing questions of patriotism, these Games are unavoidably important for the referendum debate. Wil it or nil it, we can ill-afford organisational cock-ups and Darien-pangs on the Yes side of the argument. Confidence matters. Confidence in the competence of civic and national institutions matters. And like most of life's challenges, the Commonwealth games represents both a splendid opportunity and a potential risk. 

We want the First Minister and the leader of Glasgow city council to be able to take to their pins, and echo Cameron's speech at the opening of the 2012 Games, concluding that "we want this to be the Games that lifts up a city, that lifts up our country and that lifts up our world, bringing people together." The skeptical pub bore already has his script drafted: "If we can't even run an event like this without buggering it up, how can these hopeless chancers run a country?" On the other hand, a well-executed, popular, triumphant games will bring with them a momentary glow - a national buoyancy - which is unavoidably important when thinking about whether Scotland should govern her own affairs.  

I'm sure negligibly few folk minded to vote No are cynical enough to hope that the Commonwealth Games tank - but such calamities and losses of nerve have wider resonances. There's no avoiding that. The success of the Glasgow games are - in a narrow tactical sense - much more important to the Yes campaign than to Better Together. But as to Carmichael and his irregular verbs? I think an urgent trip to the optician is very much in order.

Aidan Burley MP's alternative Olympics ceremony...

It seems that Tory MP Aidan Burley didn't terrifically enjoy the Olympics opening ceremony.  It was, he said, "the most leftie opening ceremony I have ever seen - more than Beijing, the capital of a communist state! Welfare tribute next?".  Relief soothed him as the dancing and performance gave way to the sports folk. "Thank God the athletes have arrived," he said. "Now we can move on from leftie multi-cultural crap. Bring back red arrows, Shakespeare and the Stones!" Tush and fie. 

That said, I understand the MP is something of a frustrated impresario, and his snarky observations may have more to do with personal pique than political prattery. According to a few well-placed sources, Burley attempted to collar Danny Boyle no fewer than five times as the multi-million pound event was being put together, with suggestions for additional and amended scenes to make the spectacle truly memorable, articulating an idea of Britain, its history and future which all right-thinking subjects of Her Majesty ought to be able to get behind.  Unfortunately for Burley, every single one ended up on the cutting-room floor.  I really can't see why.  They all sound spiffy to me.

Instead of depicting The Empire Windrush, which brought a large cohort of West Indians to London after World War II, a large mock up of the Belgrano would flee from an advancing regimented battalion of Margaret Thatchers, sitting in tanks.  Suspense builds until the unit of Thatchers cry as one "Take them!". Every military drum band in the country hammers, fierce. The tanks' turret-mounted cannons sound in a single volley, and the Argentine ship explodes in a festival of colour and noise. The military bands surrounding the stadium pipe up "Rule, Britannia!"

The Dark Lord Voldemort, the Childcatcher and Peter Mandelson erupt from the ruins of the smashed vessel.  Rather than being chased away by Marys Poppins, the lithe Thatcher-dancers leave their tanks, and to the stains of Land of Hope and Glory, invest the wicked wizard and cronies with peerages. Peeling Union jacks from the tanks, the Thatchers form the vast ermine and scarlet drape of Baron Voldemort of Hogwarts' cagoule of state. The scene evaporates to the joyful strains of Elgar's Nimrod, as social comity is restored.

The stars of the hit West End show Warhorse re-enact the Peterloo Massacre, with real Mancunians bussed in to London play the victims of the vicious dragoons, to be accompanied to the strains of Jona Lewie's festive "Stop the Calvary".  David Cameron to make an impromptu guest appearance as the ruddy-faced but incompetent cavalry officer in charge.

Post-boxes rise from the floor, and a host of ladies dressed in 19th and early 20th century costume dramatically lob mysterious packages into them.  In a single burst, each box explodes sending multicoloured streamers of paper arching across the stadium.  The lighting: sepia, period. Music: After the Ball. A crowd of excited punters, waving papers form into a disorderly cheering mass behind the Olympic hillock (decorated with the Tyburn tree, the dead Oliver Cromwell, played by Hugh Grant, hanging from its branches).  

The suffragettes link arms, and form a line blocking the opposite half of the stadium.  The Epsom Derby. National treasure Stephen Fry, dressed as George V, ostentatiously crowns a pantomime horse - played by Nicholas Soames and Prince Andrew, the Duke of York. Emily Davidson (here represented by Dame Judy Dench) breaks out of the suffragette line and intercepts the cantering horse - and is run down in a dramatic explosion of hoof-gouged gore. For a splash of that British sense of Humour George V (Fry) to recite Shakespeare's lines from the final Act of Richard III: "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!" All cheer and the tableau evaporates.  

A Larkrise to Candleford scene, a rural idyll of pastoral England.  Overworked children wearily pull at the teats of cows, and bail hay. Stuffy ladies find themselves caught up in suffocatingly safe emotional predicaments. A mix-up at the post office furnishes much of the social drama. In the green fields, cheerfully mud-slapped workers busily sow ballot papers into the soil - every vote cast for the Conservative Party.  The light mimics the turn of the seasons.  Puce autumn, the ice-blue of winter, the cautious lambent peachflesh of spring - and then, all in a rush, the hot lusty red heat of summer.  As the seasons turn, the first shoots of dark hair push through the lovingly tended earth.  Come the red, Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, wearing full unsullied cricket whites, has slowly sprouted from the good earth.  He favours us with a recitation of the opening verse of W.H. Auden's "On This Island":

"Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea."

From light lavender lighting, to bloody, fell-handed illumination. Smog. Smoulder. Gloom. The stadium is rent in two by an advancing line of red liquid which bisects the field. The twin floods pool at the very centre of the stadium in a smouldering, scarlet cauldron.  To a riot of drums, Kenneth Branagh explodes from the water atop a plinth shooting every higher and higher into the sky.  He is dressed as Enoch Powell, and reads a moving passage of Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden", as ethnic minority dancers carrying whips crackle about him, offering crisp percussive snaps of their goads, driving the population of Candleford into a series of caves which open in the floor of the complex. Haunting, manic laughter.

London. A 1930s Italian cafe - Luigi's - is lowered onto the centre of the stage, as several dancers, dressed as different sorts of pasta slide uneasily onto the stage.  The ethnically-stereotyped but cheerful business owner hands out ice creams to little children.  In a trice, the dancers peel off their penne overcoats, to reveal army uniforms.  The moustachioed business owner is brutally taken into custody by the children, to celebrate the internment of Britain's Italian population during World War II.  A huge silver cloche ascends into the sky, revealing an outsize and outrageous James Corden, dressed as Mussolini, sitting on top of the Olympic pyre.  A helicopter appears overhead, and Jeremy Clarkson falls from it like a fleshy comet, landing beside Corden, swaddled in the uniform of the parachute regiment.  The car-enthusiast slugs Corden across the napper, produces a box of matches, lights a fag - and casually flicks it onto the pyre. It explodes with heat and flame. Cue the world-beating running, hopping and leaping.

The ceremony to be enlivened throughout by smaller, tableau snatches of British life. A plumber tapping his watch and shaking his head to a distressed looking housewife beside a washing machine. Admiral Byng's execution. A jolly knot of gentlemen, enjoying brandy and choice cigars at their club.  A doctor demanding a shiny shilling to stitch up a patient's suppurating chest wound, before handing the gleaming coin over to a triangle of snazzy looking executives in bespoke suits with sharp lines. A knot of shakoed readcoats smartly repelling undisciplined crowds of Napoleon lookalikes with orderly volleys of musket fire. Etcetera. Etcetera.

Maybe next time, eh?