Hay Festival Blog

So – to the last eventof this whole great first year of the second decade of the twenty-first century thrash!

Stephen Fry, the man whose whole career is based on pointing out the consequences of the inconsequential, rabbited on deliciously to Peter Florence.

He started a digital deviation which along the way posed a great question. ‘Why on earth don’t  people say World Wide Web – 3 syllables – and not double you, double you, double you, (www) - 9 syllables?

A few seconds later a powercut silenced him for all except those in the hall.

His last word will be mine.

Thank you for the chance to be a blogger. Thanks for reading. And thanks to Hattie, Finn, Becks,Chelima, Georgie and many others for keeping me sane and caffeined for the last 10 days.

The last word?

‘And…..’

The CT in this case is Conspiracy Theorists – and the scan was conducted by Dave Aaronovich to a generally sceptical audience. He’s conspired to write a book examining most of the best theories around - Kennedy, Diana, Obama’s birthplace – and debunked them all. I’m sure he won’t mind if I paraphrase from genuine, incontestible quotes that can be found in the public record if you look hard enough, though not necessarilly in this order…

‘There are people out there who’ll believe anything as long as government’s don’t tell them it’s true. I’m interested in the psychology of the desire to have conspiracy theories. For example, women are more likely to believe medical conspiracy theories rather than the rule the world stuff which appeals to men. The thing is that conspiracy theories are so much more exciting as stories than the truth. If I turned in a script with a good conspiracy story or one in which the Watergate burglers were caught by the security guard, which do you think they’d prefer? That’s why booksellers tend to put Conspiracy Theories in the Mind and Spirit section – which is bookshop speak for bollocks.’

Now a little challenge to throw out to the internet world. A good conspiracy Theory needs to be a) international, b) worrying, c) anti-big business/government/royalty, d) annoying to all the above. So, in the spirit of the Hay Festival, here is the SM CT to get us all going…

Who Blew Up That BP Oil Rig?

David Aaronvitch was once a blood and thunder left-wing student activist (I know, I was the butt of his invective on Manchester Uni’s Student Union council 35 years ago). Now he’s a right wing columnist. Has that been just a hardening of the radical arteries or could it be a conspiracy by newspaper barons?

Must rush. Got to hatch a theory….

All the posh punters were devoting their afternoon to Tom Stoppard so I stopped off for a spot of Rennaisance female incarceration. Nothing too strenuous, just the pleasant energy of Sarah Dunant and Helena Kennedy discussing the way that women sent to convents by their families in 16th century Italy (to avoid paying ruinous dowries) found an outlet for their creativity in singing. The singers could achieve fame in wimples 100 years before they could have appeared on stage as opera stars. ‘Convents became much darker places thanks to the counter reformation,’ Sarah said, ‘as the church cracked down, even banning polphony, as a way of controlling the power of the great families’ who had sent their daughters inside.

Sarah had a nice line to sum up the tribal nature of pre-unification Italy – ‘blood, beauty and violence’  – and an even nicer line for its appeal to us – ‘Italy unzips the British’.

I couldn’t quite bring myself to sit supine for the new DPM (there’s a very rude interpretation of those letters which it would be unfair on the festival to spell out!) Nicholas Clegg OW MP. Firstly there was likely to be more of the ‘why I love being with Cameron’ stuff that Simon Hogart – see below – described as ‘probably illegal in 45 American states’. Secondly, because after two months of political rhetoric I’m now more curious to see how the arrangement works out in practice.

Hogart thinks Clegg played ‘a blinder’. So far all I can see is some fairly grim conservative measures being given gloss by soft-spoken soft-sell. It feels more Social Democrat than Liberal. And three of the Departments in which I am most concerned – International Development, Culture and Wales, have no Lib Dem voice in them at all. Does the coalition then impose silence on the rest of us?

Parliamentary sketch writer and political humourist Simon Hogart was brave last night to offer a ‘psycho-pathology of the Liberal Democrats’ in a constituency which had the distinction in the election of increasing it’s Lib Dem MP’s majority – Roger Williams is Leader of the Welsh Lib Dems at Westminster and the place is much better for it.

I confess I am ‘one of them’. And worse, in Mr. Hogart’s pantheon of shame, I was one of those who thought it right to discuss independent cinema at the Lib Dem conference in the day’s after 11/9  (let’s get it round the right way, for once). Why? Not because we didn’t think the destruction of the World Trade Center was important, actually Simon H, but because we thought it was only giving in to the twin demands of terrorists and media that discussion of everything else should cease.

This week will see Eric Hobsbawm reaching his 93rd birthday, though you would never think it from listening to him. His many appearances over the years at Hay have made us almost nonchalant about watching him take to the microphone but what a fabulous privilege it is. Even if he was not just about (I’m only qualifying this because I’m no good at lists) the greatest living historian, the way he gets to the heart of the world’s inadequacies -direct, consistent, unflinching – would make his analysis daunting.

Last night he was only talking for 10 minutes in a fund-raiser for the London Library’s scholarships (along with Tom Stoppard and Simon Hogart, among others). But in those 10mins he jolted the movement that is gathering pace to teach ‘traditional’, i.e. national, history and told Mr. Cameron’s government to resist the temptation to interfere. And, being Hobsbawn, he took the argument much further. Enough of me – here are a few snippets.

‘Governments should stay out of history teaching. Their intervention has led to nothing but harm…’

When governments get involved ‘they need to demonstrate that they have always been there and always will. Of course nothing could be further from the truth…’

What governments really want are ’self-justifying national fairy tales…’

‘Some form of zenophobia or religious hatred is always built into national history…’

‘And so the wrong history becomes punishable in law.’ He went on to attack all forms of legal limits on ‘acceptable’ history, saying that the way to deal with those who denied the holocaust or any other atrocities around the world was to tear their arguments apart. He regards government sanction on historical interpretation as far more dangerous than the occasional deluded historian.

‘Do governments listen to the lessons of history – or even want to? … To think of sending British troops into Afghan Helmand in the hope that they would be welcomed, despite the defeats of the Second Afghan war….’ he left the judgement hanging with an incredulous shake of the head.

‘The historian’s business is to make us remember what others want us to forget.’

Happy birthday on Wednesday – do I dare call him Eric? – and may 9th June be marked in the future by a global (never national) holiday.

Watching Francine Stock and Melvyn Bragg chat about top quality radio programmes was a depressing reminder of just how rare and under siege they seem to be. Melvyn’s riposte was forceful and accurate. ‘I get black minded about the idea of dumbing down in this country. We find an audience, just as Hay does. Inteligent listeners are a massive minority.’

Melvyn Bragg makes his progress through life, from short story writing in his teens – ‘I knew I wanted to write fiction at 19 or 20′ – through novels, 30 years of the South Bank Show, heading up chunks of television companies, being mediator for most of Radio 4’s ideas programmes, and part of the legislature in the House of Lords sound not only simple but just a matter of common sense organisation. ‘You get it done’, he says, ‘don’t play golf or go fishing.’

Years ago he gave me about the best professional advice I ever had when I moaned that I didn’t have enough time to finish a novel. ‘Don’t indulge yourself in self pity. If’ the book is good enough you’ll write it. If it’s not, don’t bother.’

It’s difficult being Caucasian.  In Oliver Bullough’s terms it’s difficult being from the North Caucasus. He’s only 33 but he was Reuter’s correspondent in the region and in Moscow for some of the most fraught of the last few years. His book Let Our Fame Be Great traces the history of the collection of peoples who occupied the mountans to the south of Russia and what has happened to them in the couple of centuries since Russia decided they were in the way. My use of that phrase ‘to the south’, rather than ‘in the south’ of Russia says most of what needs to be said about the continuingly unsettled relationship. Just listing the names of each little nationality conjures up the problem: Circassians, Abkhaz, Ossetians, Ingush, Chechens, Avars, Dargins, Laks, Lezgins, Kumyks. They never liked each other very much – like the Balkans they all have their different religious and cultural tales to tell. Where they had life even harder than the Balkans under the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires was in the forced removals and equally fractured returns they suffered in the Soviet years. Not too many Circassians about these days, and about the only place you’ll find groups of Chechens living uncomplicated lives is now in parts of Kazkhstan.

It was a salutary mind shift to move from understanding the Caucasus to reacting to the rage which Priyamvada Gopal treated those of us who are listed as Caucasian or Europeans on census forms. She has a particularly insistent and hectoring voice, heightened by the way she delivered her lecture. She’s right that the legacy of colonialsm is not over and that much of the world is very cross about it. But – boy – does she tells us! It did rather make me want to go back to my garden ad let the world look after itself. Irresponsible, as she would tell me, but nothing I/we do is going to be right anyway, so why bother?