Justin Webb on how his grandfather became the first Radio Times editor
"When Reith asked Leonard Crocombe to set up The Radio Times he was making quite a statement."
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. He is one of the forgotten characters of British journalism. In his day he was a power in the nation, a fan of new media and a manipulator of the old. A friend of the BBC general manager John Reith (until the boss fired him) but a friend mostly of the reader, the listener, the folks at home. He was a popular journalist in the days when most journalism was still stuffy. In that respect, he set us all free. When Reith asked Leonard Crocombe to set up The Radio Times, he was making quite a statement. Crocombe was already a hugely successful editor of an outlet he was turning into one of the most recognisable brands on any pre-war news stand. Tit-Bits dealt in titbits; competitions, slices of life and contributions from readers for which they could be paid. There were adverts for life insurance, biscuits in those tins we now regard as collectors’ items and tonics with various supposed but unproven benefits. Crocombe brought this zest for real life and real people's concerns to the new magazine for radio listeners – from the outset, Radio Times was about you, the listener. He would have loved the magazine's adaptation to TV, just as he would have welcomed digital TV, podcasts and whatever comes next. In the photograph he might look a tad fusty for modern tastes, but that's how cutting-edge chaps dressed then. And he really was at the forefront of any innovation going. In October 1922, he became the first Fleet Street editor to make a gramophone record – as a stand-up comedian. To Make You Smile cost three shillings and sixpence. In March of the following year, he was the first editor to make a radio broadcast, from the London station of the Marconi Company. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2023/09/GettyImages-870101930-431a549-e1695219731219.jpg" width="4903" height="3272" alt="British politician, doctor and television executive Charles Hill, Baron Hill of Luton (1904 - 1989, left) with Herbert Bowden (1905 - 1994, next to him) after opening the 1st International Broadcasting Convention at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London, 20th September 1967. On the right is the new Marconi Mark VII colour television camera." title="British politician, doctor and television executive Charles Hill, Baron Hill of Luton (1904 - 1989, left) with Herbert Bowden (1905 - 1994, next to him) after opening the 1st International Broadcasting Convention at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London, 20th September 1967. On the right is the new Marconi Mark VII colour television camera." /> Why is he not more famous or, indeed, famous at all? I wonder if the English class system played a part. Crocombe wasn’t exactly working class himself – he lived in comfortable Home Counties suburbia and employed cooks and maids – but the path he trod was of mass appeal, and in those days, mass appeal was not exactly the done thing. He was no Orwell. He leaves behind no essays on politics, no work of literature worthy of the name. Only a book of jokes and two jolly travelogues whose titles tell you all you need to know: An Editor Goes West: a Holiday Notebook, and Slow Ship to Hong Kong, the last after he took the eponymous vessel, postwar, to observe the east. He wrote those books after Lord Reith got rid of him following just three years at the helm of RT because the pace of change – what we would now call a move downmarket – was too much for the austere Scottish director-general to bear. But Crocombe had made his mark and secured the future of Radio Times. View Green Video on the source website Did I mention that Leonard Crocombe was my grandfather? My mother took me to see him when he was dying in a Bournemouth nursing home in 1968 when I was just seven years old. I remember little of him beyond the elderly hand that reached out and ruffled my hair before I was ushered out of the room. But did that hand, metaphorically, reach out during the rest of my life? It did, I reckon: something of his literary lightness has been passed to me, for sure. And if we are to wonder about genes for a moment: how about this for a more upscale family literary bent? My cousin Gregory Woods was the lucky inheritor of Crocombe’s typewriter, a Remington portable. Greg is emeritus professor of gay and lesbian studies at Nottingham Trent University and a brilliant poet. And my own son, Sam, is a graduate of the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia and intending to make a living as a writer. We are the heirs of Leonard Crocombe, just as readers of today’s Radio Times still benefit from his early stewardship of the title. He was described by the broadcasting historian Asa Briggs as "a figure of some importance in the whole story of the development of 'mass communication'". True: not exactly a legend in his own lifetime or in ours, but a man worth remembering and celebrating, who brought into the world a magazine that has stood the test of time. He would be proud and pleased to be mentioned in the centenary edition. If you’re looking for more to watch, check out our TV Guide and Streaming Guide. Try Radio Times magazine today and get 10 issues for only £10, PLUS a £10 John Lewis and Partners voucher delivered to your home – subscribe now. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
‘Rugby is the new boxing’: why rugby is the new bad boy of sport
The game is becoming too dangerous to play, Radio 4's Justin Webb warns
It was the winter of discontent: 1978, the fag end of that dark decade, long before we thought much about child safety, or in fact anyone’s safety. One weekend, I turned out to play rugby for Winscombe, a village club in Somerset that, when short of a few players, turned to the local school for help. I was told to play tight-head prop, a position, in those amateur days, given to psychopathic bricklayers. I was a 17-year-old hippy with shoulder-length hair and a liking for the Beach Boys. The only thing I remember about the game was that at half-time – as I spat blood into a bucket – my team-mates drank beer out of a watering can. I never played again. But I have watched rugby all my life. Watched as the appeal of the sport has grown as it embraced professionalism. When I went to see Bath (my home team) play in the 1970s, there were a few hundred stalwarts behind a rope. Now they are building a stadium for 18,000. Sport on TV 2018: how to watch the Premier League US PGA Championship 2018 and more What Premier League matches are live on TV this weekend? RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox On TV, too, the game is booming. At the end of the month BT Sport will restart its schedule of live matches, all weekend, every weekend. BBC Wales will join the party with their own season of live matches. So what is the problem? The obvious stuff first: the England football team and their manager seem nicer than the England rugby folk. The World Cup football team’s captain Harry Kane is a clean-living role model sort of fellow; Dylan Hartley, the rugby captain, has been cited for biting, punching, eye gouging, and verbally abusing a referee. Whereas England’s footballers seemed so cheery on their Russian World Cup capers, the rugby players made a pig’s ear of a South African tour and ended up fighting with their own fans. All true. But if that were the only problem – the vulgarity, as one commentator put it – it could be easily fixed. My fear is is a deeper one – that rugby is becoming the new boxing. If you see a professional player in the street, ask to hit him and see what happens. He will be made of steel. What used to be beefcake is now rockcake. The sport has become removed from the realms of the ordinary-looking people who watch the game; unlike footballers, who look like any other fit young man, rugby players increasingly look like another species. My bigger fear is that these young men could be dreadfully damaged in later life. The collisions between modern players are each mini explosions of violence. Wonderful Welshman Sam Warburton (a man every bit as wholesome as Harry Kane) was forced out of the game this year when he decided that his body simply couldn’t take any more punishment. He is 29. And there’s the dark side of the gym – the pressure on players to bulk themselves up. An investigation this year in The Times discovered lax drug-testing standards and a suspicion that banned substances were being used across the game. A source told the paper, “If you look at the side effects of growth hormone [hair growth, more prominent brow and chin, low body fat, high muscle mass] you have basically got many Premiership back-rowers looking back at you.” Rugby tries to convince itself that it has cleaned up its act. The fights, the beerfilled watering cans and boys playing against men are thankfully gone. And the “footballers are better people” scare will be short-lived. What matters is that the sport is approachable, attractive to children and their parents and only in freak circumstances harmful to the players. Because, if not, would you want your children or grandchildren to take up the game? Justin Webb presents Today on BBC Radio 4
Is the era of the 'big beast' news anchor over?
In light of US anchors losing their shows with little impact on viewing figures, BBC Radio 4's Today programme presenter Justin Webb wonders what the future holds for British broadcasters
I’m still scarred by that morning. The usual early start. The frantic reading of briefs. Then into the studio a few seconds before the start of the Today programme at 6am – the sound of the pips. I look down at the script: “Good morning and welcome to Today. With John Humphrys and John Humphrys.” Oh yes: I know all about being airbrushed. About the power of the big beast anchor. Who sucks up all the attention. And money. Huw Edwards presented the News at Ten the wrong way round and people couldn't handle it Huw Edwards deals with BBC News at 10 technical glitch like an absolute pro So imagine how closely I’ve been following the news from America. The news is this. Someone has finally said it: the emperor has no clothes. At times that wasn’t a figure of speech. Some of the self-styled emperors we’re talking about didn’t have clothes at the time of their misdeeds, or wore only those towelling wraps provided by hotels for men (so some of them apparently thought) conducting business with women guests. But now they are gone. It hasn’t made big news here, compared with the Hollywood trainwreck, but it should because in one important respect it might be showing us the future for news programmes. What has happened in America in the past six months is the self-destruction of the network anchor. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, Matt Lauer, who hosted NBC’s long-running morning show Today, and Charlie Rose of CBS’s morning show weren’t just kings, they were titans. O’Reilly and Lauer were paid $25 million each. Rose survived on only $8 million but had his own franchise on another channel, so we’re given to understand he didn’t have to queue for a bus. All three have been credibly accused of varying degrees of sexual misconduct, and all have gone. But here is what happened next. The ratings for their shows stayed the same, or actually rose. As Vanity Fair magazine put it, in a headline that only slightly jumped the gun: “Today and CBS This Morning Prove They Never Needed Matt Lauer or Charlie Rose.” My point is that if this headline is right – and it seems to be – this has implications that go far further than the simpering jollified world of American breakfast TV. They were spelled out for online news website The Daily Beast by US media analyst Andrew Tyndall: “It’s just not true that the reason why people watch television is to watch celebrities, and the only way you get celebrities is by paying them disproportionate amounts of money over what they’re worth.” View oEmbed on the source website We have lazily assumed that although everything else about the modern media landscape has changed, there is something oddly immutable about the network anchor. The public want a star to tell them things. And that star (in America) must be paid a staggering sum of money. Nobody thought to wonder whether it was actually true. Well, they are wondering now. As The Daily Beast suggested, “A growing number of industry insiders say good riddance to overpaid rubbish.” And so to us. Yes Huw, yes John: us. And a serious point. British TV anchors are not like their US counterparts: they are paid a lot but not nearly as much and, crucially, they are not the bosses of their own programmes. There are separate editors at the BBC, Sky and ITV news who can and do keep the big beasts in line. But still you have to wonder. For all of us who call ourselves “presenters”, what does the future hold? Time to keep the towelling wrap tightly knotted and practise the look straight to camera that says, “It’s all about me…”
Justin Webb: Broadcasters must stand up to the "keyboard warriors"
The BBC Radio 4 Today presenter says that the idea that the BBC is part of some national conspiracy is "actually barmy"
The BBC’s entertainment correspondent Colin Patterson was in a state of high excitement the other day. Just as the Baftas were winding up he managed to fight his way to the front of a gaggle of hangers-on and came face to face with Winston Churchill or, as he is sometimes known, Gary Oldman. The Bafta-winner had made a sweet but conventional speech about Churchill. But our man Colin was having none of it. Faced with Oldman, he posed a killer question: what would Churchill have made of the Time’s Up campaign against workplace sexual harassment? Justin Webb: Why the driverless car will change everything – forever Why journalists aren’t as mean as they used to be Colin told me, in his early morning interview for Today, that Oldman had been forced to think quite hard before suggesting that the great man, “was fascinated by the new. I’d like to believe he’d have supported it.” Oh, pull the other one, Gary. And Colin: nice question – a real gotcha moment – which made for a lively segment on Today. But really? What are we all on? Where does the politicisation of everything end? The answer is, in a generalised madness that subsumes us all. Here’s an example. Shortly after I had announced the latest twist in the Oxfam saga the other day I received a message from a listener. “How convenient that all this Oxfam publicity comes just as Brexit is going wrong,” she suggested. “Were The Times and the BBC keeping it up their sleeve?” Here’s the reason the message was so concerning: it was written not by some fanboy or fangirl of some “ism” that might change the world. Her online profile seemed to describe a thoughtful person living a moderate life with a non-political hinterland; actually it reminded me rather of my late mum. I think the writer keeps bees. Loves people. Travels. But she seriously thinks that the BBC is attacking Oxfam in order to cover up the government’s troubles over Brexit. We spend a good deal of time discussing online abuse. But we spend less time worrying about the fundamental views that underpin that abuse. Perfectly nice, ordinary people – your neighbours, gentle Radio Times readers, and mine – have lost their marbles. The Today programme’s online “postbag” was split between this madness and another equally unhinged take: that the Oxfam news revealed some great conspiracy on the left to abuse people around the world (using tax-funded aid money) and do so with the willing connivance of the media. Of course the BBC should be open to scrutiny and criticism and the case can be made that it is too left wing or too right wing, too sceptical of climate change or too beholden to the green lobby, too fawning with the royal family or too disrespectful of national icons, but to believe that it is part of a national conspiracy is actually barmy. Years ago the people who believed it might also have worn tin-foil hats to protect themselves from sonic booms. Now they are living perfectly ordinary lives. You may even be one of them. And it frightens me. Because the risk is that it begins to have an impact. That broadcasters – in this atmosphere of politicisation of all of human life – become cowed and frightened of pursuing news for fear of being bullied. If we take too much notice of the keyboard warriors, we’ll lose our bearings, too. When Richard Nixon (in somewhat different circumstances, I grant you) wanted to change the course of debate in the USA he announced that there was a “silent majority” who were not particularly political, but whose views ought to count. He summoned them and they came. Where are they now?
Army: Behind the New Frontlines – what's the point of the British Army?
As a new documentary on BBC2 examines the role of the British Army post-Iraq, Major General Rupert Jones tells broadcaster Justin Webb how serving in the Armed Forces has changed
Major General Rupert Jones doesn’t want to talk about himself. “I have this all the time, and I would rather not say any more.” Fair enough. The General is the son of a famous and much respected father, Colonel H Jones, who died in the Falklands during a one-man charge on an Argentine trench in the Battle of Goose Green. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. Rupert was 13 at the time. He mentions his father in his contributions to this series – points out that he understands very well the cost of war - so naturally, the question arises, did you think twice before signing up for your own army career? Did you do it because of your father, or perhaps in spite of him? In his pre-broadcast interview with me the General will say only this: “I never made a conscious decision to join the army, it’s in my blood. I care passionately about the British Army and the soldiers in it.” His mother’s view of his career choice? “Like all parents my mother supported me in what I wanted to do.” And you see what he does in this compelling set of programmes, along with what the junior ranks do, and get to make up your own mind about whether the tasks we set our army in 2017 are right and fair and whether the soldiers seem up to the job. An army smaller than at any time since the days of Cromwell is being asked to do everything now, but fight. In 2016 no British soldiers died in combat, the first year with no loss of life since 1968. Post Afghanistan, post Iraq: what is the point of the army? What do we want them to do? Let’s start at the top with General Jones himself, the man we see in charge in the first programme of the series on the ground in Iraq: steady, practical, thoughtful, open, with enough of that stiff upper lip to prevent him talking about his father but not so much to make him insensitive about the complex job he needs his troops to achieve. It’s tough work and he is open about the frustrations: “The days of the clean-cut war, the clean-cut battle, the Union Jack flying over Port Stanley, you had a good guy and a bad guy, you had the battle, you won the battle: that isn’t how warfare feels now.” “It sounds lame,” the general admits to me, but modern soldiering is “more about government objectives met. There’s not going to be a victory parade.” General Jones is back from 13 months of operations in Iraq and Syria, operations that epitomise the modern army. Not fighting, but training. Fixing broken vehicles. Staring out at the desert and trying not to be blown up by an enemy you may not yourself attack. An enemy who might easily infiltrate those local people you come across and work with. As one of the junior soldiers says in the first programme, “we have the approach of always being totally charming to every single person we meet and work with but always have a plan to kill them.” It’s all hellishly complicated. Some of the Iraqi troops being trained by the British soldiers were themselves trying to kill them only a decade ago when we invaded and occupied their land. And now our troops are back but cannot fight anyone. “We signed up for the infantry because we wanted to get directly involved,” says a junior officer. “It is frustrating,” says a soldier, “we want to go out there and do the job ourselves.” He glances out at the desert: “For reasons that are above our pay grade that doesn’t happen any more.” They are torn, these men. They want to fight. But they want to survive and they know very well what happened in Afghanistan and the cost in life of what seems to many like a very small gain. And General Jones is clear that the modern soldier cannot be a gung-ho taker of territory. “He’s a thinker first and foremost," the General says. "He’s a communicator. He uses his brain, he uses restraint.” And that is what you see in the dust of the area near Mosul as these British troops try slowly and methodically to allow the Iraqis and Kurds to get into enough shape to win their own battles and re-take that city from so called Islamic State. That is the job ‘our boys’ are doing and, with some grumbles, the thrust of the programme is that the job is being achieved. The General suggests as well that the Iraqi victory is one we can celebrate, at least to some extent in that old-fashioned, clear-cut way. I am not sure his soldiers see it that way. Given their very different ambitions for the future of Iraq I am not sure the Kurds or the Iraqis do either. We shouldn’t be too sentimental about all this. I remember being in Bosnia with British soldiers on peacekeeping duty who were equally frustrated at their inability to get stuck-in and kill the bad guys. Bob Stewart, now a Conservative MP but then the officer in charge, became quite a celebrity for his arguments with louts at checkpoints. But he couldn’t shoot them. In a sense restraint has always gone along with the job in the post second world war British army. In Northern Ireland, in Bosnia, and in other more minor engagements, it is often the job of the squaddie to try to defuse situations. And often they have been very good at it. What has changed is that the threats seems as great, or perhaps greater, than ever. And yet the ability to fight, to find a target and kill it, has been reduced to dust. The series will go on to look at the Russian threat and I suspect it will feel like a relief. A real enemy! In tanks! Massed and ready to come! Now that’s soldiering. Army: Behind the New Frontlines begins on Wednesday 18th October at 9pm on BBC2
Why the driverless car will change everything – forever
As new a Horizon documentary explores, computerised vehicles are the future – but where will this road lead us?
I am cruising down the middle lane of the M4, doing a nice relaxed 50mph or so. Up behind me comes a white van. Flash, flash, go the headlamps, as he edges ever closer. Me, I just keep on tooling along. White van man flips, overtakes on the inside, and as he passes makes a gesture too rude to be shared with readers of RT. You’re thinking, “Serves you right, I’m with the van driver on this.” Ah, but here’s the point of this story. I was not in control! It wasn’t me, officer (or white van man) – it was the vehicle that had taken the decision to hog the middle lane. I was driving the latest Tesla sports car and – as I showed the white van man before he sped off with a look of confusion and fear in his eyes – I didn’t even have my hands on the wheel. Yes: in traffic, on the M4, somewhere close to Slough. That’s motoring. Or at least, that’s the future of motoring. The car is taking over. Like a gathering wave, it begins with my fancy Tesla (borrowed for the day) and nervous company representatives saying, “We recommend you keep your hands on the wheel,” but it ends with what the boffins call “Level Five” – full automation. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p056jxyw/player
Bring on the single interview – the best way to get to know our politicians
Andrew Neil's one-to-ones will provide enough time for foolish soundbites to be exposed and for coherent points to be made, says Justin Webb
Vladimir Putin holds press conferences. Hassan Rouhani has a Twitter account. Robert Mugabe might reply to politely worded letters. You can ask these gentlemen things. But don’t try to follow up. That’s what lands you in jail in Russia, Iran or Zimbabwe. That’s where the club of world leaders willing to be properly open with their citizens gets way, way smaller. And that is where Britain can be justly proud of broadcasters still powerful enough to force politicians in the direction of openness, even if their natural instinct, or those of their spin doctors, is to run a mile from real interactions. When the party leaders sit down this week with Andrew Neil for their primetime grillings, the initial questions he asks are pretty obvious. He will certainly ask Tim Fallon about his Brexit plans. He will ask Jeremy Corbyn about nuclear weapons and Theresa May about fixing the energy market and 'dementia tax'. But the crunch comes after the initial questions are answered or batted away or evaded. Politicians look visibly queasy when you say – as the great Brian Walden used to during his Weekend World interviews back in the 1980s – “Ah, now that is a fascinating answer...” You don’t even need to say it. Relatively long interviews with highly informed and quick-witted interviewers are still, in my view, the best way to get to the essence of our politicians. Andrew Neil True, there was criticism of the Prime Minister’s decision not to debate face-to-face with other party leaders, and of Corbyn’s subsequent decision not to appear in that format if May was staying out. It’s also true that the appearances of Corbyn and May with live Question Time audiences in York on 2 June will be gripping and quite possibly headline-making. But if we are really interested in getting to the bottom of what these people really think and how consistent they are in that thinking, bring on the single interview. And give it time. John Major tells the story of visiting the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin when Major had just become prime minister. Stuck for conversation during lunch, Major asked Yeltsin, “In a word, Boris, what is the state of your country?” Yeltsin replied, “In a word: good!” Major knew this was an idiotic answer: Russia at that stage was in desperate straits, its economy shot and Yeltsin only just hanging on. So he turned back and tried again. “Boris, what is the longer version of that?” Yeltsin’s reply: “Not good!” Yeltsin Ah yes, the failure of the soundbite to tell anything approaching the truth. The need, in the age of social media attention spans (especially in this age), for time to be given to politics and informed political discussion. Hence the importance of these special programmes with their rather old-fashioned, unadorned format. Anything else is a distraction. Enough time for foolish soundbites to be exposed. And for coherent points to be made. Of course the drama matters, and Andrew Neil is well aware of that. But so does preparation. The great master interviewers need to have the agility to respond – to play the game as they see it. But they need to have a plan as well. The late Nick Clarke, who presented The World at One on Radio 4 for many years with great distinction, once showed me his flow charts. Yes, flow charts. He mapped out his interviews: if this person replies in this way then I ask that, or if he goes here then I go there. It made my head spin but it worked – outstandingly – for Nick. And crucially he had the ability, like the New Zealand All Blacks, to break suddenly around the scrum – flow chart or team meeting be damned – and hurl himself towards the try line. And get to the real answer: “Not good!” The Andrew Neil Interviews are Monday to Friday on BBC1. Justin Webb presents Today on Radio 4
Why journalists aren't as mean as they used to be
Empathy is at the heart of the modern reporter’s craft, argues Radio 4's Today host Justin Webb
What do you do when a report is being played on the radio or TV? You listen attentively. You silence the dog with a juicy bone. You concentrate. You shush the kids. No, me neither. Sometimes of course your attention is caught. You are genuinely interested or genuinely shocked. But often, let us be frank, the mind wanders. The opportunity is there for conversation until something better comes along. This happens, too, when your job is to present the stuff. Sometimes in the morning the news is so gripping and the need to keep abreast of what people are saying is so obviously huge that we sit for three hours in the Today studio without saying a stray word. But that’s not always the case. And one of the great pleasures when a slow Bank Holiday programme is unfolding on your shift is that you have a chance to chew the cud with your fellow presenter. And while I was chatting to John Humphrys the other day, we agreed on a Big Idea: that we are not as unpleasant as we used to be. To explain. One of the great journalistic books of the 1970s was entitled “Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?”. You get the picture: the manly thing, when I was a young reporter, and certainly when John was in the late 1960s and early 70s, was to be brusque and brash and care little about the suffering you saw. Or at least to pretend that this was the case. Nowadays that approach would make you look like a monster and an idiot. When the late tabloid journalist and all-round good egg Chris Buckland wrote, “The first casualty of war is room service”, he got away with it because he was charming and well liked and it was a typically funny and mildly ironic line. But even he would be hard pressed to use those words from Syria today and keep the respect of his peers. And this is not the result of any directives imposed from above: it is the impact of societal changes that have put empathy at the heart of the reporter's craft. It’s a commonplace observation these days that empathy is on the wane. The head of a fancy private school was telling us the other day that pupils will have to have special classes to teach them to empathise, such is the level of dysfunction caused by too many computer screens and too much social media. Perhaps the kids are messed up. But I’m not sure that empathy is as out of fashion now as the headmaster thinks. My friend the long-time BBC Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen was in Syria the other day and I was chatting to him before recording an interview. Yes, we did stray onto the fact that black cabs have been seen recently touting for business in our (previously unfashionable) area of south London where we have both lived for many years. But Jeremy did not pretend to me off-air that all was fine with him and with the people around him. The old braggadocio of the reporter in the field has gone. Jeremy – and others like him – are successful because they bring our attention to human suffering. Not in a mawkish way but in a manner that suggests, well, empathy. Perhaps the new generation of reporters – raised on screens and Twitter – will take us back to the old days, the swashbuckling generation who blundered around the world drinking the minibars dry. It will be interesting to see. But I somehow doubt it. Never mind the screens and all the talk of social conflict and online hate: in the world of broadcasting we live in a gentler, more thoughtful world than the one I knew when I started work in the 1980s. So what did John H get up to in the bad old days: sad to say the reporter piece ended just as he got to the juicy bits and it was time to hand to the weather and all was not revealed. Incidentally, John himself is a success not because he bullies people but because he listens intently to what they say, a more difficult skill than it sounds. You could call it empathy. Justin Webb presents Today on Radio 4
Why former CIA director John Brennan and President Trump are sworn enemies
The “spy who hates Trump” will be giving this year’s Dimbleby Lecture
When I was 16, I told my uncle Oliver that I wanted to be a spy. He looked at me with kindly concern. “Not sure you’re cut out for it really,” he said. “It’s rather private work, and they tend to look for people who are, well, discreet. And able to look after themselves.” Oliver was right: I was not obviously cut out for, ahem, “government service”. But he was. Oliver was a former soldier who spoke fluent Arabic and travelled round the Middle East before working for a time for GCHQ in Cheltenham and at various dingy Government buildings in London. That was what spies did in the Cold War. They kept an eye on people. Fast-forward to the modern era, to the world of digital communications. A world of metadata. Or fake news. Of Edward Snowden and Wikileaks. A world in which Russia, which my uncle and his pals kept in check, is able to seize territory in Europe and employ people to muddy online waters. A world in which spy agencies and the President of the United States are at war: a direct, loud, aggressive open war. A world, in other words, in which intelligence gathering is in quite a mess. And if one man above all others knows the size and shape and smell of that mess, it is John Brennan. There have been some wonderful Dimbleby Lectures down the ages, and some very august speakers. But never in its history has there been such a perfect matching of man and moment. John Brennan has worked for three US administrations, rising to be Barack Obama’s CIA director in 2013, and one of his closest and most trusted aides. Brennan is the man who organised the targeted killing of terrorists using drones – a highly controversial policy that has led to the deaths of thousands of people, at least four of them US citizens. He is no softy. But John Brennan is Donald Trump’s least favourite spy. And Donald Trump is John Brennan’s least favourite president. This is a Dimbleby Lecture with an edge. To a fastidious career spy like Brennan, the coming of Donald Trump feels like a moment of genuine madness. And Brennan has not been even the remotest bit diplomatic in his treatment of the new commander-in-chief. When Trump went to the CIA headquarters just after his inauguration, standing in front of the memorial wall for CIA officers who have died in the line of duty to give a rambling address about his own intelliegence and the size of the crowd that had watched him become President, Brennan did not hold back. His spokesman said Brennan was “deeply saddened and angered at Donald Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandisement”. In turn, Trump accused Brennan of leaking a dossier allegedly containing evidence of The Donald engaging in weird sex in Russian hotel rooms. As they say in the lower-class spy movies: it’s personal. But it’s also more than that. In a world where we live online, what should the rules be about the rights of the intelligence agencies to monitor us? What should the duties be of the tech companies that we share our personal information with? Should any communications be genuinely impervious to hacking? And if we accept that there is a need for some kind of intelligence gathering, then who is to monitor the monitors? And then there is fake news, and the damage done deliberately by lying governments and lying politicians. What should the role be of the intelligence agencies in countering online propaganda? The online world is not some separate place where battles can be fought far from our daily lives. There are real consequences to fake news. The world of intelligence and counterintelligence is still murky, but it is not distant any more: we are all of us living in a spy story. Propaganda and misinformation – what used to be called subversion – is available on every smartphone. The President of the USA himself tells people things on Twitter that are sometimes simply not true. Vladimir Putin’s agents do the same. So does so-called Islamic State. And the CIA is hardly above criticism. As Donald Trump has pointed out: who came up with the dodgy dossiers that led to the Iraq War? Yes, the looking-glass world is our world now. Brennan, not long retired, is coming back for one last mission: to tell us how to cope. The Richard Dimbleby Lecture is on Tuesday 4th April at 10:45pm on BBC1
Computerised news means the next John Humphrys could be a robot
Today presenter Justin Webb investigates how computers are generating our news and invading our Facebook streams
Picture the scene: I’m sitting in the Today studio next to John Humphrys, who has just begun an interview about rural buses. A pleasant-sounding man is complaining that he can’t get one home from the pub and John has seized on this thought: “You spend a lot of time in the pub, then?!” To the casual listener nothing untoward has happened. But I’m thinking this is unusual levity at an early hour and once John and I have a chance to talk he confesses: “I’ve been recording Celebrity Mastermind interviews and we have to get them to say something funny and I think I was trying to do the same with that chap…” Ah, we are only human. Even John, whose focus and tenaciousness are justly the stuff of legend, can veer off-piste now and then. That, of course, is why live radio broadcasting still has such a place in people’s lives. Anything can happen. (Even at ten past seven on a drizzly Saturday morning.) And that is why no machine, no artificial intelligence can be better than the real beating heart of a live broadcaster. Because, like it or not, the world of news is changing and the ability of machines to take over is being researched and discussed as never before. Tuesday was a great day for W Roberts, as the junior pitcher threw a perfect game to carry Virginia to a 2-0 victory over George Washington at Davenport Field. That was a report last year (reproduced by the website Copyblogger) of a kind that is now commonplace on some web platforms. It was entirely written by a machine, based on inputs of the scores and “knowledge” of the way sport is covered. The Associated Press use the same type of computer inputs to “write” financial stories where data is turned into prose. When I began in journalism the people who decided what was important were elderly white dipsomaniacs who had left school at 14 and commuted into London from saloon bars in the Home Counties. They knew what was what. Middle East at the top, motorway accident in the middle: skateboarding duck to finish. And home on the 6.17. Things are different now, of course. The very idea of a running order being chosen for us by some grizzled “senior editor” clashes with the tone of the times. Why should he (or nowadays, she) get to tell me what matters? How does he or she know? And into this new world of journalistic anarchy has stumbled the most ubiquitous of all the social media platforms, Facebook. In case you don’t do Facebook, it’s worth pausing to consider the power of the site. According to the very reliable independent think tank Pew Research, nearly half of all Americans get their news from Facebook. Just two in ten look at print newspapers. View oEmbed on the source website As you may have heard, these folks have just had a presidential election. For Facebook this is wonderful (they earn advertising revenue) and for users of Facebook, very convenient. But when Facebook news feeds contain stories saying that the Pope has endorsed Donald Trump, or that Hillary Clinton is to be pardoned for her crimes by Barack Obama, and we know that both “stories” are false, should we be alarmed? Yes, newspapers (and broadcasters) also get things wrong, but think of this: according to Buzzfeed (another website) an entire cottage industry of web users in Macedonia spent the US election generating fake news stories related to Trump vs Clinton in order to inject them into Facebook’s Newsfeed as a way to drive views and generate ad revenue from US eyeballs. This feels big, and dangerous. It’s tempting to suggest that computers are the problem and humans are the answer. But the truth is that we cannot avoid computerised news. Nor do we need those senior editors back, who were just as bad in their own way. But perhaps we do need to take control. Man versus machine was yesterday’s story: the challenge now is to get the two working together. The algorithm for John Humphrys’s mind is being worked on even as I write. It might well iron out the Mastermind/pub errors but it must keep the humanity. Without that, we are sunk. Justin Webb presents Today on Radio 4
What to expect from the aftermath of the US election
It’s been a gaudy, freakish circus of an election but the result affects us all – if Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump win
It’s not fair, is it? Whether we like it or not, the choice Americans make in the Presidential election on 8 November affects all of us: rich and poor, north and south, give-a-damn or couldn’t-give-a-damn. The American economy is huge and vibrant, they spend more on their military than the next eight countries combined and US popular culture and technical prowess seep into all our lives. Yet when it comes to selecting the boss of all of this, we don’t get a vote. Instead, someone who might never have been out of Ohio, or a Harvard professor, or a 25-year-old Silicon Valley billionaire, or a hippy in Oregon, spaced out on recently legalised marijuana, get to choose for us. They are among the millions of Americans who will go to the polls this week and, at least partly, decide the fate of much of the world over the next four years. Nice folks, many of them – but not all of them folks who see the world through our eyes. Still, the good news is that you can watch it all unfold. Even better than that, they have put on quite a show this year. This election has been as gaudy and freakish as any circus the world has ever seen. In fact, in these tremulous, safe-spacey times, if this election were a circus, the acts would have been banned. It has pitted two of the least popular candidates in modern American history against each other and the result has been suitably horrifying. A poll last summer asked Americans to give their appraisal of Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader came first. To take a positive view, Trump is an outsider with a business brain and a message that appeals to people for whom life has been disappointing of late. He has energised parts of the electorate other candidates could not reach. And Hillary Clinton is a woman who has dealt with the tough business of wielding American power during her time as Secretary of State. She would also be, of course, the first woman president. Actually, the president isn’t quite the boss that we sometimes paint him (or her) to be. Whoever gets the job has to deal with Congress, and the Supreme Court can strike down anything they want to if they deem it unconstitutional. The role is constrained, in other words, by politics, and by the US constitution, which ensures no single branch of government can be in charge. So, if Trump is declared the winner in the early hours of Wednesday morning, what will happen? There will be a great deal of heated talk between then and next January’s inauguration – but less change than you might think. Some of Trump’s plans would almost certainly fall foul of the Supreme Court, and others would get lost in the political fight following his election. View oEmbed on the source website Wall Street would also have a say, and the markets would punish recklessness in a way not seen after reckless talk on the campaign trail. There would be visible consequences – for instance, to the threat of destroying the world’s capacity to trade freely – and plenty of Trump’s Republican backers would be calling for caution. I’m not suggesting that a Trump presidency would be dull – far from it. A typical recent assessment came from the doyenne of conservative American commentators, the former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan. Writing in the austere pages of the Republican-supporting Wall Street Journal, Ms Noonan summoned up her full rhetorical majesty and declared: “Look, he’s a nut, and you know he’s a nut.” But if Trump wins, some of the bombast of the campaign trail might well be set aside. He would need to have serious people willing to serve him as treasury secretary and at the Defence Department, and this would concentrate minds. If he chose unserious people (particularly at defence), there would be mass resignations and a crisis he would not want at the beginning of his time in office. What of Clinton? She has trodden a cautious path. Against a man as unconventional and unguarded as Mr Trump, she has maintained a slightly glassy stare, fixed on the winning post she hopes to pass this week. Her most consequential policy change might be to insist on a no-fly zone to protect civilians in Syria, which is something that could lead to Russian planes being shot down. But she’s at pains to suggest this is a long way off. She is a gradualist: she calculates; she weighs pros and cons. And let’s be frank: the polls suggest Clinton will win. The margin might not be as large as some have been saying in the weeks before the election, but Trump has done himself few favours in the battle to win over new supporters before polling day. His bizarre assertion that the poll was rigged (there is very little documented voter fraud in America) was followed by an even wilder suggestion that he might not accept the result if he lost. This makes many Americans uncomfortable. After all, Abraham Lincoln, in the middle of the Civil War, fought an election he was willing to lose – further proof, if it were needed, that Trump is no Lincoln. Do watch out, too, for the results of the Congressional election that happens at the same time as the presidential. If Clinton does very well, the Democrats could retake control of the upper house of Congress, the Senate, and may even cut down the Republicans’ big majority in the lower house, the House of Representatives. Would this be good news for Clinton? Not really. She faces a party whose heart is far to the left of hers (remember the support her challenger for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, secured?) and if the party is in power in Congress then the pressure on her to follow their lead will be intense. She will have no honeymoon if the Democrats win big. But if the Republicans still dominate Congress, then Clinton could face the prospect of a Congressional attempt to reopen the question of the private email server she kept while secretary of state, and to have her prosecuted amid wide suspicion that she only escaped jail this year because the FBI didn’t have the bottle to pursue her. Happy times in America… but they can still put on a party. It will be quite a night.
What to expect from the first US presidential debate
The grudge match to end all grudge matches: Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump. Who will come out on top?
Ronald Reagan was behind in the polls before the televised debates of the 1980 presidential election. People thought he was an extremist. That he might start the third world war. That he was nothing but a two-bit actor, an unserious man. Remind you of anyone? Make no mistake: the TV debates of the 2016 election are Donald Trump’s last remaining opportunity to put his madcap campaign on the road to victory. He must convince Americans that he has what it takes to be president. He must charm and persuade. Or blow up. Hit out. Amaze and horrify a nation already reeling from a presidential campaign like none in recent times. He could do that too – he could effectively end the thing weeks before the poll. There is talk of him being more interested in starting a TV network than solving the Syrian civil war. If so, this could be where he goes for that option: all guns blazing. Or does he see a real chance of being president now, courtesy of Clinton’s pneumonia? What effect will her health have on his behaviour? Let us be clear: of all the live TV debates in US election history this is the one to watch. Indeed, in all the live TV events in the history of mankind, you could argue that none has been bigger than this. “Box Office” doesn’t begin to describe it: 26 September 2016 will go down in broadcasting history. It’s worth noting that the importance of the three presidential debates this year is itself unusual; yet another manifestation of the weirdness of 2016. That Reagan election aside, the televised debates are not the deciders in American presidential battles. Mitt Romney wiped the floor with Barack Obama in their first encounter in 2012 but – as predicted – was swept aside in the election. View oEmbed on the source website John Kerry damaged George W Bush in 2004 (Bush looked so wooden in the debate I attended at Miami that people wondered if he was wearing an earpiece and having the answers fed into it) but again the loser of the debate won the election. View oEmbed on the source website But, hey, that was in the far off days when American politics was restrained. Dignified even. What Trump showed during the 11 debates he held with his fellow Republicans that eventually helped win him the nomination is that no hold is barred to this man. This is the guy who used a debate to assure the nation that it need not worry about the size of his penis – “I guarantee there’s no problem. I guarantee!” View oEmbed on the source website And when it came to the attributes – mental and physical – of his opponents, Hillary Clinton has told US television, “I’ll have to be prepared for whacky stuff that comes at you.” But whacky hardly captures it. One of Trump’s former opponents in the Republican debates, Newt Gingrich, put it like this: “You need to understand that Trump is the grizzly bear in The Revenant. When you hit him, he devours you. He can’t help himself. And so he creates an environment unlike anything I’ve ever seen.” Unlike anything he’s ever seen. Yep. That’s what you will get if you stay up late on 26 September, 9 October, and 19 October. They say Hillary Clinton has had difficulty finding anyone to play the part of Trump in her preparations for the debates because nobody was willing to say “those things” to her face. Hardened political operatives blanched and refused. Even in the cause of victory. They would have had to leave the country afterwards. They could never have looked the Clintons in the face again. Remember, Bill Clinton is accused by some on the American right of being not just a philanderer, but a rapist. How nasty could Trump get? Do we need to ask? Or perhaps the Hillary plan will get him to be as nasty as possible and just hope the unpleasantness will ease her into the White House. She is said to have a team of researchers looking into ways of “flustering” her opponent. She needs a team to do that? For a start: why not try the penis size thing. (Spoiler alert: this is unlikely) However, for all the drama of these debates the big moments of yesteryear were pretty tame in reality. The biggest putdown was probably by the vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen when he ran against Dan Quayle in 1988. Quayle compared himself to former President Kennedy and Bentsen replied imperiously, “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Gosh. I have a feeling the put-downs this week will be a tad rougher round the edges, even if they make many Americans hanker after the courtly days of Bentsen and Quayle. As one of Trump’s advisers Sam Nunberg puts it, “Not only does Trump want 100 million viewers, he wants to be a showstopper at the Roman Colosseum, the main event at WrestleMania. He’s going to love this, eat it up and take her on.” Which would be great TV, but potentially catastrophic politics according to Republicans of a milder disposition. “He thinks he won all the primary debates,” says Brett O’Donnell, a debate coach who works full time for the Republican party but not for Trump, “But he picked his spots, beat up on a candidate and then evaporated for a while and stayed out of the substance.” O’Donnell told the Washington Post, “he’s not going to be able to hide like that with just the two of them on stage... He can’t just name-call her and have a wrestling match for 90 minutes.” It’s worth adding that the debates are about more than Trump and his psychological fitness for office. Clinton, too, has questions to answer. She is wildly unpopular; she is accused of being a liar and a fraud. In a recent poll Americans were asked to rate Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The best rating – the most popular – was Putin. That is not normal. The debates give each candidate the opportunity to become more normal, or at least to make a stab at it. And that is as important for Clinton as it is for Trump. The former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, one of Clinton’s closest advisers says, “People think that they have to land zingers and pivot and attack – and that’s true, but ultimately, you want your viewers to come away with a gut feeling that I like this person.” For Mrs Clinton that seems to be quite a tall order. To be fair she has been popular in the past – she was a popular Secretary of State – but the more effort she throws into campaigning the less people seem to like her. Might the TV debates help her reverse that? Fire up the microwave. Buy in the popcorn. And if you live near a churchyard, that sound outside is Lincoln, turning in his grave. The First Presidential Debate is on 2am Tuesday morning on Channel 4
Justin Webb explores the role of broadcasters in politics
Never, since those eerie days after 9/11, has the news mattered so much. For political reporters and presenters, these are the days you live for: you are experiencing history, communicating change. Sleep is for losers. And yet being in the spotlight puts you, potentially, in the firing line. Amid the shock of the referendum result – and the many aftershocks – is the question: “Did we get this right?” Were the tools there for the nation to make sense of the decision it faced? One of the clearest messages during the referendum campaign was that audiences were hungry for real knowledge. People wanted to go beyond claim and counter-claim so that they could work out what was true. And some of those on the losing side think they were let down. The Oscar-winning film producer Lord Puttnam is among those who wonder if impartiality rules torpedoed the search for truth: he accused the BBC in particular of providing “constipated” coverage. The impartiality question is a reasonable one to raise – and it is one the BBC has grappled with on subjects such as climate change, where most scientists are on one side of the argument but some very feisty campaigners think they’re wrong. But the question has to be part of a wider debate. We tend to regard campaigning as promising policies or aspirations that can be tested against the facts of the real world. A combination of forensic interviewing and zealous fact-checking strips away the nonsense and allows the public to make a balanced choice. Seriously? In the modern world, this is not necessarily what happens. It is a truism to say we’re postideological: we don’t vote tribally for “the workers” or “toffs”, based on a love for socialism or capitalism. It is equally clichéd to talk of post-factual debate, where no one accepts the version of reality presented by anyone but their own side. Our real problem might be that we are entering, as the Americans seem to have entered, an era of identity politics where the politicians, the campaigners, are seeking by a process of nods and winks to let you know, “Hey, this is where you belong. Your people are here.” So audiences demand “facts”, but are unlikely to be swayed by them. In the USA the impact of this politics of social identity has been profound. An example: a few decades ago, if a person had said they hunted at the weekend, you could have deduced absolutely nothing about whether they were Republican or Democrat. Now: you’re probably a Republican. Are you a single woman? In 1960 that would have said nothing about your politics: now you’re highly likely to be a Democrat. The way you live is the way you vote. The programme, the manifesto, the promises: at best they’re secondary. At least one professor of politics – Eric Kaufmann of Birkbeck College, University of London – suggests that the referendum debate was similarly decided by identity, not a rational weighing up of the pros and cons. In an article for the Fabian Society, he looked at the detailed data on the beliefs of voters on each side and concluded: “Culture and personality, not material circumstances, separate Leave and Remain voters.” Professor Kaufmann suggests that the death penalty is a good example. Wealthy people who back capital punishment backed Brexit. Poor folk who oppose the death penalty supported Remain. If that is true, then no amount of argument about whether we do or don’t give £350 million a week to Brussels or whether Turkey might join the EU soon would ever have got us anywhere. Which isn’t to say that broadcasters should throw their hands in the air and give up. We need to find a style of discourse that interrogates the facts, but also understands identity politics. We need wider conversations. We need to see the nods and winks. None of this will be top of the nation’s agenda in the febrile days ahead. And there is a special place in hell reserved for journalists who take their craft too seriously. Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop is still a better guide than any number of worthy disquisitions on the ethics of reporting. But a discussion about holding people to account, a discussion about impartiality in the modern era, is one I suspect the broadcasters would rather welcome, if only to sort out their own thinking. And it should not be a discussion left to newsrooms and editorial offices and university journalism departments: it really should matter to us all.
"For all the American obsession with classlessness, the big money at the top of journalism has cut off the commentariat from the rest of society," says Justin Webb
My daughter is outraged at the suggestion that I might earn more than the Prime Minister, who is paid £143,462. She has read my name on a list on the internet (do they not have bike sheds to smoke behind in modern schools?) and is quizzing me on the way home. “But you don’t do anything.” “Er, well, actually, I get up very early in the morning for the Today programme and...” She cuts me off with one of those withering putdowns that all dads of daughters will recognise. “But you just read things out. Literally, Daddy, you read for a living. And you pick me up every day.” Hey-ho. And thanks a lot to whoever it was who put me on that list. If I had a few bob and the time to spare I might approach a top lawyer and make a claim that my human rights have been abused. Oh wait: I have (allegedly) got a few bob and time to spare. Well, never mind. The fact is, being on the list – painful as it was during that journey home – is probably better than not being on it. But of course it’s all rubbish. People inflate their own salaries and deflate their rivals’. As the great Gore Vidal once said: “It’s not enough to succeed; friends must fail.” In this spirit I make an attempt, when a newspaper calls, to suggest that Jeremy Vine is probably not earning quite as much as reported. But my heart’s not in it. Still, there is a good reason to suggest that the pay of news broadcasters should be a national concern. The inflation of salaries at the top end of US journalism has led to a genuine divide between the journalists and those Americans on whose behalf the journalists are meant to be working. David Gregory, an acquaintance when I worked in Washington DC, was reportedly paid $5 million a year to present a Sunday morning politics show and then $4 million when he was fired. Exactly: even more than Robert Peston, and in a nation where 47 per cent of people in a survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank in 2013 said they would be unable to find a spare $400 (£300) to cover a family emergency. Of course, in the USA all network TV money is commercial – no licence payers are asked to fund the stars. So is it OK for them to be paid so much? I think not, and the evidence is to be found in the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, who have transformed the US presidential race, propelled by a scream of distress and outrage – who knew that so many Americans were so unhappy? But why was this political earthquake on left and right unpredicted by all these highly paid folk in Washington and New York? Might it be that they lived (and still live) in a bubble? For all the American obsession with classlessness, the big money at the top of journalism has cut off the commentariat from the rest of society. Yes, I understand the special concern about the BBC, since the salaries come straight from licence payers. That is – literally and metaphorically – a matter to be decided above my pay grade. But perhaps it’s more important that all news broadcasters – on commercial stations as well – should be paid in a manner that keeps them on the side of the people. Years ago, when I presented Breakfast News on BBC TV, I met the only person in the world who could genuinely have been called a “fan” of mine, on the top deck of a London bus. We had a lovely chat about the programme and she expressed total admiration for how I coped with such a difficult job. “Well,” I muttered with faux modesty, “it’s really nothing, though it does get a bit hairy when the weather forecast comes up on camera two and you have to turn to camera three to say ‘Good morning’ but...” “No, no,” she interjected, “I mean getting to work on a bus. You must start work so early and the night buses are so unreliable...” Yup. Those of us who are decently paid already live in another world from millions of people who struggle to get by. I see in the latest list of BBC folk earning as much as the PM I have been left off. My instinct is to be worried. But I suspect it’s for the greater good. Justin Webb is a presenter on Today on Radio 4
Inside Obama's White House – what is life really like as President of the United States?
Eight years in the making, Today presenter Justin Webb introduces a new four-part BBC2 series revealing the inside story of President Barack Obama's time in office
I began day one of the Obama presidency on my knees. It seemed only polite: a BBC producer and I had invited ourselves in to see the newly installed White House press people, and arrived in the West Wing to find a scene that would not have been out of place in, well, The West Wing. It was chaos. Cheerful chaos to be sure, but still chaos. People say, “The White House has changed hands” as if the new president’s team just takes over the existing kit. They don’t. Everything is stripped out and everything brought in afresh. I remember in particular the marks on the wall on the corridor that leads from the press room to the Oval Office where the photos of President Bush had been. Why not put up Obama shots? Because the White House photographer has also gone with the change of ownership. A new one has to be vetted and given a camera. Until then: empty spaces. And we were on our knees because the head of communications had no communications. She had a desk and a chair and a rather nice office but she couldn’t make the phone work and she was trying to plug in a fax machine. Amid the chaos I brought my young daughter in, invited by a staffer almost giddy with the wonder of having this gift to give. Martha stood at the press room podium amid the pandemonium – nobody really noticed or cared. The Obama administration began as all administrations begin: wide-eyed and cheerful, plugging in the kit, changing the wallpaper and the photographs and, like a dog that has caught up with the car it was chasing, thinking “Yikes, what now?” A new four-part BBC series captures that moment, the actual meeting where the fresh-faced Obama team sit around a table and try to suppress giggles of excitement and nerves as they wonder what to try to do first. Remember, this was a terrible moment to be taking over the White House. The financial crisis was in full swing and the whole edifice of global capitalism seemed about to collapse. As The Onion – the satirical website – put it in a mock headline after the election, “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job”. So we see them grappling with it. Pretending, rather sweetly, to be air traffic controllers bringing the various measures they have planned down to the runway and into reality. Very soon the planes are crashing, the runway awash with debris and the air traffic controllers pulling their hair out – that too is just the way things work in Washington. But what this series captures so wonderfully – with the crisply dressed, preternaturally cool President at its core – is the hope that things could be different this time. They really did think they had changed the rules. I remember asking a senior figure in another West Wing office in those early days why they had decided – in effecting this huge changeover from Bush to Obama – to chuck out the bust of Winston Churchill that adorned Bush’s Oval Office and reminded him of the special relationship with dear old Blighty. “Ah, you people are obsessed with this stuff,” was his reply. “We thought it was Eisenhower. One elderly white guy looks much like another to us!” Happy days. But short-lived. And Inside Obama’s White House charts very swift disillusionment and very swift fallout. An entire episode is devoted to the passage of the Obama healthcare changes that are perhaps his greatest legacy – in theory at least, so-called Obamacare ensures all Americans have access to affordable health insurance – but also his greatest political liability, as he allowed the arguments against change to get the upper hand; many of his congressional supporters took the heat, and lost their seats as a result. And on that subject and others the series allows us to take stock and wonder, with the folks who were there in the Oval Office for all or part of the eight-year journey, “Was it all worth it?” and “Should we have done it differently?” If you are looking for a slant, a take, a treatment, forget it. The award-winning producers Norma Percy and Paul Mitchell have perfected, over decades of documentary-making, a simple and devastatingly effective way of working. No blowhard journalists. No minor functionaries. No hangers-on. Just the people who were there. The ones you recognise. And then there’s Obama himself. The President submits to a wide-ranging interview – secured only last week – that covers all the big international legacy issues: the war in Syria, foreign policy in general and climate change. He’s challenged, too, on what for him are the very personal domestic matters of civil rights and race relations, and what he regards as the triumphs and failings of his presidency. Percy and Mitchell’s style is what persuades the top people that it is worth taking part. Percy told me that the process of convincing the Obama team to allow this access was assisted by one simple human fact: “All politicians wonder about their place in history. These are, after all, the biggest moments in their lives.” The chance to tell the Percy/ Mitchell cameras what they really thought was too much to resist. Still, she admits that this is not a project that fell into the laps of her team. It has taken a monumental multi-year effort to get this level of access and this level of participation. And what does Norma Percy think we learn at the end of it? “Just how hard it is to get anything done in American government.” It’s tough at the top. Even when you are Barack Obama. I remember when I interviewed Obama in 2009 he refused to call President Mubarak of Egypt a dictator, because, he said, “I don’t believe in calling people names.” He seemed somehow above the fray, winning the Nobel Peace Prize without breaking a sweat. Working out a new way of doing things. But as the great political philosopher Mike Tyson says, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” This series shows the blows coming in, the ducking and weaving, the blood and tears: the making, in other words, of the Obama presidency. It’s gripping, sobering, and thought-provoking. So well done, Messrs Percy and Mitchell. And keep up the good work. I, for one, am looking forward to 2024, and their assessment of President Donald Trump...
After his dog nearly died, Radio 4 announcer Justin Webb saved it at a high cost. But was it worth it?
Thanks, dog lovers. Your good wishes are much appreciated. Toffee is fine now. Our sock-eating labradoodle is home, minus a bit of his tummy, and his treatment is paid for – at least I think it is: we filled in the forms and the insur- ance company don’t seem to have complained, so rather than bothering them, I am, as they say, letting sleeping dogs lie. We can celebrate Crufts this week in good order. A month ago things were not nearly so rosy. Toffee was close to breathing his last in the Queen Mother Hospital for Animals in Potters Bar and the sadness and the costs were mount- ing. In these pages I asked the question, how much is a dog’s life worth? Were we really right to spend thousands of pounds saving Toffee when his appetite got the better of him? With so many good causes with better calls on our cash and our concern? The answer came back so emphatically that I – a late-in-life dog lover – was genuinely shocked. You are suspicious of the insurance companies that fund this business, and slightly suspicious of vets who charge ever greater fees for ever more ambitious treatments (I will return to them later), but overall you are clear: a dog’s life is worth saving. Even if it costs an eye-watering sum. I say “you” – actually, there’s quite a division between “you”, when you’re listeners to the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2, and “you”, when you’re listeners to my own programme: Today on Radio 4. Jeremy tweeted news of Toffee’s appearance in Radio Times to his countless online followers and hundreds of thousands of them (well, quite a few) got in touch. The gist: it’s your money, mate. Do what you want. Dogs are worth spending as much as you want to spend on them: end of story. Today listeners were a little less sure. We took Toffee’s story and turned it into An Issue, because that’s what we do on Radio 4. The issue was the cost, of course, but also the ethics of providing ever more invasive treatments for sick animals in order, basically, that their sentimental owners can feel good. Who monitors this area of animal medicine? The answer seems to be that not enough moni- toring is done, and that Today listeners are split between those who think none of this matters as much as (fill in your own subject here: Syria was mentioned quite a bit...) and those who took the more dog-friendly attitude but wanted Someone To Do Something. Among them, I note, there were several vets. One told me he believed the profession had to be very careful that they did not persuade people to over-treat pets. He made a telling point about how we lose our heads over the animals we choose to be close to: “On the farm side of the practice every day we are making economic decisions whether to treat or slaughter the animal. What is interesting is that hard-nosed farmers very often take a different view with their pets and working dogs, even funding expensive treatment of working dogs at the end of their useful working lives.” Ah yes, even the farmers are soppy. But they must be stopped. Hard-headed advice comes from Robin Hargreaves, a past president of the British Veterinary Association, who wants to see people making sensible decisions about when to have an animal put down and, as it were, transfer its pain to themselves. “I see this transference as very symbolic. We take a problem in the form of injury or disease that the animal cannot overcome and convert it into grief that the owner can, with time, conquer.” Easier said than done, perhaps. But the dogs we love deserve to be loved within limits: it is, after all, a dog’s life, not ours. Toffee must eat no more socks. He is on notice. Although even as I write that, he stretches and sighs as if to say, “Just sign the cheques, old man: don’t pretend you’re in charge here...”
As the BBC seeks out its Sports Personality of the year, Justin Webb takes a look at the elusive quality - and why the All Blacks have it while England do not
In my whole life I have never, not even once, employed anyone. OK, the odd electrician and plumber has come and gone from the house, but I have never had what you would call “a relationship” where I was the boss. So I am supremely badly qualified to talk about motivation and team building and project leading. Or am I? Doesn’t it strike you that we are facing, in the modern world, a perfect storm of myopic rudderless leadership? Endless awaydays (the England rugby team for the recent World Cup learnt how to guide horses round a field!). Fatuous mission statements. And yet, buried in the pile of piffle, a deep-seated lack of self-belief and self-discipline. As the BBC turns its attention once again to the search for the Sports Personality of the Year it’s time to speak up for the individual, for magic that cannot be taught, talent that cannot be tamed. In fact: to speak up for personality itself. It’s time to misquote Pink Floyd: coaches, leave those kids alone. For the England rugby team, of course, it’s too late. Never in human history has a group of men been so over-hyped and over-trained and over-managed. Once the World Cup started back in the autumn the poor lads looked utterly shell-shocked, and no wonder. View oEmbed on the source website “Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths.” Those are the ruminations of Arnold Schwarzenegger and they were among the many Big Thoughts plastered on the walls at England’s £3 million, luxurious HQ at Pennyhill Park Hotel in Bagshot, Surrey. But statements exhorting you to be strong and to learn from life’s adversities are not the same thing as actually being strong and being resilient. In sport, in business, in life: you have to live this way, not read it on the wall. Success and resilience come from individuality and self-motivation. In public life we are on the road, perhaps, to understanding this. We all know there is a rebellion against machine politicians and a zest for “authenticity”. In a horizontal world in which everyone feels pretty much equal to everyone else we seek out the stars, the jaunty, talented mavericks who can rise to the top based on that little extra twist of ability. But in too much of our life there is a failure to celebrate the individual, to tell him or her, from a very early age, to get out and enjoy themselves and do what comes naturally. One of the most affecting and beautiful pictures I have seen in recent times was the anarchic, slightly unfocused shot of a group of the Rugby World Cup-winning All Blacks. They had gone to visit the grave of a man called Jerry Collins, a fine player who’d died in a car crash. The players took the Webb Ellis Cup with them and crouched down on his grave for the photos. It could not have been more informal, or more heartfelt. Simple and effective, like All Black rugby. The building of these young men into sporting titans who care deeply about the team was done by celebrating success from an early stage. Everything starts with their talent. Building it, nurturing it, enjoying it. My sole inspirational statement would be “Just do it!” It’s taken, you say? Well, we need to tell Nike to bog off: give us our phrase back. It belongs to us. It belongs to the ages. It’s all anyone needs to know to succeed. Sports Personality of the Year is on BBC One tonight (Sunday 20th December) at 6.50pm
Why The Daily Show's Jon Stewart was a formidable news force
The comedian has changed America more than Obama or Reagan, says Justin Webb
Let me tell it straight. Straight to camera, as he does: Jon Stewart, who announced this month that he is retiring as the host of The Daily Show on America’s Comedy Central, is the most influential American since Ronald Reagan. Yep, sorry Messrs Bush (presidents 41 and 43) and Clinton and Obama. Y’all did your best to transform the nation but really, when it comes to shifting a culture, none of you came close. Mr Stewart (and perhaps the writers of Modern Family might get a mention here as well) made America different. He started presenting The Daily Show 16 years ago. His work is done: he has used his immense talent, his quick wits, his painstaking research, his command of language, to move young Americans to a different place – in many respects a more European place, with less religion, more gay rights, fewer hang-ups, more tolerance. Where Ronnie shifted them right, Jonnie shifted them back again. Not that everyone is on board for the reverse Reagan. Plenty of Americans cannot stand Stewart, but all Americans have seen the power of a comedian telling them the news every night. And although he is socially liberal – more so than his nation – he is not a partisan ranter. He can kick Obama, and has. So he has real clout: a few years ago he was voted America’s most trusted news source, and that is no joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KM_kGxVUJw Brian Williams, on the other hand, is widely regarded as a joke and not a very funny one. His departure from the NBC Nightly News (for six months, with no pay) is a punishment for embellishing stories about his war reporting. Few think he will be back, and, few are mourning his departure. It’s nothing personal. And that is the point. His demise signals the end of an era whose sell-by date passed a decade ago. Ah, the network anchors! Those chiselled jaws, gimlet eyes, and improbably dark hair. A report on a million dying of starvation? They could channel your horror. A duck? Skateboarding? In Wisconsin? Their eyes could meet yours as together you thought, “Time to make the tea...” When television news was in its pomp, the American model led the way. From Tokyo to London, from Pretoria to Moscow, people with roughly symmetrical faces and well-controlled eyebrows became famous and the things they said were (more or less) believed. They were sent up – in films such as Broadcast News and Anchorman – but not really challenged. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzZCi4G-uPU Now, in America, the TV nightly news has finally died. It’ll carry on, of course, with tweaks and rebirths and perhaps one day with Brian Williams, but the art form is moribund. Among people who expect broadcasting to be daring and vivid, the well- researched jokiness of Stewart beat the nightly news to a pulp. And he also managed to avoid the other great pitfall of the internet age: taking yourself too seriously. Poor Brian Williams fell headlong into that morass and took his whole genre with him. He was paid ten million dollars a year. Seriously! For reading the news. No jokes, very few interviews. Just reading. In a self-aware age we are simply not going to be fooled into thinking that such things make sense. Which is probably why poor Mr Williams felt the need to make things up about himself and his exploits. None of this detracts from the men who led the evening news when it was great. I got lost once, in Walter Cronkite’s walk-in closet. I had concluded an interview with the greatest of the American anchormen I and had strode out through what I thought was the door. I staggered back into the room with his shirts on my head. But he – by then in his 90s – was already taking a nap. And here’s the oddness: the interview was conducted at NBC headquarters in New York; Mr Cronkite was such a big star that he was given a suite of offices at the very top of the building. His exploits (in Vietnam and in the Normandy landings) matched his majesty. They allowed it to be acceptable. When Mr Cronkite died they should have stuck the whole evening news in a closet of its own. Or given the job to Jon Stewart. Too late now... The Daily Show is on Comedy Central Extra on Thursdays at 12.50am
Reith lecturer and rock-star doctor Atul Gawande on life, death and how to cure the NHS
The Today programme's Justin Webb talks to the US cancer surgeon about the terminal condition of living...
Face it: we are all suckers for a rock-star doctor. Prime ministers and presidents come and go. Film stars fade. Scientists seem sometimes to live in another world, or wish that they did. But oh, the lure of a man or woman in a white coat who has also written an opera, been to the Moon, run a small country, published an important novel, farmed a hundred acres and can take one look at your stubbed toe and say, with a smile revealing perfect teeth, “You’ll be fine.” Atul Gawande has not quite done these things, at least not yet. But he is a rock star for sure; one of an elite group of American doctors who has thought seriously about medicine and society and is helping us to think again about the whole idea of health. Born in Brooklyn, now 49, he’s a cancer surgeon, but among his extracurricular achievements, he’s a staff writer on The New Yorker, America’s highbrow magazine of ideas. In other words, he can’t only walk the walk as a physician, he can also write, communicate, influence. He’s a handsome fellow too, but understated: where last year’s Reith lecturer (Grayson Perry) was all out there with his women’s clothes and stage make-up, Dr Gawande is a little more buttoned down, more med school than art school. But meet him for ten minutes and you’re left in no doubt that Gawande, while unlikely to dress in women’s clothes and do anything vibrant and shocking with clay, is nonetheless the ideal Reith lecturer for our times. We’re entering a moment of neuralgia over health. It will be a huge issue at the general election next year. Hardly a day goes by without the news that the NHS is in trouble and must be rescued with this remedy or that. We are – rightly – intensely interested in the debate about how health services are delivered, how much it costs and how good the care can be. We’re worried, too, about how the health service treats us in our declining years. In other words we’re trying to be healthy and not thinking enough about what happens to us when, inevitably, we are not. As Gawande puts it, when I catch up with him, “Living is a terminal condition.” So as Dylan Thomas’s poetry rings in our ears this autumn, do we rage too much against the dying of the light? In one respect the answer is no. One of the focuses of Atul Gawande’s thinking has been, he tells me, “delivering on the existing knowledge that we are not actually delivering on. We need to tackle the science of ineptitude.” Prime example: the thousands of people who go into hospital and come out with an infection. Here is medical progress waiting to happen: it requires no expensive laboratory experiments or fiendishly clever science. It’s about being clean. That means tackling ineptitude among individual doctors – providing checklists, monitor- ing performance. But it means tackling ineptitude at the level of systems too – think of the scandals we’ve had in the NHS in recent years where poor care hasn’t been noticed and challenged sufficiently quickly. Here Atul Gawande speaks with the authority of a man who comes from a country where a full 20 per cent of GDP is spent on health but where actual outcomes vary staggeringly from place to place. We tend to think, lazily, that the question is one of money: the Americans who get the biggest slice of health money have the best outcomes and the poorest get the worst. Not true. As Dr Gawande puts it, “The most expensive places are not the best places.” In fact, he says, “The American experience is that the best places to get treatment are often the cheapest because they’re the best organised.” So can we relax about the NHS? Can we put the black hole in funding to the back of our minds? If we concentrate our organisation and efficiency, can we squeeze the funding further? Dr Gawande smiles. “The short answer,” he says, “is... maybe.” The problem is that you have to invest money to get the payoff. He gives the example of Scotland, where deaths in surgery were hugely reduced but the initial investment in training and monitoring cost money that had to be found up front. But his bigger point is that seeing health and the health budget as separate things is a mistake. It is a bureaucratic exercise, not a human one. He tells the story of the vacuum cleaners of Boston. Doctors there noticed that children from homes with no vacuum cleaner had much higher rates of asthma. They could treat the asthma but the drugs and therapies are expensive. So they gave out vacuum cleaners instead of inhalers. One for every house. It cost money up front. And it was an eccentric way to spend a health budget. But a year later there was an 80 per cent drop in children being admitted to A&E departments in Boston with asthma attacks. Money was spent out of one budget and saved out of another. His point is clear – if we’re to keep the cost of health under control, we have to find our equivalent of vacuum cleaners for many of our health problems. And we have to pay for them. But if we do, as Dr Gawande says, “We’re discovering means of improving people’s lives that are even more powerful than a drug or a device.” And it saved money in the longer term. As for the drugs and the devices; well, Dr Gawande is perfectly happy to see them prescribed and used, but before you charge off to your specialist and demand the latest gizmo or specialised treatment, make sure you’re really in need. This, he says, is the strength of the British system. We’ve invested in primary care, in family doctors, who are the gatekeepers, the triage merchants. This doesn’t always seem very sensible when you have to fight to get an appoint- ment and your persistent cough is ignored, but actually, he claims, it works. It keeps costs down and stops the overuse of medical solutions. A personal example: in my last year of working in the USA for the BBC I paid tribute to my sense of American-ness and went to a private MRI clinic in a shop- ping centre (they’re in lots of them) to have a full body scan. “See the future and alter it,” was the alluring message on the company website. But of course it was idiotic. They missed a couple of things that were wrong with me and decided that I had thyroid cancer, which, after several rounds of expensive tests, turned out to be wrong. Dr Gawande is surely right to warn us against a blindfaith in more being better. Health is more complicated than that. Which brings him to a wider philosophical place: how should modern medicine be changed so that it can cope with the reality of modern life – that many of us will live a long time but will not be healthy at the end? At the moment medicine rages against the dying of the light just as much as we do as individuals – in fact more. Some of us do want to go gentle etc. But one more round of chemo gets in the way. Dr Gawande is clear: “We lose our way. We fail to recognise that people may have priorities in their lives besides just living longer. Even in very narrow times in their lives people have purposes that are bigger than they are. Medicine has to help them. We cannot be endlessly trying simply to preserve life. It has to have a purpose. “It’s heartless to not offer people who have unbearable suffering an opportunity to alleviate it,” he says. But what then? Are we to offer death, as some would like? Assisted killing or suicide? If all else fails – all the efforts at palliative care – then yes: “You can properly give people a prescription to hasten their own death.” It happens in Washington and Oregon States in the US and, according to Dr Gawande, only half of the people who receive a prescription of drugs that would kill them actually use them. Possession is enough. It brings comfort. Might that be a job for the NHS in years to come? Cradle to the grave including a final push if we want it? Dr Gawande is certainly not a trenchant “right to die” campaigner. But his thinking about public health represents a serious effort to address real ethical issues that modern medicine struggles with, and he acknowledges that this is one of them. We are desperate to be healthy. We have the means to be healthier for longer. But in the end, gently or otherwise, the goodnight calls. What then? Paging the rock-star doctor. Even if you feel fine today, he has a message for you. The first of Gawande's Reith Lectures was broadcast this morning on Radio 4 and will be repeated on Saturday at 10.15 pm. The Reith Lectures are also downloadable from the Radio 4 website
Why our relationship with Andy Murray is the essence of tennis
Like the news, sport is as much about stories as it is hard facts, says Justin Webb
Many Wimbledons ago, when the BBC still held corporate lunches, and I was hoping for a career as a C-list celebrity, I spent a well-oiled few hours in a hospitality tent in SW19. It was the usual crowd you would ask round for lunch in the garden on an average summer’s day: a European Commissioner; a playwright; an international fashion icon; a Conservative MP; a footballer. John Birt was the host. Linen suits were the uniform. After pudding and cheese, someone suggested that we might wander through and watch the tennis. It was like a Bateman cartoon. People looked horrified, then amused, then made themselves scarce. They had not come for the sport. In the end, three of us took our seats on Centre Court and watched a few games, but our hearts weren’t in it. We had come late to the action and we didn’t really know what the action was: we could see who was winning and who was losing, we could see good shots and close shots and good calls and bad calls, but there was something missing. We were not invested. We were watching the match, not living it. With a football match or a rugby match it would not have mattered. But tennis is different. As Wimbledon hits its stride, we celebrate a sport that – when properly watched – is about so much more than volleys and smashes. Tennis is all-encompassing. Tennis is life, on a court. Sometimes five sets, going on into the evening, magnificent and life-affirming. Sometimes brutal and short, a few games and a hasty exit. And we know what the players are facing when they first come out and acknowledge the royal box and fiddle with their racquets. We can see their faces in close-up on the TV. We know about them – or know enough about them – to have an idea of how they might react if things go badly or well. And we know, as they do, that they are alone. Doubles is great fun, but can never have the psychological power of singles. The loneliness of the challenger as he or she double-faults at match point cannot be replicated in any other sport. The presence of the crowd adds tension and drama but the separation of this individual from us and from his or her opponent is what counts. This is why the nation’s relationship with Andy Murray is not some frivolous matter, of interest to air-heads with no grasp of the real sport. Far from it: our relationship with Andy is not extraneous to tennis: it is the absolute essence of what tennis is all about. Liking him, not liking him, wondering about him; all of this is part of the sport. Without it, tennis would not be tennis. The obvious analogy is with news. News also has its serious, desiccated side. A report on banking reform must contain some elements of technical detail. A report from a war must tell you about the geopolitics of the fight. But Fred Goodwin is part of the banking story, too. And children torn from their homes is part of the war story. We are human. We tell ourselves stories about life – that is how we think. It is how we comprehend. It is how we cope. Of course tennis without the actual sport – an obsession with Andy Murray’s mood completely devoid of any concern with his forehand – would be silly. It would not be grounded. And the same is the case in news. People complain – rightly – when journalists get so carried away with a human drama that we forget the wider picture. War has a human impact but it has a strategic importance, too: both need to be reported. So we need not apologise for seeking out drama along with our ground strokes in SW19 this month. I intend to go, queuing for the evening seats and paying my own way, but enjoying it all the more for having a clear head and no distractions from the real business at hand: the all-embracing psychodrama of tennis.
Spielberg’s film is about Lincoln, but it is also about now
Barack Obama could not, as a man of mixed race, have become president without Lincoln’s efforts and Lincoln’s success. So what will he do with that gift?
How did Daniel Day-Lewis become Abraham Lincoln? How does a Millwall-supporting lad from Greenwich, south London, take possession of America’s most famous son and do it in a manner that leaves Yankee jaws dropped to the floor? Hard work, of course. Study. All the obsessive effort for which Day-Lewis is famous. And then some more. And eventually the accent, the reedy, high-pitched voice, the walk; all of it, he says, came together in a whole. The accent he worked on at his home in Ireland (he’s a British and Irish citizen), where he listened to early recordings from the areas of the United States where Lincoln had lived, in particular from Kentucky, where the politician was born in 1809. “At a certain moment I begin to hear a voice in my inner ear,” Day-Lewis says. “If I am still pleased with it, I try to reproduce it.” And that is what he did. He recorded his efforts on micro-cassettes and sent them in manila envelopes to director Steven Spielberg in Los Angeles. Spielberg’s reaction? “On the second tape I heard Abraham Lincoln talking to me. It was a privileged moment. Nobody had heard his voice since he died.” And what is that voice saying? One of the most famous self-deprecating comments in American politics was uttered in 1973 by newly installed Vice President Gerald Ford. Ford was brought in to replace disgraced incumbent Spiro Agnew and would soon, everyone suspected, have to take over Richard Nixon’s presidency, too. It was a moment of national calamity. Gerald Ford needed to point out to people that he, an unelected stopgap, would do his best, but expectations should not be too high. So he put it like this: “I am a Ford, not a Lincoln.” And everyone in America knew instantly what he meant and warmed to him because they too were Fords, not Lincolns. America is a Ford nation. Its greatest contribution to humanity – in my humble view – is the offer of material progress and a sense of purpose and worth to the greatest number of people possible. American heroes tend to be ordinary folk. And that is the point about Lincoln. He began as a Ford (sorry if this car-talk is becoming tiresome – it’s nearly done), struggling to get elected and struggling to make any money but became something better than a Ford. Ditto America. So when we foreigners watch the Spielberg film (and hear Day-Lewis’s rendition of Lincoln’s voice) we cannot, it seems to me, quite grasp its emotional force. When Americans see Lincoln, they are watching a film about themselves, about their national myth, about the core of America. Day-Lewis brings us a sad man with a sense of humour, a high-pitched voice and a funny walk. He brings Americans a mirror in which they fancy they can catch a glimpse of their own saintliness. Lincoln’s greatest achievement, probably the only one we are really aware of on this side of the Atlantic, was his contribution to the final abolition of slavery in the United States. What the film focuses on is the incredible struggle Lincoln had in order to get the measure passed. We tend to think of Lincoln, to the extent that we think of him at all, as an orator who held the nation together in the Civil War. But he was a political dealer as well – a man who was acutely aware of what it took to get things done. People who like to think of politics as a business of merely having principles and following them will be surprised by Day-Lewis’s Lincoln. He gets his hands dirty. He pushes for what is possible. And here is where Lincoln is at its most fascinating. It is not about Lincoln, stupid! It is plainly and obviously and without any scintilla of a doubt a film about... Barack Obama. There is a wonderful moment in the middle of the film where someone says to Lincoln that the vote on slavery in the House of Representatives is in the hands of God. Lincoln grimaces. “If God is using the House of Representatives as his chosen agency then he truly moves in mysterious ways...” The House of Representatives with which Day-Lewis does battle in the film is a corrupt and sleazy, biddable and dysfunctional institution. There is little real leadership and those who do business with it have no respect for its members. Welcome to the modern age. Americans’ contempt for their rulers – and in particular for the House of Representatives – has never been greater; nor has the utter inability of those representatives to get anything done. The Congress that finished sitting in January passed the least legislation in history. Spielberg’s film is about Lincoln, but it is also about now! And this is not just a commentary on the House. It is also a call to arms aimed at the man who, perhaps more than any other president, can claim to be Lincoln’s heir. Barack Obama could not, as a man of mixed race, have become President without Lincoln’s efforts and Lincoln’s success. So what will he do with that gift? Use it! Get stuff done! That seems to me to be the message from Spielberg via Daniel Day-Lewis. Don’t be too worried about the arm- twisting or the compromises that might be necessary on the way. Bin the aloofness. Shorten the speeches and get stuck in. The 44th President is at the start of his final term. Lincoln the man is his hero, he tells us. He has seen the film. I wonder if he got the message? Happy Birthday Abraham Lincoln: a Culture Show Special is on tonight at 11:20pm on BBC2