The Virtual Stoa

So today a handful of newspapers quoted a senior Conservative Party politician as saying:

“It’s fine. There’s really no problem. The MPs just have to do it because the associations tell them to, and the associations are all mad, swivel-eyed loons.”

How did the word “swivel-eyed” enter the British political lexicon, and when did we first get “swivel-eyed loons”? Here’s a preliminary report, armed with access to the Lexis database, and the help of some friends on the Twitter with very good memories.

As long ago as 1983, Michael Meacher was described in the unlamented Punch as a “swivel-eyed Leftie lunatic”, so the term has been in circulation for a while. In 1987, Seamus Milne, writing in tehgraun, wrote that it was common to portray Robespierre as “the swivel-eyed high priest of political violence”. And in 1991, in a couple of columns, Simon Hoggart used the term, on one occasion to pick out politicians who had a “swivel-eyed belief in privatisation”.

And it’s in the early 1990s that the word more or less attaches itself to a certain kind of Tory politician. In fact, we can be more specific: John Redwood is clearly the key figure here. When he was first appointed to the Cabinet in the May 1993 reshuffle, an unnamed and disgruntled Tory politician said, “we want fewer swivel-eyed ideologues not more” (interestingly, one of the stories in the press reporting this view carried Ruth Kelly’s by-line). And the term, having attached itself to Redwood, from there migrates to his key political allies–such as Tony Marlow and, especially, Teresa Gorman. Tim Collins–a hero of the Stoa in years gone by–described the Tories who backed Redwood’s campaign for the Party leadership in 1995, for example, as the “swivel-eyed barmy army, from ward eight at Broadmoor”.

So: “swivel-eyed” was most commonly used in this period to pick out the kind of Conservative politician who ceaselessly plotted to undermine the leadership and, in David Cameron’s later words, was forever “banging on about Europe”. (As Hegel presumably remarks somewhere, all great Tory crises appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as farce, the second as farce.)

So much for “swivel-eyed”. Where, specifically, do “swivel-eyed loons” come from?

The answer seems to be that Euan Ferguson first used the phrase in the national press, in his Observer column of 2 March 1997, specifically to describe Tim Montgomerie’s mob. Back in those days, long before ConservativeHome, Montgomerie ran something called the Conservative Christian Fellowship, about whom Ferguson was quite sceptical–the column was published under the headline, “The Lord deliver us from the loony right”. Various right-wing Christians were quoted in the course of the article, which ended like this:

It would be ludicrous to suggest the CCF could make much of a difference. But is it so wrong to imagine it having an effect in a marginal seat between votes for a genuine candidate and votes for, well, let’s say, just for the sake of argument, a swivel-eyed loon who glories in pious deceit, or a holier-than-thou moral crusader who still backs policies expressly designed to widen inequality, encourage intolerance and promote greed?

And to take us briskly up to the present, the last thing we need to remember is the Anthony Wells-inspired Google-bomb (remember Google-bombing?) that ensured that, around the end of 2004, anyone who entered the phrase “swivel-eyed loons” was immediately directed to the UKIP home page. (This was mentioned at the time on the Virtual Stoa here.)

But that is all history. The rest, as we might say, is politics.

[Thanks to Anthony Wells and Matthew Turner for assistance with this post.]

UPDATE: Jamie K: “I’d say it’s more ‘the first time as farce, the second time as panto’.”

I HAVE, I hope, raised a prima facie presumption that the Times was labouring under some delusion. It had omitted some element from its calculations, sufficient to distort the whole history of the struggle. The story, to use its own words, was “a mystery and a marvel;” it was a mystery and a marvel simply because the Times was not in possession of the one clue which led through the labyrinth. A foreigner looking on at a cricket-match is apt to think the evolutions of the players mysterious; and they will be enveloped in sevenfold mystery if he has a firmly preconceived prejudice that the ball has nothing whatever to do with the game. At every new movement, he must invent a new theory to show that the apparent eagerness to pick up the ball is a mere pretext; that no one really wants to hit it, or to catch it, or to throw it at the wickets; and that its constant appearance is due to a mere accident. He will be very lucky if some of his theories do not upset each other.

As, in my opinion, the root of all the errors of the Times may be found in its views about slavery…

From “The Times on the war: a historical study“, by Leslie Stephen (London: William Ridgway, 1865), pp. 18-19.

Me, over at Comment is Free.

From the New York Times Magazine‘s long piece about News of the World phone hacking:

A draft of the paper’s unpublished article about [chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association Gordon] Taylor’s alleged affair indicated it was based on a voice mail message he had received from his assistant. Lewis [ = Taylor's lawyer] said the message went: “Thank you for yesterday. You were great.” The paper assumed “she was talking about shagging,” Lewis explained. In reality, she was referring to a speech Taylor gave at her father’s funeral.

In today’s number one soaraway Sun:

SIXTEEN Page 3 Girls in all their glory represent the very image of freedom in this country.

But if Labour or the Lib Dems win the election, this could be the last time they are allowed to pose together.

MPs Harriet Harman and Lynne Featherstone will move swiftly to change the law and ban Page 3 forever.

Our national treasures – who even enjoy the Royal seal of approval from our future King Prince Charles – will be no more.

And at a stroke the very liberties that put the Great into Great Britain will be torn asunder.

The radical ideas of the 17th-century philosopher John Locke helped shape our freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights and, later, America’s Constitution.

Lib Dem frontbencher Featherstone was cheered by women’s rights activists when she declared she would “love to take on Page 3″.

But our Poppy  said: “The basis of Lockean thought is his theory of the Contract of Government, under which all political power is a trust for the benefit of the people.

“His thinking underpins our ideas of national identity and society. Please don’t let those who seek to ban our beauty win. Vote to save Page 3!”

Poppy isn’t the only page three lovely who has immersed herself in the classics of modern Anglophone political thought.

Katie has opined that, “As the sixth US president John Quincy Adams said, ‘Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.’ My thoughts entirely.”

And Hollie “thinks Gordon Brown’s hated NI rise shatters the three basic laws of economics”. She said: “As guru Adam Smith wrote in his seminal The Wealth of Nations, they are: a free economy, free marketing and laissez-faire government. That means Hands Off, Gordy.” [via WJ]

Perhaps everyone else has seen this, but I’ve just noticed that the splendid Daily Mail-o-Matic has been updated to include 2009 bogeymen. Have the PC Brigade Had Sex with the Queen? Could Alistair Darling Molest Common Sense and Decency? Are the Unions Impregnating the Countryside?

Also, the postmodernism generator is much more sophisticated than it was last time I looked.

Reading this reminds me of the slogan with which Life of Brian was marketed in Sweden: “The Film That Was So Funny, They Banned It In Norway.”

The Mail on Sunday covers the issues that matter, over here [via].

Le Monde, in one of its summer retrospective thingummies, over here.

Today, tehgraun‘s arts critics are writing about sporting events, so we have theatre critic Michael Billington on darts and rock critic Caroline Sullivan on the Second Test Match.

Tomorrow we’re promised “chief football writer Kevin McCarra on Finnish contemporary dance” and “golf correspondent Lawrence Donegan on the San Francisco Symphony’s Brahms cycle”.

I like this kind of thing.

So farewell then, Miles Kington.

Go over the fold for what I think is my favourite Kington column (though I only ever read a fraction of the oeuvre), published, appropriately enough for the inventor of franglais on the occasion of the bicentenaire [Independent, 14 July 1989].

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From tehgraun:

Black has described the US government’s case against him as “rubbish”, “nonsense”, a “vendetta”, a “persecution” and as “essentially a substitute for a wealth-redistribution policy”. He has condemned prosecutors as “Nazis” and “pygmies”. All these comments were pinned on an office noticeboard by prosecutors, who filed arguments last week calling for a longer sentence because of Black’s contempt for the process.

This prompted a slight change of tack from the peer, who informed the Canadian press in an email that he considered the US justice system to be “one of the 10 best in the world”

UPDATE [5.30pm]: Six and a half to eight years, apparently. So assuming he starts the term in early 2008, he might be out just in time for his seventieth birthday on 25 August 2014. That’ll give him something to look forward to.

The Stoa has long been interested in universities, Fabians and beavers, so I’m interested to learn that the newspaper of the LSE student union is called The Beaver. But can anybody tell me why?

There’s a helpful round-up of the recent Martin Amis kerfuffle over at Matt‘s place.

All I’ll add is that we need to see the remarks about his urges to stripsearch people who look as if they might be from Pakistan (etc.) in a slightly wider context. Amis is also someone who thinks he can discern murderous intentions towards his family in the glance of an Arab doing his job, who can write things like “the impulse towards rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male”, who seems to absorb Bernard Lewis-like explanations of historical problems when non-crazy explanations are readily available, who recycles inflammatory quotations from Hezbollah’s leader that circulate freely around the internet, but which no-one ever quite manages to trace back to an authentic-looking source, and so on.

(This last one strikes me as weird, because presumably it’s not too hard to find Hezbollah leaders saying offensive things, so why is the very-possibly-made-up quote the one that everyone’s heard somewhere or other?)

We can practice our careful reading skills as much as we like on that particular “urges” passage, and we can be as charitable towards him as we want to be (though we should also bear in mind that there’s a long history of people with really offensive views managing to present them in ways that aren’t quite so offensive on a charitable reading of their words). But Amis also has form here when it comes to saying the kinds of things about Muslims that the real crazies also like to say, and it’d be a shame to lose sight of that fact in the parsing of his words from the interview.

I’m not sure enough about what I really think is going on in Amis’s head (and I’m not interested enough in either him or his books to spend too much time on trying to work it out), but he seems to me to be somewhere on the slippery slope that has Mark Steyn and Melanie Phillips festering at the bottom, and it doesn’t look to me as if he’s too anxious to be stepping off it any time soon. (But perhaps I’m being uncharitable.)

This is all terribly, terribly funny. First we have Johann Hari writing about Nick Cohen’s not especially good recent book What’s Left? in Dissent here (with bloggers’ responses here, here, here, here and here). Then we get NC’s reply to JH here and JH’s reply to NC’s reply to JH here, with today’s blog discussion over here [update: subsequently removed].

I want this one to run and run.

TUESDAY UPDATE: Oliver Kamm weighs in, again; AaroWatch has an Ode to Kamm [update: subsequently removed]; and JH has added bits and pieces to his reply to the reply [update: and some of the bits and pieces have been, er, subsequently removed].

WEDNESDAY UPDATE: Indecent Left, Conor Foley, Chris Bertram, Blood & Treasure.

As Europe drifted towards war in the Summer of 1939, the Chicago Sunday Tribune was asking the questions that matter: just how tall were the men guiding their nations’ destinies?

Here are the shorties, the rest are over the fold:

[With many many thanks to PM for sending this my way!]

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