Mandelson v. E. Miliband - and does the noble lord read (& borrow from) my blog?

Just over a month ago, I strayed from the usual 'non-aligned' focus of this blog to speculate on where one of the Labour leadership candidates, Ed Miliband, seemed to be positioning himself in the contest: 'Can Labour afford to back the Ed Milibandwagon?'

I rather wished I hadn't, as it was picked up by the Labour List website - from where the link implied that I was suggesting that Miliband the Younger is a dangerous Trot, rather than the 'lefter than thou' candidate (at least among the boys in the race).

This prompted howls of anger from some of his supporters, one of whom suggested that I was engaged in a Daily Mail style 'hatchet job'.

Now, however, the gist of what I was saying has been echoed by Lord Mandelson, whose position is summed up in the Guardian website as follows:

.. speaking to The Times, Mandelson said anyone who tried to take Labour back to the era before Blair's election as leader in 1994 would wreck the party's chances of a swift return to power.

Addressing Ed Miliband's criticisms, the peer said: "I think that if he or anyone else wants to create a pre-New Labour future for the party then he and the rest of them will quickly find that that is an electoral cul-de-sac."

He said Lord Kinnock and Lord Hattersley – the former leader and deputy leader, who have both voiced support for Ed Miliband – wanted to "hark back to a previous age".

"We're a political party, not a church, and we require the support of voters actively to embrace us, and if we stop recognising that, then we're going to be taken back into those long years of opposition that served us and the country so ill.

"If you shut the door on New Labour you're effectively slamming the door in the faces of millions of voters who voted for our party."

I don't often find myself agreeing with the Prince of Darkness, but the similarity between this and what I posted a month ago has got me wondering whether he'd followed the link here from Labour List .

Or is he, perhaps, a regular reader of this blog?

Rattling good tunes?

I've just been having another look at the video posted a few weeks ago of Simon Rattle conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. It reminded me of just how surprised I was when I heard his rather conservative choice of 8 records as his Desert Island Discs back in 2008.

After all, here's a conductor who, before migrating to Berlin, had made his name with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra by enticing the culture vultures of the West Midlands to listen to the tuneless and discordant noises cooked up by modern classical composers.

Which of their delights, I wondered, would he want to take with him to find solace on his desert island?

Answer: none of them!

Apart from a Joni Mitchell song, the most modern specimens he could manage - Janacek (1854-1927) and Mahler (1860-1911) - weren't very modern at all.

If his chosen pieces are the only ones he enjoys well enough to take with him to the desert island, it does make you wonder why he's devoted so much of his career to imposing programmes of modern classical music on his audiences - when he himself would apparently much rather be listening to more traditional and accessible fare.

Rattle's 8 Desert Island Discs:

1. Mahler: Andante, 9th Symphony
2. Sometimes I’m Happy, Performer Joni Mitchell
3. J.S. Bach: The beginning of Brandenburg Concerto No 1
4. Janacek: The end of The Cunning Little Vixen
5. Mozart: Adagio for Serenade for 13 Wind Instruments
6. Haydn's Creation: The Great Work is Completed
7. Sleep on and Rest in Dreams from Schumann’s Paradise and the Peri
8. Handel: Scherza Infida from Handel’s Ariodante

70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain: speeches by Churchill & Roosevelt

Friday 20th August was the 70th anniversary of Winston Churchill's famous words after the Battle of Britain "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few" - from a speech that can be read in full HERE.

As he was speaking in the House of Commons, long before its proceedings were broadcast on radio or television, there are no tapes of the original.

But news of the anniversary sent me looking through YouTube to see what else was available from that period.

The first one that struck me was a speech made by President Roosevelt in 1939 that goes a long way towards explaining why, when we were children, my generation used to hear so much bitterness from our parents and their contemporaries about the USA staying out of the war until the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941.

Before seeing this, I hadn't quite appreciated just how emphatically isolationist the American position was on the eve of the fall of France and the Battle of Britain (and, to my English ears, Roosevelt's delivery comes across as vaguely menacing):

Then, a few months later, as the Battle of Britain was about to begin, Churchill came on the radio with what was to become another of his most famous wartime speeches:

Watching and listening to these clips reminded me of two anecdotes about the two leaders.

Speechwriting is a waste of time
One is that, when Churchill used to disappear for a few hours to write his broadcast speeches, there were civil servants in Downing Street who used to complain about the amount of time the PM was 'wasting' by taking so much time off to prepare his speeches.

Churchill v. Roosevelt
The other was a story of two speeches that Churchill and Roosevelt were scheduled to make at about the same time. The time difference between the USA and the UK meant that Churchill spoke first.

His script was wired to to White House before Roosevelt had made his speech - at which point, so the story goes, an angry Roosevelt summoned his speechwriters to complain of the inferior quality of their work compared with Churchill's latest masterpiece.

The hapless writers are alleged to have replied: "Sorry Mr President, but the trouble is that the old man rolls his own."