I read that a new political party is in the process of being formed. It has apparently been “secretly under development for more than a year by a network of entrepreneurs, philanthropists and donors”. And it has “access to up to £50 million in funding”.
 
Obviously I believe this story implicitly. After all, it quotes variously “a source”, “one source”,  and “sources”. Getting increasingly specific, it “understands” this, and “it appears” that; this is “said to be”, that “is believed”, and there is a great deal of “the Observer understands”.
 
Yes, it’s the Observer. Of course it is.
 
And it’s clearly pretty convincing. Which is why in a week which has seen so many major stories from Syria, Salisbury, Washington, London, this detailed revelation is the lead story.

It’s clearly a major priority for editor Paul Webster, Michael Savage, described as Policy Editor, and of course Andrew Rawnsley, the political columnist who told us that Labour “should choose Jeremy Corbyn and field him as its leader at the next election, so that the thesis that Labour loses because it is not left-wing enough is finally tested to the destruction that it so richly deserves”. Finger on the pulse as you would expect.
 
He tells us what is required: “a potential audience” - tick; “money” - tick; “a policy platform - tick”; a name – he has heard “Mainstream” mooted and notes that it “sounds moderate and inclusive without being as anaemic as ‘Centre party’.”
 
Obviously, we have to await the verdict of Nick Cohen before we make a firm decision as to whether we embrace membership of the Mainstream Party. Nick was concerned this week with the politics of the forthcoming movie Entebbe and hasn’t had the time to give his well-considered views on a new party. But he will. Not for nothing did the Observer refuse to publish a letter from women in Unite pointing out his misogynist response to the election of Jennie Formby. Don’t worry, Nick will make his views known, but maybe in the Spectator where his politics has a “potential audience”, “money”, “policy platform” etc etc.
 
Enough already.
 
I have no idea whether these meetings of “sources” and “figures from across the political spectrum” have taken place. I have no idea whether the new Mainstream Party will make a formal appearance any time soon or, indeed, any time at all.
 
But I know a flier when I see one.
 
Unattributed and unattributable quotes. A Nick Clegg interview on Radio 4 this morning, arguing that Labour is fractured and that a break would unleash a new kind of politics, straight out of the SDP songbook. Doubtless, there will be more over the next few days. We’ll hear the phrase “breaking the mould” over and over again.
 
But the mould is already broken. And so is the “mainstream”.

​It's about time that the "mainstream" press and "mainstream" politicians recognised this.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: On the anniversary of its release, New Morning. The original acetate together with outtakes. Happy days.

It was midnight UK time when the Sox surrendered the last out and an Opening Day defeat to the Rays.
 
It had all started so well. The Sox arrived in St Petersburg after a short bus ride from Fenway South, with a 22-9 record in the pre-season. They were looking good. And they continued to do so for seven and half innings. Sale was awesome, nine strike-outs, six shut-out innings. The hitting was fine. A Laurel and Hardy moment in the Rays’ outfield gave Nunez an inside-the-park home run. Barnes pitched a 1-2-3.
 
To be honest, it was all pretty routine. A good day at the office. What could possibly go wrong?
 
Pretty much everything. This is why we watch sport, because you couldn’t predict what happened. No-one could expect the implosion that followed, not even the Red Sox Nation, and we’ve seen it all over the years.
 
Kelly couldn’t throw a strike. He walked three. Carson Smith was no better, unable to get what he’s paid for, ground ball double plays rather than the triple that he did manage. Suddenly, we had conceded six runs. All the walks came home to roost. Why was the outfield so shallow?
 
Should Cora have called up young Bobby Poyner, a lefty but someone who has never pitched outside of Double A? Should he have brought in Kimbrel, the best closer in the MLB who he had talked about using in non-save situations?
 
By the time he had Poynter warming up, it was too late. We’d lost the game. Kimbrel never got up from the bench.
 
So far, so Red Sox. Defeat from the jaws of victory. Criticism of the coach for in-game decisions. Relief pitchers blowing a lead. It’s happened before, back on Opening Day 2003, against the same club. The same 4-0 lead from Pedro. The same final score. I remember it well, as I will remember this Opening Day.
 
But there are 161 games to go. And I like the look of the Town Nine this year. I’ve watched a fair number of the Spring Training games, and although I have to keep telling myself that it is only Spring Training, the record was good and the way we won those 22 games was even better.
 
I know that I will have issues with some of Cora’s decisions. It’s all pretty obvious from where I’m sitting, on my sofa, with a glass of wine at hand. It’s a great deal harder from the dugout.
 
Kelly has never walked more than two in his whole career. Smith will get his command back. Cora had every right to expect better than they gave him.
 
So do we.
 
And we’ll get it. We have a powerful line-up. We have a great defense. When they’re all fit, we have a great rotation. And we have JD.
 
What could possibly go wrong?


Today from the everysmith vaults: The Dead on their first 'trip' to the UK and a crazy weekend at the Hollywood Festival outside Newcastle under Lyme. I've had a couple of AUDs for a while, but this is primarily SBD and it seems that the sound guys managed to keep their heads while all around them (including me) were losing theirs!

Sunday morning in the everysmith household. I am wrestling with the prosaic prejudices of Andrew Rawnsley and Nick Cohen in The Observer. Jill is listening to a recent episode of Desert Island Discs on catch-up. The castaway is John Gray, whom Kirstie describes as possessing “a disarming lack of introspection”, which I enjoyed, but what attracts my attention to the extent that I stop reading, is Gray's reference to Isaiah Berlin, a thinker in whom I affected interest in the sixth form.
 
Back in the day, I had been intrigued by Berlin’s essay on Tolstoy, The Hedgehog and the Fox. The title of this famous essay comes from the 7th century Greek poet Archilochus, probably via Erasmus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
 
One suspects that this aphorism is to be taken literally: for all his cunning, the fox cannot defeat the hedgehog’s single form of defence. But it’s fun to take it figuratively and riff on the theme, characterizing assorted writers and philosophers as either foxes or hedgehogs. Those who recognize the world as diverse, a ‘world of fragments’ with a plethora of ideas and systems and those who see the world through the lens of a single, unifying idea.
 
Berlin compares Tolstoy with Dostoyevsky: the former a fox who should be a hedgehog, the latter a down-the-line hedgehog.
 
John Gray, it would appear, is a fox. He is one of a new and growing category of academics, strolling troubadours of erudition and opinion, moving effortlessly from the ivory towers of academe to the op-ed pages of our newspapers: from Oxford and Cambridge to the Sunday Times, from Harvard to BBC2 and PBS, from the literati to the twitterati.
 
This is not a new phenomenon – the ‘media don’ was a fixture of the BBC in my childhood, as I sat transfixed by Hugh Trevor-Roper, AJP Taylor and AJ Ayer. But, unless I misremember, their lectures to camera were specific to their own field. Whereas now, it appears that academic achievement in one discipline is sufficient to justify a forum for views on pretty much anything.
 
I am thinking, not disparagingly at all, of, for example, Niall Ferguson, of Simon Sharma, of Mary Beard, of Bethany Hughes, of John Gray himself.
 
These polymaths are clearly foxes of a high order. They know a great deal about a great many things. They are in the great tradition of “Renaissance” men and women: famous foxes such as Leonardo and Shakespeare as opposed to Proust, say, or Dante.
 
We can all play the game: Hegel and Marx are hedgehogs; Sartre and de Beauvoir are foxes. Plato is a hedgehog; Aristotle a fox. Beethoven is a fox; Bach a hedgehog. Dylan is a fox; Van Morrison a hedgehog. Corbyn is a hedgehog; May is … who knows? Probably neither one nor the other.
 
And me? A second division fox who would give anything to be a hedgehog.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: an old BBC recital by Kathleen Ferrier: Warlock, Britten, Vaughan Williams. Such an exquisite voice which transports me back to the Third Programme in my childhood. In a good way.

I'm very careful on Sunday mornings. At my age, I have to be.

At least half an hour before turning to the Comment section of The Observer, I take 10mg of diazepam, and whilst waiting for it to kick in, carry out a series of deep breathing exercises to bring down my heart rate.

Only then am I able to turn, tentatively, to Nick Cohen's column. Usually, whatever its apparent subject, I can read through to the end with its gratuitous and irrelevant slur against Corbyn without too much difficulty. After all, I’ve been doing it for years. With the appropriate preparation and medication, it is possible to complete the entire piece without serious risk to one’s long-term health.

Not this morning.

Even by Cohen’s standards, the attack on Jennie Formby is appalling. Take a deep breath, hold your nose, and read this:

“Unite is trying to force through the appointment of its official Jennie Formby as labour’s new general secretary on the grounds that she is the feminist candidate who will challenge the patriarchy. Its egalitarian argument would carry greater force were she not McCluskey’s former mistress. Was it for this Emily Davison died?”

Where to start? Unite is not trying to ‘force’ anything through; it is backing her in an appointment process. Yes, she is a feminist candidate and I hope she will challenge the patriarchy. But she has a great many other credentials for the role as well. Not least 30 years as a union official, working as a Regional Officer, National Officer, Political Director and Regional Secretary. None of which has any bearing as far as Cohen is concerned, because her entire career is reduced to one thing.

She is “McCluskey’s former mistress”.

For fuck’s sake. Of what conceivable relevance is this? And who uses the word ‘mistress’ these days? Emily Davison and Emily Dickinson would both be turning in their graves. If this is the kind of language used in 2018 by an Oxford-educated writer, then yes, they did die in vain.

So with stomach churning and heart racing, I ask what the hell The Observer is doing providing a platform for this offensive nonsense?

At a push, I can accept that Cohen has a right to think this kind of misogyny, and even express it. But I don’t want to see it in my Sunday newspaper.

Equally, if Mohammed bin Salman wants to spend a million or so on charm offensive advertisements, there is nothing to prevent him doing so. But I don’t want to see them in my copy of The Guardian. And while we’re on the subject, the editor of The Guardian may believe that Leveson 2 should not be progressed, but this is not a view I expect from my daily paper.

These examples are, I’m afraid, indicative of a conscious move by The Guardian and The Observer away from their once proud tradition and important role within a responsible and free press.

They have taken their new format too literally. They are, increasingly, tabloid tat. And although I have threatened it before, I really think that the subscription they took from my account on the 1st of March, will be the last.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter from the Boar’s Head Coffee House in 1961. Historically fascinating. Musically great.

Warwick District Council presides over an area with nearly 600 empty houses. 33 of them have been empty for ten years or more; 79 for five years or more; 188 for more than two years.
 
Warwick District Council can do something about this. It has the power to take these houses over and make them homes again through EDMOs (empty dwelling management orders).
 
But there are still 600 empty houses which could be utilized for much-needed social housing, to help the rising tide of the homeless.
 
Instead, the council is proposing to build new offices, selling off its current site in order to create new private housing.
 
No affordable homes. No social housing. No council housing.
 
Absolute zero.
 
This is in a district which is one of the most affluent towns in the sixth richest county in the country, a district which is represented by an MP who has made homelessness a priority, raising the issue of the Riverside development in parliament and campaigning hard to make the council see sense.
 
To defeat this proposal is crucial, because in our district, it is symbolic. It is only one development, but it represents everything that is wrong with the process and the people who drive it.
 
The petition signed by thousands goes unheeded. The campaigns by Matt Western are ignored. The huge opposition from residents is dismissed. The highly visible and increasing homelessness is left to under-funded charities and over-worked volunteers.
 
But the Riverside development is voted through, with only Labour councillors opposing it.
 
The ultimate decision on this profligacy with public finances for the benefit of private developers will now rest with Sajid Javid, the minister for Housing, Communities and Local Government. But, even though his own directive insists that new developments must include at least 40% affordable housing, I have no great hopes that he will come to the right decision.
 
Not least because we discover that, over the last two years, he has ‘surrendered’ £292 million which had been allocated for the affordable homes we so desperately need. Plus a further £379 million which had been ear-marked for Starter Homes projects, a so-called ‘flagship’ government policy.

In total, there is £1.1 billion – yes, billion -  of the housing budget which has not been used, despite the platitudes about the housing crisis which we heard from the minister on the Today programme this morning. (Unsurprisingly, he was not questioned at all about the spending shortfall.)

​He did, however, make one point which local councillors of his own party in Warwick, Leamington and Whitnash, would do well to take on board.
 
The councils have the power to make a difference. But they are not using it. We, the residents and voters of Warwick District, can also make a difference. We can replace them with people who will.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: The heritage of the Grateful Dead continues. LiveDead 69 the other week, Dead & Co rumoured to be heading to Europe this autumn. And through my speakers this morning, a great show from Broken Arrow, with David Gans and Phil Lesh.
​

Last month’s absurdity of the Telegraph, the Sun, the Express and the Times revealing that Corbyn had contact with a Czeck spy came to an end with the groveling apology from Ben Bradley MP, but still lingers on in the mainstream press.
 
Despite, or rather because, Corbyn pointed out on social media that, although the charges were risible, they were indicative of the approach dictated by tax-exile press barons.
 
“Change is coming” he promised.

But yesterday, we watched as Channel Four News allowed Rees-Mogg to claim that Corbyn had voted against the Good Friday Agreement. (He didn’t. He voted for it and made an eloquent speech in its favour.)
 
Yesterday, we watched as, during Prime Minister’s Questions, the BBC scrolled a succession of tweets down the side of the live footage of Corbyn’s questions. The tweets were from someone called Carrie Symonds. You may not know the name. But you should. She is the Tory Director of Communications.
 
The BBC being as impartial as ever, right?
 
But that was last month, and it was winter. Today is the first day of Spring. We look forward with renewed hope, optimism and all that.
 
So the news today is … that Leveson Part 2, promised by Cameron and still not delivered, has been cancelled. The enquiry into corporate malpractice and corrupt relationships between press and police will not take place.
 
But that’s OK, because the Government “will take action to safeguard the lifeblood of our democratic discourse and tackle the challenges our media face today, not a decade ago.”
 
At the end of the Part 1 enquiry, The Right Honourable Sir Brian Leveson stated “that there is still a legitimate expectation on behalf of the public and, in particular, the alleged victims of phone hacking and other unlawful conduct, that there will be a full public examination of the circumstances that allowed the behavious to develop and clear reassurances that nothing of the same scale could occur again: that is what they were promised. … I do not believe we are yet even near that position.”
 
As we have seen recently, we are not. And the malpractice continues daily. The bias, the bigotry, the fantasy is a regular part of my daily reading of the mainstream press and our daily listening and viewing of the BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel Four.
 
But we are promised by the Culture Secretary that the ‘free’ press will be ‘safeguarded’. Action is promised to ‘tackle the challenges our media face today’.
 
Like the truth, for example? Like honesty, fairness, impartiality, objectivity? Because these  are these challenges for the media today.
 
If change is coming, let it be soon.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Those extraordinary sessions at The Supper Club in November 1993. Playing alternately the soundboards and some high quality audience tapes. As ever, am preferring the AUDs.

​A curious by-product of the Brexit negotiations is the return of existentialism, or, more accurately, the language of existentialism.
 
Every debate, every vote, every meeting is now an ‘existentialist crisis’. Every pundit peppers their arguments with words such as ‘freedom’, ‘responsibility’, ‘choice’, ‘essence’ and ‘identity’. I have even read of one columnist’s ‘existential angst’ at the prospect of a possible result.
 
And, then, a couple of days ago, David Davis accused the European Commission of ‘bad faith’.
 
‘Mauvais foi’ is, of course, a key concept in Sartre’s thinking, and in the context of the Brexit negotiations, it is damning. It refers to self-deception, the way in which we think that we do not have the freedom to make a choice because we are afraid of the consequences of making this choice. (It’s more complex than that of course but it is early on Monday morning after a late night- see below!)
 
Sitting in Deux Magots or Café Flore, comme d’habitude, the example which springs immediately and inevitably to Sartre’s mind is that of the waiter, who is striving to be everything which he thinks a waiter should be. In other words, he is play-acting a rôle, the role of a waiter whose essence is to be a waiter.
 
But in order to play the role, he must know, by definition, that he is not actually a waiter at all. He is a conscious human being who is deceiving himself into thinking that he is a waiter.
 
From the example of this waiter, Sartre develops the notion that while we may pretend that we do not have freedom of choice, we cannot pretend that we are not ourselves; that we are not conscious human beings disconnected from our pragmatically-lived lives. (His conclusion, famously, is that we are ‘condemned to be free’.)
 
Many of the ‘players’ in the Brexit melodrama are clearly playing roles. I am thinking here in particular of Johnson and Rees-Mogg.
 
The former is the jester, the fool, the buffoon. The latter is the “MP for the eighteenth century”, the toff from the kids’ comics of my generation.
 
Sartre points out that his waiter is too “waiteresque”: “his movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid”.
 
Johnson and Rees-Mogg – and Davis and Barnier also in different ways – are deceiving themselves into thinking that they are authentic politicians. Their over-exaggerated histrionics, their method acting, betrays them.
 
They are acting inauthentically.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: My late night was the result of attending a gig by Live Dead 69. Tom Constanten of the Dead, Slick Aguilar of the Starship and Mark Karan of Ratdog gave forty or fifty ageing groovers a great show last night, close - on occasion - to authentic performances of some of the songs that defined us.

This is the set list. Not just any set list either. This is Slick Aguilar's set list!

​The show is firmly and clearly in my head, but as part of a continuing winding down from last night's high, I'm playing a show from Asbury Park a couple of years ago: Live Dead 69 with the Jefferson family.

An interview on Radio 4 this morning, with Antony Gormley, reminds me that Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge is about to re-open after being closed for ‘refurbishment’.
 
I confess I am always a little apprehensive about these programmes of refurbishment in general and this exercise has caused me not a little concern, because the Kettle’s Yard I remember was not an art gallery. It was a home with some great art.
 
For a time, back in the late sixties, I would walk past Kettle’s Yard a couple of times a day, on a journey between my rooms in college and the digs of a girlfriend in Castle Street. In those days, there was no signage to invite one inside. It was all word of mouth. And it was from a friend that I heard that Jim Ede and his wife Helen would hold open house most afternoons, offering tea and guided tours to those who were lucky enough to knock on the door at the appropriate time.
 
On a couple of occasions, I was one of those.
 
I wasn’t totally visually illiterate then, but the art I liked was almost exclusively figurative. Paintings that told a story. Narrative art if you like.
 
The work that I saw on my first visit was revelatory, despite - or more probably because of - the fact that I was stoned. Very stoned. I doubt that I would have ventured to knock had I not been.
 
Helen Ede – it was just Helen on that day - must have realized this, but I was treated with courtesy and respect, given tea and shown round the collection. I was told stories of Ben Nicholson, David Jones, Miro. I saw sculptures by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
 
But I also saw odd stones and pebbles and bits of coloured glass and weathered wood.
 
In my normal, unintoxicated, hard-line rationalist state, I would have paid little heed to these found objects. But on that day, they were wonderful. Not for what they were, but for how they appeared. How they balanced and complemented the art, how the domesticity of the rooms seemed to be the ideal environment for their display.
 
There was no shop, no café. There were no little typewritten notes telling us what to think. Just a couple welcoming you to their house and sharing their love of art.
 
I felt completely at home.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Yesterday was Shostakovich String Quartets, all of them, from the first to the fifteenth. Today, it’s studio outtakes from Dylan’s Desire sessions. As ever, I am unable to understand Bob's decisions to take one cut and abandon others. 

There ought to be a word for it. There probably is a word for it in German. But the loss of one’s most precious sense, the sense that plays a central role in one’s life and work, appears not to have a specific medical or psychological term in the English language.
 
For Beethoven, whose extraordinary String Quartet in A minor, the Opus 132, I heard played superbly by the Brodsky Quartet on Friday evening, it was loss of hearing.

For Bruce Chatwin, it was loss of his sight. “People would compliment me on my ‘eye’” he wrote, “and my eyes, in rebellion, gave out.

​“After a strenuous bout of New York, I woke one morning half-blind. The eye specialist said there was nothing wrong organically. Perhaps I'd been looking too closely at pictures? Perhaps I should try some long horizons?”
 
As John Berger taught us, there are different ways of seeing. And different ways of hearing.
 
Beethoven’s late quartets were written in silence. He was profoundly deaf. But he was recovered from a life-threatening gastric illness and was ready to address in his music his sense of mortality. Nowhere is this contemplation on life and death more emotionally charged and exquisitely expressed than in the third – slow – movement of the A minor, a Song of Thanksgiving for his recovery.

I have never heard it played so beautifully or so slowly, and listening with my eyes closed – a procedure on my eyes 48 hours previously had left me with headaches and blurred vision – I thought of that scene in Huxley’s Point Counterpoint, when the nihilist Spandrell introduces Rampion to this piece, claiming that it proves everything – God and goodness amongst other things – and that only Beethoven could achieve this “counterpoint of serenities”.
 
And one reason why it could only be Beethoven is precisely because his most precious sense was gone. His deafness forced him into introspection. The sounds he heard in his head are the sounds of his hopes and his anguish, uncontaminated by the outside world. And he heard them in the purest manner. He did not sit at the piano to compose. He did not make the compromises of traditional composition. He poured it directly to the paper in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
 
All this went through my own head during that third movement as the Brodsky dispensed a salve on my self-pity and paranoia at the possible prognosis for my precious sight.
 
It was a genuine catharsis, a much-needed purgation of pity and fear. I feel better now.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Unaccountably, this is the first time I have seen the Brodsky perform live and I resolve that it shall not be the last. But meantime, delving into the digital vaults, I discovered this morning The Juliet Letters, a joint enterprise with Elvis Costello. I can’t remember acquiring it or playing it before, but it is strangely affecting. 

The word is, Oprah Winfrey is ‘entertaining the idea’ of running for the presidency, after making a powerful speech at the Golden Globe Awards the other week. She is being hailed as ‘the antidote to Trump”, with Stephen Spielberg claiming that we need ‘a mindful, empathetic human being in the White House’.
 
No argument there. But I suspect that the key word in that first dentence is not ‘idea’ but ‘entertaining’.
 
Trump is a TV celebrity turned politician. And the States has also given us Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura. In the UK, we have showmen like Boris Johnson in key positions, regularly making idiots of themselves and the electorate with ludicrous actions and crass statements.
 
The ‘celebrity culture’ is not merely taking over our TV and movie screens. It is taking over our lives and our national institutions.
 
What’s equally concerning is the way that this culture, propagated by the mainstream media, forces even principled politicians to play the same game.
 
Yes, I am thinking of Jeremy Corbyn.

​Politics is now profoundly personalized. It is easier to relate to an individual than to an idea or ideology. And for a lazy journalist, of which there are currently far too many across the political spectrum, it is so much simpler to present a caricature than to explain complex issues, even though almost all decisions and policies are now collegial rather than individual.
 
It was no accident that many voters told Labour canvassers that ‘they couldn’t vote for Corbyn’, until the election campaign suddenly forced the mainstream media to put policies on the front page.
 
Right now, Corbyn has a massive following. He is popular but not, willingly, populist. If he is not a celebrity, he has celebrity status. He appears at rock gigs. Thousands serenade him:  “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn”.
 
I don’t join in (or at least not without a sense of irony). But then I am neither a Corbynite nor a Corbynista; I am Labour.
 
Yes, I am impressed by the way in which Corbyn remains principled, quietly spoken, committed to ideas and policies, steadfast in his refusal to involve himself in personal abuse.
 
But my allegiance is not to him personally. It is to the the political philosophy he espouses and uses his celebrity to promote.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: A December 2000 gig from the avant-jazz-funk band Medeski, Martin & Wood. Not everyone’s cup of tea – it is, after all, a fusion of avant, jazz and funk – but now and then, I'm in the mood.