UR TV CAST

However small the actual tax increases proposed, they enabled Tory propaganda once again to portray Labour as a party of high taxation. In the meantime, I hope that those contemplating a pink protest at Packington Hall will remember that intolerance covers both – in fact, all – genders.. They argue that, had Tracy not fled from the interview in tears, she might already be on her way to a career in one of the rougher areas of the media.It’s possible. They point out that many students of Dr Griffiths have used his crash-course in brutality to good effect – Vanessa Feltz humiliating people on TV, Amanda Craig writing a take-no-prisoners satirical novel, David Sexton causing the same novel to be withdrawn and rewritten. Caught between envy and contempt for their more visible colleagues, a whole generation of English academics went bonkers and tried to destroy reading altogether by teaching literary theory.The luckless Griffiths made his name at Cambridge just when these changes were taking their toll. He wrote his one book, developed a reputation for the rough-tongued campery that passes for wit in academic circles, and became a judge on the Booker Prize.

If ever there was a cry of pain, it was his description of A S Byatt’s Possession as “the kind of novel I’d write if I didn’t know I couldn’t write novels.”Some have said that it is healthy that such people are in positions of power at the modern university. “I’d rather have a heart to heart with another gay man about the ups and downs on the relationship front and get his gay take on the new football season.”If finding converts to his cause at the Manchester Mardi Gras is difficult for Charlie (and I can’t see him being able to contribute much to the gay take on the new football season), he could always return to our old Alma Mater, Trinity College, to discuss matters of intolerance with Dr Eric Griffiths, the English don who humiliated an 18-year-old interviewee on the grounds that she was female, came from Essex and was called Tracy.Although much has been made in the press about the fact Dr Griffiths is gay and the son of a docker, neither background nor sexual orientation have anything to do with his peculiar taste for sadistic snobbery. The division between learned criticism and the vapid opinion-mongering favoured in Sunday newspapers and late-night arts shows on TV became blurred. This very week Manchester’s Mardi Gras Gay festival has introduced for the first time a charge of pounds 5 to be paid by any heterosexual man who wishes to join the party. In addition, straight men will be required to wear a Pledge Band on their arm, presumably to avoid misunderstandings and save time. “For far too long the Gay Village has been overrun by straights,” the editor of Gay Times, David Smith, has explained. In vain will he point out that he is not shocked by the behaviour on his land – as a farmer, he sees far worse every day – but is simply concerned by the litter and possible effects on ground-nesting game.

Unless he has changed a lot since we were at Cambridge together, which seems unlikely since he was one of those people who was 50 even when he was 20, a kinder, more tolerant and easygoing man could not be imagined.
Perhaps the best defence that he could offer is to point out that exclusivity is not the preserve of heterosexuals. Fencing had been broken, disruption caused, he said, not to mention “all manner of items relating to men’s activities strewn about”. Hence the pigshit, which was to be liberally spread throughout the woods. Doubtless there are already plans for a pink protest march, with poor old Charlie becoming an emblem of heterosexism, class privilege and homophobia in the columns of the gay press. A wood on his estate is a favourite spot for gay trysts, The Times revealed last week, and Charlie, now known as Lord Guernsey of Packington Hall, rather wishes it wasn’t.

IT WAS something of a shock, I admit, to read that my old pal Charlie Guernsey has gone public with a plan to cover the homosexuals of Solihull with pig manure. At one and the same time they resented the South and craved its bounty and opportunities.”They still do Perhaps, after independence, they’ll give over.. Its Labour councils are like baronies, run by latter-day thanes and lairds. It harboured, for many years, the worst kind of deferential Toryism. Until 10 years ago no Catholic had ever played for Glasgow Rangers.No wonder the new Scottish elite would rather fashion a different history.

Linda Colley, in her book Britons, describes some of the Scots of 1707 thus: “As for the wealthy or ambitious minority, they were torn between anger at the loss of Scotland’s ancient independence and a natural desire for a wider stage than their own homeland could afford them. It’s little wonder, then, that many Englishmen opposed the Union; they weren’t keen on being yoked to feudal Scots, lots of whom seemed intent on restoring the Stuarts. English progressives were also aware that the representative element had always been much weaker in the Scots parliament than in the English, and that Scotland was largely run by great estates-holders.England, too, was (as it is now) a much more heterogeneous and polyglot place. Defoe characterised English genius as being created through a “mongrel, half-bred race”. London was a haven for successive generations of immigrants – I should know.