intercourse with biscuits a modern miscellany

The other day when I wrote about Prince Charles meddling at the Copenhagen summit, I had no idea how far his attempts to influence policy have gone in the past. The Guardian has revealed that he’s written to eight separate Whitehall departments over the last three years.

Prince Charles seems to have forgotten that he is ultimately just a living tourist attraction. The Royal Family are not our betters, they are an accident of history. Like anyone they have the right to contact the government and express their opinions but it seems Charles has been actively trying to use his influence to change policy.

The Guardian claims that the documents it has obtained reveal that the Prince’s advisors attempted to influence senior cabinet ministers to bring the government’s policies in line with Charles’s beliefs on hospital buildings, architecture and eco-towns.

In a nice piece of detail, ministers apparently call the correspondence ” the black spider memos” because of Charles’s awful handwriting. They have refused to release the content of the letters but it’s clear that he has been lobbying ministers consistently.

The content of the letters should be revealed. Charles is a public figure. He and his family receive public money. His role is essentially ceremonial but he is clearly acting as a political figure in an attempt to push his causes. If he wants to do this, he should renounce his future claim to the throne.

Both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair have acted to prevent correspondence between ministers and the Royal Family from being published and Christopher Graham, the information commissioner, has supported that decision.

Some argue that Charles has the right to be instructed in the business of government prior to his ascent to the throne. That may be the case but his actions overstep that requirement and move him from the position of political neutral. He’s an actor in political decisions in a way his mother has never been.

Charles’s aides have denied that he’s hassled ministers or been politically contentious but a former advisor, Mark Bolland, revealed that Charles laughably referred to himself as a “dissident” working against the political consensus. It has also been reported that he railed against “a truly absurd degree of politically correct interference” to former Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvine.

If Prince Charles so desperately wants to push his political agenda, he should renounce his position as a member of the Royal Family and stand for election. It is not his place or his role to take a political position. The fact that he uses his unusually privileged position to secretly lobby elected officials is not acceptable.

Prince Charles lives in an archaic world where he believes he is in some way more qualified to comment on these issues than anyone else. Having lived his life in a privileged vacuum-packed world, he is, if any, less qualified. It’s easy to be snobby about architecture when you’ve spent your life in palaces.

I just had one of my big music geek moments of annoyance. It proves two things – I have read too many Clash books and need to get out more. Reading John Doran’s otherwise pretty decent piece on the 30th anniversary of London Calling in this week’s NME, I stumbled upon this paragraph:

NME had been Clash supporters from the start, and in his review [of London Calling, Charles] Shaar Murray declared the album their first that was “truly equal in stature to their legend.”

Now it’s true that Charles Shaar Murray did change his mind about The Clash, it’s not quite true that NME supported the band from the start. In fact Shaar Murray initially reviewed the band in typically acidic style:

“They are the kind of garage band who should be speedily returned to their garage, preferably with the motor running.”

This kind of small plastering over of history happens every month in the music press as it picks over the sparse carcasses of the great rock bands.

We move ever closer to an agreed story that simplifies everything – the Rolling Stones reduced to a tug-of-war between Mick and Keith, Bowie as the shape-shifting genius standing alone, The Smiths as propelled purely by the sheer force of Morrissey’s unusual personality. It’s boring because it smooths out all the complexities, turning the story of every interesting rock’n’roll band into fodder for an afternoon movie.

Prince Charles has given a very Churchillian speech about climate change in Copenhagen. To the assembled great and good he talked in the broad sweeping rhetoric of battles and survival. It was a good speech by the wrong man. His insistent reference to the many opportunities he has had to speak to experts and luminaries remind us of one thing – he has lived a life where his opinion has been taken into account based on the circumstances of his birth not on any real achievement.

I don’t disagree with the content of his speech but I do disagree with the continued reverence of him and his family, a group of people who have achieved absolutely nothing. He has been an average businessman (Duchey Originals had to be saved from bankruptcy) and a persistent nimby-ish pest when it comes to architecture. Charles, you’re just waiting to get your face on a postage stamp. Your children are not extraordinary and neither are you. Be quiet, encourage tourism and leave the real issues to experts. Royal families have always been part of the problem, not the solution.

Google launched a new Android app this week called Google Goggles. Point your phone camera at an object or logo and Goggle will dive into the search database to pull up results about it. Those who’ve tried Goggles already say it’s pretty good but there’s more to it. Google’s photo sharing site Picasa already features facial recognition and if it weren’t for Google’s concession to “privacy concerns”, Google Goggles would be able to do that as well. It’s simple a matter of enabling the feature and that’s a big deal.

State security services already have systems that can rifle databases using facial recognition data as a query. But facial recognition in Google Goggles would put a watered down version of that capability in the hands of anyone with a compatible Android phone. It’s another step into an augmented reality world where on the plus side we’ll be able to use our data and data created by other people as a extension of our memories. On the downside it will mean we’ll be even closer to a world where it’ll be impossible to slake off your past.

For a long time, it was possible to move city and change your personality and reputation entirely. You were tied by National Insurance records if you wanted to make use of official services but your social reputation could be white-washed. Now we’re coming to a time when it’ll be necessary to actively work to totally change your looks, perhaps even opt for facial surgery as facial recognition software becomes more advanced and more able to see through superficial additions like beards, glasses or wigs.

Social interactions like dating or networking will be utterly altered with people able to snap a picture of someone from the other side of a room and pull up openly available data on their target. With organisations like Google, Twitter and Facebook acting aggressively to diminish our traditional concept (look at Google head Eric Schmidt’s recent “if you’ve got nothing to hide”-style comments on privacy), vast amount of information will be out there. Youthful indiscretions will be permanent. And moves like the Tories made to prevent the widespread publication of the Bullingdon Club photo featuring Johnson, Cameron and Osborne will be much harder to achieve.

It’s possible that the transparency of almost unremovable internet tracks will mean that our attitude to human failings like drug use or infidelity. But I seriously doubt it. In Britain especially, we have retained a very Victorian attitude to sex that seems to expect public figures to engage in only missionary sex with the lights off before whispering a silent apology and falling into a guilty slumber. While French politicians live in a climate that has swung too far the other way (politicians talking morality while supporting several mistresses), we’ve got odd standard for people in public life.

People in their late-teens and early-twenties are becoming increasingly blase about privacy, throwing more and more of their lives online but with innovations such as Google Goggles moving forward at a tremendous pace, their openness may also mean their embarrassment is just a snapshot away.

Piers Morgan was involved. As was Simon Cowell and the evil empire that calls itself a record industry. And yet, the Susan Boyle story still makes me smile. Because the woman at the heart of it isn’t cynical and she has got something she dreamed about. It just works, even with all the inevitable tabloid trauma that surrounded it.

Her struggle with sudden fame after Britain’s Got Talent has been covered in extensive detail (and was picked over purulently during parts of last night’s The Susan Boyle Story) but she seems to have recovered. Those who’d suggest she shouldn’t have been allowed to have taken part because of her slight learning difficulties may mean well but they are effectively saying: people like her should be allowed to dream of stardom.

Watching Boyle enjoying herself at the heart of her own review show – singing with Elaine Page (the singer she said she dreamed of emulating) and the London cast of Les Miserables – was a touching sight.

Boyle’s not faking her love of singing. I think she enjoys it as purely as she did the day she walked on to the Britain’s Got Talent stage and belted out I Dreamed A Dream. It was a moment that you could not have manufactured, even if Cowell has slopped a half ton of gloss on her story since.

And I don’t think that Simon Cowell could or would exploit Boyle. There’s two reasons for that: firstly, I don’t think he’s a nasty bloke (despite the opinions of half of the population) and secondly, if he let Boyle down, unlike non-entities like Steve Brookstein, her story has tapped into the public’s imagination.

If Cowell let Boyle down, he’d face an enormous amount of flak. When he recalled asking “have we ruined this woman’s life?” after the final of Britain’s Got Talent, I did believe him. More fool me perhaps.

Unlike last night’s plastic confrontation between Olly “Mr Potatohead” Murs and Joe “No Functioning Genitalia” McEldry, Susan Boyle comes came over as a real human being who had lived a fairly trying life.

Talking about her loneliness after the death of her mother she revealed the kind of fragility and sadness that X-Factor contestants desperately try to manufacture. And meeting her childhood hero Donny Osmond, she was as shy as a teenager, struggling to look at him.

But when people suggest that Boyle is not strong enough to face her fame, I have to disagree. She seems as if she has move past the initial shock and tapped into a steeliness bred into her by a rough ride through childhood and adult life.

Boyle has always been treated like an outsider – fame won’t feel that different to her. That we still sneer at the fact that she’s not pretty is a shame for us as a society. It’s not something she’s all that fussed about: “Now when I look in the mirror, I see a sophisticated lady. I think I scrub up quite well.”

The dream isn’t perfect, of course. It never could be. It was quite heartbreaking to hear, Boyle talk about what she still longed for: “I dream about security and maybe finding the right person.” But my cynicism can’t knock down the idea of this woman who dreamed about being a professional singer achieving that goal (and selling over 4m albums to boot) despite the initial eye-rolling scorn of the world.

Let’s not forget how the world greeted her appearance before she sang: the studied sneer of Piers Morgan, the scrunched up face of the eye-rolling girl in the Britain’s Got Talent Crowd. If it seems like a fairytale, can’t we just let Boyle enjoy it?