TWENTY MEN WITH A PAST Precedented people Vol. 2 BY WILL COE Twenty men of today assessed by those who preceded them. A selection of articles published during 2011 in Egopendium. TWENTY MEN WITH A PAST Precedented people Vol. 2 by WILL COE A Wilcooperative publication Published in Great Britain 2011 by Wilcooperative Publishing 59 Crow Lane Husborne Crawley Bedford MK43 0XA UK Smashwords edition ISBN 978-0-9570025-3-1 Copyright Will Coe 2011 The right of Will Coe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Smashwords Edition, License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. TWENTY MEN WITH A PAST Table of Contents Chapter 1: Julian Assange by Thomas Paine Chapter 2: David Beckham by Adonis Chapter 3: Silvio Berlusconi by Garibaldi Chapter 4: Harold Camping by Nostradamus Chapter 5: Simon Cowell by PT Barnum Chapter 6: James Dyson by George Stephenson Chapter 7: Chris Evans by Alvar Liddell Chapter 8: Colin Firth by Emil Jannings Chapter 9: Bill Gates by Charles Babbage Chapter 10: Bob Geldof by William Wilberforce Chapter 11: Damien Hirst by Caravaggio Chapter 12: Boris Johnson by Dick Whittington Chapter 13: Nelson Mandela by Toussaint Louverture Chapter 14: Peter Mandelson by Niccolo Machiavelli Chapter 15: Paul McKenna by Franz Mesmer Chapter 16: Rupert Murdoch by Randolph Hearst Chapter 17: Vladimir Putin by Lavrentiy Beria Chapter 18: Nicolas Sarkozy by Napoleon Bonaparte Chapter 19: David Walliams by Will Kemp Chapter 20: Mark Zuckerberg by Karl Marx Chapter 1: Julian Assange by Thomas Paine ET TU, JULIAN? Tom Paine assesses Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame When you upset the world order, as I did and the editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, is emphatically doing, the thickness of your skin is fully measured. Dermatologically speaking, you need to be an insensitive freak to be a proper revolutionary. You’ll make an igloo of friends but an arsenal of enemies. Look what happened to me - ‘Maligned on every side, execrated, shunned and abhorred’, is how Bob Ingersoll, ‘The Great Agnostic’, summed up my life. Six people came to my funeral in New York even though the late President, John Adams, had said, “Without [Tom Paine’s] pen, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” The lesson being that reputations are hard earned and easily lost. I was looking to Julian for a bit of a revival in my reputation.  Because, even though it’s come round to my way of thinking, posterity hasn’t treated me much better than my contemporaries did. The English rescued my bones from a sorry American grave and then managed to lose every one of them from cranium to metatarsus. So you would think me immune to criticism. Not quite. Not when it comes from someone you’d expect to revere my memory. Betrayal by a fellow traveller always hurts. When Julian Assange characterised me as a ‘hidden curse’ in the headline of an article he wrote, my soul recoiled. ‘You as well, Julian?’ I sighed. Happily, it was just a literary device to encourage readership (Julian’s better at hacking computers than writing articles). His real purpose was to support my contention that, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” To judge from the hysterical reaction of the US government, Julian’s Wikileaks organisation is certainly threatening to do that. Their reaction upsets me. From free-speaking anti-colonialists to censorious imperialists in a couple of centuries. So much for the First Amendment. It seems Julian’s policing that now, and it doesn’t make for an easy life. We share a fundamental belief, that man is above country. Julian is rootless. His home is his suitcase and his front door is his passport. His country, Australia, officially despises him, has considered trying him for treason and cancelling his passport. Without success, because unofficially he’s something of a ‘bonzer bloke’. Whether he can escape other jurisdictions is in the balance. If he is in my image, the omens are not favourable. England, where I was born, charged me with seditious libel for penning  ‘The Rights of Man’, forcing me to flee to France. Always an excitable destination, France took me to her bosom as the only member of the French National Convention who had hardly a word of French. Then, within the year, she had me in a Parisian jail waiting only for the chalked cross on my door to confirm my day of execution. Fortunately, Robespierre died before I could be intimately acquainted with the promiscuous Mme Guillotine. Time front cover The Swedes have it in for Julian on the grounds that he is an over-insistent lover, not a charge ever levelled at me. I had not previously regarded Swedes as devious conspiratorial puppets of the CIA but this (and, of course, the books of Stieg Larsson) has brought their national characteristics into question. Julian has taken refuge in the country of my birth, perhaps believing that my countrymen are a fair-minded, incorruptible lot. ‘Perfidious Albion’ is obviously not a term familiar to the world of hackers and leakers which he bestrides. It is with some distress that I find the Americans to be the real Assange hunters. I helped construct their Constitution thinking that I could engrain the right of all men to freedom in their hearts. It seems that I was better at making corsets than framing American minds. America, who vanquished oppression, is now the engine of global repression. How much of myself is there in Julian? We both tilt at windmills like Don Quixote but perhaps Julian is short of a Sancho. I had Ben Franklin - a highly superior Sancho - to point my lance. He has a small team of “dedicated and overworked” staff, as well as 800 part-time volunteers and thousands of supporters. No Sanchos unless you count Vaughan Smith, sustainable farmer, elegant restaurateur and dashing war correspondent. No disrespect, but if Vaughan and Swedish justice was all that lay between me and extradition to the States on espionage charges, I’d be worried that I wasn’t even going to get a funeral, let alone more than six mourners. Tom Paine’s opinion was interpreted in July 2011. Image attribution Photo: Assange poster, anorak.co.uk Photo: Paine statue, bbc.co.uk Photo: Time cover, fyash1229.wordpress.com   **** Chapter 2: David Beckham by Adonis AUREIS TESTICULIS Adonis assesses archetypal metrosexual, David Beckham Very occasionally, someone’s life can be a question mark. David Beckham’s life poses the question that I was meant to answer. Can vanity ever be deserved? Is he as beautiful as I was? Is he as accomplished at football as I was skilled at hunting? If the answer to both is yes then he is someone all women can love beyond reason and all men envy without resentment.   I don’t think he’s quite there yet. If he knows anything about me, he won’t ever want to get there. The lesson of being loved by all is that you become the payback for other people’s crimes and passions. You end up dead way before your time. I have no expectation that David has ever considered whether he and I are alike. I don’t mind that he probably doesn’t know anything about me. For him, the classical texts are likely to be found in the Marvel comics not Robert Graves’ ‘Greek Myths’. No matter, I was not revered for my intellect either. There’s nothing I can teach him. It’s not that he’d be a slow pupil, it’s just that you can’t learn your way out of fate’s clutches. I might be able to help him understand what has happened, what is happening to him, but perhaps it is better for me to help other people to understand him rather than he try to understand himself. When a legend grows around you like a glorious climbing rose it’s best not to worry at the prickles that protect the flowers. They cause bleeding, of which I do quite enough for the both of us (I’m responsible for the colour of roses and anemones, if you too haven’t read your Greek myths). When a person looks like you and has the same effect on other people as you did, it doesn’t have to mean that they’re the same in every way. I can’t run away from the fact that I’m a bit of a god clouded in myth while David is all gorgeous flesh and blood. There’s no mystery about David’s birth. He’s the son of Sandra, a hairdresser, and David “Ted” Beckham, a kitchen fitter. There was nothing unusual about Sandra’s confinement. My beginnings are far more remarkable. I came out of a tree and they say my daddy was not only a god but also my grandpappy. Of course, it’s not how you come into the world it’s what you do when you’re there. David Beckham plays football very well. How significant is that to his fame? Measured in sporting terms, David was never the best footballer in the world. Or anywhere near. Measured in terms of column inches in the world’s press, David is the most famous footballer in the world. Other sportsmen only come close when infamy intrudes on their fame (OJ, Tiger, Zizou - need I go on?). Can you see what I’m driving at? You can’t define David Beckham as a footballer. He’s much more than that. He is a legend. Like a Greek god.  But not a Greek god because the world has too many of us already and because he doesn’t show any of the of the character weaknesses and flaws you come to expect from a Greek god. In that respect, he’s very like me. Being without obvious faults, I was a very atypical and short-lived god. But most of all, David resembles me because he is becoming a female fantasy figure more than a male one. Aphrodite and Victoria Beckham compare attributes Please let me explain. David wouldn’t be an Adonis figure if Victoria hadn’t muscled in on the act. She may be stick thin but you won’t find many more powerful women. She’s up there with the women in my life, Aphrodite and Persephone. You don’t get many heavier hitters than the goddesses of sex and death, yet Victoria seems to be in their league. When David was transferred from Manchester United to Real Madrid a much more important transfer took place. David ditched the man who had started the Madrid ball rolling, his long-time agent, Tony Stephens of SFX Europe, and bedded down with Simon Fuller and his company 19 Entertainment which already managed Victoria’s career.  That was when Victoria took over his life entirely and turned him from a boy who kicked a ball into the archetypal metrosexual, a kind of work-in-progress god for both sexes. She called him ‘Goldenballs’. ( A name once given in Latin form to Richard Orescuiltz, Lord of Sharnecote. She should have stuck with Aureis Testiculis, less derogatory, somehow.) I don’t think irony was intended because Victoria has ensured that he lives up to his name. He is now the lucrative icon much sought after by clothing designers, health and fitness specialists, fashion magazines, perfume and cosmetics manufacturers, hair stylists, exercise promoters, and spa and recreation companies. He’s even become a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF’s Sports for Development programme and a government propaganda tool.  He is  wheeled out to boost troop morale in Afghanistan or to persuade foreigners about Britain’s suitability for any grossly expensive international sporting event. If I wasn’t above envy, I’d be quite jealous. Adonis’s opinion was interpreted in October 2011 Image attribution Photo: David Beckham, mty.co.uk Photo: Adonis, Wiki Commons Photo: The Callipige Aphrodite, art-prints-on-demand.com Photo: Victoria Beckham, danielatamayo.com **** Chapter 3: Silvio Berlusconi by Garibaldi BERLUSCONI IS NOT WOUNDED, ITALY IS. Revolutionary, Giuseppe Garibaldi, assesses Italian PM, Silvio Berlusconi When your legacy is a nation you are in limited company. Qín Cháo in China, Alfred in England and Bismarck in Germany certainly belong to that band. I say it with all humility; my name is among them too. Do we all share the same pride at what has happened to our legacy? Wen Jiabao is no warrior leader but China is a remorseless power under him. Cameron is not in the mould of Gladstone or Disraeli, both of whom I knew well, but England's head is not yet slumped upon its shoulders. Merkel is a woman, which might offend Bismarck more than it does me, but her country prospers. Berlusconi is...I cannot write the words for the tears that stain them. A century ago, when the world thought of Italy, it thought of Giuseppe Garibaldi. Now when the world has to turn its mind to Italy, it sees Silvio Berlusconi. No more than a preening penis. Should I just weep and let my soul sleep fitfully on in Caprera? Or should I take some responsibility and ask modern Italians to rally to a flag that is not fouled by Forza, mafiosi, media manipulation, bribery and prostitution? I can accept that responsibility is not a burden that dies with you. Geographically, Italy remains the shape I fought to make it. Spiritually, it has returned to a state that the Borgias and Medici would recognise. A great historian remarked that "Garibaldi is the only wholly admirable figure in modern history." I cannot criticise Berlusconi and take that as truth. Only Jesus has been wholly admirable. My faults were those of any man - pride, folly and lust. It was my image that rose above my frailties and guided Italy through some dark hours. Therefore it is the image of Berlusconi that I despise more than the man. The image takes over when your name gathers associations. I am not talking about biscuits or moustaches. There is a nursery rhyme still sung today. It's called 'Garibaldi is wounded'. When I saw Berlusconi's face pulped by a marble and lead statuette I wondered if he had staged it himself and it was my blood, my stigmata he wanted to echo. Italy did not feel Berlusconi's wounds because there was too much pain from the injuries he had done to her. Berlusconi wounded, me preparing to wound Il Cavaliere, as he loves to be known, is the second longest-serving Prime Minister of Italy. He entered politics to express his support for "freedom, the individual, family, enterprise, Italian tradition, Christian tradition and love for weaker people" and his intention to combat the fiscal, judicial and bureaucratic oppression of Italians. He has acquired breathtaking freedoms for only one individual, Silvio Berlusconi, and his family. He has turned commercial enterprise into a synonym for political manipulation. He has revived those most Italian and unchristian traditions of corruption, bribery and extortion. He expresses his love for weaker people by persuading underage women to dance naked with him in the newly adopted custom of bunga bunga. He has fiercely combated fiscal, judicial and bureaucratic oppression of one particular Italian by spending 174 million euros on lawyers' bills to resist 789 prosecutors, 577 visits by police and 2,500 court hearings. If I had the power to do it, I would rise up and remind people of what the Italian tricolor stands for: the fertile green of the country's plains and the hills; the pure white of the snow-capped Alps, and the red, red blood spilt in the Wars of Italian Independence. I would don the redshirt of i Mille again and ask even those who worship i Rosoneri of Berlusconi's pet football team to hound the man from office. Giuseppe Garibaldi’s opinion was interpreted in Jan 2011. Image attribution Photos: Berlusconi, m24digital.com, and dailymail.co.uk Image: Giuseppe Garibaldi, freemasonry.bcy.ca Image: Garibaldi with flag, dressspace.com **** Chapter 4: Harold Camping by Nostradamus ONE TRICK PROPHET Nostradamus assesses Harold Camping’s rapturous predictions Harold Camping doesn't appear to comprehend that it's not prophetic to foresee something that doesn't happen. He is a disgrace to the trade that brought me fortune and everlasting fame. Well, I think he is. I'm not doing him down definitively because at the back of my elastic mind is the thought that he might just be cleverer than the rest of us seers put together. Which would make him really, really clever. I'll come back to that thought but, for the moment, let's take things at face value and explain why Harold, the 'Rapture' man, is obviously an idiot. Harold's hooked into the Rapture idea that, at the End Time, the few will get transported to heaven while the many are obliterated. That's sounds a winning formula for conning money out of vulnerable people until you put a precise and proximate date on the End Time. When Judgment Day didn't occur on 21 May, 2011 as he had augured, any more than it had when he'd opted for 7 September, 1994 and 21 May, 1988, you'd expect Harold Camping to be universally dismissed as daft. Happily for those in the future trade, listeners to the 150 outposts of his Family Radio station still regard him the sanest person alive. Elsewhere, the probity of forecasters in general is suffering from Harold's constant backtracking. For the sake of the men and women who earn their comfortable living from their psychic powers, I feel that it's up to me to tell him what he's doing wrong. I think I am best qualified to do that. After all, among my 6,338 prophecies are the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler, the atomic bomb and the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. Which, for those of you unschooled in history, all came about. Harold has approached the Bible as predictive text. That's a sound beginning. I've read some of it myself and found it brilliantly confusing. I drew on it for many of my own prophecies. The point is that a lot of it doesn't make sense, which is the perfect starting point for the practice of auguring. Harold Camping has used numerology to clear up all this confusion. A bad move. Since nobody has yet been able to even define Pi with numerals, it's farfetched to think you can use Biblical digits to divine the precise date of the Rapture, or Beginning of the End of the World (BEW). The rapture wrongly predicted by Camping, the disaster rightly predicted by me In my opinion, being precise about his sort of thing is a major mistake and likely to invite ridicule. Not even Bishop James Ussher, who famously placed creation at 4004 BC and the Flood at 2348 BC, put a date on BEW. Harold was on firm ground when he contradicted Ussher by declaring that the start of it all was 11,013 BC and that the very damp year was 4990 BC. No one in their right mind could argue about something that occurred millennia before they were born. In contrast, it was unhinged of him to use the same methodology to predict an imminent BEW. He should take his cue from people like Drosnin who use Equidistant Letter Sequences to show how the Bible has predicted known events. That's cute because you can't be proved wrong about something that has verifiably happened, like Rabin's assassination in Israel. They don't use the Bible Code to say what's around the corner because they say they don't have enough information to input into the search software. Enter 'rapture' and you'll throw up a Google-sized number of ELSs. The weakness of the Bible Coders is that they can't prove if you entered 'Napoleon 14 June 1800' into a software program trawling the Collected Works of Shakespeare you wouldn't come up with an ELS spelling out the recipe for Chicken Marengo. Or argue against John Safran's contention in his Australian tv show that ELS tuning techniques could find "evidence" of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in Vanilla Ice's lyrics But, hey, they've sold a hell of a lot of books and booked out a whole load of lecture halls. The point I regularly make to apprentice seers is never to get too precise about the future. Always aim for the clarity you get from a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, stuffed inside an enigma. I hid my predictions inside quatrains using a form of syntax that would have baffled Virgil. To add confusion to mystification, I threw in a mixture of Greek, Italian, Latin, and Provençal words. You can read what you like into them. A tsunami engulfing Alabama, Bin Laden being canonised, a Briton winning Wimbledon - if they ever happen, you'll find I said it would be so in one of my quatrains. If you look hard enough. Evidently, Harold Camping hasn't worked out the importance of being imprecise if you want to win an 'America's got prophets' tv show. Which brings me back to the nagging doubt at the top of this article. Maybe getting it precisely wrong over and over again is the real point. It brings the business philosophy of deadlines to his money making empire. If he convinces you that the end of the world is nigh upon you then there's no sense in sending him a $10 a month, tax deductible donation. You might as well give him everything you own right away. As Eileen Heuwetter’s aunt, Doris Schmitt, did. I never thought of that ruse but if Harold Camping should become the richest man in the world before he becomes enraptured on October 21st this year, it's spelt out somewhere in one of my quatrains. Nostradamus’s opinion was interpreted in June 2011. Image attribution Photo: Camping, pokerknave.com Photo: Nostradamus by Cesar, Wikipedia Commons Photo: World Trade Centre, frogview-gallery Etching : Rapture by Jan Lutyens, Wikipedia Commons **** Chapter 5: Simon Cowell by PT Barnum THE FREAK FACTOR PT Barnum assesses the X-factor in Simon Cowell I honestly did not say it, but it is a sentiment which is supposed to have filled my coffers and is doing much the same for Simon Cowell more than a century later. "There's a sucker born every minute." As damn true now as it was then. Suckers spend a lot of bucks, not always wisely. Is it wrong to take their money without improving their lot or sharpening their minds? I didn't have a conscience about it and if Cowell's hiding any guilt it must be under those hitched up pants, because it sure don't show on his face. Every sucker on the planet has a right to be amused and I've never come across one that finds Shakespeare a laugh. Barnum and Cowell give them what they want. The Greatest Show on Earth. Uncomplicated amusement. No thinking hats required. Where's the harm in that? I can't make up my mind whether Simon and I are criticised because we serve people with what they like or because we somehow infected the general public with a lack of discernment, as if that's some kind of tuberculosis of the mind. I wasn't clever or devious enough to do that and I doubt Simon is either. We rely on the freak factor to draw people in, I admit it, though Simon might not. What we don't do is introduce the freak factor into anybody's life. It's already there. Everybody is fascinated by freaks. The majority will happily raise their hands to that. A minority will deny it - the type that covers their eyes but sneaks a looks through the cracks in their fingers. They never visited my museums, circuses, aquariums or rogues galleries. Not without their homburgs pulled right down over their faces, anyway. The same applies today. No one claiming more than a dozen brain cells owns up to an addiction to 'Pop idol', 'X factor' or '(Some country)'s got talent'. They dispute that with a conviction which would've made Judas proud. You can trace a lot of Simon's ideas back to me. Take just a couple. 1. From my General Tom Thumb, it's no giant leap to the Cheeky Monkeys and all the other child acts Cowell's given screen time. Children acting like grown-ups has always wowed the audiences. It doesn't take genius to spot that. You'll say it's exploitation but I say talk to little Charlie Stratton about the life Phineas Taylor Barnum gave him. The Cheeky Monkeys will say something similar. 2. I gave you the 'Feejee' mermaid, the traditional Native American dancer, fu-Hum-Me. the Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng, and Commodore Nutt. Not dissimilar to Stavros Flatley, Jedward, Brenda isaacs and Edelweiss Warby, which have been among Simon's more remarkable contributions to international culture. When you take a man's dollar or dime, you should always look at both sides of the coin. Swedish song bird, Jenny Lind, Scottish songbird, Susan Boyle What would the suckers have missed without PT Barnum and SP Cowell? Jenny Lind and Susan Boyle are the obvious answers (but not the only ones). Who would have believed sixty thousand culture shy New Yorkers would have turned out to greet an unpretentious, shy, and devout Swedish nightingale with a wistfully clear soprano voice? PT Barnum, that's who. It's no less incredible that Simon Cowell is behind the unpretentious, shy, and devout Scottish nightingale with a wistfully clear soprano voice, Susan Boyle. And that you feel the better for it. Neither of us were making suckers of you then, were we? The more I look at Simon, the more I see of myself. He doesn't keep all his money to himself any more than I did. Tufts University wouldn't be where it is today without my help. If you doubt that, don't ask why Tufts students are known as Jumbos (could it have anything to do with the very famous elephant shown to the world by the Barnum and Bailey Circus?). Simon is doing his bit for hospices and animal welfare. Neither of us are trying to buy a place in heaven that we don't deserve. What I applaud most of all is that Simon tells it like it is. When people put themselves forward for stardom on his shows, he doesn't hold back. I like the cruel humour of rebukes like: “If your lifeguard duties were as good as your singing, a lot of people would be drowning.” I wasn't that different in spite of being crowned 'Prince of Humbugs'. There's a gulf between hype and fraud which I never crossed. I ran my life according to two principles. 1. “Without promotion something terrible happens... Nothing!" 2. “Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.” Simon Cowell wouldn't argue, would he? PT Barnum’s opinion was interpreted in Mar 2011. Image attribution Photo: PT Barnum, Wikipedia Commons Photo: Simon Cowell Wikipedia Commons Photo: Jenny Lind, Wikipedia ommons Photo: Susan Boyle, Wikipedia Commons **** Chapter 6: James Dyson by George Stephenson ROMANCE AND INVENTION Railway inventor, George Stephenson, assesses James Dyson James Dyson’s hero is a great railway engineer. Sadly it’s not me. In name let alone reputation, a plain George could never measure up to an Isambard Kingdom. Consequently, James will not value my comments on his life as much as he would Brunel’s. Yet he seems a charming man and I’m sure he’ll respect what I have to say. Particularly since we have what you might call a romantic attachment. We’re not just fellow inventors of some international note, we’re connected by family name. A Miss Hindmarsh became very dear to the pair of us, providing both comfort and guidance. In 1968, James married Deirdre Hindmarsh. He was twenty-one, with no secure job. She is his anchor in the very turbulent sea that has been his life. At times, she was the only breadwinner. When I was that age, I wooed Elizabeth Hindmarsh secretly in her father’s orchard. She was to become my rock. The coincidence is not precise because I didn’t marry Betty when I was a young man and neither did she provide financial support at any time during my inventive life. Farmer Hindmarsh thought a lowly miner like me entirely unsuitable for his daughter’s hand. It took twenty years and a considerable upturn in my fortunes for him to relent. Because I married into the Hindmarshes long before he did, I consider myself a kind of great uncle to James. I’ve always wanted to pass on avuncular wisdom, even when I didn’t know what it meant. The point I’m making about our wives is that men who create fame and fortune by tinkering in their sheds with technical drawings, metals and plastics can have romantic and loyal souls. We may be obsessive men. We may not make good drinking or shopping companions. We may not be renowned for giving up space in our lives to other people. We may not always have the quietest of temperaments. We can still be fine husbands. The other reasons why I feel an affinity towards James Dyson are perhaps more predictable. It is the lot of inventors to struggle. I don’t want to make too much of the obstacles I had to overcome. Molehills to James’ mountains, really. At eighteen I was an illiterate engineman at Water Row Pit, Newburn. I paid to go to night school, worked my way up to Black Callerton colliery ‘brakesman’ and had to cobble shoes and mend clocks to make ends meet. My first wife died before we reached our fifth anniversary leaving me with a son to bring up. It wasn’t until I was thirty, that events began moving more in my favour. At eighteen, James was self-confessed Norfolk bumpkin who had a bit of a Dick Whittington moment when exposed to the delights of London art colleges. He made his mark very quickly. The Sea Truck, Dyson’s first product, was launched in 1970 while he was at the Royal College of Art. His next product, the Ballbarrow, was a modified version of a wheelbarrow using a ball to replace the wheel. He formed Kirk-Dyson with this brother-in-law to manufacture it and assigned the patent to the company rather than himself. A mistake he learnt not to repeat when he was booted out of the company for having unmarketable ideas like bagless vacuum cleaners. My 'Rocket', Dyson's air multiplier ‘Blucher’ and ‘Locomotion’ weren’t the only steps on my way to ‘Rocket’, but that hardly compares to the five years and 5,127 prototypes it took before James was satisfied with his dual cyclone cleaner. Even then, his trials were only just beginning. Although I didn’t invent the steam locomotive - that was down to Richard Trevithick in 1804 - I was the first to attach a passenger car to one. I was in at the beginning of a new world while James was a century behind the world’s first vacuum cleaner. He invented something the world didn’t know it wanted; another vacuum cleaner. Only the Japanese were impressed. A bright pink £2,000 upright vacuum cleaner, being the last thing a Japanese house needed, was the perfect status symbol. Nevertheless, it was the start he needed. I found the Americans very accommodating. The first ‘iron horses’ all came from my workshops. By the time James came to dealing with them, they were less easily impressed by British technology and marketing prowess. His experiences with devious US companies mirrored my own problems with London businessmen who tried to prove that my safety lamp, which was keeping Newcastle coalminers alive, was a copy of the Davy lamp. After expensive lawsuits, both of us won through in the end. When it comes to running his company, James puts the same kind of faith in the family as I did. It was my son Robert who did most of the work on the ‘Rocket’ and the Dyson empire is totally owned by James, Deirdre and their three children. One of the great ambitions James has is to turn the company name into a verb. He wants the world to dyson their living room, not hoover it. I can’t see that happening. You need to be first. I was the first to realise that railways lines had to be the same size so that they could eventually join up and the Stephenson gauge, a rather comical four foot eight and a half inches wide, is still the world’s standard. They also say the men of the north east are called ‘geordies’ because of my safety lamp. Maybe James will get a type of cyclone named after him… ‘a force 12 dyson hit the Caribbean last night’. George Stephenson’s opinion was interpreted in Oct 2011. Image attribution Photo: James Dyson, shanghaist.com Photo: George Stephenson, Wiki Commons Photo: ‘Rocket’, lookandlearn.com Photo: air multiplier, lightstalkers.org **** Chapter 7: Chris Evans by Alvar Liddell THE BBC. NOW AVAILABLE IN GINGER. Archetypal announcer, Alvar Liddell, assesses BBC presenter, Chris Evans Today Chris Evans represents the British Broadcasting Corporation much as I did in the 1940s and 1950s. That is not his fault any more than it was mine. Except for the BBC being our paymaster, there is little to connect Evans with me. Evans and I are worlds apart. In upbringing, personality, career, wealth and style there is a chasm between us. I won’t comment on our respective looks, since that would seem either vain or an attempt to ghettoise people with red hair and glasses. I cannot criticise Evans. To do so would be to deny that times and attitudes have changed beyond my understanding. I can express dislike of the frenetic pace of his delivery, the rude populism of his content and the poor modulation of his voice. That would be a predictable and justifiable viewpoint but not valid criticism. The objections I have to Chris Evans are not about him as a man but as a symbol of a once-worthwhile institution. I was proud to work for the BBC. In my early days there I was happy to abide by the rules of the then Director General, John Reith, that radio announcers should wear dinner jackets after 8pm and be completely anonymous. I doubt that Reith would have allowed Evans into the BBC and I’m sure Evans could not have been told what to wear if he had been let in by Reith. Although both might have agreed on a Nazi uniform, one as a sign of respect and the other as a door to mischief. It was only after Reith was long departed from the BBC that anyone in Britain knew my name. To an extent the cult of personality on which Chris feeds began with the words, “Here is the News, and this is Alvar Lidell reading it”. This was not a sign of the BBC relaxing its prescriptive approach to ‘improving’ Britain. It was a response to the German propaganda machine which was filling the airwaves with bogus BBC news items describing how Britain was crumbling under the heroic onslaught of the Third Reich. My name, my voice, was the sign that this was the real BBC. This was the news you could trust. With hindsight, I have come to the sad conclusion that the decline of the BBC as an institution beyond censure began when I announced myself before the news. The BBC was no longer anonymous and irreproachable, no more a firm but loving ‘Aunty’. It had ceded control of its reputation to the ‘names’ that fronted it. From Alvar Liddell through Kenny Everett to Chris Evans is a short journey in years but an epic one for the Corporation. The most listened to voice on BBC radio today, engaging almost 10 million listeners, is that of a poorly educated, one-time Tarzanogram who first made his mark on the BBC with innuendo-laden features like ‘Honk Your Horn’ and ‘In Bed With Your Girlfriend’. Presumably, Chris’s shows are consonant with the ‘Public purpose’ of the BBC, which is described in its most recent Charter as mainly to: 1. sustain citizenship and civil society 2. promote education and learning 3. stimulate creativity and cultural excellence 4. represent the UK, its nations, regions and communities 5. bring the UK to the world and the world to the UK. How does the dominance of a ridiculously rich business entrepreneur with a passion for Ferraris and an undisclosed BBC salary fulfil the commitment to those public purposes? I hope you don’t hear jealousy in my voice when all I feel is sadness. A couple of years before my death, I rounded on my previous employer for the deteriorating standards of speech apparent in many of its broadcasters. I should have been dismissed as a pompous old fart. Instead the BBC took me seriously enough to set up an inquiry. What I had done was remind the Corporation of what it wanted to be, not what it was becoming, or indeed what it should be. Which is representative of nation’s current values. The BBC still sees itself as emblematic of an older, better Britain, alongside Big Ben and red buses. It is most comfortable in an empyrean realm of social, cultural and moral superiority, above the stresses of commercial and political give-and-take, providing uplift to the mass of citizens. ‘Dammit,’ the BBC bosses say, ‘the Royal Charter means we’re still the organ of the nation.’ If that’s the case, it’s my contention that the monkey not the organ grinder is calling the tunes. Sorry, Chris, it’s not personal. Alvar Liddell’s opinion was interpreted in August 2011. Image attribution Photo: Alvar Liddell, uk.ask.com Photo: Evans, marketingweek.co.uk **** Chapter 8: Colin Firth by Emil Jannings CAN’T SPEAK - GIVE HIM AN OSCAR! Original Oscar winner, Emil Jennings, assesses Colin Firth Colin Firth is just an actor, ja? He is not a star. Emil Jannings was a star. Ein filmstar. I was honoured by Goebbels as Künstler des Staates, Artist of the State. Firth does not tread my footsteps. I was the first. Die erste Oscar. Many huge stars have won since me. Bogart, Brando. Cooper, Tracy, Wayne. I would be happy to dine, tell stories with any of them. Not Schell, even though he was Austrian. Not a true star. Not a star whose name was first - und grōsste- on the poster. In now times, stars do not win. The British do not know how to be stars. I would not dine with them. Am I angry when the Oscars happen now? Naturlich, jedes jahr. I would not have thought about Firth but Marlene made me. The coincidence was amusement to her. I won my Oscar without speaking. Firth wins because his part cannot speak. “82 years on, and they’re still giving the little man to people who murder their language, Emil.” She is jealous that I am the only German actor to win an Oscar. Sehr eifersüchtig. She never liked me for supporting Herr Hitler. I tell her she was nothing without Sternberg and that they do not give das kleiner mann to director’s toys, spielzeug. She growls. Does Firth deserve an Oscar? Nein. Pretty boy, character actor. Never bigger than his part. Das is nicht Hollywood. Why do I care? What did Oscar do for Emil Jannings? Nichts. Have you seen the film which made me an Oscar winner, the first of Hollywood’s greats? I know your answer.  It’s no, nein. ‘The way of all flesh’ has gone the way of all flesh. The only ‘Best picture’ you’ll never see again. Burnt, ‘denazified’, to spare embarrassment. How does that make me feel? Ein schwarze Schafe. Firth should listen to my story. The little man is not a good luck charm. I did not attend the first Academy Award presentation brunch at the Hotel Roosevelt on May 16, 1929. Nor the party at the Mayfair in the evening. $5 for the ticket to that was money well spent, so I heard later. Though my wife would have made sure I did not enjoy it too much. Today, I would not miss either for the world, frau or no frau. Then, I had already been sent home, fired by Paramount because I was a highly paid German star and the new talkies spoke English. Mr Mayer gave me the little statue months before the ceremony and wished me ‘ behazlaha’. Jüdische krokodil. The winners were already known in 1929. The presentations took five minutes, funf mintuten!, and the winners were not allowed to speak. It was the organisers, Mayer, de Mille and their cronies, who bored the audience. My name was clapped, my films of 1928 applauded, my absence was not questioned. I never appeared again in a Hollywood movie though I was its Best Actor. Best picture, best actor, 1929. Best picture, best actor, 2011. Think about that, Firth. You are not Hollywood. You are British. It is only good fortune that you speak the language of Hollywood. The British have not given Hollywood what the Germans gave. It was Germans who brought their sense of theatre to Hollywood. The POV style, Kino Wahrheit (cinema verité before the French thought of it), the unchained camera technique of mixing tracking shots, pans, tilts, and zooms - all German ideas. We were comfortable with publicity too, with stardom, while the English are always embarrassed by such things. I returned to the Third Reich to make Der blaue Engel with Marlene. It did not seem a bad career move. I did not expect Germany to lose a world war. Very few Germans did. So, Colin Firth, your peers in the Academy think you besten der besten. Geniessen Sie es. They are fickle. In their hearts, they want their stars back. Do not compare yourself with all who have gone before you because many of us had star quality. It is harder to be ein filmstar than an actor. I doubt you will ever be a star because you do not rise above the parts they give you. If you want to do that, you could learn from the films of Emil Jannings. I had no voice to earn the Oscar. No attractive English speech defect. I owned the cinema screen with my expressions, my movements, my presence. I did not have other people’s words to read. I was me, Emil Jannings, the star. Emil Jannings’s opinion was interpreted in Mar 2011. Image attribution Photo: Colin Firth, judyhalone.com Photo: Emil Jannings, out of copyright Photo: Film poster, fair use under US copyright laws Photo: King’s speech poster, Weinstein & Co **** Chapter 9: Bill Gates by Charles Babbage WHO’S THE DADDY? Charles Babbage assesses Bill Gates’ contribution to computing Everyone knows that my Analytical Engine was the first machine computer, don’t they? Before me (Before Babbage, BB, I like the ring of it), a computer was a living person who did difficult sums and more than occasionally got them wrong.   If I am ‘the father of computing’, a title often granted me, then I suppose I have to acknowledge Bill Gates as one of my sons. I cavil at doing so partly because I find him boring and also because there’s a small if in my last sentence. The iffiness is about me not about Gates. I am not too proud that I won’t admit to it. In spite of plans being drawn up in 1835, they didn’t finish building my Analytical Engine until 1991, sixteen years after  a tiresomely young and unhealthily thin Bill Gates set up a company called Micro-Soft with Paul Allen. That probably gives Bill every right to ask. ‘Who’s the daddy then?’. So, even though it is undisputed that I am far more interesting,  it would be ungentlemanly of me to argue that I am also much the more important. Can I propose a compromise? I’m happy to stand as the father of the idea of machine computing, accepting that Pascal and Leibniz might have a word or two to say about that, while allowing Gates some claim to paternity of the PC, (though ‘in loco parentis’, after the likes of Stibitz, Shannon and Zuse stepped aside, might be a better description). It makes it easier for me to be objective. I would be uncomfortable criticising anybody whom I might have actually sired, even in an analogous way. I can’t deny there are connections between us, some of them bizarre. A couple amuse me. 1. We are both relaxed about the value of a university education. Gates went to Harvard but never bothered to complete his studies. I was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge but never found the time to give any lectures. 2. One of my numerous inventions  was an arcade version of tic-tac-toe. Gates’ first computer program was an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against their computer. I like the child in him but I wish I could find more joy in the man. He would not have been welcome at my soirées, to which the most farsighted and influential thinkers in Europe would come in their droves. Too one dimensional. Ben Franklin reincarnated  he is not. I see him more as the Genghis Khan of the computer kingdom, aggressively seeding his rather barbaric approach to the beautiful world of code across all nations. Yes, he conquered the globe at an incredibly early age through the single minded viciousness that is excused as ‘hard-nosed business’. Now the Khan has retired to his earthen palace beside Lake Washington, yet the Microsoft hordes continue to ravage far and wide. There are signs of retreat, though,  aren’t there? Computing in the cloud, that could bring some of the romance back. I would love that. My analytical engine makes Gates look a computing slouch. I lived in a mechanical world when numbers were mystical , long before Shannon made them digital. We weren’t in control of numbers, we were under their spell and wanted to understand their magic. My steam-driven Analytical Engine was designed to have more than fifty thousand moving parts so that it could remove human error from mathematical calculations. I wanted to make numbers perfect because I knew of nothing more beautiful. And, for a poignantly short number of years,  I had Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada King, Countess of  Lovelace, to make them even more enchanting (why can’t all programmers look like her?). She has every claim to be ‘the mother of computer programming’, and I don’t think she’d be any more keen than I to acknowledge Gates as her son. Gates deals in codes not numbers because his world is electronic. He skipped maths classes to experiment with programming, a sure sign that he has no affection for numbers. He has worked towards his goals with a passion I can only marvel at. I thought I was fixated on my Analytical engine but I could sidetrack sufficiently to: a. pioneer lighthouse signalling b. invent the ophthalmoscope c. advise Tennyson on his poetry d. propose ‘black box’ recorders e. suggest the use of tidal power f. design the cow-catcher for the front of locomotives as well as a ‘hydrofoil’. If I say it myself, that puts me about as far away from what you now call a nerd as the abacus is from the Apple. Bill didn’t have anything to do with the Apple, did he? That might have made him interesting. All he’s done is make himself rich and the world a lot drearier. Has anyone ever been enchanted by what a Microsoft program does for them?  Has anyone ever counted the minutes in their lives lost to Microsoft load times or Microsoft crashes? Add them all together and you’ll probably find a sum equivalent to the annual output of China. Who’s the daddy now, Bill? Charles Babbage’s opinion was interpreted in May 2011. Image attribution Photo: Bill Gates, thesun.co.uk Photo: Charles Babbage, Wikipedia Commons Photo: Analytical Engine, science-museum.org.uk Photo: Bill Gates, windows8italia.com **** Chapter 10: Bob Geldof by William Wilberforce THE PROFANE KNIGHT Anti-slaver, William Wilberforce, assesses Bob Geldof I had the better singing voice and I never used profanities. I would like to make that clear. Those differences apart, Robert Geldof is at least my equal. It lightens my heart to say so. My sons, Samuel and Robert, made immodest claims for my achievements in their biography of my life. It is hard to chastise sons for glorifying their father but I feel unworthy of the place in history they fashioned for me, and embarrassed by the grandeur of a Westminster Abbey grave. I welcome the chance to sing the praises of Robert Geldof and, by comparing what he has accomplished with my own efforts, I hope to convey a more graceful and measured humility than my sons foisted upon me. Affinity of purpose is what draws me to him, for there are few ways in which we are alike, even allowing for the passage of two centuries. Robert cares passionately about humanity and reminds me of my own words, “If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow-creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large.” How did we both arrive in the same place? Robert was born in Dublin and began adult life as a slaughter man, road navvy and pea canner in Wisbech. I was born in Hull - arguably a more dour place than Dublin - but, at 21, I was one of the richest undergraduates at Cambridge. The religious diet of Blackrock College tasted sour to Robert and his commitment to Christianity is far less fervent than mine yet his work has been no less godly. I came to evangelism firstly through my Aunt Hannah and later through my mother and sister while Robert’s faith was sorely tested by the traumatic loss of his mother when he was only seven. This became the wellspring not only of his empathy but also of the anger that has driven him so powerfully. I did not feel that kind of anger and can only wonder whether, with it, I might have brought a sooner end to slavery. Robert entered geopolitics through the medium of music while I took the more conventional route of buying a seat in the House of Commons. We didn’t find our causes, our cause found us. Robert was incredibly moved by a BBC documentary on famine in Ethiopia and became a whirlwind of activism which shames my more timorous embrace of the African enterprise. My involvement was less wilful. When the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade sought a voice in parliament. William Wilberforce was not their first choice. Charles Middleton, MP for Rochester, was. He declined, suggesting me as an alternative. The Society’s second choice became the voice for Africa, as Robert has so many, many years later. My voice was polite, well modulated and not short of fine phrases. It nagged like a respectable but unlovely wife for decades in the House of Commons and through the printing presses. Eventually, it was heard. Compare that with the curse-laden, rough cadenced voice of Robert Geldof and how it immediately echoed into almost every corner of the world. I have and I feel humbled. 19th century slave ship. 20th century famine. The man has the Irishman’s easy delivery of the English language which he combines with a profound turn of phrase.  In 2008, a survey showed that nearly a quarter of British people confused passages from the Bible with speeches made by Robert. Even though I accept that my countrymen’s acquaintance with the Bible can now be best described as ‘nodding’, I find that a remarkable judgment not only on what he has said but the way he has said it. Robert has backed his voice with tireless action. I backed mine with my wealth and parliamentary oratory, which was easy for a rich MP to do. But he has not done it alone. And nor did I. Thomas Clarkson was the drive and organisation behind the Anti-Slavery Society, the man who put the public behind abolition. Robert has been supported, at first by Midge Ure, and later by Bono. He knows as well as I did, that they have helped him be heard. As much as Robert is an echo of my success, he is testament to my failure. God set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners. Robert Geldof has not been knighted by the Queen for his gentle politeness or his gracious manner. I suppose one out of two wasn’t bad. William Wilberforce’s opinion was interpreted in July 2011. Image attribution Photo: Geldof, collider.com Photo: Wilberforce, Wikipedia Commons Photo: Famine, philadelphiaproject.co.za Photo: Slave ship, Wikipedia Commons   **** Chapter 11: Damien Hirst by Caravaggio CON BRIO, CON TECNICA, CON ARTIST? Renaissance man, Caravaggio, assesses Brit art’s Damien Hirst From the most talked about artist of his day to the most talked about artist of today, I salute you. The dark soul of Caravaggio lurks manically in your works, Damien, and I rejoice in your vulgarity. You are a man I would drink and brawl with gladly. We are what artists should be. Loud, mad and bad. Not demented like that burino, Van Gogh. We show the world like it is not how the world would like it to be. No artist should conform because then we would be imitators. If you do not live beyond the boundaries you cannot paint beyond them. Arrests, death warrants, banishments, quarrels and trials are as much the measure of an artist as the price of a canvas. That’s why we are great artists. Great artists ache for vicious criticism. How else can we know we are not just being noticed, we are being felt? A cardinal’s secretary once said of my work that it is nothing “but vulgarity, sacrilege, impiousness and disgust…”. I am jealous of what the ignorante say about you because what that secretary said about me is mild in comparison. Didn’t New York public health officials ban your ‘Two Fucking and Two Watching’ because of fears of “vomiting among the visitors”? Magnifico. Forget the Colonnas and the Alof de Wignacourts, forget the Charles Saatchis, controversy is our greatest patron, isn’t it, Damien? It might seem that it was very easy for me to be controversial as a painter not just as a man. All I had to do in order to upset the Michelangelo-loving cretinos was to paint from life and make exaggerated use of chiaroscuro. Realism was seen as unacceptably vulgar in Renaissance Italy. Unbelievable, si? Art has taken many wild strade since then and you have had to court controversy with much more bravata. Yet the gulf between my ‘Saint Matthew and the Angel’ and your ‘Away from the Flock’ is not great. The philosophy of realism inspired both. We have our different themes. Mine was life. Why should the Blessed  Virgin not look like the seductive courtesan who modelled for me? Why should Cupid not look like Cecco, the Roman street urchin sat in my studio? Renaissance realism vs Brit Art realism Your theme is death, constantly echoing your student-placement days in the mortuary. The way you play with death seems to keep it at bay. It is ironic that I died young for my art, poisoned by the lead in my paints, while you, the most famous of the Young British Artists, threaten to grow old. I hope you do though jealousy is beginning to get the better of me. An artist who shatters convention should die young. A man who puts a cigarette in the end of his penis for the benefit of journalists should die young and be welcome nowhere. Instead, you are your country’s richest living artist and renowned wherever you travel. Where we differ most is in the practice of our art. A Caravaggio was a Caravaggio. A Hirst is, well, it could be a Hawkins or a copy of someone else’s idea. You’re very relaxed about the quality and extent of your own input. I would not have been happy to admit, “The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel”. I was a genius while you have a genius for masquerading as a genius. If I had employed the factory system favoured by you and many of my contemporaries I might not have died of lead ingestion at only 38, there would be many more of my paintings and my pupils would have carried my reputation into the next century. There were Caravaggisti like Orazio Gentileschi but they were followers of my style not pupils of my school. In contrast you rely unashamedly on your assistants to produce the volume of work that carries your signature. I only ever signed one of my paintings but the autograph of Damien Hirst abounds in galleries and private collections around the globe. You justify your lack of shame by insisting that the real creative act is the conception, not the execution, and that the progenitor of the idea is always the artist. Everything you do has style, it is done con brio. Technically, you are accomplished, con tecnica. Yet above all you aspire to being the consummate con artist. Did you not say, “I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it.”? Are you there yet? Perhaps you are because your 2008 collection, which you staged yourself, sold for nearly $200 million. Not bad for an artist who can say of his work, “… there’s fuck all there at the end of the day.” Benissimo. Caravaggio’s opinion was interpreted in August 2011. Image attribution Photo: Hirst, supertouchart.com Photo: Caravaggio, museumsyndicate.com Photo: Cecco, archive.com   Photo: Virgin Mother, wirednewyork.com **** Chapter 12: Boris Johnson by Dick Whittington CATS, SHOES AND NEWTS Fellow mayor, Sir Richard Whittington assesses Boris Johnson Pantomime is the most whimsical of plagues ever to infect London. There are some who mark me out as its source and Boris Johnson as the latest evidence of its virulence. To find myself as the provenance of an art form is both amusing and bemusing. To think that Boris shows signs of a contagion I started is equally so. I have a merchant's mind for detail so let me first make it clear that Boris has not inherited a title invested in me more than six centuries ago. I was Lord Mayor of London and if you have ever been a pantomimer you will know I was thrice that important officer. As I write, Boris Johnson is the one-time Mayor of London, a twenty first century invention, and Alderman Michael Bear is Lord Mayor of the City of London, which was the role I performed, though with a truncated title (London and City of London were one and the same when I trod its cobbled streets). With that off my chest, let me now examine why being a Mayor of London, however titled, invites ridicule: why it seems I have a cat fetish; why Boris acts as though his mouth was somewhere to keep his shoes, and why his predecessor was obsessed with newts and articulated public transport. My transition from prominent mercer and moneylender to long legged pantomime character is not a logical one. I don't begrudge that it has happened since no other Mayor in the world is celebrated every Christmas. Perhaps Boris is headed that way too, for he is a natural buffoon whereas I was always proper and aldermanly. How that transition happened is a lesson in how facts should never be allowed to get in the way of a good story. There was nothing about my life that could be called entertaining. My words were as respectable as my deeds. I became remarkably wealthy but as the son of a knight I was not new to wealth. If I had a cat in any of my households I did not notice it. I was never worried about rats although if I had known their role in the Black Death that gripped my country, I would have been. My face and figure were as plain as my days were long. In spite of all that, I became the central character in a timeless piece of musical comedy. When you consider how much more amusing Boris's traits are, you can only conclude that he is an even bigger pantomime in waiting. For that to come about, unrelated ideas and occurrences have to catch hold of Boris's story. Jupiter has to collide with Mars on his birthday, or something of that ilk. In tune with the development of the theatre, my life story became intermingled with Persian folklore about an orphan who gained a fortune through his cat and with Saturnalian revels involving gender reversal. It didn't have to be me. It could have been any Englishman who made his fortune without pillage. I left a lot of money to charity simply because I didn't have children. In the next century, Gresham and Bodley did good works too. It could have been them. They might even have liked cats. My example is not a pattern for becoming an icon. It reinforces the idea that history is made up of accidents. There is every reason to suppose Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is an accident on the brink of happening. Or, some might argue, has happened. Physically, he is all a bumble. He makes mistakes in public. I dread to think what he would have made of being Lord Mayor instead of Mayor. Can you picture him in the gilded coach, at 'The Silent Ceremony' of investiture, leading the solemn procession through the streets without laughing? I concede that the Lord Mayor's Show is pure theatre if you have no respect for tradition. It isn't the symbol of authority over the entire City that is was in my time (not that I got the coach, that came for later Lord Mayors). Today, it's about as much to do with the running of London as the Changing of the Guard has to do with the security of England. Perhaps more people would turn out in the rain every second Saturday in November if there was more pantomime in the spectacle. Unwittingly or not, Boris as Lord Mayor would have provided that. As a result, perhaps 'Boris in robes' could have rivalled 'Puss in boots' and 'Dick Whittington' at theatres around the country this Christmas. Admittedly, he would have been the Dame, the clown at the centre, not the 'Principal Boy' like me. If he really wants to be remembered on stage by a beautiful young woman with no skirt then I can only suggest one thing. Donate all your money to Shelter, Women Against Rape or Barnardos. Sorry, two things. Find a better barber. Sir Richard Whittington’s opinion was interpreted in Dec 2010. Image attribution Photo: Boris Johnson, racingdiary.co.uk Image: Imaginary portrait of Sir Richard Whittington, Mercers Company. btinternet.com Photo: Ld Mayors Show, ukstudentlife.com Image: Dick Whittington poster, its-behind-you.com **** Chapter 13: Nelson Mandela by Toussaint Louverture I WISH I’D GONE TO ROBBEN ISLAND Black revolutionary, Toussaint Louverture, assesses Nelson Mandela Nelson Mandela may not regard himself as the second Toussaint Louverture. You may not see him that way either. If you'd like to know why we should be put in the same bracket, ask yourself this: 'Who was the first coloured man to overthrow a government and give permanent freedom to a whole nation built on slavery?' It isn't Mandela, any more than it's Gandhi. When Nelson Mandela rescued his country from what was no more than enslavement, he was only doing what I had done two hundred years before. That does not make him a lesser man but it surely gives me the right to comment and compare. Not that I seek to undermine him. You have to have a lot of charisma to carry off those shirts. I wish only to suggest that his achievements are no greater than mine. Hispaniola was not South Africa and I was around when the term 'Negro' wasn't an incitement to violence. Nevertheless, setting time and place to one side, the real reason you've heard of him and not of me is that he went to a better prison in a less treacherous country. If I had the choice, I'd pick Robben Island over Fort de Joux any day. French brutality makes the South African version look like playground bullying. At least it would be warm in Robben Island. I spent a year in Fort de Joux prison in the French Alps. It was my last because the French believed that allowing prisoners food and blankets when the snows came was pampering them. Mandela survived twenty seven years in Robben Island, Pollsmoor and Victor Verster prisons. The guards weren't pleasant but they weren't murderous. How did we get thrown in jail? I went to prison because Napoleon 'What could the death of one wretched Negro mean to me?' Bonaparte was a racist bastard with no sense of honour. That is not a characteristic of all Frenchmen, just the majority. I had thrashed his armies with a regularity that would have had Wellington and Blucher blushing, which won me the name of the Black Napoleon. This upset the white one tremendously. In 1802, he gave me 'safe conduct' to a meeting where an agreement to abolish slavery on Hispaniola would be signed. Instead, he seized me and shipped me to France so that I could slowly shiver to death in an Alpine castle dungeon. Nelson Mandela was incarcerated because the CIA are interfering imperialists with not a decent corpuscle amongst them. That is not a characteristic of all Americans, just the majority. The United States Central Intelligence Agency ended Nelson's romantic role as the Black Pimpernel by alerting the South African government to his David Motsamayi disguise and hiding place. For the next three decades he was brutalised but never finalised because Boers lack the imagination to be devious. There was nothing of Napoleon in Verwoerd. Vorster or Botha. Why were we jailed? We were committed to the same goal - the eradication of racial discrimination in our homeland. In that, I think I should be given even more credit than Nelson because I was way ahead of my times. Mandela was speaking my language when he said: “I detest racialism, because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.” I was the one who stopped the butchery of our lightly pigmented brethren on Hispaniola (or Saint-Domingue as I preferred it). I was into racial harmony well before anyone dreamed up a Truth Commission, though the mulattoes did test my resolve more than I'd care to acknowledge. By reaching across lines of race and class, I earned the title "Papa Toussaint". You must admit that's a lot more impressive than being nicknamed 'Madiba' because you're fond of wicked shirts. What happened next? As I've made clear, I died. While I was lingering over doing that, my number two, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, was stealing my glory back home by declaring the new Empire of Haiti. His revengeful brand of black racism soon got him assassinated but not before my race-blind, egalitarian revolution had been irrevocably tarnished. My reputation died with me in Fort de Joux. Contrastingly, Nelson came out of prison a lot taller than he went in. Neither the martyrdom nor the armed revolution which he had reluctantly prepared for were necessary. By being gracious, dignified and photogenic, he then became the most famous and respected man in the world. In fact, he has become fame's yardstick. If you haven't been photographed besides Nelson Mandela, you're a nobody today. I don't begrudge the man the honour and fame that should have attached in part to me but can I be allowed one criticism? Aren't his constant and lucrative 'me with Nelson in a shirt' photoshoots beginning to demean him? Toussaint Louverture’s opinion was interpreted in June 2011. Image attribution Photo: Toussaint Louverture, Wikipedia Commons Photo: Nelson Mandela, nydailynews.com **** Chapter 14: Peter Mandelson by Niccolo Machiavelli THE SOLIPSISTIC SERVANT Niccolo Machiavelli assesses the manipulative powers of Peter Mandelson I am a man. Machiavelli: I am a character assassination, Machiavellian. I am comfortable that history has been able to separate the two, the good in me from the evil perceived in my philosophy. There is little of myself to be seen in Baron Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool, although superficial similarities of upbringing can be noted. With him, the image is the man and the man is the image. I was never Machiavellian, my short political career swears to that, doesn't it? Whether 'The Prince of Darkness' has evinced sufficient deceit, despotism, and political manipulation to be described as Machiavellian is a more pertinent question and one which there is none better than me to answer. Peter Mandelson is so self obsessed he observes all life through a mirror. The distortions this provides allows him to believe that he wears the cloak of servant only to cover his true uniform, that of master. Solipsism is no bedfellow of service but, as any despot knows, it has a strong albeit tempestuous relationship with success. It is clear to me that Mandelson considers himself capable of ruling any kingdom up to and possibly including heaven. By positioning himself as 'The Third Man' of Britain's recent government, he struts as though he has ruled already. "I was at the heart of the story," he declares. So deeprooted is his self assurance that he has been able to make reincarnation appear something akin to the three-card-trick. His deceits have been discovered and he has simply made them disappear. Does that mean he has the makings of a true Prince within him? That, with a man like me to advise him, he could soon oust the charismatically-challenged Miliband and negotiate a fourth coming? Even if I helped it happen, I could not make it last long. Mandelson has marked history by being adviser to the twin heads of the New Labour Party, though he would prefer the term 'architect'. Temperamentally he may be an eminence rouge but functionally he has never risen above eminence grise. As with most advisers, he would never accept advice even from me. Much about him is a contradiction. In the pond of British politics he has been able to grasp power with his tongue, as a frog might latch onto insects. Absolute power, however, has been beyond his swallow. He can manoeuvre like a Prince, embrace deceit with lustful immorality, seize elusive chance in the name of realism and aspire to being both loved and feared. He can exude the rebarbative grandiosity of a ruler but he is too vulnerable to contempt to exercise it effectively. He has the speed of thought but not the depth to be either another Machiavelli or truly Machiavellian in his actions. His words are diary entries not political thought. There is no insight into any of the Labour leadership or any assessment of their fitness to be prime minister. He cannot say what Labour should do in the face of this coalition government. He builds pyramids of sand out of what he has 'achieved' in the past without lighting any beacons to the future. As I once was, he has now been cast into the political wilderness, blamed directly for David Miliband's failure to win the Labour party leadership. His hardships are butterfly slaps against the trials I faced. Cameron is not a Medici any more than Brown was as fallible as Soderini. Cameron will not hang him from wrists bound behind his back until his shoulders are like Catherine wheels. He has bought too many rich friends to be aghast at the spectre of poverty. Mandelson lacks the need that drove me to write The Prince and my Discourses, and the talent to write my plays and comedies. Political science will not be shaped by who Mandelson breakfasts, sunbathes or spends New Year with. If he is to be missed, it will be for his entertainment value as the vitriolic dame in the Westminster panto. Machiavelli’s opinion was interpreted in Feb 2011. Image attribution Photo: Niccolo Machiavelli, esquire.com Photo: Peter Mandelson, labourlist.org Photo: Godfather poster, londonpatriot.org **** Chapter 15: Paul McKenna by Franz Mesmer DON’T LOOK INTO MY EYES Franz Mesmer assesses internationally famous hypnotherapist, Paul Mckenna I didn't invent hypnotism, the power that has made Paul McKenna famous, I discovered it. In the eighteenth century. Think about that. No, please do. That's not a 'Look into my eyes' instruction from the man who spawned everybody from Svengali and Rasputin through to Kenny Craig. You should think about it because you'll find it puzzling. Western medicine, if you date it from Hippocrates, had been going for over two thousand years without noticing the therapeutic force that many people possessed. But nobody told them they had. Within a couple of decades of my first demonstrations of mesmerism, all the best surgeons were using it as the only anaesthetic available to them besides ethyl alcohol. How much pain could have been saved if some medieval barber (aka surgeon) had realised what a stare, a flick or any kind of 'mesmeric pass' could have done for his business? A look at the career of Paul McKenna might help you understand why it took so long for the world of medicine to cotton on. Hypnotherapy, which is what Paul McKenna practises, is where medicine and theatre combust explosively. Medicine has always been theatrical. Why else would surgeons operate in a theatre? I owe it to Paul Mckenna for helping me understand that my love of theatricality had a crucial impact on my work as a physician in Vienna and Paris at the turn of the eighteenth century. Hypnotherapy began with my doctoral dissertation of 1766, De influxu planetarum in corpus humanum ["The Influence of the Planets upon the Human Body"]. I'm embarrassed to concede that it was a pile of nonsense about cosmic energies and I'm confident Paul hasn't read it because he has neither a Latin nor a medical education. I am equally confident that it was from my wordy little acorn that Paul has grown an incredible amount of money. Like the £23million the Discovery Channel gave him in 2008 - the largest deal ever for a British TV personality. Money and medicine have always had an awkward relationship. Like Paul, I don't have a conscience about becoming rich through making people feel better about themselves. For doing that, Paul has been labelled a charlatan in some quarters, which is exactly what happened to me. Kenny Craig, 'Little Britain' hypnotist Actually, Paul McKenna is a much more natural charlatan than I ever was. I do not mean that unkindly, nor to argue that I had nothing of the charlatan in me. You need the skills of the charlatan to be able to either mesmerise or hypnotise. While physician to the great and the good in the reign of Louis XIII. I watched the first charlatans on the streets of Paris. Men like Tabarin and his brother, Mondor ,who would draw huge crowds to the Place Dauphin. They were comedic entertainers first and sellers of ineffective medicine second. They made Parisians feel better about themselves with or without buying their pills and potions. Shamelessly, I borrowed their techniques to develop a form of healing that was far more effective than the bleeding, purgatives and opiates used by my fellow doctors. Patients flocked to me to free themselves from the bondage of their mental and sexual insecurities. Very soon I was dousing roomfuls of patients with spray from magnets and iron filings submerged in water. Then, wearing a purple silk robe and waving an iron wand, I would perform my 'mesmeric passes' . McKenna came to hypnotherapy via the razzmatazz world of the radio disc jockey. His understanding of theatricality was more innate than mine. When a guest on his radio show described his hypnotic techniques, Paul suddenly glimpsed a more interesting and rewarding career. He dabbled with hypnotism, first to amuse his friends and then to gull inebriants in London pubs and clubs into making fools of themselves. His employers, a radio station which also owned a London theatre, realised that there was money to be made out of McKenna's unusual talent. They put him on the stage. Unsurprisingly, Paul was quick to appreciate that radio was not the natural habitat of the hypnotist. Very soon,' The Hypnotic World of Paul McKenna' was - may I use my word again? - mesmerising tv audiences in 42 countries. This was Paul McKenna, the entertainer. In his shadow, the shape of Paul McKenna, the self-help healer, was looming larger and larger. In developing that side of himself, Paul hasn't latched onto any of my 'cosmic energies'. Instead, he first of all snuggled under the wing of Richard Bandler, the not uncontroversial pioneer of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). Finding TFT a more compelling acronym, he then turned to Richard Callaghan, the inventor of Thought Field Therapy. And in case that's not mind controlling enough Paul has more recently collaborated with the American Zen Master, Dennis Genpo Merzel Roshi, abbot and founder of Kanzeon Zen Center. A huge number of successful books and tv programmes have resulted. Along with an impressive list of personal hypnotherapy patients, like Simon Cowell, Ellen de Generis and David Walliams. What Paul has perfected is the operating theatre of the mind. He owes me a great deal. Franz Mesmer’s opinion was interpreted in November 2011. Image attribution Photo: Paul McKenna, beyondthelawofattraction.org Photo: Franz Mesmer, Wiki Commons Photo: Kenny Craig, dailymail.co.uk **** Chapter 16: Rupert Murdoch by Randolph Hearst GOTCHA, RUPE! Press baron, WR Hearst, assesses Rupert Murdoch "This is the most humble day in my life," said Rupert this month, fresh from his pie-in-the-face moment. Not very humble then. Newspaper men like me and Rupert may taste humble pie when it's flung at us but WE NEVER SWALLOW. Humility is not a gene in our makeup. Schadenfreude sure is though. Watching Murdoch being grilled in the House of Commons warmed my bones. He took my crown and I'm happy to see it slip from his head. I lost it because of the Great Depression; he's losing it because of some phone calls. I think I can be excused, he can't. What's happened won't make him humble, just pissed (or pissed off as the Brits would have it). He knows he's toast now. If he doesn't accept it, he'll go King Lear mad. Of course, I recognise myself in Murdoch. Any fool would. There wouldn't be a Rupert Murdoch if there hadn't been a Randolph Hearst. Press barons, you call us. Disrespectfully, in my opinion. Barons own estates, ours are kingdoms. Humble pie moment in House of Commons The kingdom of information is richer and more powerful than any geographical entity. Its rulers start wars, create Presidents and Prime Ministers, shape the world's opinion. We stand for everyone and WE ANSWER TO NO ONE. The US went to war with Spain because of me. The US and UK invaded Iraq because of support from every one of Rupert's 175 newspapers across the world (except the one in Papua New Guinea, for some inexplicable reason). I put Hoover and Roosevelt into the Oval Office, Rupert gave the UK to Tony Blair. Again, I think I can be excused, but can he? I was hardly cold in my grave when Rupert took over his first newspaper. OK, I'd been sad and a little mad for many years. Maddened mostly by the worthless pretenders like Rothermere, Beaverbrook, Luce, Thomson and Paley. But considering the power he has amassed I have to concede Rupert is a mighty successor to my crown. I don't feel too bad about it, MURDOCH IS KING DAVID TO MY SAUL. Yes, there is some jealousy there but I don't rate myself as second best. The kingdom of information is a gazillion times bigger now and there were no Goliaths like Pulitzer for him to slay. His timing is better than mine. The world speaks English now. Only part of it did at the turn of the nineteenth century. So don't think too highly of him. He didn't invent sex and sleaze in journalism, I'd trawled that path well before him. BOOBS WITH BREAKFAST was an inspired move, I admit, but big headlines, big pics, celeb scandals and heavy crime mashed up with xenophobia was the precedent I'd set. I'm not apologising for that - I also threw quality into the mix. When I started running newspapers, I turned straight to Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Jack London, Stephen Crane and Julian Hawthorne to write for me. Rupert has just dumbed everything down because he thought that was the only way to ramp up circulations. I was happy to call myself a populist. Rupert professes to be a libertarian and wants, "As much individual responsibility as possible, as little government as possible, as few rules as possible." The subtext is pretty obvious. In spite of what he says, he believes passionately in rules - Rupe's Rules. The game Rupert played better than anyone since Genghis Khan is called 'BE MY PATSY'. Until last month 'Be my Patsy' was very popular in Britain. Especially with politicians and celebrities, for whom the game was more or less compulsory. The aim of the game was not to do what Rupert wanted. Every time you tried to do what Rupert didn't want (like ratify a new EU constitution or veto a takeover of BSB, for instance), the banker could play one of his TWO JOKERS - the top cop or the major newspaper editor. The only way you could win was to do something when the banker wasn't looking or didn't care. Now that the biggest jokers, like Sir Paul Stephenson and Rebecca Brooks have been taken out of the pack, RUPERT DOESN'T WANT TO PLAY ANY MORE. Which brings me to the main difference between us two great newspaper men. I didn't despise the system I manipulated. I joined in. I was twice elected to the House of Representatives. Rupert has never wanted to be part of anything but his own News Corporation. He is a loner who has said that he is “proud” of the enemies he has made. PRIDE COMES BEFORE A FALL, they say. WR Hearst’s opinion was interpreted in July 2011. Image attribution Photo: Playing card, internetweekly.org Photo: WR Hearst, nndb.com Photo: pie incident, fox.com.au **** Chapter 17: Vladimir Putin by Lavrentiy Beria PUTIN’S ARMY - NO MATCH FOR THE NKVD Stalinist, Lavrentiy Beria, assesses Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin Vladimir Putin was a year old when I was arrested on trumped-up charges, tortured by the NKVD in my favourite cell in the Lubyanka and then handed over to General Batitsky to be shot in the head like a dog. My only regret is that I didn’t see it coming. It was how politics in Russia should work. Because that is how I had taught the Politburo to operate. With a little help from that madman, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. So the NKVD could turn on Lavrentiy Beria, the man who had made it the ultimate power broker in the Soviet Union? What better proof could there be that I had moulded a perfect, flexible and resourceful organ of government? I noted the rise of Putin with quiet satisfaction. A KGB officer trained at the 401st KGB school in Okhta, Leningrad. An officer who had served with the First, Second and Fifth Directorates of the KGB, the successor organisation to the NKVD. Here was man with the steel of Beria in his soul, surely. A man who could lobotomise the Russian psyche with the scalpel of terror. I had the flexible mind of a Georgian and I soon realised that Russians understand two things above all else: power and fear. They know you can’t have one without the other. Although the lesson has been well taught since the days of Ivan the Terrible nobody taught it better than Lavrentiy Beria. I was confident that Putin had lapped up my lessons like mother’s milk. Events seem to justify my confidence. Vladimir Putin has been running Russia since May 2000, either as President or as Prime Minister through his nominee President, Dmitry Medvedev. At 48, he was the youngest man to take the reins since Joseph Vissarionovich. There is every possibility that he will remain in control for as long as that unlamented Chairman of the Council of Ministers. If he does, history will of course repeat itself and he will die, naturally or otherwise, a madman, leaving Russia an enigma to the rest of the world. It might not happen that way, My concern is that Putin is beginning to forget that fear is the only stable basis for power in Russia. He has the instrument available. The FSB, the new title for the Russian secret police, is still guided by the proud and bloody tradition that stretches from Cheka, through OGPU, NKVD and many other fearful acronyms to the KGB. That tradition swept him to the Presidency. The initials KGB attached themselves to him like stigmata. They were the proof to the Russian people that he would be the unprincipled strong man they crave as leader. Putin’s Army compared with the NKVD He has not yet disappointed them in his iron-fisted leadership; in leading the Second Chechen War; in suppressing human rights and freedoms in Russia and Chechnya; in forcibly silencing his opponents like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and in bullying the former Soviet Republics. I applaud the brute strength in all those actions. What right have I to be concerned then? Instead of strengthening the FSB, he is turning to an entirely new army, Putin’s Army , made up entirely of beautiful young women. Because I am not part of the Facebook generation this is a political development I could not have foreseen, nor am I able to understand it. I should have seen it coming though. Putin was not part of the KGB like I was part of the NKVD. The difference is that he never got anywhere near running it. In fact, he was among the most harmless of KGB officers; monitoring foreigners and consular officials in Leningrad; investigating political dissent; reporting from consular offices in Dresden on the situation in East Germany, and eyeing the students of Leningrad University for both dissension and potential. While in the KGB he also held down full time jobs as a police officer and university lecturer. His commitment was clearly demonstrated by the alacrity with which he abandoned the KGB when it tried to defy Michail Gorbachev. My career was rather more intimidating. As head of the NKVD, I consigned millions of people to their graves, a fair number of whom I would have called comrade and sincerely meant it when I did. The rest were “turncoats, deserters, cowards and suspected malingerers”. Their deaths were a political necessity for which I do not seek salvation. I knelt before no god and until Batitsky took me down to the basement of the Lubyanka I did not kneel before any man either. No one has died as a direct result of Putin’s KGB activities. And, although he is a 6th dan practitioner of judo, no one screams when he enters the room. He wears a baptismal cross around his neck at all times and will admit that he kneels to a God. No, Putin is not in my image but he is in danger of moving out of my shadow. He is not the real thing. His head is being turned by pretty young women who are willing to display their breasts in his name. Putin’s beautiful Army is no replacement for the NKVD. Vladimir Vladimirovich, this is a warning. I loved many, many women whether they wanted me to or not but women are instruments of pleasure they are not the keys to power. Beria’s opinion was interpreted in August 2011. Image attribution Photo: Putin in KGB uniform, Wikipedia Commons Photo: Beria, samegrelo.geguchadze.com Photo: Putin’s Army, putinwatcher.blogspot.com Photo: NKVD, wwii-issues.blogspot.com **** Chapter 18: Nicolas Sarkozy by Napoleon Bonaparte HIS COMPLEX IS NOT MINE Napoleon assesses the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy Nicola Sarkozy, the present leader of France is 165 centimetres, about my height. His wife, Carla, is scandalously beautiful, as was my first wife, Joséphine. Small coincidences from which the man is trying to fashion himself in my image. In the attempt, he makes himself ridiculous and undermines my reputation as the greatest ruler of the French since Charlemagne. As vividly as Sarkozy dreams, there will never be another Napoleon Bonaparte in France. In another country, in another age, there might be a man like me, in the same way that I was the second Alexander the Great. It is deeply irritating that I am compared with Nicolas Sarkozy simply because he is short. I was not short, nor was Alexander. Let's make this entirely clear. We were men of normal size for our times. Sarkozy is not. Yes, I was a complex man. No, I never had a complex, certainly not one of inferiority. When that Austrian mind doctor, Alfred Adler, associated my name with aggression in small men, he was scrubbing at the shame which I inflicted on his countrymen at Austerlitz, Teugen, Abensberg, Landshut , Regensberg , Eckmühl, Wagram and Znaim. He is the only Austrian in the world who has been able to diminish me. Not only is that unjustified but stature is not measured in centimetres. Every man should aspire to my stature. If the Napoleon complex exists, then it should be taught in all schools as the paradigm of leadership for alpha males. Me standing tall at Arcole, Sarkozy caught short with his wife. No one is happier with the myth that I was a small man than Sarkozy. Thanks to Adler, it makes it more credible that he could stand in my shoes. My shoes are vote winners and that is what Sarkozy is most short of, now that the re-election struggle looms. He is attempting to be Napoleonic because France has always wanted their leaders to be like me. Decisive figures who command the world stage. Chaos at home is bearable if France can strut abroad. Every Frenchmen believes that his birthright is to show the world the path. In my time, we did. I doubt that it can be done now or that an ex-Mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine could do so with little more than a short temper and an adorable wife to support his pretentions. French militarism has not greatly influenced the world since I led its armies. In Libya, Sarkozy is trying to change that by picking on an enemy who cannot fight back while claiming unselfish, wholesome humanitarian motives. I was more comfortable with being outnumbered and believing in the destiny of France. I accept that Sarkozy's 'liberal militarism' has won the hearts and minds of Libyans. “Sarkozy mia mia!” they chant as his fighter-bombers assault their own President's stronghold. My countrymen are less gullible even though the embers of la révolution française still burn in their hearts. Nevertheless, his name has entered the global language - a 'Sarkozy', I gather, is an unopposed air strike on a disposable tyrant. Since I have a complex in my name, I should not begrudge him that eponymity. My quarrel is that Sarkozy is a belligerent puppet of the Americans, a little dancing man demanding the credit for what is yet another US military intervention. When he does stand alone to shake France's rusty iron fist, it is at little countries like Côte d’Ivoire who were once French colonies. He stands back from Egypt and Tunisia like the playground bully uncertain of opponents who might bite back. His militarism is not that liberal. If I am to applaud the man it is for one thing only and I do it through the mists of pain. He has done what Napoleon Bonaparte never did. He has managed to make his most beloved wife pregnant. It is the greatest sadness of my life that I was never able to do that. As you know, I tried hard enough. I was not to know it for sure but the fault was Joséphine's not mine. The change came on her when she was hardly thirty but she kept that from me, and from her own mind. Carla is into her forties but she is about to give Sarkozy what he wants most of all from life, a charming new bundle of votes. When they are born, I will shed angry tears and think only of Joséphine and what might have been. Napoleon Bonaparte’s opinion was interpreted in May 2011. Image attribution Photo: Nicolas Sarkozy, thepoliticalelite.com Photo: Napoleon, freemasonry.bcy.ca Painting: Napoleon, Wikipedia Commons Photo: Sarkozy-Bruni, connect.in.com **** Chapter 19: David Walliams by Will Kemp HE’S NO FOOL Will Kemp, marathon morrisman and comic, assesses David Walliams Comic actors raising money by feats of endurance is not new. Eddie Izzard running consecutive marathons, and David Walliams swimming down the Thames, are only following a four centuries old trend. I set that trend. Me. Will Kemp. Will Shakespeare’s favourite fool before he discovered comic subtlety. Who better, then, to understand what David Walliams has just achieved? Mmm. I’m not sure that I do. I hesitate to say it, but I don’t think he’s quite the fool I was. What I did was no less remarkable. I jigged and morris danced all the way from London to Norwich, a distance of one hundred and fourteen miles in the company of my tame musician, Thomas Slye. Thirty odd miles shorter than David’s recent swim and yet I took a day longer to do it, nine whole exhausting days. I wrote a book about it, ‘Nine days wonder’, a money-making exercise which I found to be even more tiring than nine day’s jigging. I also got a big bag of coin from the Mayor of Norwich for putting his city back on the map. Besides jigging versus swimming, there are two obvious differences between my feat and David’s. I kept in character and I kept the coin. Compared to me, David Walliams isn’t a fool. Not in my book. That swim down the Thames - it wasn’t funny, not the act of a real fool like me. David swam down a very dirty river dodging turds and worse for over one hundred and forty miles yet he didn’t try to raise a single laugh. He wasn’t even putting himself though hell to make money for himself. That’s not the behaviour of a fool. I know because I was one. The best in the business until Will Shakespeare started writing me out of his plays. Should my achievement seem any less than David’s because I acted the fool all the way and pocketed all the proceeds? Definitely not. He may have raised over a million pounds from splashing about in a river but I broke people into over a million smiles. They were lining the route every day and not just clapping as they did for David - they were falling about laughing. Laughing is what fools should make people do and what they should be well rewarded for. Especially when everybody lives in the shadow of something as fearsome as the Plague. It isn’t that humour’s changed since my time. In spite of the silly caps, swimming, which David does a lot of, has never been funny. Morris dancing, which I did almost to death, is and always has been. Everybody in the world swims so it’s a bit dull. David has swum the Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar and half the Thames but has he invented a new and funnier way of swimming? Will the ‘Walliams’ be the next daft event in the Olympic pool? Not a chance. Even David Walliams couldn’t think up anything to top synchronised swimming. Swimming isn’t something a fool would do to get the world watching. Morris dancing is. The reason why morris dancing is funny is that only the English do it. The English aren’t known for being ridiculous so it’s amusing to watch us when we are. The Austrians came up with the waltz and the Latins have turned any number of sexy frolics into dances, but we English are happier making idiots of ourselves than prancing around like stallions. If we had to have a national dance it suited us to borrow from the French. In France, when I was a visiting apprentice fool, I discovered that it was an upper class custom for a dancer to come into the hall after supper with his face soot-blackened to look like a Moor, his forehead bound with white or yellow taffeta, and jangly bells tied to his legs. I turned that into morris dancing jigs which I took all around Europe and they loved it. I was the English fool, which sat comfortably with the sense of superiority felt by the French, Spanish, Italians and even the Dutch at the time (Dr Dee had only just come up with the idea of the British Empire, we were still a long way from having one). I did a very long jig to make myself more famous as a fool and a lot richer. David has done a very long swim to make himself more serious, and less fortunate people a lot richer. He’s not the complete fool I was. Instead, David is the tearful clown. A man prone to depression. A man who wants to be liked more than he wants to be laughed at. I can’t really argue against the world being more enriched by tearful clowns than complete fools. The fool is more selfish than the clown which is not a particularly happy place to be either. I have to face the truism which doesn’t threaten David - that the only happy fool is an idiot. Which makes me unhappy or stupid. I hope that by not being a fool like me, David hasn’t actually been very foolish. I was risking injury on my journey to Norwich. My every fourth step was a hop, which gave my forty nine year old joints a hammering. Then there was all the backwards steps, which made the hundred and fourteen miles a lot longer. What I didn’t risk was Weil’s disease. From a fool to a clown, best wishes that the rats didn’t get you. Will Kemp’s opinion was interpreted in Oct 2011. Image attribution Photo: David Walliams, thesun.co.uk Photo: Nine days wonder, allposters.co.uk Photo: Kemp tribute jig, metro.co.uk Photo: Walliams swimming, guardian.co.uk **** Chapter 20: Mark Zuckerberg by Karl Marx HAST DU DAS GESICHTBUCH GESEHEN? Karl Marx assesses Mark Zuckerberg in conversation with Friedrich Engels Karl Marx Friedrich, old friend, it is so long since we discussed matters of moment. Did I ever thank you for completing Das Kapital for me? Unforgivable, even if I did not agree with everything you added. You will forgive my ungraciousness nevertheless, as you always did. Enough of wittering. To my point. For too long, I have been horribly depressed by what has happened in my name. Yours too. Stalin abused you. With your capacity for pleasure, I am sure you have not brooded on it as much as I. Have you been keeping up with the new social movements or have you been lost in a champagne corner of the afterlife? No, you would never abandon reason totally to the pursuit of pleasure. You will have kept up, I know. You are a very social animal. You of all people must have been drawn to the - I would call it mindless - conviviality of Zuckerberg's creation. We could not have foreseen it, could we, dear Friedrich? Friedrich Engels It is pure joy to hear from you again, Karl. You are right. I keep my reason but I have not abandoned jollity simply because I have left life behind. There is no tear too wet that a smile cannot dry, even here. Thank you for thinking of the honour of my name. I am no more the ideological father of Stalin than Jesus was the apostle of the devil. It does not weigh on my soul that some people think otherwise. We were makers of destiny but not its masters. No, we could not have known how many would piss on our legacy. I urge you to leave the thought behind. KM Oh, I have done. Friedrich. I have done. That is not what I meant. It is not the dismal dictatorship of the Soviet proletariat that still engages my mind, it is the birth of the international communitariat that is rescuing me from deathly despair. You too must have been astounded, not so much by what has happened, but by how Zuckerberg has made it happen. FE As ever Karl, you are a pace or two ahead of me. And what pleasure you seem to be taking in those strides. A Jewish philosopher with a convivial turn of mind? I'm happy to leave my cups to hear more of him. KM Friedrich, you and I embraced the dialectic only to know her as a mistress with too many quarrelsome lovers. Well, I believe there is a new dialectic in town. And people like us are wooing her, leading her on. Actually, not like us. In fact, not like us at all. Social engineers by chance not by philosophising. And so young, Friedrich, so young. If the world had noticed me before I became a headstone in Highbury, much would have changed. History would have changed, Friedrich. No one listened till we were gone, did they? Zuckerberg, you must know of him. Thoughtless thinker besides you and me, but boundless achiever. FE I am warmed by your tone. You speak as though there is romance in your soul. There was precious little of it in your life so I raise my flute to this Zuckerberg if he can affect you so. I thought romance was my province. He expounds a new dialectic, you say? Hegelian or anti-Hegelian? KM Expounds? No that is not the word, Friedrich. He is a casual classicist but, I think, an involuntary philosopher. He is parent to the cyberspatial dialectic yet I doubt he would recognise his child. From the sound of things, neither do you. Is your mind now an empty corral - there used to be so many horned beasts buffeting around in it when we shared our thoughts? Zuckerberg thinks but mostly he does. What he's done is to alter my view on materialism. Friedrich, what if thought is matter? FE That would either be nonsense, since matter is an objective reality existing outside the mind, or proof of the first principle of the dialectic, the law of the unity and conflict of opposites. Matter precedes thought. That was the core of all our ideas. "The ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought," you said that. Matter is the philosophical superstructure of any society. Is Zuckerberg saying that thought is matter? KM Definitely not. He'd never use the word 'matter' in that context. 'Stuff' is his word. All he's ever wanted is to 'get stuff done'. FE 'Thought is stuff 'doesn't have quite the right philosophical ring, Karl. Are you sure about him? KM About him, perhaps not. About what he's done, very, very sure. You're not part of his movement, you've not showed your face? You don't have to have a body to have an identity, you know. I have, along with nearly six hundred million others. Admittedly most of them are alive. Six hundred million, that's a big share of the world to join in a revolution. It’s happened in Colombia. In Iran. In Egypt. FE Karl, I'm sorry. I'm with you now. Das Gesichtbuch. Facebook. He's the man behind that, of course. It is a revolution of a kind, I suppose. Not like the one I joined in Prussia. A lot less bloody. Where's the struggle in it? In fact, where's the class in it? KM Zuckerberg has passed authority to the individual, so our mantra of class struggle begins to sound hollow. I'm prepared to give it up. If I am surely you are, Friedrich? No one was more passionate about the individual. FE I can't believe what I'm hearing. Are you abandoning communism? To something you have said you find mindless? KM If individualism is abolishing the present state of things then it is pure communism. Perhaps because much of it is mindless it is all the more dangerous to those in power. What are they stopping? The return of the individual to the infant at the breast state when it was the centre of the universe? FE You want my help writing about this, don't you. Karl? Knowing you, you have a title already. KM I will dedicate it to Mark Zuckerberg and I will call it Das Cybernipple. FE Predictably brilliant. Call me again when you’ve written the first line. You’re good at those. Karl Marx’s opinion was interpreted in Jan 2011 Image attribution Photo: Mark Zuckerberg, topnews.in Image: Karl Marx, tonypapard.info Photo: Karl Marx headstone, commons.wikimedia.org Photo: Weekender cover. aemmgradnewmediastrategies.wordpress.com Photo: Friedrich Engels, answers.com **** About the author Will Coe is the Editor and Publisher of Egopendium, (http://www.egopendium.co.uk) the online magazine that looks at current personalities from the perspective of historical figures with whom they have something in common. TEN WOMEN WITH A PAST, volume 1 of Precedented people, is also available as a free e-book. Will Coe is also the author of 'THE ARCHER PRISM', which explores the fascinating life of Elizabethan courtier, writer and inventor of the flush toilet, Sir John Harington, as he now sees himself, using Jeffrey Archer as his lens. This e-novel is in the Egopendium spirit. Instead of looking at a modern life through an historical lens, it uses the prism of a modern life to help an historical figure understand his own. It's a fictional autobiography with a difference. Connect with me online Twitter: http://twitter.com/ #!/editorego Facebook: http://facebook.com/Egopendium Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/willcoe ###