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A lot of people have asked me about our new DG, Mark Thompson.
This is because I first met him nearly 30 years ago, though it would be misleading to say I have known him for nearly 30 years. That first meeting was at Oxford, when I was the business manager of the student magazine Isis. One of the things you had to do when you were business manager of Isis was keep it in business, which was not easy since no-one ever paid their bills. So the main job was to get things from people without ever actually paying for them, or at least not paying them very often and then not very much.
One of the other things you had to do was to make sure the right people got elected editor. This too was not always easy because democracy can be a fickle thing and is not always to be trusted when it comes to serious things like running student magazines - though it seems perfectly ok for less serious things like running the country or being mayor. I know this because I stood for the editorship twice and lost twice; the first time to two people who just managed to get the fourth edition of the four published each term into the shops about three weeks after the end of term, and the second time to two disturbingly secretive goths who only managed to collect enough advertising to publish two of the four. But I am not bitter about this and 30 years on do not rejoice in their misfortune or, let's face it, rank incompetence and it gives me no pleasure of any kind to reveal all this now.
Anyway, since the electorate of Isis did not think I was enough the foppish aesthete to be trusted to commission another poem from Clive James or another interview with David Bowie or coax one of the jeunesse doree into penning a prose poem of bowel loosening perception, I was clearly the man to leave alone with the chequebook.
Which I found out was the best thing to be because the point about editing Isis was - and perhaps still is - that it was in fact very little to do with being a foppish aesthete at all and much more to do with the begging tone you could adopt while extracting charity advertising from guilty multinationals. No advertising, no money. No money, no magazine. And, once I'd got a taste for telling foppish aesthetes that once again they'd failed on the begging front and that therefore they could chuck that fortnight's foppishly aesthetic whinings in the large bin kept at the back of the basement office for the purpose, I couldn't get enough of it.
The best bit of all, though, was the bit before each editorial election at the end of term when eager foppish aesthetes would traipse into my lodgings two by two - for that was the custom then - to put their "business plan" forward for approval to enable them to progress to the election stage. Inevitably if you liked them and they were clean and more or less normal then you would encourage them but if they were a bit strange or wore tight jeans then you would tell them to stop bothering you and to leave their hopes for election in the hollowed out elephant's foot by the door on their way out.
Which was where Mark Thompson came in some 30 years ago. I remember him as being jolly clean and, for the times, quite normal and accompanied by a young woman whose name I have to my shame forgotten but who later gave me a cup of tea which I spat out saying it tasted funny. She looked at me in a way that I now recognise as pityingly and I have never liked Earl Grey since.
As well as being clean and quite normal, Mark T was also clever and ambitious: neither of which was a particularly attractive trait at Oxford in those days though quite common in chaps from Merton. I've no recollection of his "business plan" and indeed it's quite possible he didn't even have one and certainly didn't need one since he and his co-editor were up against two early specimens of punk - the 70s youth movement not the 17th century euphemism - who were therefore not at all clean and lagging by a lap or two as far as being normal went.
No recollection either of what he put in the four editions of the magazine that he managed to get out, though he did get them out which is a good thing and he must have survived the end of term audit too which given how things have turned out for him and us probably augurs well.
Which is more or less it. Apart from a brief month or two, the trajectories of his and my 91热爆 careers have been near perfect examples of Euclidean parallel lines. Mine has been in radio, his in TV. Mine languid and moonlit, his sharp and sunlit. My habit has been to stick at things long enough to reap the product of my own errors, he is a clever and ambitious man from Merton. So we have not met for about two and a half decades and until now he has had no opportunity to repay my kindness of all those years ago.
Africa humbled us again this week though there has also been the traditional election fencing with Lord Falconer over the curious case of the all postal ballots in the :
with over the challenge from UKIP:
and Alistair Darling over the :
and I suppose these things matter but perhaps slightly less so if you've been driven miles from home by and robbed of your possessions and in all probability raped and beaten. reported from Chad where and can look forward to little except the rains that will cut them off from the tiny amounts of that have made it through until now:
Meanwhile, found that while the world has got richer, Africa has got poorer:
discussed the developed world's appetite for intervention:
while from one African country where such intervention ended the reign of the machete, Alistair Leithead reported on something that felt a bit like good-ish things were happening - - alongside forgiveness of a quite incredible kind:
Kevin
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