Aspects of political correctness

Here’s an early bid to win a nomination for the shortlist of the 2017 version of the internal Rusters’ competition to find the most incongruous link between two media stories.

My starting point is that familiar old bugbear of the editorial team – the wonderful world of Political Correctness.

My first exhibit is the furore that erupted in the media itself – and on social media (I mention that not because I’ve noticed it myself as I don’t use social media but because I’ve heard it second-hand from others) – about the front page story in yesterday’s Daily Mail reporting upon the Prime Minister’s last-minute dash to Scotland to meet with the Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon before today’s triggering of Article 50 and the starting gun for the two year period of British/EU negotiation over our leaving deal.

All of this based around an article by Sarah Vine commenting upon the official photograph issued of these two important ladies posing together before they began what was by all accounts a frosty meeting on the topic of the Scottish nation holding a second independence in advance of Brexit actually happening, as Holyrood formally voted in favour of doing yesterday.

Ms Vine, one of those ‘Marmite’ journalists that some love and some hate, is of course married to former Tory minister and Boris Johnson-backstabber Michael Gove, which in itself probably adds 30% to her degree of unpopularity in some quarters.

For those that have been asleep, or possibly abroad, over the last few days and may have missed it, here’s a link to a piece penned by La Vine herself about the story as appears today on the website of the offender itself – DAILY MAIL

Holding my hand up straight away, I confess that on the subject of PC I am a curmudgeonly old cynic. No one would seek to deny that the drive for equality generally has brought many positives for the female population and indeed every other supposedly disadvantaged social group under the sun, albeit that we’re talking only about within liberal Western democracies by definition, of course, because they’re the only countries that revel in anguished hand-wringing about such subjects. The real crisis regarding the way that women are treated isn’t in the Western World at all – it’s in the other two-thirds of the world where corrupt dictators and religious zealots rule over downtrodden impoverished populations and women are still treated as chattels or worse.

For me it’s the ‘nannying state’ aspects of the priority it is automatically given by ‘right on’ broadcasters that grates, along with the fact that so often the rights and privileges that PC gains tend to accrue to members of the female elite who already have careers and/or hobbies and/or ‘social awareness charity-based activities’ to occupy their time and can afford to employ nannies, cooks and even servants to deal with traditional ‘female’ roles that they themselves would rather not perform.

And not the overwhelming majority of the female population who still bring up the children, buy the food, care for elderly relatives, do the housekeeping and basically keep family units everywhere ‘on the road’, often without enough money coming in to give them a chance to have these spiritually rewarding careers to which their elite counterparts feel entitled.

Imposing ‘representative’ quotas upon the board of FTSE 100 companies, in Parliament and other areas of power and influence is all very well but frankly it means close to little or nothing to most ordinary women.

There, that’s my rant over.

Coming back to ‘Legs-it’ [Geddit?] – the moniker now given to the issue of the legs and fashion-choices of powerful female politicians after the Mrs May/Sturgeon coming together – the only point I wished to add was simple one (borne of my experience of these things) that the section of the human race most interested in such aspects of females who for whatever reason are in the public eye is actually other women.

Way back in the 1980s and 1990s, when I worked in television and had titular responsibility for monitoring such things, it was an ever-present industry ‘given’ that when analysing the viewer criticisms received by broadcasters on the subject of the looks and performances of on-screen lady newsreaders, presenters and others –  e.g. their new hairstyles and fashion disasters, or auto-cue cock-ups and fawning behaviour when interviewing famous ‘hot’ male actors – the vast majority of the comments and criticisms came from females.

We all know the jokey summary about ‘Who reads which newspaper’ that begins “The Times is read by the people who run the country; the Daily Telegraph by the people who wish the country was still run as it was 50 years ago …’ and later, further down the list, continues ‘… the Daily Mail by the wives of the people who run the country …’.

As I understand it, the Daily Mail is the only national newspaper whose majority of readers is female. From my perspective, the ‘Legs-it’ issue that has caused this latest uproar is precisely the sort of story that appeals directly to that majority. Not, of course, that the elite ‘right on’ sisterhood currently so up in arms on the subject would ever wish to acknowledge this as they queue to get on the airwaves to protest about its sexist nature.

My second and final exhibit for my ‘topic de jour’ comes from the world of cricket.

This time it is nothing to do with comparisons between the male and female versions of the elite game – how much they are each paid, how the latter is constantly vying for progress in central contracts, to what extent ‘equal rights’ is wholly divorced from the reality of how popular in terms of paying customers and spectators at grounds each of the versions is – but all to do with descriptions and terms used within the sport, many of them having passed into common parlance several decades, if not centuries, ago.

The springboard for my comments today comes from an excellent piece that I would like to recommend to Rust readers, written by Andy Bull, appearing today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN

All I would like to add by way of comment or association is that, way back in time, when I was a youngster incarcerated first at a boarding prep school in Seaford in East Sussex and then at a secondary equivalent public school in Berkshire, I was a cricket all-rounder good enough to represent my schools from the ages of nine to sixteen – after which I basically left the sport, or should I say it left me … except for the occasional social games of village cricket that I played from time to time up to the age of almost exactly 50, at which point I recognised that my reflexes were sufficiently ‘shot’ that fielding (in my day a neglected aspect of the game in terms of practice and development of skills) with any degree of proficiency was now beyond me.

I could no longer move with enough speed to ‘field’ balls coming even quite close to me, nor indeed any longer throw the ball back with even a modicum of power and accuracy.

However, back in my halcyon days of yore I had been a moderately successful ‘bowler who also batted’ (usually at number six or seven in the order) type of all-rounder, rather than a ‘batsman who also bowled’.

I was and am left-handed. At cricket I bowled left-handed, but then batted as a right-hander for reasons that I cannot explain or analyse but which came naturally rather than being taught.

Bring a keen ‘joiner-inner’, my nature made me have a go at every aspect of any sport I played. I began as what I thought was a left-arm opening fast (but really medium-paced) bowler approaching the crease from ‘over the wicket’ – i.e. rather than ‘round’ it.

Later, in addition, this originating from my endless school holidays spent playing cricket on the lawn with my brothers and friends, I developed an aptitude for bowling off-breaks of spectacular fizz and turn out of the ‘back of my hand’ around the wicket off a five pace diagonal run-up (with the umpire having been requested to stand back form the stumps so that I could pass in front of him on my way to the crease).

Such a ball is known in cricket as a ‘Chinaman’. Don’t ask me why. As it happens, in his article linked above, Andy Bull lists some of the possible origins of the term.

Orthodoxy has it that slow left-arm bowlers deliver leg-spinners as their norm and then – as a surprise in their repertoire, if they have practised it enough – produce a Chinaman with which to hopefully bamboozle the batsman.

My unique selling point [to use a modern term] was the fact that I bowled Chinamen as my stock ball. It was an off-break bowled around the wicket that pitched somewhere outside off-stump and then span prodigiously across the batsman, i.e. towards the leg.

Probably simply because of its novelty, my slow bowling was quite successful. My biggest ever achievement with it was when playing for Edenbridge village side in Kent as a guest one summer as a seventeen-year-old, I came on to bowl almost as an afterthought – our venerable captain was giving every man in the side two overs and I was next to last to have my go – and ended up bowling five overs and taking 4 for 10.

All I wished to add here is that – never mind this modern world of all-pervasive PC – I’d like to register with Rusters everywhere that I bowled Chinamen then and – even if it is at the risk of being hung, drawn and quartered by the powers that breaching some newly-passed law – will continue to describe what I did as such to my dying day.