Best musicians I've seen - guitarists: time to get off the fence

 I shortlisted four guitarists as the best I've ever seen - David Gilmour, Jimmy Page, Robert Fripp and John Frusciante (22 March) while prevaricating about whether this was even a sensible question.  I can explain this by recalling a music journalist's review of a Traffic gig. He noted that he'd never thought Stevie Winwood to be that good a guitarist (and he isn't, though a great musician and songsmith). However, at the gig in question Winwood's solo in Sometimes I Feel So Uninspired dripped with emotion and made the journo's hair stand on end. So it's not just about pure technique. And Rolling Stone magazine's list of 100 greatest guitarists clearly allows for innovation and influence as well as playing ability.

Nevertheless, even if it's a daft question, which of my shortlist do I pick?

Of the four the guitarists the one I listen to the most now (and probably over time as well) is Frusciante, whose work consistently impresses while not detracting from the songs. If you wanted a guitarist to produce the perfect fills for your song, Page would be the conventional pick because of his long stint as a session musician before joing The Yardbirds and forming Led Zeppelin. (Or at least he would before he got a bit drug addled). But Frusciante would probably be the most reliable at nailing it for you and quite possibly more adept at turning out a guitar break that sounds a bit like, oh, Hendrix, Clapton, Page, whoever you'd like it to sound like. He has a significant body of solo work which I'm not very familiar with. It is mainly less commercial, some of it verging on avant garde with oddly fewer flashes of the crisp guitar playing we know him for.

If I had to pick a song for the Desert Island featuring one of my four guitarists it wouldn't be Frusciante, though. It would be Page's Dazed and Confused from Led Zep I or Ramble On from Led Zep II with it's brilliant, jagged electric riff smashing over the lyrical acoustic backdrop to the song. (I still don't understand how this works, but golly it does). Or Gilmour playing Astronomy Domine on the live album Ummagumma, a perennial favourite of mine. (Though I read an interesting blog by music producer/tour director/equipment specialist Mark Thompson which noted that the recording bears little resemblance to the gig he actually attended, with rather a lot of overdubs, apparently typical of many "live" albums. But never mind, I love it).

Which of the guitarists would I want to see again if I could be transported back to a gig in their prime? That would be Gilmour, though probably because I haven't seen him play live since the early 70s. A Pink Floyd gig later in that decade or the 80s would be just the ticket.

Although I'm a great admirer of Robert Fripp this means I'm down to three (though I have seen him the most of them and also most recently).

Regardless of how "good" I thought they were, which of the four did I actually most enjoy seeing play? That would be Jimmy Page, who I saw pretty much at his peak with Led Zeppelin in 1971, with more of a catalogue to showcase than when I first saw Gilmour in 1969.  And there was a huge tingle of excitement when Page joined Roy Harper at his 70th birthday gig at the Festival Hall in 2011 for their glorious extended acoustic duet in Roy's The Same Old Rock.*

Which guitarist was I most excited about seeing for the first time? None of the above, actually: Mick Jones of The Clash. I know, punk guitarist, three chords and all that but I've just been listening to the guitar runs on Complete Control from the eponymous first Clash album and I can understand exactly why watching Jonesy gave me such a buzz. I may return to that thought with an account of the 1981 gig some time. I'd claim Jones was a great musician but no way was he one of the world's best guitarists.

My 'favourite' guitarist? That might actually be Mick Jones or Del Bromham. And of course, had I seen Hendrix the question probably wouldn't need any debate with myself.

So, where does that leave me? Against my original question, the most competent technician on his instrument, I'd go with Frusciante. But hang on, which guitarist impressed me most when I saw him play? That would be Page, followed by Fripp. Frusciante sounded faultless but in the end you can't separate the playing technique from the performance and your involvement with what they are playing (well, I can't anyway).

So while Frusciante is the guitarist I enjoy listening to most on my hifi or in the car, the guitarist who impressed me most when I saw him was Page. So I'm going with Jimmy. 

So it's Page joining my supergroup on guitar with Keith Emerson on keyboards, Jon Hiseman on drums and Dick Heckstall-Smith on sax. Now I need a bass player and a singer...

* You can see a passable if wobbly recording of this performance at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2bdLAVHbQU though the subtlety of Page's playing come across better in the original studio recording, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwdamD86t8M

Are the Tories still the cake party?

I hadn't been paying much attention to the Tory leadership election. After all, selecting a new Conservative party leader is a matter for the party, so why should I waste time even thinking about it? I wasn't even sure why the TV debates were aired on mainstream channels. Why not spare us by having those debates in front of the MPs whose job it is to produce the two candidates to put forward to party members? And then put that stage on a stream accessible only to members? But I got suckered in by the newspaper coverage and snippets of the debates on the news. Which revealed that I should have been paying attention and the Tories have some big problems.

Firstly, the Tory party seems to have lost its sense of what it exists for (besides winning elections, at which it has traditionally been very successful). I've been saying for some time that the current government, if you set aside Brexit and a few dog-whistle policies such as sending small numbers of immigrants off cross channel dinghies to Rwanda, has been the least right wing Conservative government since Ted Heath's. The Johnson government was strong on rhetoric more than anything else. I suppose some would argue the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which came into force in June,  is an extreme right wing measure designed to restrict the ability to protest. It was used within a day of enactment to silence the irritating "Stop Brexit" guy outside the Houses of Parliament. But it still leaves plenty of scope for legitimate protest and as it was designed to crack down on disruptive guerrilla protests of the kind used by climate change activists it's fine with me. Those who disagree are presumably perfectly happy to see ambulances held up. The candidates tried to sound a bit more like Tories but with no particular coherence.

Secondly, it seems that, despite having got rid of Boris Johnson, the Tories has not moved on an iota from his policy on cake, i.e. to be pro having it and pro eating it. I hadn't thought "cakeism" was a real word but  the Cambridge dictionary defines it as the wish to have or to do two good things at the same time when this is impossible. So most of the candidates, with the exception of Rishi Sunak, indicated they would implement tax cuts without saying whether they would cut spending or how they would make up the shortfall. The sort of promise that the Tories have rightly castigated over many decades.

Indeed, some of the candidates have revealed a startling lack of economic marbles. Promising unfunded tax cuts is bad enough for a Tory but Mordaunt spoke about having a monetary policy, seemingly unaware that this was delegated to the Bank of England 25 years ago.Truss talked of paying back the covid debt over a longer period when we aren't actually paying anything back at the moment, as the debt is continuing to grow.

I'm not particularly bothered that it was described as a "dirty" race by David Davies, a Penny Mordaunt supporter (indeed, one of the few prominent "PM4PM" supporters). If MPs are so determined that a candidate should not be their leader then that seems to me to be significant. No cabinet members supported her bid, but it was more notable that none of her colleagues at Trade supported her either.

I had been well disposed to Mordaunt before the race started. I suspect this was mainly out of sympathy for her brutal sacking from her dream job as SoS for Defence after only 85 days when Johnson took charge. But I read some devastating critiques of her, particularly by Dominic Lawson and I was relieved when she didn't make the final two. It seems she can't take a decision, is a good presenter but has no grasp of policy and prioritises her personal aims over ministerial duties. When she gets things wrong (which she seems to do quite a lot) it isn't that she's a liar, just "awesomely ignorant".*

So the debate changed my mind about the Tory leadership election being open to public scrutiny, even though the nature of that scrutiny has been poor. The questions posed in the "debates" were weak. We didn't find out much or anything on important issues like foreign policy (China? Where's that?), energy strategy and supplies, how to fix social care and unblock hospitals, how to tame inflation or what to do about public sector pay. The fact that there might not be very good answers to any of these questions is perhaps something that we will all have to acknowledge, not just the candidates.

The debate allowed Tom Tugendhat to increase his profile and probably earn a cabinet post in the future. But please not defence, he needs to have something else to talk about. It also brought Kemi Badenoch to our attention. She has earned a promotion to a more significant role so she can be tested and we can see more of what she could do.

However, the main reason I think it is a good idea for the debate to be open to the public is that we have steadily moved to a more and more presidential status for the PM without the checks and balances constitutions of countries with presidents, such as the USA, provide. This process is not new - it's certainly been developing since the time of Thatcher - but Johnson put a twist on it with his reluctance to quit even when he had lost the support of his MPs. We need to know about these people so we can make it clear whether they are suitable. The public might not choose new party leaders but the people who do are influenced by whether the candidates are acceptable to the electorate. After all, it was arguably public opinion that eventually persuaded Tory MPs to ditch Johnson so they could clear the decks well before the next general election.

There are lessons for democracy in the rise and fall of Boris Johnson. Daniel Finklestein argued in the Times that leaving party members to make the final choice must be changed as it delivered us Corbyn and Johnson. But Johnson was perhaps the only candidate who could have pushed through Brexit. Remainers might think this was a bad thing but it implemented the will of the people and cleared a log jam. 

In the USA the selection of presidential candidates is influenced by a much wider electoral base, though that does not seem to have produced better quality candidates of late. Worse though is the fact that the American system cannot deliver sensible gun controls even though a majority of the electorate would be in favour and ditto has not acted to protect abortion rights, leaving a flaky precedent to be overturned by the Supreme Court, when the politcians should have enacted legislation and had plenty of opportunity to do it.

I've always thought that the party leaders should be chosen by the people who know them best and see them at close quarters - the MPs. The Tory MPs have produced the short list of two and we will now see whether Sunak sticks to his sound money stance and, if so, whether the Tory members vote for that or for tax cuts off the back of an envelope, the sort of promise Tories would previously have condemned out of hand.

However, some polls of Tory members, many of them still Johnson loyalists, indicate that tax isn't necessarily the crucial issue in the ballot. Sunak is viewed as disloyal so they will go for Truss. It's often been said that, in the Tory party, he who wields the knife shall not wear the crown - Michael Heseltine is an example. The general population may feel that Sunak did the right thing in precipitating Johnson's fall (though he only twitched after Javid jumped) but Truss may be rewarded for sitting on her hands. And the Tories will still be the cake party, leaving those of us who support sound money with no party to vote for. Ho hum. Maybe, just maybe, the Tory members will vote for jam tomorrow instead of cake.

* Dominic Lawson's Sunday Times column on 17 July noted that a colleague of hers during her brief stint as SoS Defence told him that, of several defence secretaries he had worked with, Mordaunt was the worst: "couldn't take a decision". Another she worked with in a ministerial role said she performed well at the despatch box but on anything to do with policy she was "all over the place, absent" gaining her the nickname "Penny Dormant". Lord Frost said that, when Mordaunt was his deputy in the Brexit talks, she didn't master the detail, wasn't accountable and wasn't always visible: "Sometimes I didn't even know where she was". Her colleagues at Trade wondered the same when she didn't fly abroad to sign a trade deal. One official, asked where she was, said "I have no f***ing idea". (She was on a promotional tour for her book).  She advocated NHS funding for homeopathy, despite no evidence for its effectiveness. She wrote that the Queen stuck by the country, no matter that at one stage it meant working with a government that wanted to abolish the monarchy (no such UK government ever existed). During the 2016 referendum campaign she erroneously told a disbelieving Andrew Marr twice that Britain would not be able to veto the accession of Turkey to the EU. Hence "awesomely ignorant", though Lawson noted that, when challenged on this some years later, she came up with a "shifty" account of why she hadn't really been wrong.  She claimed that when she said to the Commons, with furious emphasis "trans men are men; trans women are women" she didn't really mean all of them, just that "in law, some are". Lawson branded her the continuity candidate: little grip on policy, a tendency to go AWOL, a rich line in fantasy and an inability to admit error. "But Boris Johnson had the intellectual capacity, if not the character, for the job of prime minister. Penny Mordaunt has neither". Ouch. I'm glad we found out more about her. Though if she'd got to the last two maybe Sunak could have prevailed.

By spinning it out so long, has Johnson done the Tories a favour?

The long drawn out, slow motion train wreck of Boris Johnson's resignation has been a farce beyond parody. Like Monty Python's Black Knight, Johnson suffered from unchecked confidence and a staunch refusal to ever give up. The Black Night declared "tis but a scratch" as his limbs were progressively severed by King Arthur, just as Johnson appeared to try to carry on after so many slings and arrows, a vote of confidence so narrow that previous Tory leaders would all have resigned and then an unprecedented flood of ministerial resignations which made it seem impossible for there to be enough supportive Tory MPs for him to form a functioning government. Perhaps he thought he could do it all himself.

There have been many bizarre twists but newly appointed chancellor Nadhim Zahawi telling Johnson within 48 hours that he should resign and there being three education secretaries in three days were perhaps the strangest. Not that different from the end of the Python sketch where King Arthur tells the limbless but still aggressively screaming knight "you're a loony".

Since Partygate unfolded it's not been clear how this would end, other than badly. I could sympathise with the arguments on both sides of the Partygate issue. It was egregious and a total failure of leadership for there to be parties in number 10, even if some of them didn't really merit being called a party, while people were forbidden to visit dying relatives. On the other hand the most serious events involved civil servants who didn't report to the PM and he isn't their keeper. Of course he should have set an example by turfing people out of his office, or telling them to disperse, rather than toasting them with a rather pathetic can of coke while standing in front of some miserable pre-wrapped sandwiches. But no, he's not a criminal: a fixed penalty doesn't attract a criminal record and very few people would expect a PM to resign for "breaking the law" by getting a parking ticket. Some of you would say that's not the same, even though strictly speaking it is. A lot of people felt very strongly about Partygate one way or the other. I didn't, though I felt it was crass and, had I been a Tory backbencher, I'd have voted to eject Johnson once there was a ballot.

What was more significant for me was the drip, drip, drip of evasion and, at best, half-truths. I agree with Matthew Syed that this was corrosive to our faith in standards in public life in the UK and his argument that, as has been shown by studying the case history of southern Italy, once that is lacking in society there is a permanent hit on economic performance, as no-one trusts anyone about pretty much anything. Together with the government's increasingly miserable performance in competent delivery I had felt that, while Labour seem bereft of much in the way of ideas, simple decency might be enough for them to win the the next election. It felt to me like the 1990s, when the electorate decided in late 1992, only 6 months after they had won a general election, that the Tories had lost their reputation for economic confidence and then, when they become embroiled in sleaze, that they would take the next chance to turf them out. With the hindsight of decades the sleaze of David Mellor purportedly making love to his mistress wearing a Chelsea shirt seems faintly ridiculous (he says he wasn't but really, who cares?) and the corruption of cash in brown envelopes to ask a question in parliament seems small beer compared with billions for PPE contracts. But the public had decided, so even though Major's government rediscovered its economic mojo they were out, handing over a burgeoning economy to Blair and Brown. 

Partygate and then steady flow of further problems felt much like the 90s and so the electorate would surely, in due course, turf the Tories out. But the saga of Johnson's departure may yet give them an opportunity to regroup. 

"Nothing in his life became him, like the leaving it," Malcolm says after death of the Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth. What he meant was the Thane died with great dignity. He had lived badly, but he bravely confessed to his crimes. He confessed his treason, repented, and asked for King Duncan's pardon right before he is executed. The only good thing Cawdor did in his whole evil life was to repent for his villainous behavior and die with a clear, forthright, and honest conscience.

Johnson's exit was the opposite of great dignity. His refusal to see that his own behaviour had caused and was continuing to cause so much disruption means the Tories could run an argument on the following lines:

Boris did well on delivering Brexit when it looked as if there was no way through even though people had voted for it. The pandemic was well handled overall in comparison to similar countries and the vaccine development and deployment saved thousands of lives and jobs. Partygate wasn't great but he had credit in the bank; we're a loyal party and don't give up on good people because they make a mistake. However, his behaviour became increasingly erratic and he completely lost the plot: he went full tonto*, threatening to stay on even though confidence in him had been lost. The party can now get back to what it stands for rather than being run by a maverick, etc etc.

This wouldn't have worked against an opposition as competent and fresh as Blair and Brown looked in 1997. Against Starmer who can readily be portrayed as Mr Boring and Dull it might. I see no chance that the Tories will win the next election by anything like their current 80 seat majority. But I could imagine it being close.

Further twists could yet be to come, especially if Durham police serve Keir Starmer with a fixed penalty notice and he falls on his sword, as he has said he would. From what we know I can see very little difference indeed between Starmer's beer and curry event in Durham and the 'ambushed by birthday cake' do for which Johnson got his fixed penalty. Starmer has done well to rehabilitate Labour quickly after Corbyn, anti-semitism etc. But he is rather colourless and appears to be a sanctimonious prig. I wasn't impressed by a former DPP seeming to attempt to pressurise the police by his dare to quit if given a ticket. Even if he's not given a ticket some mud will stick; the episode will be brought up repeatedly whether or not he is penalised.

The Tories will have a lot of candidates for leader; I'm not sure if any seem terribly convincing at this stage. Liz Truss is the favourite of the Tory membership but her colleagues may conspire/vote tactically to keep her off the ballot. I have some concern that she could be as crazy as Johnson, though my bigger concern is that I don't know what her views on, or understanding of, the economy are. 

Labour may or may not have many candidates if they suddenly need to elect another leader; I can't think of a single convincing candidate. If it's still Starmer, or if both parties play safe in their choice of new leader, at the next general election we could find a situation where it's more about the policies than the personalities, in a kind of charisma free zone inhabitated by leaders who make Ed Davey and Mark Drakeford look interesting. Wouldn't that be weird? 

The Tories will feel they have two years to pick a leader, hope for an easing of headwinds in the world economy and produce some worthwhile achievements to show for their term in office besides getting Brexit done - sort of, but maybe not really in Ireland.

P.S. I expect we'll hear the usual nonsense from people saying there should be a general election and why should members of the Tory party pick the next prime minister. Er, who else should pick the leader of the Tory party? That would be as bizarre as Everton fans having a say in picking Liverpool's next manager (hmm, maybe a good idea....)  Since I've been old enough to pay attention more PMs have come to office between rather than at general elections (Home, Callaghan, Major, Brown, May and Johnson v Wilson, Heath, Thatcher, Blair and Cameron).

* Tonto in this context isn't a reference to the Lone Ranger's sidekick and has nothing to do with Native Americans. In Spanish it means stupid or foolish, though it's widely used to mean someone has gone crazy