When an accident occurred during an F1 Grand Prix, Murray Walker, the motor racing commentator would sometimes tell the audience “we can’t see what’s happened from where we’re sat.” The reason Walker could not tell who came off at turn 11 of the Hungaroring is that he was in a BBC studio in England, watching the same television pictures as everyone else. Therein lies the irony of sports commentary. The purpose is to tell you what is happening. Apart from when listening on the radio, the same goal can be realized by using your own eyes. But watching television sport without commentary is like watching a modern-day movie made in black and white. Some people will never overcome that gnawing feeling that something is missing.

For the most popular sports, commentary has expanded exponentially. The commentator, once the lynchpin of television sports presentation, is now a bit part player. Time was that you used to only hear commentary, talk about events as they happen. Now every major sport is immersed in talk about what will happen before it does, and talk about why it happened after. Commentary is submerged in punditry. When once a retired footballer would buy a pub and serve stale beer to his hangers-on, he now learns to wear a tie with an enormous knot, gets media training, and reinvents himself as a television personality.

As a consequence of the shift from talking about events as they happen, to just talking, the entrance qualifications for talking about sport have changed. It used to be necessary to be good at talking, specifically at continuously something interesting and coherent in response to changing events. Now, the major qualification is to have once been a sportsperson. The idea is that having been a sportsperson, you have some special insight on the events. That may be true to a point, but most sports people are individuals with exceptional gifts of strength, stamina, speed, balance and agility. That does not mean they have two brain cells to rub together, had the foggiest idea what they were doing, why they were good at it, or the least bit of ability to explain it to others. Thanks to this trend, it is not unusual to hear halftime conversations that go something like the following…

Steve: Gary, do you think the blues will be happy coming in one-nil up?

Gary: Yes, Steve. But they’d have been happier to be two-nil up, no doubt about it.

Steve: It’s been one of those halves where the team on top is the one that takes its chances.

Gary: You’ve got to take your chances when you’re playing at this level. Albion didn’t take their chances. The blues did take their chance. The funny thing was that the lad took what was the hardest of the chances he had, after missing three or four easy ones.

Steve: Once again, it all comes down to taking your chances…

Gary: It does, Steve. And not just chances but half-chances. Sometimes you don’t even get a chance, so you’ve got to take your half-chances too.

Steve: And Albion didn’t make many chances.

Gary: No. To make chances you’ve got to take a chance or two. They’re sending in balls from deep and the defenders will gobble them up all day and night. The blues are working hard and they’re making it hard for Albion and that’s what we saw right from the kick-off, right up to when the ref blew his whistle and they came in for halftime. To be fair to Albion, the blues have played with two solid lines of four in defence and midfield, and they’ve not let Albion have a chance in this game.

Steve: Albion have shown they can make chances in their other games.

Gary: They have, and I’m sure that’s what the gaffer is telling the boys right now. The final ball’s let them down, but with the chances they’ve made in other games, you’ve got to back them to score sooner or later. But at this rate, it might not be today. Saying that, we’ve seen games like this turn in an instant and like the great Brian Clough used to say: it only takes a second to score a goal. Another goal, from either side, will definitely change the game.

Steve: What else do you think the manager’s telling Albion in their halftime talk?

Gary: I think he’s probably saying that there’s no need to panic. They’ve got forty-five minutes to come back. They need to be patient and find a way to inject some more urgency in their passing and overall play. They’ve not been the top team so far, but even the bottom team can be the top team on any given day in this league. We’ve seen it many times before, but I’d be surprised if we see it today. The main thing is they need to score first to get back into the game.

Steve: If they go two down, it’ll be a mountain to climb back.

Gary: That’s right Steve. They’ve done well for a newly-promoted team, but they really need to score first to stand a chance in the second half. If they go two down then you’ve got to think they’re out of it. But with the goalscorers they’ve got, they can never be ruled out completely.

Steve: Is it too soon to make a change?

Gary: I don’t think they need to make a change. The young lad on the wing is causing them problems when he runs at his opposite number. He just needs better delivery into the box. The strikers aren’t getting fed and if you don’t feed them they become invisible. There was a ten minute spell when the guys upfront looked bright and seemed to be getting on the front foot but the rest of the time they’ve not got their foot on the ball and that’s why they can’t get a foothold in this game.

Steve: That’s the game of football for you. Now what about the referee - is he having a good game?

Gary: There’s been some tackles flying in which makes it hard but he’s keeping the game flowing which the fans like to see.

Steve: And the penalty shout?

Gary: Definitely not a penalty. He won the ball cleanly and the lad went over too easy for my liking. If you’re going to criticize the ref you have to question why he didn’t give a yellow card for simulation. This ref never tends to hand out many cards unlike other refs, which I like to see, but makes the players very confused. The players are crying out for more consistency. That’s all that anyone can ask from the men in black. If a player falls that dramatically in the box, and it’s not a penalty, you’ve got to card him. We’ve seen them given in other games and it’s the lack of consistency that makes it hard for players to tell what are the rules on pretending to be fouled in the box. They just want to know what the rules are and if they’re allowed to pretend to be fouled in order to win a penalty decision. The refs really need to sit down together and decide what the rule’s supposed to be so players know where they stand when falling over in the penalty area.

Steve: Do you think they might throw on Hobson, who’s not played for six weeks but is fit enough to sit on the bench?

Gary: Hobson gives them something different. The question is his sharpness. Without playing he won’t be sharp but you don’t get sharp unless you’re playing. I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t come on until the last ten minutes, especially if they’re still down.

Steve: And what do you think of the blues’ new signing, the lad Kinzamann from Kaiserslautern?

Gary: He came here with a big reputation but I’m disappointed, to be honest. It looks like he’s struggling to keep up with the pace of an English derby game. This isn’t a derby game but it’s as good as a derby game.

Steve: I think the teams are about thirty-five miles apart. It’s not technically a derby game, but I know what you mean. It’s just like a derby game with everyone running around at a hundred miles an hour. And Albion would only have spent a half hour on the team coach, coming down the motorway this morning.

Gary: There’s a lot of huff and puff. There’s a lot of commitment on show. Typical English game with everyone diving in, hard tackles and no time on the ball. It’s what makes our football so entertaining to watch. Some of these new foreign players struggle to adjust to the pace when they first arrive. But the lad Kinzamann had that moment early on when he showed he’s got some silky skills, so I’m hoping he’ll be better in the second half.

Steve: Would either team be satisfied with a draw?

Gary: I don’t think so. This game’s a six-pointer. If it’s a draw, then the teams only get two points between them and that means they’ve both lost a potential four points. Even at this stage of the season, you can’t afford to drop four points in a single game.

Steve: Every game counts.

Gary: It does. There’s thirty-eight games in a season, not ten games or six games or twelve games but thirty-eight games in a season. And that’s not counting cup competitions. I think they’ll both be glad that they’re not in Europe which would mean even more games.

Steve: This league’s a marathon.

Gary: Exactly. These days, football is literally a marathon. That’s what makes the result in every single game so much more important. That’s why they’re playing this league game like it’s a cup game. In the league what matters is how many games you win and how many you draw. You can’t afford too many loses so you’ve got to aim to win every game, especially these games because you can’t expect to win against the top four. But with the blues at home, they know they’ve got to beat a side like Albion to stay up, and so far they are beating them which is all the fans can ask for.

Steve: The game might be unlocked by that little bit of skill or a mistake in the last ten minutes.

Gary: If the game is still one-nil going into the final ten minutes, then what happens in those ten minutes could definitely change the result in a big way. And then there’s stoppage time too.

Steve: So they’ll both be trying to win.

Gary: I’d bet my shirt on it.

Steve: And it looks like an expensive shirt too.

Gary: [Laughs] Thanks Steve.

It is tempting to denigrate the low end of punditry, but the high end of pre and post match analysis is now supported by an extraordinary array of technology. Pundits like Andy Gray of Sky’s Football coverage, and John Madden when talking about American Football, are now supported by gizmos that make even Bill Gates drool with envy. They have chalkboards, replays, hawkeyes, highlighters, snickometers, speed measurers and even computer simulations to help explain such basic things as how one team managed to score despite the best efforts of the other team to stop them. The investment in technology is so impressive, you have to assume there has been a knock-on stimulus to other sectors, in the same way that the space race resulted in teflon pans and pens that write upside down. Right now you imagine there is an American general somewhere in Afghanistan, marking on a touch sensitive screen the plans for how his team of troopers will make a touchdown run into Al Qaeda’s endzone.

Whilst some pundits have masterful analytical skills of a kind that were sorely lacking at Lehmann Brothers, the average pundit has descended to the level of former sports stars who can be trusted to dress smartly, speak coherently and avoid getting drunk until the show has finished. But then, they did let Gazza have a go at it, so even those expectations are not universal. More and more televised football games has created such a vacuum for former footballers that even Stan Collymore gets to share his insights with the rest of us. If even can talk sense about football, perhaps he should have told himself to score more goals during those long years of underachievement out on the pitch.

Journalists have been frozen out and their skills are no longer needed in front of camera, thanks to the seemingly endless rise of the professional sportsperson and amateur personality. The idea that being good at a sport is correlated to being knowledgeable or understanding a sport is laughable, as demonstrated by the modest playing careers of coaches Arsène Wenger and José Mourinho. That makes no difference to the television producers, who want stars with name recognition. Knowing what you are talking about is a secondary consideration. The problem for the stars is that they must eventually wane, and make room for the more recently retired. Only an organization like the BBC has the charity to keep Garth Crooks in work, and former footballer and pundit Gavin Peacock saw the writing on the wall and decided to pursue a higher calling, studying divinity and training for his new vocation with the church. As they get older, the bigger stars realize that anecdotes about their old sport and old chums tend to age as well as George Best’s liver. Lineker had the sense to diversify the range of sports shows he hosted, and Ian Wright diversified into mainstream light entertainment. Amidst all the hard-headed business nous, there is less of the engaging whimsy and eccentricity that makes Peter Alliss the Wogan of golf or made Murray Walker the Norman Wisdom of motorsports.

Occasionally, though, sheer numbers will deliver an unusual new flavour amidst the rotten apples that dominate punditry. When Mark Lawrenson reformed his double act with Alan Hansen, migrated from the centreback pairing of Anfield to the sofa pairing of Match of the Day, he seemed like Hansen-lite in every respect. Most of the time he made crappy self-indulgent chit chat about historical episodes in his life and those of the fellow players around him. Entertaining this may be, but relevant to presenting sporting highlights, it is not. Lawro’s witticisms were reminiscent of Richard Whiteley on a bad day. But as the anecdotes have run out, a new Lawrenson has emerged so seamlessly that it is impossible to identify where the transition began.

I first noticed the new Lawrenson when he was moved from the comfort of the studio settee to being the live commentary sidekick of John Motson. Normally sidekicks are there to pick up the slack with some knowing insights when the principal commenter needs a respite or someone to bounce off, or when the action lulls. They barely need to watch the game, and only need to come out with all those staple clichés that can only be excused because the former player has been there and done that. Lawrenson’s approach was radically different. He watched the game and talked about it. And he really did watch it. Whilst the normal viewer is befuddled why Motson is clueless about the events on the pitch (’the ref’s blown the whistle, I’m not sure what for…’) Lawrenson would know perfectly what was going on (’the ball flicked up off the midfielder’s heel and it struck the right back on the hand’). On top that, after all the lazy self-indulgent matey chat in the studio, putting Lawrenson next to Motson, and making Lawro talk about real events in a crisp manner as they unfold, has revealed a command of language at least the equal of the Scouse defender’s command of the offside trap. Lawro not only knows what the word ‘perfunctory’ means, something that cannot be said of many professional and university-educated people, but he is unafraid to use it. On returning to the sofa, Lawrenson has now cut the smalltalk, let the vocabulary off the leash, and found the way to weld information to entertainment. At one time, Lawrenson made even Ian Wright seem profound. Lawrenson is now the Hemmingway of pundits, except with added quips. Which goes to show that sports punditry, like so many other things, can sometimes be a game of two halves.

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Imagine you went on a holiday - a long holiday. Maybe you went to Venus, or some Antarctic research station because you have not been keeping up with the news. You just got back after leaving exactly twenty-two months ago. You get back, switch on the TV news, and ask yourself… “so who is this Barack Obama guy?”

It is not like you are angry at yourself for not knowing who Barack Obama. You like to stay informed of what is going on in the news, but you have been away for a while. You left on February 9th 2007, the day before the junior senator from Illinois announced his candidacy for President. You do not live in Illinois, so it is not like you have been following Obama’s career, but perhaps you did see his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. Maybe you wondered at the time how a complete unknown from Illinois local politics had secured the opportunity to speak on such a lofty national platform. That morning the Philadelphia Daily News ran its story with the headline “Who the Heck Is This Guy?”. Today, you are just bemused. When you left, Obama was a pup, a whelp, who showed promise but was still wet behind the ears. Now you are back, Obama is not just the hope, but also the choice of America. People talk about him like he will be the saviour of the whole world. So who is this man, Barack Obama?

You can think of two people that Barack Obama is not. He is not John McCain, the defeated Republican candidate. And he is not George W. Bush. John McCain is George Bush, at least according to Obama’s campaign. How very surprising. When you left, it was McCain the maverick, the man who is despised by large sections of his own Republican Party. In the meantime he not only gets selected as candidate (the GOP must have been desperate, you think to yourself) but then turns out to be nothing more than a puppet of the Bush family. Pretty unlikely, but there you have it. Obama says so, and people seem to believe him.

Come to mention it, Obama is not Hilary Clinton either. When you left, people were worried if America was ready for a female commander-in-chief. They sure called that one wrong. There are more women than men in America, and most of those women voted for Obama. Men, in contrast, were evenly split. If women were prepared to vote Obama, you might hope they also have some faith in their own gender. For all the people who did not like the former First Lady, it seemed her enormous fund-raising machine would guarantee the nomination, if not a return to the White House. You start to investigate what happened during those twenty-two months. It turns out this Obama, this unknown, outspent Clinton! He energized the African-Americans and the anti-war movement, and built a strong organization on the ground. That was all held together with an internet fund-raising and mobilization operation that looked like Howard Dean 2.0 (but minus any crazy shouting antics).

Obama only just beat Clinton, it turned out. Usually the primaries are over by the half-way stage. This nomination race went all the way to the wire, with Clinton doggedly snapping at Obama’s heels all the way along, and even closing the gap slightly in the final stretch. But Obama won, and secured the nomination. There was a lot of mud-slinging between the candidates. Some of the most venomous attacks were not about the race, but about Obama’s race, or whether it could be commented upon. However, when it came to the national convention, the Clintons did their duty and became Obama’s biggest cheerleaders. They did so much cheerleading, that some were worried it overshadowed the man himself. That turned out to be only temporary. Before the race began, a lot was said about Bill Clinton’s charisma, and whether it would soften Hilary’s hard edges just enough to win her the trust of the American people. By the end, nobody was talking about Bill Clinton’s charisma. Now the Democrats had an all-new superhero to fight the prolonged charm offensive of a Presidential campaign: Barack Obama.

Not many men attain mythical status in their own lifetime. Fewer still get to manufacture it for themselves. But Obama had, thanks to his books. The books were very good, per the reviews. Who actually reads these things, other than the fanatics who have decided which way they will vote? So why were these books so important to the campaign? Then it dawns on you. This man was unknown - where would the press look for information about Obama, other than his own books? What better way to introduce an unknown candidate to the people, than in the form of books: inspirational memoirs and aspirational agendas that can be used as reference guides. Every lazy hack could simply dive into them and recite chunks to spin out a threadbare story. Is anybody naive enough to expect a politician to write a balanced account of themselves and their lives, even if they do their utmost to make it seem balanced? You would hope not. But when deadlines loom, and there are few alternatives, news organizations have a lot inches to fill and minutes to occupy. The swiftboats sunk Kerry’s campaign by making assertions that were widely repeated. Obama’s campaign learned that lesson well: always launching their own messages first, and quickly torpedoing any hostile claims that surfaced. No, you might research the campaign and the man, but of course, you had not going to read Obama’s books. Only simpletons prefer propaganda to the real story. Anyway, there is no need to read them, when so much of the content is repeated in the news.

You think back, and try to think of men like Obama. Ronald Reagan was the last President to have acquired a personal mythology whilst in office. The seeds was of Reagan’s mythology were sown during his movie career (”win one for the Gipper!”) but truly blossomed as a result of the events of his Presidency. Take the collapse of your cold war enemy, throw in a failed assassination attempt and top it off with a generous spread of military interventions worldwide, and any President would attain an enviable grandeur. Combine that with confidence, and the priceless training of a life spent reading lines in front of cameras, and legends will inevitably follow. With all that going on, it was little wonder that Reagan could not remember if he ordered the selling of arms to terrorists. Yet Obama’s mythology already transcends Reagan’s and he has yet to actually do anything. His lustre comes from something else - the promise of change. It is an all-sweeping, all-embracing change, that promises to set the world to rights, whilst never threatening to upset the apple cart. If it takes broken eggs to make an omelette, Obama is the greatest celebrity chef, promising to remix the economy and give everyone the opportunity to taste the good life. It is best that Obama avoid being photographed with fishes and loaves, lest the religious overtones become too obvious.

What were the ingredients that made up this Obama? At the heart of the myth lies the greatest trick of all: transcendence. He is black, if you want him to be. He is African-American, if you want him to be. Try to pin him down and confine him, and his essence evades the traps set for mere men. He is defined by race, he redefines race, he rewrites the history of race and he is above race, all at the same time. Suggest that his popularity is linked to his race, and like Geraldine Ferraro, you risk being accused of racism. We are told that some voted against him because he is black, but few have voted for him because he is black. What an incredible claim to make! Do pollsters and pundits really presume to get inside people’s heads and determine the subtleties of subconscious prejudice therein? Obama has a white parent, and a black parent, yet oddly enough gets lauded for being the first ‘black’ President, just like he was the first ‘black’ to be elected President of the Harvard Law Review. You muse whether you can you be black on a part-qualified basis? You look it up on the internet. According to the US Census you can, because the rules they employ reflect

“…a social definition of race recognized in this country. They do not conform to any biological, anthropological or genetic criteria.”

So, Barack Obama can simply chose which race he is when he submits his own census return, and nobody else can say he is right or wrong. It does not depend on the way he looks, or his genes, or who his parents were. Could it be that Obama has more than one race? Since 1997, the answer is ‘yes’. Back then, a decision was made with the intention of better reflecting diversity and, in particular, the increasing numbers of children from interracial unions. That manifested itself in 2000, when the US Census permitted respondents to identify themselves with more than one race. So Obama could be black and white at the same time. A bit like a panda, or a zebra, you chortle to yourself. It is all up to him.

There are many politicians who have been chameleons - able to morph to suit their audience. Obama looks like he might be the ultimate chameleon. He can even change colour when necessary. Or rather, it is not Obama who changes, but the eyes of the audience that see in Obama what they want to see. ‘Change’ and ‘hope’ are powerful. They permit every Obama supporter to see the Barack Obama they most desire. He is black and white, educated and in touch with the people, liberal and moderate, all at the same time. His opponents missed the point when trying to attack a Chimera like Obama. Whatever you accuse Obama of, half of his supporters will disagree with the attack because they believe it is untrue. The other half will believe the accusations are true, but like Obama all the more because of it.

Looking at the reactions on election night, it is little wonder that so many got some stars in their eyes. History was being made. Here, they all proclaimed, as if with one voice, is the first black President. It would have been a little trite, but still true, to point out that Obama will also be the 44th white President. Arguing the point is as futile as telling a Kenyan mother that naming her child ‘Barack’ does not improve his chances in life. Because it is up to him, this confusion of black and white could be resolved, if Obama came out and told us what race he is. You remember that golfing genius Tiger Woods settled the issue of his race with great aplomb, when he proclaimed himself a Cablinasian - Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian. Obama, however, prefers to be ineffable. He gives away some clues. For example, he is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, the blacks-only club of the US Congress that bars entry to whites. This same Caucus was described as “race-hustling poverty pimps” by J.C. Watts, the Black Republican and former Representative for Oklahoma. At a Caucus meeting in 2004, the independent (and white) campaigner Ralph Nader claimed to be on the receiving end of racist insults from Representative Mel Watt of North Carolina. In his letter to the Caucus after the event, Nader stated the following:

I do not like double standards, especially since our premise for interactions must be equality of respect that has no room, as I responded to Mr. Watt, for playing the race card.

But you digress. Obama had not been elected a Senator at that time. And whilst the Caucus bans whites, it admits blacks. So perhaps Obama gets special dispensation to allow his white half to attend in conjunction with his black half - a bit like conjoined twins. Of course, had Obama been in the room when Nader spoke, we can only hope and assume he would have been active in protesting about the racial slurs. After all, he should have a special ability to empathize with his fellow black, Mel Watt, who used the foul language, and his fellow white, Ralph Nader, on the receiving end.

You keep searching, but to no avail. In the end, it looks like people are allowed to decide Obama’s race for themselves, in contravention of the census rules. Obama, the consummate wordsmith, declines to define his race, so leaves the rest of us to do it for him. Because the term ‘mulatto’ is out of fashion with some because it stems from the language of slavery, and ‘half-caste’ suffers the same connotation, we are left with ugly and bland epithets like ‘bi-racial’ to describe a personal background that Obama seeks to celebrate. When left with that meagre choice, just calling him black has some advantages. To call Obama black is to be positive - to affirm something about not just the man, but about black people. To many minds, it is all the better that Obama should be a guiding star for all blacks, a shining inspiration for everyone with roots in sub-Saharan Africa. They were rushing to celebrate, but here, after the event, you have time to ponder. Surely, whatever can be affirmed can also be denied? A black man and a white woman make a black child, and he becomes the first black President of the USA. In another age and time, a Jewish man and an Aryan woman have a Jewish child, who is condemned by the holocaust. The oft-repeated proclamation that Obama is the hero and representative of blacks is just a broken mirror, reflecting the same racial distortion as Nazi zealotry and the Nuremburg Laws. The urge to categorize and pigeonhole is, by turns, human, understandable, lazy and dangerous. You notice there has been a lot of talk about the symbolism of Obama’s victory. Obama should be wary of becoming a symbol. Prince, the eccentric music legend, tried being a symbol for a long while, and it did him no good. Obama would be better off playing it humble, especially now the election has been won. You scan forward, and notice Obama did this well at his first press conference after the election. When talking about buying a dog for his daughters, Obama called himself a ‘mutt’. In the end, we are all mutts to some degree. If he is to govern well, Obama must represent his whole country, and not just a minority. Being top dog amongst a band of mutts will be much easier than pretending to be a breed apart.

Not satisfied, you keep trying to unearth the mystery of this Obama. This mystery surrounds and pervades the man on all levels, not just his race. At times, he appears to be the greatest magician of all time, able to escape traps that would have defeated Harry Houdini, and amaze crowds that are bored to tears by David Blaine. His greatest trick is the promise of change. Everybody knows he stands for change, but how many can say from what, and to what? Perhaps some supporters see change when looking at the colour of his skin, or the change of colour from Republican Red to Democrat Blue that swept across the electoral map. Look again, and this is a lawyer. So much for a change in how the country is governed. Just in case some people think electing an inexperienced Harvard lawyer is too radical a change, it gets further watered down by adding Joe Biden to the ticket, a man so steady that he campaigned for the Democratic candidacy in 1988 and waited twenty years before he risked having a second go. Biden would be the worst dinner part guest imaginable. He never stops talking. When he is talking, it is probably about how he rides the train to work every day. Lucky him to have the same cushy job, year after year. The rest of us need to move with the times. Of course, half of the words that come out of Biden’s mouth are not even his own. Forget speechwriters - in 1988, Biden demonstrated his own special aversion to change, by copying good political speeches by others, and forgetting to mention he had plagiarized them.

Skimming back over the campaign, and you notice that imbeciles on all sides were falling over themselves to endorse Obama. In doing so, all plaudits were taken to be good, no matter where they came from. Edward Kennedy compared Obama to his brother, John. Presumably the analogy stops short when thinking of how JFK’s hawkish tendencies lead to the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and ultimately the Vietnam War. One hopes that Obama is also a better family man than JFK, and is less indebted to organized crime for his victory. Obama is not at fault if he gets the approval of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, whilst Wright was simultaneously giving racially divisive sermons. However, you are surprised that Obama came off so unscathed from the relationship. Obama must have thought that Wright was talking sense most of the time. This lawyer, who so carefully plotted his rise, had taken a quote from Wright - “the audacity of hope” - and used it as the title of one of his books. Obama also showed himself to be made of a mixture of teflon and granite, as he was unscathed by his wife Michelle’s ill-advised comments about being proud of her country for the “first time in her adult life”, the implication being that it had hitherto been a source of shame. In the greatest act of collective amnesia, by Obama, media and all, Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama because the Republicans had moved too far to the right. Come again? The Republicans moved to the right at the end of Bush’s Presidency, but not at the start? And Colin Powell now has sound judgement? You can spot that there must be anomaly somewhere in this story. When exactly did Bush move too far to the right? Was it during the time that Powell served the Bush administration? Or was it after Powell stopped being useful to the neo-cons and got kicked out? Most of the really bad redneck stuff was done in Bush’s first term. For most of the second term, Bush was just mired trying to minimize all the damage he had caused. It was Powell, after all, who went to the United Nations to prove, to the whole world, the following equation:

(satellite photos of moving trucks) + (bugged conversations of people coughing down telephone lines) = irrefutable proof that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction

Now, we are supposed to believe that Obama, who always opposed the war in Iraq, can be relied upon to be a good commander-in-chief because he has the endorsement of one of the patsies who started that same war? One of these men may have sound judgement, but not both of them. Nothing succeeds like success, and a lot of Obama’s approvals come from politicians, American and overseas, hoping his popularity will rub off on them. After winning the election, even the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad congratulated Obama on his victory. If a man is judged by the company he keeps, then Obama the man continues to evade you. Neither the history of personal relations, nor the throng of current well-wishers, can be used to define this man.

You note that inexperience was Obama’s greatest weakness as a candidate, but it hardly mattered. If anything, his clean slate helped to affirm his message of hope and change. When it came to difficult topics, it also helped him avoid being pinned down. The best evidence offered for his readiness for executive office was the size and success of his massive campaign - a circular logic if ever there was one. How much that campaign is down to Obama, and how much down to talented individuals who aligned themselves with him out of principle or opportunity, you can never be sure. Either way, a President is not a man alone but the leader of a team that he selects. If the team is successful, it reflects well on the man. That said, too much can be read into his victory. Obama is lauded for his accomplishment in winning the election - an achievement that is seemingly on a par with a disabled man climbing Everest. Any idiot can win the US Presidential election: his predecessor did it twice. When George W. became President, he had to overcome plenty of prejudice. That prejudice was about the way he thought and talked. Compared to those natural infirmities, Obama had it easy.

You look at the results. Obama’s victory was good by Democrat standards, but not the marvel that some had hoped for. A lot of people that will remember, for decades, the hoopla of election night history will probably have missed the cold reckoning that belongs with the day after. Obama won 52% of the popular vote, a tremendous result for a Democrat. Bill Clinton did not break 50%, and Jimmy Carter did well to get 50.1% in 1976. Even so, it means only slightly more than half the voters preferred Obama to McCain. Turnout was up, but at a little over 60%, was not enough to break any records for the proportion of eligible voters who made the effort. Combine those numbers, and you realize that, even after the huge voter registration drive and the massive spending, Obama got the support of less than 32% of the eligible electorate. The Federal Election Commission states that, at 15th October 2008, Obama spent US$573M on his campaign. Probably by election night on November 4th, he had broken US$600M. That is more than double his opponent, and equates to well over US$8 for every vote he gained. If Obama needs indicators of the need for change, he need look no further than his own campaign finances. And in a final little story that passed with little remark, Obama’s campaign did the decent thing a few days before the election, when it returned the ineligible donations made by his aunt, who is living in the US illegally. You marvel at Obama’s fund-raising accomplishment, but are still left bemused that, even for Barack “Change” Obama, the golden rule is to get the money in first, and worry about where it comes from second.

You give up, in frustration. There is no point trying to learn about Obama by looking at the surface. Occasionally he gives away snippets of information about himself. Some of it suggests he may be a poor poker player. Refusing to wear tiepins that sport the American flag was not just petty and counter-productive - it needlessly offered a target for his attackers. Good poker players do not make small statements like that; showing your cards only helps your opponents. But Obama learned from his experiences, and now keeps his cards much closer to his chest, at least most of the time. Only a thorough dissection will reveal who Obama is now. The dichotomies of political life will soon put Obama to the sword. Whilst he rode high expectations to election victory, he now knows to dampen those expectations, and not just when it comes to the state of the economy. Obama’s term will be defined by how he handles conflicts and builds and maintains the consensus he has promised to deliver. The battle lines were submerged by his campaign, but they will resurface.

To begin with, as some commentators have already noticed, having a black President begs the question of affirmative action and racially-targeted assistance from government. If Obama supports money for blacks then he could be accused of looking after his ‘own’, at the expense of all the poor whites who will also feel pain during a recession. If Obama does not target assistance for blacks, he risks losing support with the black politicians and voters who favour it. The next dilemma links to unions, healthcare, taxes and employment. Obama is backed by the unions. Union leaders were vocal in giving Obama their support. One of the key benefits which unions secure on behalf of workers is healthcare rights. However, healthcare costs are killing the American economy. Unless Obama can find a way to make healthcare cheaper not just for those who lack it, but also for those unionized workers who already enjoy it, he will be unable to liberate the American businesses that are crippled by the cost of providing healthcare benefits. It is little wonder that they struggle to compete with overseas rivals. The American population is ageing, which will only make the problem worse with time. Ongoing benefits for retired workers poses more and more of a burden on businesses that are trying to downsize because they are failing, and trying to get lean to stay competitive. The American car manufacturers, for example, could easily fall into a rapid death spiral. Government money cannot help, because tax money has to come from somewhere. It will not help to shift the burden from one part of a flagging economy to another. As businesses start to struggle, the only solution is to cut the cost of healthcare across the board, which will be no small trick except by cutting the numbers of workers in healthcare, or by reducing the provision of healthcare enjoyed by the average person who already has it.

You read over Obama’s manifesto, which seemed the standard litany of promises, waiting to be broken. It was long on spending promises, and short on explanations of where the money would come from. Though Obama will doubtless blame the economic malaise, he was always going to have a tough time ticking all the boxes on his wishlist. If anything, the crisis might help Obama. It could buy him time, but only at the cost of making his choices a lot starker. For instance, Obama has already signaled he would like to see a speeding up of the government aid for ‘retooling’ US car manufacturers. These tools are supposed to help make environmentally-friendly cars. You wait to see how eco-friendly the US car industry will really become - it is not as if they ever fought to save the planet before. However, it is safe to say that this ingenious but disingenuous retooling subsidy will only scratch the surface of the automobile industry’s problems. Jobs will be lost. What is more, Obama cannot afford to give state bailouts to every industry. Pumping money into Wall Street leaves little spare for anyone else. So whilst he may favour the retooling program, Obama quickly needs to discover alternative answers than the hollow promise of money from the government’s ever-growing borrowing.

You agree that America needs change - deep, fundamental change. But from what you see, Obama has carefully talked around the nature of the economic change that is needed. Government R&D projects may raise the hope of a better future, and maintaining expenditure on road building will help keep jobs today, but neither represent a deep-seated change. To get America back on a sound economic footing, American goods and services need to be provided to the same quality, whilst costing less. That means cutting out waste. You go back over your previous example, healthcare. In the US, healthcare is expensive. One of the reasons for expensive healthcare is the cost and complexity of the insurance industry because people need insurance to pay for healthcare. One of the reasons for the cost of healthcare insurance is the cost of the legal sector, because of the complexity and costs involved in legal liability. Healthcare, finance, law - all nice professions. A surprisingly high number of these professionals voted for Obama. Obama is a lawyer after all! All of the industries run by these professionals need to be made a lot more efficient. That means better returns and better products at lower price. And that probably means job cuts, or at least pay cuts. America cannot afford to allow the disease that has plagued its airlines to consume every other sector. Some of the people who will lose their jobs will have voted for Obama. That adds even more pressure on Obama to preserve American jobs. Yet one obvious way to keep down the amounts spent on these professions is by offshoring the work to highly skilled and well-trained people - accountants, engineers, even lawyers - in places like the Philippines. The one thing Obama cannot afford to do, is to do nothing. Keeping the richer professions protected only adds to the costs of the poor. Blocking offshoring adds to costs. Preventing simplification adds to costs. And allowing well-off professionals to suffer a decline in living standards will also lead to a cut in the size of the economy, albeit the right one. The question is whether Obama will be ruthless enough to start challenging the professions, like his own legal profession, that are costing America too much.

On foreign policy, Obama kept showing a penchant for foolishly showing his hand. After your long time away, you feel you are a traveller, and can empathize with culturally and nationally diverse points of view (however wrong they are). Obama fell into the great trap of thinking the American media is the only one that listens to an election campaign. Okay, so foreigners do not get to vote (not all Americans get to vote for that matter - Puerto Ricans picked Clinton over Obama in the primaries, but are excluded from the Presidential election itself.) It can seem, to a politician worried about what American voters think, like a good idea to share your ideas on how to deal with the rest of the world. However, if you tell American voters, you tell the rest of the world too. And Obama should have appreciated that it is unwise to announce how he intends to negotiate, before his negotiations even begin. Unfortunately, he kept falling into that trap. To begin with, he announced he would negotiate without preconditions. Though it signals a positive shift in approach, and makes for a snappy campaign message, it is also wrong. American negotiators can will all sorts of concessions just by laying down the conditions for a meeting to happen. It is more evidence of a bad poker player - Obama gives up a bargaining chip for nothing in exchange. Worse still, every crumby dictator’s regime is legitimized by a meeting with the US President. That means if Obama keeps his promise, he risks becoming an impediment to change all over the world. But even when Obama gets tough on foreign policy, he talks too much. During the Presidential debates, Obama insisted he would send troops into Pakistan to finish off the Taleban, if the Pakistani government could not get the job done. He would have been better advised to send the Taleban a special delegation from his campaign, offering advice on how to recruit more supporters. Obama’s rash comment will have sent a message to every America-hater in Pakistan. That message reads: “we know you hate America, and we do not care.” Pakistani governments regularly get criticized by the citizenry for doing too much to placate the US. When the ‘leader of the free world’ announced he will send in troops if a sovereign government cannot get the job done, he just encourages all those suicide bombing fanatics who feel that American values are there to be imposed by Americans on everyone but Americans. Looking at the video of the debate again, you could see from McCain’s reaction that he thought Obama had made a howler, but was caught between two stools. He wanted to lambast it, but commenting on it would only repeat and exacerbate the mistake. How funny that even big mouth maverick McCain (”bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran”) could teach Obama a lesson in diplomacy.

For all the talk of change, Obama shares all the traditional attributes of men who reach high office. Extraordinary self-confidence is one them. Obama has it in buckets. His self-confidence may inspire support and devotion, but could be dangerous if it encourages him to pursue mistaken policies. Bush, like many before, suffered from the flaw of believing his talents were greater than they were. He was an oaf - hailing the UK Primeminister with “Yo Blair!” and trying to give neck massages to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Obama may be more reserved, but may suffer from blind spots about his own weaknesses. At least when politicians tend to err towards a laissez-faire philosophy, the risk of catastrophic error is less. Bush made his greatest mistakes when he took charge and made decisions. His best moments were when he shut up and did nothing. Except when he sat doing nothing during 9/11, or when he did nothing about Katrina.

There is little doubt that Obama is a doer, but he may do too much. At times, he conveys an almost naive belief in the power of government to make the world better. When Obama said, during one of the Presidential debates, that the computer had been invented by the American government, it was as much a Freudian slip as it a misremembering of his debate preparations. Perhaps Obama meant the invention of the internet, but even that skirts around the fact that the invention of the internet was driven by military needs, not civilian R&D. The US defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War not by having the better military, but by having the bigger economy that could pay for the better military. And the US had the bigger economy not because the American government was better at R&D than the Soviet government, but because American businesses were better at R&D than either government. In the 80’s, Reagan’s economy was lucky to enjoy an unforeseeable boost from Silicon Valley, not from some monolithic Federal research program. Perhaps it should be no surprise that Obama has no feel for this - he is a lawyer, organizer, academic, and apparatchik, not an entrepreneur, technologist or businessman. It looks like he also has a better understanding of culture than he has of history. If the cold war is too far back, perhaps Obama should look at the last eight years and the very mistakes he railed against. Even if the Republicans were evil and stupid, they had a government infrastructure that encouraged and enabled them, with devastating consequences. Bush’s administration had spy satellites, and wire taps, and intelligence operatives. They had administrators, managers, analysts and even Obama’s new best friend Colin Powell. Yet on one simple question, whether to go to war in Iraq, they reached, not least according to Obama himself, the wrong decision. All of those governmental assets, human and technological, were fielded in the cause to deny UN’s weapons inspector, Hans Blix, more time in his search for those apocryphal WMD’s. They were all part of the US Government. Can Obama really be so naive to believe that, by changing the man at the top, the rest will just become a factory for creating good?

So here you are, and after your long meditation upon Obama, are you any closer to knowing who he is? He is personable but undefinable, steely yet flexible, poetic yet approachable. He has an odd name, but people name their children after him. He invokes fear amongst some, hope amongst more. He is a visionary, but promises to embellish the vision with detail. People obsess about his skin, and laud him for his brain. For all the talk of colour, Obama’s brain is the same colour as everyone else’s (pinkish, not grey, as most people wrongly believe). He is of history, but has not made history. On election night, history was made not by the candidate but by the electorate. They were the ones who made a historic decision. Whilst photos of a smiling Obama will stick in the memory, the real images of change should be of the unexpected people - the rural whites, the blue-collar anti-intellectuals, the bitter gun-owners - who went against the supposed grain and voted for him.

Now imagine you are going on holiday again. Once more, you will be out of touch, with no idea what is going on in the rest of the world. You will be gone for a long time - about four years. When you get back from that holiday, that is when you will find out who Obama, the man, really is.

I was walking down Regent Street a few weeks ago, and as you often do in that part of London, I saw a minor celebrity. In real life, Gok Wan, host of the UK makeover show How to Look Good Naked looks as you might expect. He is a tall bloke, with unusual features. He was well dressed, but not in a showy way. If it was not for the small film crew around him, most people would not notice him. Even with the film crew, few of the Regent Street shoppers gave him a second look. But there was one thing I noticed about this fashion guru. Standing around, not doing anything in particular whilst waiting for his crew to do whatever they were going to do, Gok Wan looked content.

It would be hard not to like Gok Wan. Normally I find television about fashion, and especially fashion makeovers of ‘ordinary’ people, to be dreadful. Fashion does not bear rational analysis, so most explanations of what looks good or does not look good are absurd and pointless. All that television can do is just show us the clothes and tell us what styles are more prominent this year. The only way to really know if an item looks good on you, is to put it on and stand in front of a mirror. The golden rule is not to worry about what other people think, because everyone has different taste. Trying to dress to please others is always going to end miserably. Gok doles out his advice on his show, and most of the time just says sensible things, though every so often he makes a dud suggestion. I mean, Gok may think the woman looks good when dressed like a rock chick looks good, but if she is a hippy, it will not be good for her. The way you look has to somehow reflect who you are. The occasional bad idea is okay, because Gok is paid to come up with ideas and not every idea is going to be good. He can be proud of his day’s work if four out of five of his ideas really do suit the person being made over, especially if they keep following his advice in future.

The secret of Gok’s success does not lie in his fashion sense. Most of his advice is so obvious that anybody, if forced to take some time out and think about how they look, would come up with independently. Wear nice clothes. Try to work with the shape of your body, not against it, nor hide it. Accentuate your best bits. Get a decent hair cut. Wear make-up that is right for you. The biggest ‘trick’ in the Gok Wan book of beauty involves the selection of underwear. In other words, wear the modern day equivalents to the corset - which is hardly a new invention. Select undergarments with the right combination of lycra and wiring to squeeze or support where a woman’s figure might benefit from squeezing and where it might benefit from support. But in the end, the title of his show is a complete misnomer. If the women Gok Wan dresses look good naked, it is not because of the way Gok Wan dresses them. Even the haircuts and make-up are a form of dressing-up, so when stripped down to their naked glory, the women look no different after a Gok Wan makeover - except in one place.

What makes Gok Wan’s show enjoyable, when most makeover shows seem designed to manipulate and mould the shapes of the poor women who appear on them, is that he does not really try to change the way these women look. There is no talk of cosmetic surgery, or dieting, or any of that. Sure, he makes them get into underwear that boosts where boosting is needed, and flattens where flat is best, but for the most part he selects items that also would be comfortable. Where the moral of most fashion makeover shows is that if you look good, you will feel happy, Gok Wan has realized it works the other way around. Feel happy, and you will look good. Most of the show is dedicated to boosting the self-esteem of the woman being made over. He does not change the way they look naked, he just encourages them to have a positive self-image. Everything is designed with that in mind. He devises situations where random strangers will speak, without prompting, in flattering terms about the woman’s appearance. He challenges any negative thoughts they have. He gets the women to pose naked for an artful photography. He parades the women, dressed in sexy lingerie, on a catwalk alongside real models, so that friends, family and passersby can all clap and cheer. To top that all off, Gok Wan’s straightforward and irresistible encouragement leaves the women with little choice but to be positive. The title of the show is a misnomer. It should be called, “How to Believe You Look Good Naked”, or better still, “How to Know You Look Good Naked”. Having confidence in your looks is self-fulfilling - you will look better as a result. The women who goes on Gok’s show get a huge confidence boost, and so will tend to make better decisions about how they look in future. Simple, really. The one place where Gok really changes the way a woman looks naked is her face. As they take their clothes off, he gets them to put a smile back on.

The feeling good, looking good philosophy of Gok Wan has its limits. For the most part he realizes people will not look good if they do not feel good, so comfort cannot be ignored. However, Gok does sometime forget himself - on one episode he suggested high heels for a pregnant woman! Not every idea is a winner, but that is forgivable if there are plenty of them and most of them pay off. Gok does play the part of the myth-buster to some extent, by running experiments where groups of women try unmarked beauty products. These often conclude that the cheap supermarket labels are better than the expensive brands. But in the end, Gok does not battle convention. Gok has no sympathy for body hair, even though the human race has had body hair for millions of years. Our ancestors were perfectly able to find each other attractive without the needing razors and depilatory creams. The fascistic idea of stripping the body of all unwanted hair should be deeply troubling to an intelligent mind. We are animals, and hair grows on our skin. Hair is a sign of sexual maturity, so the obsession with its removal suggests some confusion in the associations between youth and beauty. Gok may give advice on how to sooth the skin after the purging of every last follicle, but that hardly compensates for his ruthless imposition of a societal norm that causes pain for the women on the receiving end. Those women may well question whether they really are less beautiful with a little bit of hair sticking out here and there, no matter how many other people pull childish faces of disgust as if their bodies did not have the exact same design feature. Conventions like this are impervious to a rational mind, so I can understand why Gok Wan can only parade women on a catwalk after their bikini-line has been waxed. Nevertheless, it is worth pondering how Gok Wan would react if confronted with some other notable beauty conventions that have come and gone. Would he have discouraged Coco Chanel from getting a tan, and dispelling the dominant fashion that women should be pale? How does he feel about real tans, still craved by many, despite the cancerous risk and the terrible long-term damage it does to the skin? If real tans are not safe, and pale used to beautiful, why do some people think fake tans are beautiful? Tanning is a safe but useful example of how our conventions can be re-examined, but history tells of societies that encouraged systematic deformity in the name of beauty. Some ancient peoples forcibly moulded the shapes of baby’s heads, in order to artificially change them. The binding of women’s feet was accepted in China for a thousand years, and lasted up to the start of the 20th Century. The use of brass rings to elongate a woman’s neck is still practiced by the ‘long neck’ people in Burma and Thailand. Nobody is entitled to say whether a majority is right, or a minority is wrong, to make the aesthetic choices they do. Perhaps one day people will look back at Gok Wan’s disgust at body hair and find his behaviour as perplexing and discomforting as we would when shown images of bound feet and deformed heads that are meant to be ‘beautiful’. But if you cannot change the world, change yourself, and at least the women are smiling at the end of Gok’s changes.

Gok Wan satisfies the 80-20 rule. Most of the time he gets it very right, so we can forgive him if he sometimes gets it wrong. He has realized that no end of fabric or tailoring will make someone look good, unless they feel good. I have no pretension to being a fashionista, but in that same vein, here is my own three-step approach to looking good naked:

Eat when you are hungry, stop when you are full. Being hungry is your body’s way of telling you to eat more, and being full is your body’s way of telling you not to eat any more. Your body knows best, so trust it. Keep your body happy, and it will look better.

Do some physical exercise now and again. We are animals, and our ancestors lived by chasing and gathering our food. Your choice of exercise does not really matter - our ancestors used their bodies for purposeful activities, not body-sculpting sessions down the gym. Our bodies are meant to be used, and look better if they get some use. Your body will thank you by giving you more energy, which will brighten your mood and make you more positive.

Take a deep breath. Relax. Smile. Everybody looks good when they are happy. So be happy and stop worrying about looking good naked.

A relatively minor news story grabbed my attention this week. Or rather, I noticed it briefly, and then kept remembering it as I found a lot of examples of the hypocrisy that underpins the supposedly civilized society we find in modern Britain.

Perhaps that last comment is not fair. A society is not hypocritical just because its members contain opposing views. The people who make up our society often do hold opposing views. Whether you can call society hypocritical comes down to whether you think society, as a whole, does a good job of reconciling and managing the differences of opinion between its members. A positive way to do so is to recognize that not everybody can be right, and to be clear why a decision may favour one opinion over another. A negative outcome seeks to keep everyone placated, without making a proper decision. It will be interesting to see how British society copes with yet another debate surrounding the greatest of taboo topics: sexuality.

The story that kicked things off was that campaigners and local government leaders had been pushing for a change in the way lapdancing clubs are licensed. See here for the story, as presented by the Guardian, Daily Mail and ITN. Like most people would have, I read the story (in my case, on msn) and did not pay it great mind. In short, when you cut through the waffle, we have some people who do not like the idea of lapdancing clubs at all. They would like to get rid of them completely, but they have no realistic hope of that at present, so their current objective is to make it harder for lapdancing clubs to obtain a license. For councilors, always wary of pleasing the minority of people who actually bother to vote in local elections, taking a stand does them no harm. Their powers would be increased and they can tell local NIMBYs that they are doing everything they can for them. In the end, it is a minor issue, because even with the emotive choice of words selected by campaigners, who talk of “floodgates” and being “powerless to stop the spread” there are only 300 lapdancing clubs in the country. That makes them small beans in the big scheme of things, even when you consider the number has doubled in recent years. Here comes some miscellaneous UK stats to put UK lapdancing into perspective: 1 lapdancing club for every 90,000 adult men; 1 lapdancing club for every 1.7 people who sleep rough in the UK, 1 lapdancing club for every 4 people murdered last year; 1 lapdancing club for every 3,000 burglaries last year. You can probably infer what I think council leaders should be spending their time worrying about.

The reason why the story stuck in my mind was that the people who were pushing for the change were described as campaigners for women’s rights. Which women are the ones who need more rights? Presumably not the women who want to make money from lapdancing. For the remainder of the day, I saw example after example of women exercising their rights. My friend flicked the television to an unedifying “documentary” about gold-diggers (the people who exploit other people to get money, not the ones who rush to the Klondike carrying a pickaxe) that was shown on Virgin 1. For several minutes I was subjected to an “interview” with a woman boasting of how much money she made as a professional escort. Apparently, one evening she made UK£10,000 from a single punter. She also revealed how much time and effort went on regular maintenance of her looks (nails, hair, Winehouse-like cakes of make-up) and on one-off enhancements (lips and boobs) in order to augment her earning power. All of which is her right, I suppose. Afterwards, Davina McCall spent the whole of Big Brother eviction night brushing the hair out of her eyes. That long, lustrous hair so prominently featured in ads for Garnier’s haircare products. Doubtless it was just a coincidence, but if not, that is her right. After that, we saw Kylie Minogue dancing in a tight-fitting outfit and towering boots, as is her right. Bored with television dross, I flicked back to browsing about the lapdance licensing story on the internet. On the Daily Mail’s site I noticed a story from their “Femail” column, highlighted alongside the story about lapdancing laws. It was about former swimmer Sharron Davies wearing revealing outfits that showed off her boobs and legs whilst presenting the Olympics on the BBC. As is her right. Below that, the next highlighted story was about a woman who acted beyond her rights. That was about a Thai woman who murdered her older British husband for his money. Nevertheless, it was an example of a woman who did what she wanted to do.

The thing about women’s rights is that they are a convenient fiction. There are no women’s rights. There are rights. Human rights. In a tiny fraction of circumstances, there may be very particular ways in which human rights need to be interpreted or applied specifically for one gender. An example is the practice of female genital mutilation. The point I am making is that female genital mutilation is not exactly the same, and does not happen in the same way, as male genital mutilation, but the rights of the human being are essentially just the same. It would be intellectually untenable to be against female genital mutilation whilst in favour of male genital mutilation. People have all sorts of rights. The right to shelter. The right to treatment for mental illness. Of course, I pick those examples to make a point. In Britain, far more men sleep rough than women. In Britain, far more men commit suicide than women. But that does not mean homelessness or suicide are “men’s rights” issues. Even if far fewer women are homeless, and far fewer women commit suicide, their suffering as individuals is the same, and rights are the same for all people, not just a gender.

We are not living in the 19th Century any more. Modern-day Pankhursts miss the point. They are wrong to try to borrow her clothes and dress themselves up in the language of women’s rights. Trying to restrict lapdancing clubs is not like trying to give women equality with men. One woman may feel liberated if free to live in a town without a lapdancing club. Another woman may feel her right has been constrained - her right to use her body as a source of income. One woman may find the thought of writhing naked across a strange man to be disgusting. Another may consider it lucrative. In a society, we need to find a compromise between the rights, and conflicting goals and priorities, of these women. Casting the debate in terms of “women’s rights”, as if this was simplistic battle of the sexes where women are underdogs, trying to free themselves from the subjugation of men, is no longer appropriate. The human rights of women must be weighed on both sides of this debate.

One of the groups that supports the change in the law is called Object. After reading their material, and what was said by their Director in the press, I considered pulling it apart. Their arguments were weak and tenuous. The presentation of data to support them was confused and contradictory. One of the key arguments in this particular case was that lapdancing clubs are places where sexual activity takes place, and so should not be licensed like a cafe. That is a reasonable argument. However, the purpose is to exploit some already fuzzy logic in how cafes, and other establishments, are licensed. Why cafes need to be licensed like bars and restaurants - places that sell alcohol - is beyond me. If you say to me, would I treat a cafe, a bar, and a lapdancing club all the same, I would say no. That is what the current legislation does. The campaigners say that lapdancing needs to be treated differently. I would say they should all be treated differently. In my opinion, cafes should enjoy the most liberal licensing arrangements, and places that sell alcohol should have the most stringent licensing arrangements. Lapdancing clubs, if they do not sell alcohol, belong somewhere in the middle. For all the posturing about the dangers of lapdancing clubs, it is not lapdancing that is behind a wave of violence on our streets, anti-social behaviour in the small hours, and no-go zones in our town centres. It is alcohol. Yet, following the absurd logic of this debate, the government is being asked to clamp down on lapdancing because the selling of lapdancing needs to be more restricted than the selling of coffee. Whilst I agree with that, it is absurd to claim to fight for women’s rights by fighting lapdancing, whilst turning a blind eye to the impact of alcohol on our society, and on women in particular. Lapdancing poses less of a danger to women, than the dangers that come with alcohol. I sympathize with any woman who feels insecure when near to a place that sells sexual titillation. But in terms of risk, the same woman should worry more when near places that sell alcohol. Drunkenness increases the chances of the abuse of women far more than trivial sexplay.

Of course, no sane “women’s rights” organization would campaign to further limit the sale of alcohol, just because pissed-up louts might roll out of a bar, ready to grope, hassle and persecute any women outside. That is because those louts may also be groping, hassling and persecuting the women inside. And that is because women still choose to go inside anyway. Despite all the risks heightened by alcohol - as imbibed not just by the abuser, but also by the victim - women still go to those bars and put themselves at risk. That is their right. They balance the enjoyment they hope to get against the risks, and still decide to go. That is what living in a free society is all about. And that is why demolishing the arguments of groups like Object is unnecessary. Every day, the vast majority of women are already undermining their cause far more effectively than I could with a few words. They do so by the choices they make. Limiting some lapdancing clubs may inhibit the earnings of some women who may otherwise be struggling to get by in life. That makes them soft targets for campaigners, who convince and console themselves the dancers must have all been coerced and denying their right to work as lapdancers is actually in their best interests. These campaigners dare not take on the bigger players. They will never take on big money-spinners like the breweries and their distribution chains. They will never take on high-profile figures like Sharron Davies, or Paris Hilton, or Davina McCall, who have their own reasons to flaunt their bodies and beauty, and in doing so, contribute to the sexual objectification of women. They will never take on a single woman who does any of the normal, ordinary, commonplace things that most women do to objectify themselves in a sexual way. Lipstick. Cosmetic surgery. Diet milkshakes. Wonderbras. Working out. Boob tubes. Miniskirts. Women have fought hard for the right to objectify themselves and their bodies. If they choose to do so, that is their right.

The reason for the name “Object” is the group is against the objectification of women. I almost feel sorry for them. They must see themselves as fighting some imagined cabal of sexist capitalist exploiters of women (who doubtless are also predominantly male). In reality, they are fighting everyone. Which makes them unlikely to win. We all, men and women, objectify people all the time, in countless ways. Not every human relationship is going to be deep. Most of them will be utterly superficial. We just forget that they are relationships, because the encounters may be so trivial. At the supermarket, we objectify the check-out staff. They are the means to an end when it comes to paying for our shopping. We do not see them as fully-rounded people. The same happens to our bus driver. Or to our waiter. Or to our dentist. Even if we make conversation, it is superficial. We see them at best in a very limited way. Did the bus driver brake too sharply, did the dentist make my teeth white, was the check-out girl polite. We do not think about their emotional needs, their backgrounds, their hopes for the future. I was objectified at 7.20am this morning, when the postman kept banging on the door even though I was asleep. He needed a signature, so kept banging (for a parcel that turned out to be wrongly addressed). I was the object to give him a signature. At 9am something similar happened. Then the postman did not wait for me to get to the door. Presumably I was the object slowing down his busy delivery round. So he went, leaving a card asking me to collect a letter that really was intended for me this time. And when I went to collect it, and it was not there, my interaction with the man behind the window was perfectly polite, perfectly perfunctory. Nobody was expecting to walk out with a new best friend.

The same applies with sexuality. Human beings are animals as well. We have our peacock attributes, our mating rituals, our visual and olfactory signaling systems. There is no requirement to be best friends with someone in order to fuck them. If people want to screw a stranger, that is up to them, not me. If they do so, they objectified each other sexually. There is no pretense they really knew each other. Knowing someone’s personality inside and out is not a mandatory precursor to sexual attraction. It rather works the other way - you tend to assume positive personality traits to people you fancy. In order to get your pick of the most fanciable people, you make yourself fanciable, by willingly objectifying yourself. Women resort to push-up bras, eye shadow and cleavage. Men’s gambits are more confused and varied these days, some emulating the female approach of obsessing about beauty and clothes, others going for more traditional status symbols like cars and watches. All of us draw a line somewhere. You can spend a lifetime with someone and still not know everything about them. If you intend to reproduce, that means getting into bed with someone based on only a finite amount of information. Objectification is a fancy way of saying you reduce someone to the key attributes you selfishly look for. Does the bus driver miss my stop. Did the dentist cure my toothache. Does that girl at the bar have nice tits. Does the guy pay for the drinks. Campaigning against sexual objectification is as hopeless as Canute commanding the tide not to come in. Objectification is part of human behaviour, sexual and otherwise.

We are all objects all the time, in countless ways. Sartre distinguished things that exist in themselves, or en-soi, and that exist for themselves, or pour-soi. In his existentialist philosophy, human beings are pour-soi. We are conscious of ourselves as the authors of our own lives. We make our choices. By doing so, we decide who we are. In contrast, the en-soi is just a physical reality - material that has no purpose in itself. To borrow from Sartre’s terminology, to complain about objectification is to complain that we treat a person as an en-soi, and not a pour-soi. We recognize their physical reality, but not their nature as a person. Sartre also talks about being-for-others (être-pour-autrui), by which he refers to how a person stops being for themselves, and instead be for other people. We can choose to objectify ourselves and subjugate our existence to their experience of us. We can also choose to objectify others, and make that choice part of our being. Cutting through the tangle of French philosophic words, we can all understand the truth that Sartre was alluding to. We understand the existence of human beings differently to the way we understand objects… for the most part. However, not even Sartre was a philosopher all of the time, as can be attested by his vigorous and varied sex life. Sometimes we see ourselves through our own eyes, and look at the choices we make. Sometimes we look at another person’s body and see it as a physical object, without seeing anything else. Sometimes we look at our own bodies and see them through the minds of on-lookers, imagined or real. Objectification is something that takes place more or less all the time, in many different ways. Some people are more inclined to it, others less. Some people will focus on objectifying others, some objectify themselves. Objectification can be deep, unpleasant and permanent, like the way torturers objectify the tortured, or it can be casual, in the way we coolly treat bodycounts in far-off wars as mere statistics. People who speak a different language die somewhere we have never been, and we objectify them. People who speak the same language die somewhere in front of a video camera, and we objectify them less. In the same way, a photo on a billboard, or the way a friend dresses, or the way a stranger dresses, or a fictional story in a novel, can elicit a sexual response. That response is objective, not an action of love. That does not make the response wrong, or any less natural.

We can fight our sexuality. Men and women do seem to have differences in what they want from a sexual partner, and act differently as a result. However, in our imaginations we often exaggerate the extent of gender differences for all sorts of reasons. Generalizations are not helpful, as they only encourage the constraint of liberties that may be enjoyed by some at no harm to the rest of us. If Max Mosely wants to be spanked by prostitutes, and they are willing to spank him, and nobody else is able to watch, we should keep our grubby little eyes and minds out of his private life. Trying to turn it into some high-minded debate about the rights of public people to have fetishes about fascism is just an absurd excuse to profit from prurience. I am glad the judge saw it that way too. By the same token, those prostitutes objectified Max Mosely as a walking wallet twice over: first by taking the payment he consented to make for their services, and second by selling secret recordings he did not consent to. Women’s right activists wear photochromic sunglasses when they look at human behaviour. When they look at men, the world is pitch black. When looking at women, it is rose-tinted. Women are not just helpless victims, and may objectify sex just like men. Sometimes their goal will be to enjoy sex, and there is nothing wrong with that. Sometimes they have another goal, like the Thai woman who bludgeoned her husband to death. He suspected she was trying to kill him, but did not want to live in a world without her. She suffered no such soppy sentimentality. She calculated that her good looks and relative youth would attract the older, richer mate. Then she calculated how best to kill her husband in order to free herself of his company but retain his wealth.

On this earth, we do have a society which has reached the logical conclusion on how to prevent the sexual objectification of women, whether they like it or not. That conclusion is not friendly to the rights of women. Saudi Arabia’s puritanical strain of Wahabi Islam precludes any opportunity to objectify women as sex objects. Not only do you not see women in lapdancing clubs in Saudi Arabia, you do not see women in Saudi Arabia. You see black shrouded figures which you understand are women underneath. To reduce temptation further, the opportunities to talk or make eye contact with women are extremely limited, not least by very strong conventions. Separate visiting hours for men and women for many facilities, and the vigilant religious police act as further safeguards. Presumably nobody in Object wants this solution for women’s rights, yet their manifesto is negatively against sexual objectification, with no balancing messages about women’s rights to use their bodies as they please. That makes their manifesto too simplistic to reflect the full spectrum of women’s rights. Their scathing criticism of mass media does not extend to complaining about the lazy way journalists reproduced the rantings of the leader of this group without any proper analysis. According to its website, Object has hundreds of members and thousands receive its newsletter. In other words, they probably have no more than 3 members per every lapdancing club in Britain. For Object to act as if it speaks on behalf of all women is more than pompous. A genuine and unbiased survey of women would find many of them to be gladly, willingly objectifying themselves most days, if not every day. Making the connection between Object and the Saudi brand of Islam may seem extreme, but Object are no less extreme in their views than the Wahabi Muslims. Both are prepared to impose their opinions about sexuality by denying people choices about how they behave. The loss of our freedom does not occur all at once, but one step at a time. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and well-intentioned people may blunder their way along it without realizing where they are going. Extreme minority viewpoints, like that of Object, should not be reproduced in the mainstream press as if they represented a mainstream point of view. Extremists are not people in other countries with different religions. Extremists are people in this country and elsewhere who are strongly motivated to impose their view of right and wrong on everyone else, with no regard to the consequences or alternative points of view.

We are all here because of sex. Sex is not just a part of life, it is the start of life. Different people have different attitudes to sexuality. What sexual encounters we permit, and what we prohibit, is a test of our ability to reach civilized compromises in society. It is not hard to understand why lapdancing clubs may face a powerful coalition of forces that oppose to them. Many citizens in our country still have attitudes to sexuality that would have been the norm in the 19th Century, where women should be chaste and chased, and not use their bodies for personal gratification and gain. Many people are NIMBYs, as likely to complain at having a refuge for beaten women located down the road as they would if a lapdancing club were built there. A voter motivated by a single issue enjoys the same number of votes as a voter who tries to balance many considerations in reaching the right decision. Governments need to satisfy the people who vote, not the ones who do not, if they want to stay in power. The mass media makes most money if it sells sex and gives a platform for would-be censors at the same time, so long as they are not the ones censored at the end of the day. Lapdancing clubs are small businesses, on the verges of polite society and automatically assumed to be semi-criminal or disreputable by many people who would never venture inside and have no genuine knowledge of them. It is very easy to be lazily opposed to lapdancing clubs, and doubtless every day there are hundreds of ways that the girls working in them are demeaned and taken advantage of. In the end, those women have a choice to work there or not. That is a right. That right should not be affected by any personal emotions we have about sexuality. A coalition of prudes and misguided activists may well motivate a change in the law, a reduction in lapdancing clubs, and they may even go on to further successes in their mission to harass, obstruct and ultimately close these businesses. Whether they do not, they should not be allowed to take ownership of the bankrupt concept that they are fighting for women’s rights, as if rights should be determined according to gender. Our rights include the right to objectify ourselves. That right is genuine and true for women as for men. The women who exercise that right deserve their rights to be respected, and not denigrated because of any confused or outdated sense of distaste about how they make a living. Women have the right to say yes, as well as no, whatever their fellow women may think or feel about that. Those are the rights of women and all of us. “Women’s rights” is a disguise, used to justify why some people, men and women, would exert their will over other people, men and women. That disguise should be torn from their backs, revealing the naked reality of what lies underneath.