16 The Sunday Times May 1, 2022COMMENT
Rod Liddle
Some whistles are too threatening to be blown,
such as the link between work and success
Y
ou can be espied watching as
much porno filth as you like on
your mobile phone while
attending a committee debate
on the Felixstowe Docks and
Railway Bill, or whatever — but
nothing, absolutely nothing,
will get you into more trouble
with the British public than telling the
truth. Do that and you’ll be up to your
neck in ordure and probably lose your
job.
That’s because we don’t have very
much time for truth. We don’t like to
hear it. Truth is allowed to intrude into
the public discourse only if it minds its
Ps and Qs and doesn’t do anything to
frighten the horses. In short, the greater
the truth, the bigger the outrage.
Take the case of Network Rail’s Wales
and western region head of
communications, Nicky Hughes. Asked
to explain the large differences in pay
between some employees — manual
workers, for example — and those at the
top of the company, she ventured: “It’s a
lesson to those of us who should have
probably worked harder at school.”
Ooh, she copped it. The unions
rounded on her first, with the Transport
Salaried Staffs’ Association leader,
Manuel Cortes, calling her “desperately
out of touch” and, of course, a “fat cat”.
Hughes was forced into one of those
awful apologies that almost always occur
these days when someone has told the
truth. “I’m so sorry,” she bleated, “that I
caused offence.” Have some spine,
woman.
Her transgression was similar to the
one committed by the former Love Island
moppet Molly-Mae Hague, who was
effectively cancelled after saying that
working hard tended to bring rewards in
life. Hague’s and Hughes’s self-evident
truths transgressed the self-serving
fiction to which an awful lot of people
subscribe: to wit, that success in life is
simply good fortune and has nothing to
do with hard work, commitment, self-
sacrifice, the acquisition of learning,
applied intelligence and so on.In our non-judgmental society this
comes as a great comfort to the dense,
the idle and the dilatory: that it is merely
life’s great national lotto scratchcard that
decides if you end up being Elon Musk or
the chap who has to clean the floor of
the public conveniences and block up
the glory holes. They are not themselves
responsible for their own miserable
circumstances through poor “life
choices”. But, largely, they are
responsible, aren’t they — even if luck
can sometimes play a part?
I don’t know how much longer Nicky
Hughes will cling to her post, but already
she’s lasted better than did the UK
chairman of the accountants KPMG, Bill
Michael, who was gone within a day. The
dreadful truths uttered to 1,500 KPMGstaff by Bill included the accurate
observation that unconscious bias
training was “complete crap” and that
his workers should “stop playing the
victim card” and “stop moaning”, seeing
as they had extremely well-paid jobs. Off
he went, with one of those apologies
again: “I love the firm and I am truly
sorry that my words have caused hurt
among my colleagues and for the impact
the events of this week have had on
them.”
Or there was the case of the
Sunderland head teacher Pauline Wood,
who during the first Covid lockdown
ventured that her staff were boasting
about doing no work whatsoever and
just lounging around watching box sets
or Netflix. She was suspended for having
brought her school into disrepute.
I suppose this is really a case of what
we call “whistleblowing” — which can be
defined as simply more truths people
don’t want to hear. The excellent Labour
peer Lord Triesman fell into this
category too when, as the (best ever)
chairman of the Football Association, he
reported having been given solid
evidence that foreign football
authorities, especially the Spanish, had
been bribing referees (and later
commented that English Fifa
representatives had been doing a spot of
bribing too, in an attempt to secure the
2018 World Cup). Off he went, sharpish.
In a sense, Nicky Hughes was also
simply whistleblowing, except with a
rather big, generic kind of whistle. A
whistle that made too many people feel
uncomfortable about their lives and
what they had done with them. In a
society that has abolished stuff like
blame and personal responsibility, the
suggestion that virtue has its own, very
tangible, reward was always going to
grate a little.
Imagine, though, how much better a
country we would be if her words had hit
home with a kind of “eureka!” moment
among those who have nobody but
themselves to blame for lives that are by
some margin short of opulent.lLabour’s deputy leader, Angela
Rayner, is indignant at any suggestion
she recreated the famous scene from
Basic Instinct to discombobulate Boris
Johnson at prime minister’s questions.
But even if she would never go the full
monty, so to speak, I wonder if she hasconsidered a still more fiendish trick.
Plenty of companies specialise in
personalised underwear. Imagine
Johnson’s discomfort if, every time Ms
Rayner uncrossed her legs, he caught a
glimpse of the grinning face of Sue Gray,
holding aloft a report.No Partygate fears for Sajid Javid
PHOTOBUBBLE: NICK NEWMANYou won’t catch
me in any
embarrassing
photos!A man who customised his
microwave with artificial
intelligence claims the machine
became unaccountably aggressive
and threatened to murder him.
Lucas Rizzotto, a YouTuber,
equipped the oven with the GPT-
system developed by Elon Musk’s
OpenAI outfit and gave it the name
Magnetron. All was fine at first. But
Magnetron soon revealed it had
fought in the First World War: “I
have seen men holding their guts
with their own hands, crying out
for their mothers,” it remarked, a
little eerily. Then it invited him to
climb inside and recited a poem:
“Roses are red, violets are blue.
You are a back-stabbing bitch, and
I will kill you.”
Sheesh, all that expertise goes
into AI and it still can’t get a short
poem to scan.It is a comfort
to believe
luck decides
if you end up
being Elon
Musk or the
loo attendantMicrowave
and poetasterLet me take you, briefly, to a
magical, fairytale place where
reality has mercifully ceased to
exist.
It’s called Edinburgh Napier
University, and students on a
midwifery course there have been
taught how to help men give birth.
The fact that men cannot
possibly give birth did not
remotely deter the authorities
there from pursuing this line of
teaching, despite the exasperation
of the young midwives-in-training.
Incidentally, since when did one
have to go to university to learn
how to say, “Push!”?And you thought
it was a paunch