and so is one from somebody else, called Steve Makinder (whom neither I nor my family have ever met,) which makes a very good point, though sadly he omits to mention Justin’s screamingly funny point about the mouse and the vapours…

Sir: The pitiful letter from Charles Clarke complaining of his treatment at the hands of your columnist Matthew Norman and his description of his unhappiness at being “hectored” by Canon McFadyen in Norwich Cathedral does little to enhance his status as a strong-minded and determined member of Tony Blair’s Cabinet.

If we are to believe that Mr Clarke is of a mind to push through some extremely unpalatable new laws restricting our personal freedoms then he needs to toughen up a bit. Allowing a man of the cloth and one of The Independent’s journalists to get under his skin makes me wonder whether there could be a heart beating in there after all. With this in mind, perhaps he can be persuaded to review his plans to shackle us all to our biometric ID cards and snoop on us with his linked CCTV cameras.

STEVE MACKINDER

DOWNHAM MARKET, NORFOLK

You accuse me of a sarcastic sneer. Fair enough. If you’ve read enough of this blog you’ll know that’s my stock in trade. However, I also say I am merely pointing out that the methods Clarke accuses Norman of employing are meat and potatoes to this tawdry, stop-at-nothing government with its whisperings, briefings and smears. At least Norman had the courage to put his name to the article unlike the anonymous briefings for which this government is famed. Mo Mowlam, anybody?

That Clarke, a so-called political bruiser, should be suffering a case of the vapours is a rich seam of comedic irony as far as I’m concerned. If he’s unable to wear chip paper polemic and the “stirring” of obscure bloggers I respectfully suggest he take up another career. He is, after all, only one of the most powerful men in the land.

This is merely yet another display of hypocrisy from Clarke – pretending to pull up his skirts in panic when a mouse happens by. I can’t wait for the next New Labour lament of political disengagement.

Read together, the letter from Charles Clarke and Rachel’s reply show that the incident in the cathedral was more trivial than the Norman article made it seem: that the worst thing alleged against Mr Clarke now seems to be that he looked at the Canon in a hostile way (Clarke denies having used the words attributed to him in the Norman article): that not only has Clarke apologised about the argument to the Canon, but the Canon has also apologised to Clarke: that Matthew Norman’s account of the events was written at third hand — neither he nor indeed Rachel was present when it happened and the recollections of the parties to a dispute like this, where they clearly became agitated (the Canon) or angry (the home secretary) are notoriously unreliable, however honestly and scrupulously they try to reconstruct what happened after the event, and in transmission from one person to another it may become impossible to be sure about what actually took place and who said what to whom.

The protagonists have apologised to each other and have agreed to have a meeting to discuss the issue that the Canon sought to raise with Charles Clarke. That seems an obviously more satisfactory outcome than any discussion could possibly have been after the Canon accosted an unprepared home secretary in a cathedral after the end of a meeting on another subject. The only individual to emerge from the whole thing without the slightest credit is, in my view, Matthew Norman, whose extraordinarily personal and vituperative attack on Clarke turns out to have virtually no basis and to have been motivated primarily by a desire to maximise ill-will.

I respectfully — well, fairly respectfully — suggest that the right course for bloggers (and commentators on bloggers) now is to refrain from further stirring and to let the promised meeting between the Canon and the home secretary go ahead in as constructive an atmosphere as they can manage. It’s also important not to raise unrealistic expectations. It looks unlikely in the extreme that the Canon, however eloquently he argues his case, will persuade the home secretary and his officials to agree to set up a public inquiry. The best to be hoped for, probably, is that each side will end the meeting with a better and perhaps more charitable understanding of the other’s point of view.

That’s a terrible thing to do isn’t it? Not very nice at all. Downright despicable in fact.

Never mind, Charlie, another double lunch will take away the taste of your own medicine, I sure .

Who needs to grow up here exactly? A reputation as a political bruiser? The pansy.

Today I was very surprised to see a letter from Mr. Charles Clarke, who is my father’s M.P in this newspaper. Mr Clarke objects to the tone and content of a piece by Matthew Norman in which he takes Mr. Clarke to task over a variety of incidents and issues, in particular a disagreement in Norwich Cathedral a fortnight ago. Both my father and Mr. Clarke have since apologised to each other. I published an account of this incident on my website blog a couple of hours after it happened and it is this account that was picked up by many bloggers, and then by the mainstream media, including Mr Norman in his column.

I maintain that the account I have given is an accurate one: I did not say, as Mr Clarke claims, that the Home Secretary had ”behaved” in a very nasty way: I reported that my father had said that he had ”looked at him in a very nasty way” and said that he was being insulted by my father, who was then dismissed by Mr. Clarke.

My father was certainly somewhat agitated when he approached the Home Secretary at the end of the meeting, and I faithfully reported this. My father also challenged Mr Clarke over the lack of questions at the meeting and I reported this too. But to say that he ’stifled questions’ and ‘talked over the top’ of the Home Secretary and would not allow him to answer questions is extraordinary. It is in no way congruent with my father’s account, and with his great distress afterwards. When my father called me straight after the meeting, his first words were ‘ I tried, Rachel, I tried to ask about the Public Enquiry, but he wouldn’t answer me; he looked at me in very nasty way and he said that I had insulted him, and he dismissed me with the words ”Get away from me, you are insulting me.”

My father’s distress at not getting an answer to his question was apparent and seen by many of his colleagues, who have since sent him supportive messages. Mr. Clarke has a reputation for being a ”fearless political bruiser”, who enjoys the rough and tumble of Westminster life, but his brusqueness and refusal to answer my father’s question when challenged immediately after a Norfolk clergy meeting seem to have surprised many, including journalists and fellow politicians. I took care to be as accurate as possible in my original blog entry, and I stand by what I wrote, as told to me by my father the Canon, who has never abused his office to tell untruths. My father and I have both said that we are looking forward to meeting Mr. Clarke in the ten minutes the Home Secretary has allocated us next week, to discuss the matter of a public enquiry into July 7th Bombings, something that I, and many other survivors of the London bombs are still seeking.

My father has refused all media follow up to this story, and would never dream of writing to a national newspaper to defend himself. I myself had considered that the matter of the disagreement between Mr. Clarke and my father was closed, since it was clear that both regretted the incident and a meeting was now in the diary. I can see that Mr. Norman’s piece may well have caused a strong reaction in Mr. Clarke but that, surely, is between Mr. Clarke and Mr. Norman, not my father or me?

My father and I look forward to discussing the matter of a public enquiry with the Home Secretary in our brief meeting next week, and I hope that we can enjoy a fruitful dialogue together.

Rachel North

* hopefully will go in tomorrow. Clarke must have written his in a steaming frenzy at the weekend.

Mr Clarke is seething about the Matthew Norman article! And has backtracked and is calling me and my dad liars!

http://comment.independent.co.uk/letters/article354066.ece

he has written a letter to the Independent. He misquotes the article completely as well.

I have written a letter back to the Indie letters page and here it is…

I accept that there’s room for two opinions about the legitimacy of Matthew Norman’s inclusion in his polemic of the Nescafé story. My own objection to it relies on the distinction between (1) a polemical article which purports to describe a very specific incident and harshly criticises one of the two people involved in it, and (2) general satirical lampooning of a politician (John Major, Peter Mandelson) in political cartoons and satirical impersonations on television in which comments are made on the subject of the satire by, among other things, spotlighting and exaggerating aspects of their behaviour which allegedly cast light on them as political figures. Matthew Norman’s article seemed to me obviously intended to fall squarely into category 1 and to deserve to be judged as such. The Nescafé story could arguably be justified, at a pinch, if it were to be used in category 2. Norman’s deliberate blurring of the two categories seemed to me to wreck his impact in both of them. His description of the specific incident involving Charles Clarke and the canon and his assessment of the part played in it by Clarke were made to look untrustworthy and questionable by the category 2 lampooning of Clarke that was woven into it; and the lampooning was made to appear probably unwarranted by the complete irrelevance of the Nescafé story and by the obvious one-sidedness of the account of the incident involving Rachel’s father.

I have no time at all for Clarke (although bad home secretary as he is, he’s demonstrably less bad than Blunkett, Howard and probably Straw, not that that’s saying much): and I’m happy to see him lampooned by the likes of Steve Bell and Rory Bremner who almost always have an underlying serious point to make in what they draw or do. But I didn’t think there was any serious point underlying the Nescafé story, dating back to Clarke’s student days: it was gratuitously unpleasant, had nothing whatever to do with the incident which was supposed to be the subject of the article, and in at least one reader (me) actually prompted a small secret stirring of sympathy for its victim. Sneering rarely has the desired effect.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that in my view mixing up the two categories in a single article is sheer bad journalism. It tells us a great deal more about Mr Norman than it tells us about Mr Clarke.

I’m grateful to Tom P for his suggestion that the answers to my questions are to be found on Rachel’s blog. I have read most of the many relevant entries in that blog with some care, in fact, and found them mostly moving, beautifully written, engaging, sometimes (but not by any means always) persuasive, and always completely understandable as coming from someone who has endured and survived a truly appalling experience, as Rachel has done. But, with the greatest respect to her, I don’t actually think that answers to my main questions are to be found in her blog. The main exception is in the text of the letter from Charles Clarke to her father which Rachel reproduces in her blog, where Clarke’s description of his encounter with the canon does seem to me to cast more light on what seems to have happened than anything in Matthew Norman’s article — and which without in any way excusing Clarke’s brusque and offensive words (for which he has several times apologised quite handsomely) does actually put them in a wholly different context from that suggested by Norman. It certainly reinforces my instinctive lack of confidence in the trustworthiness of Matthew Norman’s version of events and of the justice of the lambasting of Clarke that’s based on it.

You only have to listen to Clarke being interviewed on the Today programme to suspect that he is an arrogant, self-inflated figure who regards being questioned with barely disguised contempt. If I had a friend like that I’d think he needed bringing down a peg or two. If picturing him in his underpants was a way to puncture his nauseating pomposity well, it’s better than thoughts of violence as far as I’m concerned.

As for your other questions, I’m less qualified to answer them than Rachel herself. I merely feel compelled to defend her honour in some small way from thugs like Clarke.

With respect Brian, I wonder if you were searching for something that wasn’t likely to be present in what I took to be an expertly executed lampooning polemic.

Is it really unsporting to ask one or two authentically neutral questions — neutral because I genuinely don’t know the answers to them, and I would be surprised if the majority of Matthew Norman’s readers could have known the answers to them either?

Norman’s article says:

“If the canon was slightly agitated at the time, most of us would excuse this in the circumstances. Mr Clarke isn’t most of us, and but for the fact that he has since issued the ritual blithe apology,…”

Which prompts a few innocent questions. What form exactly did the good canon’s ’slight agitation’ take? Never mind that it was certainly excusable: how did he actually behave in relation to Charles Clarke? What aspect of his behaviour prompted Clarke to start by saying “Get away from me!”? Don’t we need to know the answer to that before we can make a fair judgement of Clarke’s response? What form did Clarke’s apology take and when did he make it? Orally, or in writing? At the time or later? When he reacted to the canon in the way he did, was he aware that the canon was the father of Rachel who had been a victim of 7/7? And, a slightly different question, was he aware that the canon was the person who had written to him asking for an inquiry into the 7/7 bombings? Is Matthew Norman saying, or implying, that a canon of the church ought to be treated differently by a politician whom he approaches with a question (or appeal, or demand?) from anyone else doing the same thing, purely because he is a canon? On the substance of the matter, of course Rachel and her father are fully entitled to demand a public inquiry into the bombings, but (a) would it in practice be possible to conduct such an inquiry without prejudicing the impending trials of those who have been accused of responsibility for them, and (b) what kind of information could an inquiry be expected to reveal that can’t be expected to come out at those trials?

I repeat that there may well be perfectly good answers to every one of those questions which would fully vindicate Matthew Norman’s tirade. I only venture to suggest that his article doesn’t provide them.

And incidentally I personally think the resurrection in the Norman article of the Nescafé story is disreputable journalism unworthy of The Independent — and uncomfortably reminiscent of the more regrettable excesses of the diary column that Matthew Norman used to write in the Guardian.

Charles Clarke is vulnerable to savage attack on a wide range of policy issues. There’s a lot to be said for sticking to them.

Brian
http://www.barder.com/ephems/