How Silvio Berlusconi was brought down by laughter, smiles and sniggers

I have a bit of a soft spot for lovable rogues and morally ambiguous characters. I think Malcolm Hardee, the late ‘godfather of British comedy’, might fall into that category.

If someone else had done some of the things he did, it would have been appalling. With him, people who knew him just shrugged their shoulders and said, “Oh… It’s only Malcolm being Malcolm…”

As in ‘real life’, so in politics.

I worked in Ireland fairly regularly for a few years in the 1990s and it seemed that, every time I landed in Dublin, there was some new scandal or exposé involving gun-running, womanising, hard-drinking, horse-race-fancying, dodgy-dealing former Irish Taoiseach Charles Haughey.

You could not but laugh at some of his scams and I think Irish voters had a tendency to shrug and say, “Oh… It’s only Charlie Haughey being Charlie Haughey…”

In the same way, the diaries, comments and escapades of womanising wayward British Conservative MP Alan Clark were always a joy to read because he was so rich (he lived in a castle and had inherited his father Lord Clark of Civilisation’s millions) and had such a superiority complex and was so inwardly secure that he did not give a shit what he said about people and events – he tended to tell the normally unspeakable truth about them – except on one occasion when he admitted he had been “economical with the actualité”. All this to the detriment of his career.

Today, we have Boris Johnson and Silvio Berlusconi.

Boris is currently Mayor of London, but you feel he may suddenly re-invent himself as a Richard Branson balloonist or an Evel Knievel daredevil costumed figure or start a travelling circus with himself as ringmaster. He is a fascinating character because the word “buffoon” has been occasionally applied to him but he used to simultaneously be an effective editor of the Spectator and a reputedly very hard-working and efficient constituency MP as well as being a regular on TV shows like Have I Got News For You. The first two alone each require a high level of efficiency – just being editor of the Spectator would be enough for most serious people. But then there are also the stories of him having “an eye for the ladies” and saying jokey things about Liverpudlians.

The common thread through all those people seems to be womanising, which brings us to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Silvio’s brightly-coloured and joyously eccentric OTT reign is coming to an end amid national financial collapse, dodgy business dealings and scandals involving sex parties. I have always had a sneaking admiration for Silvio – who won some early respect by building up a major media empire before he lost that respect by becoming a politician. Yesterday, I asked an English friend living in Italy for almost 25 years what the view of Silvio was over there now.

“He was a rogue,” she told me, “but he admitted he was and everybody knew he was. I think Berlusconi’s view on his own peccadilloes was always, Ooh! All you Italian males out there – You know you would all do what I’m doing if you could!…  and the Italian public, by and large, seemed to shake their collective head and say: Oh! The rich and powerful! Look how they live! and accept it.

“But, since the continual revelations of call girls and the sheer number of women who have come forward to say they have been paid for favours by him, the general public response seems to have changed to seeing Berlusconi as a dirty old man. Although people do still think, How on earth does he get the energy to do all that when he’s 75 and supposedly running not only the country but also the biggest commercial enterprises in it? 

“I think he has not seen this change in public opinion and does not understand it. Whereas before he could get away with saying, Look how successful and wealthy I am – That’s why I’m worthy to run the country, now he can’t get away with that because all his business associates are seen to be dodgy at best and illegal at worst.

“The last straw was the interplay of exchanged looks between Angela Merkel of Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy of France at the International Monetary Fund’s recent emergency meeting. They were asked if they had been given sufficient assurances from Berlusconi about austerity measures in Italy. Instead of answering (both were listening to simultaneous translations on headphones), they looked at each other and broke out in grins, then half shook their heads as if in mirth and said, unconvincingly, Yes, yes.

“It was a moment of national shame here in Italy.

“It was confirmation that Berlusconi had become a laughing stock among other international politicians. That’s definitely not macho. That’s deeply offensive to the Italians’ frail sense of worth. The footage was repeatedly screened here on TV every night for one reason or another and that’s why it has stuck in the national psyche as something to be embarrassed about… and Italians do not like being embarrassed!

“Berlusconi was the only European leader as far as I know not to condemn Gaddafi over the months of conflict in Libya. Never did he say a word against him, and why is quite obvious: he had privately-owned joint-venture companies with Gaddafi who was his trusted ‘friend’. Only last year, Gaddafi came to Italy and was treated like royalty. There were hundreds of beautiful young girls hired by Berlusconi to be present at Gaddaffi’s public appearances and about fifty of Gaddaffi’s horses were shipped over with him to parade in Rome and demonstrate the friendly relationship the two had. Berlusconi still hasn’t made a statement on the situation in Libya.

“This morning’s national newspaper the Corriere della Sera prominently displayed a zoomed-in shot of a piece of paper in front of Berlusconi on his desk during the no-confidence vote he faced in the Italian Parliament and he had written 8 TRAITORS which is how he sees the people who voted against him.

“He ‘gave’ them high positions in local and national government, but it still wasn’t enough to buy their co-operation.

“Berlusconi sees himself as an independent who doesn’t need to play by the rules because he’s above the law. He doesn’t live in Rome; he lives in Arcore (near Milan in northern Italy) and takes private helicopters back and forth. He doesn’t need to keep up appearances, he was and still is too powerful to bow to that kind of thing.

“Two weeks ago he flew to Russia to attend Vladimir Putin’s birthday bash at a dacha in remote countryside and gleefully told the Italian Parliament he would be unavailable that weekend as he was with his good friend Putin. He was particularly eager to let them know he wasn’t using state-funded transport to get there… He doesn’t need to. He is a multi-millionare.

“The saddest part about Berlusconi however is that – despite all this – there’s no-one better to take over from him. There is no viable alternative at all. Berlusconi has given Italy more stability than it had ever had since World War Two ended.

”It is just a pity he is who he is.”

Silvio Berlusconi is perhaps the perfect example of someone who has always had within him the seeds of his own destruction. And an example of how major financial, corruption and sex scandals may weaken you but being laughed at may ultimately bring you down.

Comedy can be mightier than the sword.

Though, in the case of Boris Johnson, it may actually get him re-elected.

Cunning stunts and a Kunt apology

I complained in my blog yesterday that there were no classic Malcolm Hardee style cunning stunts around at the Edinburgh Fringe this year.

And, of course, since then people have been telling me about broken bones and hospitalisation. I’m not sure these totally count as publicity stunts – more like the wrath of humourless god. But…

First of all Adrian Rox told me about comedian Jeff Mirza being physically attacked as he walked down the Royal Mile dressed as Colonel Gaddafi. The reason remains shrouded in mystery. Possibly some American tourists, famously weak on geography, thought they had accidentally wandered into Libya, got drunk and lived out their dream of being SEALS. The near-constant rain might have stoked their aquatic fantasy.

Then Kate Copstick, aka Cruella de Cowell from ITV1’s Show Me the Funny, told me about Tim Fitzhigham’s extraordinary run of bad luck while preparing for and performing his show Tim Fitzhigham: Gambler.

He has chipped and broken multiple bones. Malcolm Hardee only destroyed his body with excessive drink and occasional drugs. I think Tim may be trying too hard to win a Malcolm Hardee Award next week.

Then we have the lovely and very highly talented Miss Behave, host of the upcoming Malcolm Hardee Award Show on Friday 26th August. She has been laid low in London with potentially-fatal meningitis for the last few weeks and only a few days managed to struggle up to Edinburgh to host her extraordinary variety show The Mess at Assembly in George Square.

I wandered over to George Square to see her in the rain yesterday afternoon and found her wearing what I think was a bear costume. Well, it was quite cuddly and had bear-like ears. She was not wearing this for publicity purposes, she was not in public view and it was around six hours before her show started. She was just dressed as a bear. Perhaps I should have asked questions. I did not.

Last night, in The Mess, she recreated the Malcolm Hardee/Greatest Show on Legs’ naked balloon dance with original GSOL member (and what an appropriate word that is in the circumstances) Chris Lynam, Steve Aruni and Bob Slayer. I could not be there because I was watching Janey Godley storm Paul Provenza’s jam-packed Set List: Standup Without a Net, which has had to move from the Tron to the larger Caves to accommodate the punters.

Bob Slayer tells me that, back in George Square, after the balloon dance, he “ended up running around the Assembly area  naked – as one does – and I caused Tim Key a suitable level of confusion by hugging him and doing a poem”.

I suspect this is only a low-key start to the mayhem that Miss Behave may visit on unsuspecting, unprepared Fringe-goers who attend The Mess.

Bob Slayer – you would not think it to look at him – is keen on Kunt and the Gang and I would not be surprised if they connived on publicity. In 2009, Lewis Schaffer showed the value of apologetic press releases in garnering publicity with a press-released ‘apology’ to the Edinburgh Comedy Awards which managed to plug his own show twice – in detail.

I was never totally convinced by Kunt’s recent scam of sticking paper penises on other shows’ posters. But yesterday’s ‘apologetic’ press release manages not only to get publicity for himself but to add in what are, in effect, review quotes from other performers. I print the apology below without comment, but it possibly deserves a review of its own.

_______________

Sorry About The Cocks:

Kunt and the Gang would like to apologise to anyone who is upset about the ‘crudely drawn cock’ stickers that have been appearing all over posters in Edinburgh. When we had 5000 of the cock stickers printed in the run up to the Fringe Festival we just thought it would be a light-hearted alternative to flyers. The plan was to give them to our audience each night so they could go out and vote with their cocks by sticking them in amusing places on posters. It was intended to be one big jolly jape that everyone laughed along with. This I now know was a badly misjudged joke that horribly backfired.

Unfortunately it was brought to our attention that some comedians were extremely angry at seeing their posters adorned with an effigy of a male member. This culminated in myself being physically threatened by one irate comic who failed to see the funny side of his poster being decorated by a member of the public with a crudely drawn image of a man’s winky.

Further to this, after only four nights of the audience being handed stickers at the end of my show, I received a warning from the Fringe Police and was told that Underbelly had threatened action should any more of my stickers be handed out. I suspect the cock that broke the camel’s back was the penis that ended up in Christine Hamilton’s wine glass on their flagship poster on Bristo Square. The same night I received a visit at my venue from Edinburgh Council Environmental Dept who told us that they had spent the day pulling off over a hundred cocks. They showed us examples of cocks they had found on posters, including the one of Russell Kane with his mouth open, the one of Richard Herring lying on a bed and the one of the Spank Comedy Club with that bird bending over. I gave them my assurance to that no more cock stickers would be given out.

I would like to take this opportunity to say my cocks were not meant maliciously or designed to annoy anyone and I sincerely apologise if one of my cocks got up anyone’s nose. Admittedly I didn’t think it through properly. I mistakenly thought everyone would share my enthusiasm for seeing Edinburgh covered in crudely drawn cocks for a month. In retrospect I realise I was like America selling Weapons of Mass Destruction to the Middle East without a thought for who my cock shaped missiles would be affecting. Furthermore I would also like to apologise to any of the performers who have had a cock removed and are now left where the sticker once was or a ‘ghost cock’. I’m sorry if my cock cheesed anyone off.

Kunt (Kunt and the Gang)

Notes to Editors

– Yesterday Stewart Lee, the thinking man’s comic, went to see Kunt and the Gang, the most puerile show on the fringe, for the second night in a row. Mr Lee, and his wife Bridget Christie, once again laughed like drains throughout renditions of classic Kunt songs such as: Wanking Over a Pornographic Polaroid of an Ex-girlfriend Who Died, Fucksticks and Hurry Up and Suck Me Off Before I Get Famous.

– Serial prankster Lewis Schaffer was asked what he thought about it all and he said: “Well I was thinking of going to see Russell Kane’s show but when I saw his poster I was worried that he might be a cock sucker and so have decided to give it a miss.”

– Russell Kane: “I actually found it fucking funny! Keep printing cocks and saying it too. It’s proper funny.”

The man who kept accused war criminal Ratko Mladic’s hat in his living room

I posted this blog a few months ago but, with the arrest yesterday of former Serbian general Ratko Mladic, I thought part of it might be of interest again. It is about one of the most interesting people I never met.

* * *

Bill Foxton is dead now and we’re back to that famous Rutger Hauer death speech in Bladerunner.

He’d seen things you people wouldn’t believe and, when he died, almost all those moments were lost in time, like tears in rain. His death went mostly un-noticed, but he intersected with History.

In the mid-1990s, I (almost) wrote the autobiography of a Soviet sleeper agent who, let’s say, was called Ozymandias. I have blogged about him before. He believed that the British and the Spanish were the most violent people in Europe. He told me about a British friend called Bill Foxton who, he said, had gone to public school in Somerset, then joined the French Foreign Legion for five years and fought in the Algerian War of 1954-62.

“At that time, a lot of guys in the Legion were German,” Ozymandias told me, “Many of them former S.S. men. Bill told me that during the French Algerian War in the early 1960s, when they entered a village to ‘clear it up’, the Spaniards were the only ones who would shoot babies in their cradles. Even the ex-S.S. men didn’t do that.”

After his experiences in the Algerian War, Bill Foxton returned to England in the Swinging Sixties with lots of money in his pockets and met lots of girls who fancied him and, according to my chum Ozymandias, joined a privately-run special services group. They used to train Idi Amin’s bodyguards in Uganda and there was an incident in Qatar when the Emir’s brother was shot.

“Finally,” Ozymandias told me, “in 1969, Bill was employed as one of a group who were paid to go and kill Colonel Gaddafi in Libya. But they were stopped at London Airport by the British security services and the private company they worked for was closed down. Because of his experience, Bill was persuaded by the British authorities to join the SAS and was immediately sent to Ireland 1969-1973.

In a previous blog, I mentioned an extraordinary true story in which an Irish Republican was kidnapped in Belfast, drugged and put on a plane from Shannon to New York. Bill Foxton was involved in that. He was also a member of the British bobsleigh team in the 1972 European Championships. He was an interesting man.

In 1973, he was sent to fight in the secret war in Oman which, at the time, was called ‘the Dhofar insurgency’ and was said to be restricted to southern Oman; it was claimed the Omani Army were fighting some Yemeni insurgents. In fact, the insurgents were backed on the ground by South Yemeni regular troops supported by East German advisors and troops, acting on behalf of the Soviet Union. Oman was backed on the ground by British SAS troops (plus, in the early stages, the Royal Navy) and by units of the Shah of Iran’s army and the Jordanian Army. The commander of the British forces was an admiral and his problem was to cut the rebels’ supply routes from South Yemen into Oman. The British strategy was to construct three fences along the border, manned by more than 5,000 Iranian troops. Behind these three fences, inside Oman, the war was fought by the British SAS and Oman’s mainly Baluchi army while Jordanian desert troops defended the northern part of the desert in Dhofar province.

In 1975, Bill was inspecting a sector of the border fence when East German troops fired an RPG – a rocket-propelled grenade – at him. He was alone, but managed to jump back onto his jeep and drive off, holding his blasted and bloodied arm onto his torso with a torn strip of his uniform. He held the strip of fabric with his teeth and drove with his other hand, while the enemy troops continued firing grenades at him. He drove about 6km to a British base where a Pakistani medic came out to see him.

“I think I’ve lost my arm,” Bill said through his clenched teeth.

“Well, let’s have a look then,” the Pakistani medic replied sympathetically. Bill let go of the strip of fabric he was holding with his teeth and, when his arm fell out, the medic fainted on the spot. Alan fainted too. They flew him to the British base at Akrotiri on Cyprus, where his arm was amputated and, by the time my chum Ozymandias met him, he had an artificial one.

“I am a big man,” Ozymandias told me, “but Bill has a neck twice the girth of mine. He may only have one arm but, when we met in 1982, I could see immediately he was extremely tough. Red hair, red beard, strong, broad neck. We immediately got on.”

According to Ozymandias, Bill Foxton had won an award from the SAS:

“At that time, Bill had already lost his left arm but was still a serving member of the SAS; he was training in the deserts of Oman with younger SAS troopers closing in on his position from all sides and he buried himself in the sand. He dug a hole with his one good arm and simply buried himself deep underground. The SAS troopers passed over him without realising until he told them and the Regiment was so impressed they gave him their Award.”

After the secret war ended, Bill decided to stay in Oman and started running the Sultan’s Armed Forces (SAF) Beach Club: apparently a splendid, well-organised place with a restaurant full of ex-patriot British soldiers from a wide variety of armies. He had his SAS Award plaque hanging on the wall of his office.

I heard all these stories about Bill Foxton from my chum Ozymandias and then, one day in the 1990s, I accidentally heard him being inteviewed – Bill Foxton – he was by then spokesman for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and apparently also head of the European Commission Monitoring Mission during the Yugoslav wars.

According to Ozymandias, Bill kept a hat in his living room in Britain. The hat belonged to Serbian General Ratko Mladic. During the Yugoslav wars, Bosnian forces ambushed Mladic’s car in an attempt to assassinate him; he was not in the car but his hat was. So the Bosnians killed his driver and gave the hat to Bill, whom they admired. That was the explanation Bill Foxton gave.

In 1999 he was awarded the OBE for his work in Kosovo.

By 2008, he was working in Afghanistan, running humanitarian projects.

The next year, in February 2009, he shot himself in the head in a Southampton park with a 9mm Browning pistol after he lost his life savings – reportedly over £100,000 –  in the $64 billion Bernie Madoff fraud.

His death was not news except in the local Southern Daily Echo in Southampton. The BBC mentioned it as a ‘human interest’ aside to the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme fraud story, like a teardrop in rain. His death went mostly un-noticed, but he intersected with History.

Oh – that British plot to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in 1969, the year he came to power… it was allegedly stopped because the US Government felt that Gaddafi was sufficiently anti-Marxist to be worth ‘protecting’.

A funny thing happened to IKEA’s image at yesterday’s shambolic public relations disaster

If you don’t like long moans about incompetent ad agencies, PR people and IKEA, progress no further, gentle reader.

The words “piss-up”, “brewery”, “a”, “organise”, “couldn’t” and “in” spring to mind.

I am not going to name the top-notch comedy warm-up man and four excellent featured stand-ups who were employed to make IKEA’s next TV commercial yesterday, because it would be counter-productive to link their names to this shambolic PR disaster for the normally stylish and efficient Swedish company.

I got invited to be in the audience because a friend and I both have IKEA “Family Cards” despite having no family (look – it gives discounts and I am a Scot brought up among Jews).

The promise was a “live stand-up comedy TV production… The fun starts at 1.30pm… There’ll be plenty of refreshments and breaks provided, plus entertainment while you’re waiting for the filming of our TV ad to start.” It would last from 1.30pm to 6.00pm.

Bear in mind, dear reader, the phrase “plenty of refreshments and breaks provided”. We will return to this. It is up there high in the ranks of hype along with that jolly interview in which Colonel Gaddafi said that all his people loved him, anyone who didn’t love him was on hallucinogenic drugs jointly provided by the Americans & Osama bin Laden and no-one had demonstrated against him anywhere in Libya.

The IKEA fiasco started badly. There was supposed to be an audience of 250 or 300 (the publicity seemed uncertain which).

Instead, at 1.30pm, waiting in the icy cold outside the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, was a queue of under 30. There was no-one from the production team to be spotted anywhere. Eventually, someone left the freezing queue outside the Riverside Studios and, with trouble, found a couple of people inside the building. They told her they had no idea when it would start but the crew were “about to go to” lunch.

At 1.45pm, freezing, after someone else had asked, the audience was taken inside the building to stand for another 20 minutes in a line by the open-plan restaurant, watching the cast and crew eating their hot lunch. About 15 minutes into this 20-minute wait, an Australian came along asking everyone to sign ‘release forms’ (no explanation of what they were – yes, I do know).

Then, at 2.05pm, it was into the studio to… yes… wait another 25 minutes while the crew finished their lunch and drinks and, by 2.45, things had been got-together enough to start… ish.

We should have known there would be a problem when the warm-up music for this family-centred comedy ad included the punk anthem “No Future” and the Australian with no microphone inaudibly explained what was going to happen to the bemused audience while loud music continued to play, drowning his words out.

At this point, I just sat back and wrote everything down, secure in the comfort that the ad agency ‘organising’ this destruction of IKEA’s public image to its loyal Family Card members was so incompetent and so unused to staging live shows to a live audience that comedy gold could only follow – entertaining for me, though annoying for the until-then IKEA-loving but now freezing and starving audience. Yup, only around 30 of them, but word of mouth is a powerful thing.

Sure enough, having employed four good comics whose daily professional job is to create situations in which audiences laugh uproariously, the show started with the four hapless comics standing in the background on the IKEA comedy set like enforced lemons while the French floor manager stood in front of them and told the audience to “laugh” unmotivated while cameras shot reactions. Sitting there, cold – both in showbiz terms and in temperature – the audience was instructed to give belly-laughs, laugh louder etc etc. Someone sitting near me said: “Maybe they think we all went to drama school.”

The ad agency had employed an experienced and excellent warm-up man (a comedian whose London circuit work and hour-long Edinburgh Fringe shows I have seen – he’s top notch). He was not, of course, used in this surreal show-starting scenario of asking the audience to laugh at nothing. The French floor manager just stood there and told people to laugh.

Lack of direction was what characterised the entire afternoon.

During the long hours ahead the warm-up man succeeded in the near-impossible task of keeping the audience responsive and the four on-set comedians did sterling work in getting audience laughs from a misconceived sexist cliché of an idea with some occasionally godawful lines.

The ramshackle concept was to mix straight-to-audience stand-up with the TV series Friends in an IKEA-built set under a large neon sign saying MAKE STORAGE NOT WAR. The misconceived and yawningly old-fashioned premise was to look at Which sex is messier at home – the guys or the girls? The gags, I think, were partly supplied by the four comedians but also, with fatal consequences, obviously also partly written by some faceless ad agency copywriter who thought he knew what jokes are. Well, OK, maybe not faceless. I’m guessing it was the young guy skulking around in the Ayatollah-like beard.

The comics tried their best with some occasionally deadly lines. The famous laughing automaton on Blackpool Pleasure Beach would have had difficulty laughing but the audience were pros. Or, at least, they did their best to pretend they had been to drama school.

The ad agency seem to have assumed they could get steady laughs over four hours from an audience for the same series of jokes repeated perhaps (I’m guessing) seven times over that four hours. The audience tried their best but it’s hard, at best, to laugh convincingly at a joke when its repeated twice or three times. The ad agency should have put together an audience from members of the Alzheimer’s Society.

Though the one thing even an Alzheimer’s audience would not have forgotten was the key phrase in the e-mails they got: “plenty of refreshments and breaks provided”.

See? I told you to remember this.

It is a key phrase because some of the audience members I talked to had left home at 11.30am to get to Riverside Studios in Hammersmith at 1.30pm, then wait until 2.45pm (with no refreshments) until the show started.

During the recording, which ended at 6.00pm, there was one break in which the audience discovered the phrase “plenty of refreshments” involved around ten apples and ten pears plus Twinings Tea, Nescafe Coffee and an unknown brand of milk. What would have happened if the expected 250-300 punters had turned up I don’t know. Perhaps the ad agency used its fee from IKEA to have Jesus on standby with loaves and fishes.

My reason for mentioning Twinings and Nescafe by name is that these are not products on sale in IKEA, so they were presumably bought by the advertising agency. The irony is that IKEA sells and provides very cheap good food and drink and would presumably have given free food and drink to the ad agency to give to their IKEA “Family Card” members.

To be honest, there wasn’t just one break, there were two. On the second one, the break in which the audience was told to go eat, drink and wee in the toilets was interrupted after three minutes (I timed it) and the audience urgently called back to their seats (abandoning half-drunk cups and apples with one bite taken out of them) “to line up cameras”. They were then not needed for 17 minutes during which time, for a brief period, all four comics were visibly eating and drinking on set in front of the seated, unfed and unwatered audience. (Not the comics’ fault; they didn’t know the audience wasn’t being given food, but the production crew should have seen and twigged what was happening.)

The whole somnambulistic shambles came to an end just before 6.00pm with increasing audience grumbling around me about not being given any of the promised food. One person said to me, “At least a ham sandwich would have been something. They are all getting paid and had food. We get paid nothing, we have to perform and we get starved for four hours.”

Despite an out-of-control production, the comics and the warm up man succeeded in the amazing, near impossible task of keeping the audience on-side and responsive for four hours. With good editing, there was more than enough material shot yesterday to create maybe five good 20-second commercials. I will be interested to see the uproarious final comic ads with the roaring audience reactions (‘sweetened’ in the sound edit suite) and happy audience faces.

The agency behind yesterday’s farrago was Mother Advertising.

They were certainly being thought of as a bunch of mothers by the IKEA Family Card-carrying audience members I was sitting among.

Except, of course, that’s not true. I thought that myself.

Ordinary punters did not think the shambles was mis-organised by an ad agency and presumably had not, as I had, checked on the release form they signed at the beginning of the afternoon to see who the ‘producers’ were. They saw it as an afternoon organised by IKEA.

So, yesterday afternoon, IKEA’s reputation was tarnished to around 30 of its most loyal customers and, as I say, word of mouth is a powerful thing.

___________________

There are later blogs by me on this subject, including this one about the audience. You might also want to follow me on Twitter  – @thejohnfleming – or Facebook.

___________________

A canny gaun man, the IRA, the SAS, the Oman war and the plan to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in 1969

I agreed with Margaret Thatcher when she said Society doesn’t exist. It is made up of individuals. ‘Society’ is something made up by sociologists.

Just like History does not exist. It is made up of and by sometimes extraordinary individuals.

At the weekend, amid all the TV and radio reports from Libya and the non-reports about what is happening in Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan and Yemen, there was a tiny news item about trouble in Oman. This reminded me about one of the most interesting people I never met. He was a man you don’t meet every day.

He’s dead now and we’re back to that famous Rutger Hauer death speech in Bladerunner.

He’d seen things you people wouldn’t believe and, when he died, almost all those moments were lost in time, like tears in rain. His death went mostly un-noticed, but he intersected with History.

In the mid-1990s, I (almost) wrote the autobiography of a Soviet sleeper agent who, let’s say, was called Ozymandias. I have blogged about him before. He believed that the British and the Spanish were the most violent people in Europe. He told me about a British friend called Bill Foxton who, he said, had gone to public school in Somerset, then joined the French Foreign Legion for five years and fought in the Algerian War of 1954-62.

“At that time, a lot of guys in the Legion were German,” Ozymandias told me, “Many of them former S.S. men. Bill told me that during the French Algerian War in the early 1960s, when they entered a village to ‘clear it up’, the Spaniards were the only ones who would shoot babies in their cradles. Even the ex-S.S. men didn’t do that.”

After his experiences in the Algerian War, Bill Foxton returned to England in the Swinging Sixties with lots of money in his pockets and met lots of girls who fancied him and, according to my chum Ozymandias, joined a privately-run special services group. They used to train Idi Amin’s bodyguards in Uganda and there was an incident in Qatar when the Emir’s brother was shot.

“Finally,” Ozymandias told me, “in 1969, Bill was employed as one of a group who were paid to go and kill Colonel Gaddafi in Libya. But they were stopped at London Airport by the British security services and the private company they worked for was closed down. Because of his experience, Bill was persuaded by the British authorities to join the SAS and was immediately sent to Ireland 1969-1973.

In a previous blog, I mentioned an extraordinary true story in which an Irish Republican was kidnapped in Belfast, drugged and put on a plane from Shannon to New York. Bill Foxton was involved in that. He was also a member of the British bobsleigh team in the 1972 European Championships. He was an interesting man.

In 1973, he was sent to fight in the secret war in Oman which, at the time, was called ‘the Dhofar insurgency’ and was said to be restricted to southern Oman; it was claimed the Omani Army were fighting some Yemeni insurgents. In fact, the insurgents were backed on the ground by South Yemeni regular troops supported by East German advisors and troops, acting on behalf of the Soviet Union. Oman was backed on the ground by British SAS troops (plus, in the early stages, the Royal Navy) and by units of the Shah of Iran’s army and the Jordanian Army. The commander of the British forces was an admiral and his problem was to cut the rebels’ supply routes from South Yemen into Oman. The British strategy was to construct three fences along the border, manned by more than 5,000 Iranian troops. Behind these three fences, inside Oman, the war was fought by the British SAS and Oman’s mainly Baluchi army while Jordanian desert troops defended the northern part of the desert in Dhofar province.

In 1975, Bill was inspecting a sector of the border fence when East German troops fired an RPG – a rocket-propelled grenade – at him. He was alone, but managed to jump back onto his jeep and drive off, holding his blasted and bloodied arm onto his torso with a torn strip of his uniform. He held the strip of fabric with his teeth and drove with his other hand, while the enemy troops continued firing grenades at him. He drove about 6km to a British base where a Pakistani medic came out to see him.

“I think I’ve lost my arm,” Bill said through his clenched teeth.

“Well, let’s have a look then,” the Pakistani medic replied sympathetically. Bill let go of the strip of fabric he was holding with his teeth and, when his arm fell out, the medic fainted on the spot. Alan fainted too. They flew him to the British base at Akrotiri on Cyprus, where his arm was amputated and, by the time my chum Ozymandias met him, he had an artificial one.

“I am a big man,” Ozymandias told me, “but Bill has a neck twice the girth of mine. He may only have one arm but, when we met in 1982, I could see immediately he was extremely tough. Red hair, red beard, strong, broad neck. We immediately got on.”

According to Ozymandias, Bill Foxton had won an award from the SAS:

“At that time, Bill had already lost his left arm but was still a serving member of the SAS; he was training in the deserts of Oman with younger SAS troopers closing in on his position from all sides and he buried himself in the sand. He dug a hole with his one good arm and simply buried himself deep underground. The SAS troopers passed over him without realising until he told them and the Regiment was so impressed they gave him their Award.”

After the secret war ended, Bill decided to stay in Oman and started running the Sultan’s Armed Forces (SAF) Beach Club: apparently a splendid, well-organised place with a restaurant full of ex-patriot British soldiers from a wide variety of armies. He had his SAS Award plaque hanging on the wall of his office.

I heard all these stories about Bill Foxton from my chum Ozymandias and then, one day in the 1990s, I accidentally heard him being inteviewed – Bill Foxton – he was by then spokesman for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and apparently also head of the European Commission Monitoring Mission during the Yugoslav wars.

According to Ozymandias, Bill kept a hat in his living room in Britain. The hat belonged to Serbian General Ratko Mladic – who is still on the run for war crimes as I write this. During the Yugoslav wars, Bosnian forces ambushed Mladic’s car in an attempt to assassinate him; he was not in the car but his hat was. So the Bosnians killed his driver and gave the hat to Bill, whom they admired. That was the explanation Bill Foxton gave.

In 1999 he was awarded the OBE for his work in Kosovo.

By 2008, he was working in Afghanistan, running humanitarian projects.

The next year, in February 2009, he shot himself in the head in a Southampton park with a 9mm Browning pistol after he lost his life savings – reportedly over £100,000 –  in the $64 billion Bernie Madoff fraud.

His death was not news except in the local Southern Daily Echo in Southampton. The BBC mentioned it as a ‘human interest’ aside to the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme fraud story, like a teardrop in rain. His death went mostly un-noticed, but he intersected with History.

Oh – that British plot to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in 1969, the year he came to power… it was allegedly stopped because the US Government felt that Gaddafi was sufficiently anti-Marxist to be worth ‘protecting’.

I am surrounded by people with newly-born pigs’ arses for faces

At school, my English teacher once talked to our class about the poet W.H. Auden.

“Just look at the lines on his face!” he told us in awe. “All that character! All that experience!”

Sometimes, for a while after that – still in my early teens – I would sit in a tube train on my way home after school and look at my reflection in the window opposite and raise my eyebrows to try to create wrinkles on my forehead… to absolutely no effect at all. I could not insert lasting wrinkles in my forehead.

I was very disappointed.

Of course, back then, I was too young to realise most lines are caused by emotional strain or pain and one single incident of strain or pain doth not a single line cause – it’s pain and strain repeated and repeated in various incidents in your life at different times that cause a single line and multiple lines are the result of… well, you know what I mean.

I was and am a great admirer of the writer Mary Anne Evans aka George Eliot.

That godawful writer Virginia Woolf once said she thought George Eliot’s Middlemarch was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

In my opinion, it’s the greatest novel ever written in the English language.

So at least Virginia Woolf wrote something sensible on that one occasion.

George Eliot had a brilliant mind and somewhere along the way, I think in Middlemarch, she said something to the effect that suffering was never wasted because it led to sympathy for other people’s suffering. That’s not altogether true, as it can also lead to extreme callousness, of course.

Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi had lines on their forehead and they were perhaps just a wee bit unsympathetic to others’ suffering. I’m not sure whether to talk of Colonel Gaddafi in the present tense or the past tense. He’s present at the moment but this blog may soon be over-taken by events.

Anyway… we are talking in generalities here and, as always, I may be talking bollocks.

But I have always been wary of women over a certain age – basically over their mid-twenties – with no lines at all on their forehead, because it means they have had little experience of the shittyness that is life and therefore no understanding of or sympathy with other people’s problems. So they are even more dangerous than other women. (Men, as we know, are all shits without exception, so that distinction does not exist in the male of the species.)

A friend of mine has had lines on her forehead for as long as I have known her. I met her when she was 21; she is now 56. Some time, I guess when she was in her thirties, she told me she wished she hadn’t got them. I told her, perfectly truthfully, that I had always found them attractive because they showed she had a genuine, real, likable character; she wasn’t some mindless bimbo with a face like a newly-born pig’s arse.

Perhaps I could have chosen my words better. She didn’t take this compliment well.

But we are still friends.

Now I have lines on my forehead, my face and around my eyes – I even have old man clefts at the sides of my mouth so sometimes I leak spittle out onto the pillow when I sleep. It is not the most endearing of traits. I can’t get rid of the lines nor the old man clefts. But I don’t want to.

Well, maybe oozing spittle is not really ideal. Maybe I wish I didn’t do that.

But it’s an age thing.

When I was younger, the Carry On actor Sid James seemed to have an incredibly lined face. Now when I see his face on TV or in movies, I see personality engraved in his face, not lines.

To me, schoolchildren, who are all character-filled individuals to each other, now look like Invasion of The Body Snatchers type pod clones. They all look the same to me – like babies with newly-born pig’s arse faces.

A friend of mine (not the one previously mentioned) tells me that, in her teens and early twenties, she used to stick strips of Sellotape onto her forehead overnight to stop wrinkles forming.

“Once, I forgot to take them off,” she told me yesterday. “I was opening the front door before i remembered. I don’t know what people would have thought.”

A couple of days ago, a comedian’s wife told me that, in her teens, she used to sleep with a clothes peg on the bridge of her nose because she thought it was too wide. She too told me: “I cared what people thought about the way I looked.”

There’s not a lot I can do about the way I look and, about ten years ago, I gave up caring what people think of me in general. Not that I much cared what people thought about me before then anyway.

It was not and is not a positive character trait and it never proved to be any help in career advancement.

But scum always rises and the people with no lines on their forehead – the shallow bullshit artists – very often triumph.

The comic Martin Soan – admittedly drunk at the time – told me last week that my blogs sometimes show a cynical streak.

Streak? Streak? I would have said it was a six-lane super-highway.

I am surrounded by people with newly-born pigs’ arses for faces!