Radio
The doctor's fault
Michael Vestey
Ihave been brooding on the Paymaster General's shoes. Geoffrey Robinson is, I know, a figure of fun, a politician who can- not open his mouth without inviting ridicule, and with a Middle East crisis in the air his footwear should be of little interest; besides, the Lord Chancellor might think it appropriate to ban comment on the subject.
I blame the historian Dr David Starkey for this. Driving to an appointment on Sun- day morning a fortnight ago, I tuned into Starkey on Sunday on Talk Radio, a three- hour current affairs phone-in which I've mentioned before. Starkey devoted the first segment of the programme to trivia, informing us that he'd seen Robinson at a champagne party in London and he'd been impressed by the shoes he was wearing. He then suggested we call him and speculate on what they might have been. Listeners could also draw their ideas and fax them.
Starkey said he would disclose all shortly, but he became so excited at some of the faxes he was receiving that he decided to keep the mystery going. The suspense was dreadful. I slowed the car, chose a longer route to my destination, stopped at every amber traffic light as Starkey reached new heights of surrealism. One caller phoned to tell him that Robinson must have been wearing flippers so he could swim out to his offshore trust. Another suggested san- dals.
Maddeningly, I had to abandon the radio before finding out. As I hurried into the building enough footwear to captivate a shoe fetishist clip-clopped through my mind's eye. Could it have been a sabot, a shoe hollowed out from wood? A chappal, an Indian leather sandal? A Cuban-heeled, square-toed slingback? A velvet win- klepicker? As the days went by it became too much and I telephoned Talk Radio to put me out of my misery. Their answer, when they phoned back, was not as exotic as I had imagined. They were thin leather woven sandals with buckles which Starkey had apparently described as 'spiv's shoes'. Anyway, I'm glad I know. I listened again last Sunday, this time at Illy desk. There is something absolutely compelling about Starkey, whom I have never met. He is no more politically correct than Lord Irvine's wallpaper is cheap. His voice can reach an outraged falsetto when he meets a view that is so obviously incom- prehensible to him. His guest Nigel Nelson, the political editor of the Sunday People, told him Tony Blair and President Clinton were right to attack Saddam Hussein's arsenal of weapons. Starkey, no pacifist, was against because there seemed to be no clearly defined objective.
Nelson said Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were a direct threat to world peace but Starkey became impatient. 'What is the direct threat?' Then, with his voice soaring to the level of the Mir space sta- tion, 'For heaven's sake, man, use the lan- guage correctly!' But bouncing off Mir and returning to earth his voice grew more ana- lytical in tone. He was generally more seri- ous this week, though he had some fun with the Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. A disillusioned Labour voter phoned to say he'd learned that in China the last eunuch had died, and he wondered if Cook, 'cock Robin', shouldn't be caponised, as he put it. Starkey was thrilled. 'Caponise: I love that word. It's useful that his wife is a doc- tor. I'm sure she would love to perform that operation on him.'
He was also much taken by the Labour MP Tam Dalyell's phrase about the bomb- ing of Iraq, 'The war of Clinton's penis.' Nelson pointed out that Saddam was a madman and had to be dealt with. Starkey, his voice vibrating like ancient plumbing, countered, 'I put to you that half of the world's leaders are criminally insane. Sad- dam is not unique, he's just another demon figure.' Later, ranging across other subjects such as education, the nanny state and what he called food puritanism, he opined, `Teetotallers tend on the whole to be bitter and twisted people.' He knew this from the temperance streak in his own family.
On the subject of the preposterous and Gilbertian Lord Chancellor that Blair has saddled himself with, both Nelson and Starkey decided that Lord Irvine only wanted to protect politicians from the press. Starkey, thinking of the Jaguar bear- ing John Prescott's red boxes while the deputy prime minister did his publicity stunt walk, mused, 'Should the cars of politicians be protected?' There is with Starkey not just a hint of danger but a fusil- lade. I've noticed it on Radio Four's The Moral Maze where he is often, sadly, kept in check by a nervous Michael Buerk, as when I heard Starkey delivering an El Alamein of an attack on a now deposed female tabloid editor, who was not present in the studio. 'Now, now, that's enough, David,' Buerk umpired just as we were get- ting interested.
But on Talk Radio he is under few such restraints. I find his presence refreshing because he actually has something to say. It is often the antithesis of consensual, pro- gressive received wisdom of the kind we're so familiar with on BBC radio. He is a ver- bal Magnus Pyke, his voice the equivalent of the late doctor's semaphoric body lan- guage. He is also, I suspect, something of a cult,
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