Quintin Jardine's blog

. . . on AJ’s 20% off deal of the week. This week’s choice is the paperback of Aftershock, normally retailing at £7.99, post free in the UK, discounted RoW. To  take advantage, click or cut and paste this link

http://www.campbellreadbooks.com/departments/books/quintinjardine/qj_books.php

select ‘Aftershock‘ then enter code QBW3D1 in the promotion window. Offer runs from now till January 26.

They are available as eBooks, globally on Amazon and on major UK sites.

You’re quite a historian, townie; I must introduced you to my friend Michael Jecks. Good for the Saint. I might have done the same myself, but I played in a different street, and maybe at a different time. I don’t remember McLeod; it was Charlie Cox in the number four shirt when I came along. Paton was there though; chosen as the greatest Motherwell player ever, even though only a minority of the voters will ever have seen him wear the shirt. (But why wasn’t the wonderful Andy Weir in the top team? Davie Cooper could have played on the right.) No, Skinner will never head the new national force: I wouldn’t allow it, since I am deeply opposed to it myself. Politics and justice should be kept as far apart as possible, unless a politician is in the dock. In fact, Bob may resign in protest against its establishment, but we’ll have to wait and see whether the next Scottish Government is foolish enough to do it.

I made a mistake last night. I caught some of Question Time, switching over as they were discussing Tony Blair’s appearance today before the Chilcott Apologia. If I’d realised that George Galloway was on the panel I wouldn’t have bothered, but he was, in full cry, demanding that our former Prime Minister be tried as a war criminal, and calling Alastair Campbell, one of his fellow panelists, ‘his Goebbels, his Lord Haw Haw’, with blood on his hands. As Campbell  remarked, that was rich coming from a man who had been in his time an apologist for Saddam Hussein. But George would not be silenced. George never is silent; he is an articulate and supremely gifted speaker, with a quickness of thought that makes him a hugely dangerous opponent in debate, as a US Senate committee famously discovered.

George was not the only man to oppose the Iraq War. He had the right to do so, even if his actions led to his expulsion from the Labour Party. He denies supporting Saddam, and he and his cronies claim that his notorious praise of the dictator and mass murderer was misquoted and out of context. But the film evidence is there, of George smiling in the company of a man who had by that time used weapons of mass destruction on his own people, killing thousands, and who had conducted a different sort of genocide on others, the marsh arabs. The question at issue has never been whether Saddam had WMD, but when he had them; his willingness to use them has never been doubted. George has been interviewed several times by television stations in the Middle East. I’m not going to reproduced some of the things he’s listed as saying, because I find them too offensive for this blog, but they’re out there if you care to research them. (By the way, Saddam is not the only unpopular cause that George has espoused. In 1990, he backed the military coup in Pakistan, although he later criticised President Musharraf . He also expressed support for the Soviet Union. I can find no record of him expressing a view on Hitler.)

It is good that the cages of the major UK political parties, and their leaders, should be rattled by people of independent mind. But George doesn’t have an independent mind. He seems to be obsessed by a notion of a global Zionist conspiracy, and he is extremely selective in his definition of terrorism. George is in fact a dangerous demagogue, a mob orator of the worst sort, because he has the gift of appealing to the basest instincts, and of stirring people by the sound of his words when normally they would be repelled by their content. He’s glib too, and very clever, as in his interview with Piers Morgan, in which he said that the assassination of Tony Blair would be justified, but was careful not to say a single word that might have constituted support for it.

George plans to run in the next Scottish Parliamentary Election. He doesn’t have a cat’s chance in hell of being elected as a constituency member, but the calculation is that he only needs 11,000 votes to gain a seat as a regional list MSP. I will be deeply disappointed if that many of my fellow Scots support his slate, but I suspect that they will, given the current state of play.

No, I don’t, not really, but sometimes it’s difficult to keep your head down when the sun is splitting the effing trees outside. I’m thinking about adding a web-cam to the blog, so visitors can share it with me. However,  you’d have to share the rain when it comes, and believe me, it will.

New for Skinner fans. Starting today Campbell Read Books is offering a deal of the week, giving 20% discount on a selected, signed, Skinner novel. This week’s choice is the paperback of Aftershock, normally retailing at £7.99, post free in the UK, discounted RoW. To  take advantage, click or cut and paste this link http://www.campbellreadbooks.com/departments/books/quintinjardine/qj_books.php select ‘Aftershock‘ then enter code QBW3D1 in the promotion window. Offer runs from now till January 26.

Channel-hopping at lunchtime, I was cruising past MTV when I came upon something called Hogan Knows Best, a reality show based on the family life of Hulk Hogan, (Terry Bollea) who was in his time, the Godfather of pro wrestling. However Terry’s time is over, and all this did was make him look  old, tired and beat up in the eyes of all those Hulkamaniacs. The show itself made The Osbornes seem like Tea with the Huxleys. But don’t let me put you off watching MTV. The rest is pretty damn good, plus my friends’ daughter Caroline is an exec with the company.

Praise indeed from a fellow author. That’s nice; thank you very much. Now I must go and wallow some more in the dark side.

I read something a couple of days ago that has me a little alarmed. Britain’s dairy farmers are sending out distress signals. They are saying that they are being forced by their customers to accept prices that are below the cost of production, and that they are facing oblivion. Yes, I know, ‘Show me a poor farmer,’ but twenty years ago I made a PR pitch to the Scottish Dairy Council, and as my memories of that occasion put me instinctively on their side.

The debate can rage on, and I’m all for reasonable pricing, but there’s this: if you are a UK consumer reading this. If the farmers are right, and the industry goes into freefall, do you want to be forced to buy imported UHT milk produced in countries where our government has no way of monitoring standards?

Last summer, as part of the launch of A Rush of Blood (which is out in paperback very soon, incidentally) I spent a day long the south coast, visiting a warehouse and several stores owned by an enterprising firm trading as British Book Shops. I was told that the company was a management buy-out, committed to growth, with a policy of value for the customer’s money. I was welcomed by the top brass and on the shop floor and was nothing but impressed everywhere I went, not least because they’d made me their author of the month.

Yesterday, a friend in the trade told me that the chain has gone into administration. Theoretically that doesn’t mean it’s gone bust; it’s in the hands of an appointed administrator whose task is to run the business short term while trying to sell it as a going concern. It’s something we’re hearing more and more these days in the football business, where for some reason it’s regarded as a crime and punished by a fine in the form of a league points deduction. In the real business world the results are usually more definitive than being pushed around by your holier than thou competitors. In the real world, administration is usually a step taken to ward off the Receiver, the specialist accountant whose role is that of a corporate hangman, come to wind up the business.

In recent years two UK national book chains have gone into administration, like BBS. In the case of Ottakars, some of their stores were bought by competitors and some staff kept their jobs, but the business as such went under. With Borders, it simply folded. Today, Waterstones is the only specialist national book chain in Britain. (I say ‘specialist’ as a nod to my friends in W H Smith, which has probably sold more books than anyone else over the years but which tends to offer less choice in its multi-purpose outlets.) If the big W has no more high street opposition it’s bound to survive, you say. Well no, because it’s part of the deeply troubled HMV group, which is in major trouble, word being that its suppliers could face difficulty in insuring against loss in trading with it. If they can’t insure, HMV can’t  get stock; that’s how it works.

We live in an age which demands that blame must be attributed, so, whose fault is this? Well, it’s yours. And it’s mine. Every time you buy a book from Amazon or another on-line operation, that’s another nail in the coffin of another bookshop. Every time http://www.campbellreadbooks.com, my son AJ’s business, sells you a book, that’s another. Every time you buy a book from a supermarket, that’s half a dozen of them.

But no, the world is real and the world is earnest. Online trading exists, the Tescopoly exists, and Luddism doesn’t work in practice. We can’t legislate or insulate against progress. Or can we? Need we allow the bulk purchasing power of a large organisation to be used as a weapon against its smaller competitors?

I spend my life in pursuit of ideals. Some are achievable, some are not. But here’s one that should be. I say it should be the law that when a manufacturer agrees a price per unit for its product with its  biggest retail customers, that price should be available to every retailer in the land, through wholesalers if necessary. To give this provision a few more teeth, it should be illegal for a retailer to sell new product below the price of acquisition. In other words, no more loss leaders. In the book business, who would suffer from that, long-term? As I see it, nobody; if things go on as they are, the entire independent book trade will disappear. As it is, most of them have to sell coffee to survive. Every publisher will tell you of its commitment to the independent sector, so let government give them all the tools to deliver on that commitment.

Does this reek of an author’s self-interest? Sure. But ask yourself; do you want to have to rely on supermarkets and Amazon, which has become a glorified eBay, as your only booksellers? Because if you do, pretty soon they’ll be telling you what you can and can’t buy.

Lovely day outside, but it means nothing to me; I’m hard at work now on the next project and I have targets to meet. The slight downside is a back muscle spasm that comes upon me every so often, but it’s good to suffer for one’s art.

Just getting into Skinner 22, scheduled pub date June 2012. I’ve even got a title, but I’m keeping that secret for a year or so.

I see that Katie Price has binned her latest, Alex Reid, a cage fighter by profession. I happened to catch Alex’s last fight, by accident, on an obscure satellite channel. He’s tough, as they all are, but it struck me, even with my limited knowledge of MMA, that he isn’t very good. If he was the top boy in the UFC, rather that a bammer in BAMMA, I wonder if he’d have been ditched so quickly. Truth is, I care nothing for such people, but I am concerned that the headline that announced the separation of these talent-free zones was so large that even I couldn’t miss it. I hate the cult of  the celebrity: it’s completely out of control. Don’t we live in a strange world when we can rage against bankers’s bonuses, yet be oblivious and indifferent to the fact that the likes of the model formerly known as Jordan can amass vast fortunes, while contributing only to the dumbing down of our society?

I’ve just noted that Apple made a profit of $6bn in the last quarter of 2010. No wonder; their kit may be lovely to look at, and delightful to hold, but it’s also damned expensive, and backed up by very little in the way of customer service beyond that which is statutory, as I know to my not inconsiderable cost. If ever there was a demonstration of the power of global marketing, Apple is it.

I’d hoped that we’d heard the last of the Chilcot Inquiry, but sadly we haven’t. It seems that the circus is pitching its very expensive tent once again and we’re in for another round of questioning of our once-elected leaders by a group of people with no obvious qualifications for the task they have been given. By whom were they given it? By Captain Barbossa, our departed and unlamented former Prime Minister, in June 2009. Why? This is the official reason offered at the time: ‘to identify lessons that can be learned from the Iraq conflict.’ Simple enough, but this is the spin the chair, Sir John Chilcot put on it when he outlined what he saw as his terms of reference: ‘. . . the essential points, as set out by the Prime Minister and agreed by the House of Commons, are that this is an Inquiry by a committee of Privy Counsellors. It will consider the period from the summer of 2001 to the end of July 2009, embracing the run-up to the conflict in Iraq, the military action and its aftermath. We will therefore be considering the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned. Those lessons will help ensure that, if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country.’

That all sounds great, but the real reason that Barbossa set the thing in play was that there was an election in the offing and he wanted to spin the public blame for Iraq away from him and on to Tony Blair.

I’m not clear just how the nonentities who make up the committee of inquiry got to be privy counsellors, but it is apparent that the intake that year wasn’t very good. Check their CVs and you’ll find that they’re a crowd of civil servants, academics, diplomats and do-gooders with no experience at all of the sharp end of the kind of decision making on which they will be passing judgement, when eventually they get round to writing their already delayed report, which, I tell you now, will come to have as much historical relevance as a failed and discarded betting slip.

With public spending cuts biting hard, I’m amazed that the Coalition has left Chilcot untouched, with its nose still in the public trough. The fact that they are still calling witnesses eighteen months down the road, and demanding that legitimately private correspondence be made public, indicates to me that they have lost what little grasp they ever had of the plot. They should be told to wind up, shut up and start drafting, without further delay.

Just had an interesting comment from my friend Nurmi, remarking that vacuous would be a step up in the US. Could it be that they’ve all been crapping themselves ever since since the great 1976 movie ‘Network‘? Its message was, ‘Get too controversial and eventually someone in the audience will step up and blow you away.’ There is a wonderful line in that movie: “You are television incarnate . . . indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality.”

I caught an item on BBC Breakfast this morning, about the effect of tuition fees on the average student. After a few minutes of watching Bill and Sian trying to coax the answer their producer wanted out of a pretty lass who had clearly flunked articulacy classes, I found myself asking, ‘What’s the point of this?’

When I was a younger man, there was no early morning television. If you wanted to catch up with the day’s affairs radio did the job perfectly well. Now we have immaculately dressed people on telly, being paid vast sums to front expensively produced programmes that are either vacuous, in the case of the ITV version, which has lost any hook it ever had now that the world knows that its presenters really are only good friends and no more, or on BBC, the bland leading the bland in debating topics in which most viewers have no real interest. In theory the viewer has a choice between being entertained or informed, but in practice neither is happening.

So here’s my question. If BBCtv binned the whole Breakfast set-up and stuck a camera in the ‘Today’ radio studio to look in on Jim Naughtie etc in shirtsleeves and headsets, would its audience be better served or worse in terms of its current affairs coverage? No-brainer, folks. Having just forked out £145 for this year’s increased Broadcasting Tax (I refuse to use the term licence fee) at a time when everyone but the BBC is cutting costs, I find myself wishing it would do just that. Until it does, I’m going to have to put up with sound only.

If you are addicted, it was possible to watch live football on Sky Sports yesterday for ten hours on the trot, with barely a break. I am not, so I was selective. I stuck to  Man U and Barcelona. While the mighty Reds still manage to top the Premier League, they are not playing particularly well, and owe their present position more to their defence than to the runners, or in Berbatov’s case, the jogger, up front. Barça, on the other hand, continue to show what is possible when eleven guys train, think and play as one, and give real meaning to the over-used term ‘The beautiful game’. I suggest that Murdoch considers switching their matches from the Sports channel to Sky Arts, for that’s where they belong. Mes que  un club.

I don’t usually get too excited about crime stories, particularly if I’ve read the books. (Yes, I know the old camel story, and the pedantic view that printed word and TV adaptation are entirely different experiences, to be judged separately, but in the real world, people do rate one against the other.) So when the BBC series based on Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen came along, I was able to watch it free of preconceptions, having barely heard of him, let alone read any of the books. There were three in all, and for me they worked. I’m looking forward to  the next adventures of the laid-back Venetian ‘tec, who always comes up smelling of roses. The Roman background helped, but still; if Skinner or Primavera were ever pursued by television, that’s the crew I’d want to work with.

You may have finished the Skinner series, Allison, but I haven’t. Let me repeat; Grievous Angel will be in the shops in June, three months after The Loner.