Simon Fanshawe Blog

Pat Stewart is remarkable. She takes for granted that someone has to do what she does and it might as well be her. She set up a project in Gorton in Manchester called On The Streets (OTS). I made a Radio Four programme about it last autumn. It’s just a terrific project. Yet today it has no regular funding. It’s ears are full of the praise of every agency you can lay your hands on. The Council press office boats, “Manchester City Council is impressed by the work undertaken by On The Streets” and then goes on proudly to trumpet that they have approved funding for “almost £27,000”. Oh yippee. At the last count there were 369 young people who attended OTS projects, 3000 times. That’s £73 a young person.

If you are gay it‘s almost impossible after the last couple of weeks to work out what the world wants, expects or thinks of you now. Your head will be spinning faster than the revolving door on Michael Barrymore’s closet. In Government it looks like you could possibly remain Secretary of State for Wales, but by implication from the press coverage, only as long as you have sex indoors and with men you have met before. To be married and gay is officially now “a personal tragedy”, transformed into hypocrisy if anyone finds out about it, and something “sick and illegal” if you act on it on impulse anywhere near shrubbery. According to Lurch from the Addams Family’s stunt double, Norman Tebbit, you should be barred from being Home Secretary if you’re gay, as he suggested in a letter to The Telegraph. The Daily Mail profiled Chris Smith and his partner and pronounced them the acceptable face of homosexuality. So do you really have to be Culture Minister or, pace the BBC for daring to discuss his private life, might you be fine as Secretary of State for Trade & Industry because even though you are gay, it’s OK by The Sun because you have a “brilliant mind” and are a “talented politician”? As ever advice on the right way to be homosexual has been pouring from journalists, politicians and other people only rendered charismatic by publication in such a confusing torrent that the love that dares not speak it’s name can now hardly work out what to say when it opens its mouth. Should it stay in the closet and not flaunt itself; flaunt itself but only if it’s polite, partnered and preferably has a pet; shut up about itself altogether and then be accused of being hypocritical when other people find out? Risk open affection in public only to be told by Telegraph columnists in what they think is a bracing and expression of an opinion too inhibited of late that you are “distasteful” or worse that you “disgust them”? And if disgust is coming your way, should you be open about your desires in Wyoming and risk being beaten to death for pleasure like poor innocent, young Mathew Shepherd?

Tell any cliché bound Brit that you’re writing about Australian culture and back comes the stock joke about the article being very short. Fosters, Neighbours and Rolf Harris don’t amount to an over laden cultural table. They see a country, a whole continent, with a fearsome, outdoorsy, anti-artistic machismo, the only place in the world where even women slap you on the back. People talk about Australia as if it is insensitivity writ large, as if it is still a nation of brutish convicts rejected by a more refined Europe.

Just a few weeks ago a middle aged, fairly well off husband and wife from California took a poor, black South African couple from Cape Town out to lunch. The young man works for their Foundation. His girlfriend works in the Standard Bank. The Americans raise several million dollars a year in the US to support community projects in The Cape. The fund is called The Amy Biehl Foundation after their daughter. The two couples see a fair amount of each other. But this weekend the Americans were giving the younger ones a treat. Lunch in Franschhoek a one of the smarter towns in the wine district. It was a bit of R&R for everybody. A day out. A nice gesture. An ordinary event. Even though the young man murdered their daughter.

What is it in the air in Limehouse? Today it may be home to more lofts, designers and 4×4s than almost any other bastion of the bohemian bourgeoisie, but this east London neighbourhood has in the past 150 years given birth to three campaigns that have aimed straight for the hearts and minds of liberal Britain and changed the landscape of the country in the process.

Twenty years after the Brighton bomb, the IRA man responsible and the daughter of one of the victims came together in an extraordinary meeting. Simon Fanshawe took the chair

Simon Fanshawe: Jo, what compelled you to explore this path of reconciliation?
Jo Berry: It’s a choice I make every day. I mean, I woke up this morning and had to make a choice to carry on because today is a difficult challenge. Part of me just wanted to say: enough is enough. I just want to be quiet today. So it’s a choice to carry on this journey, to build bridges. But actually I have no choice. If I do not do this then I feel I choose to stay a victim.

The nail bombs were a blast from a straight, white, imperial past

There’s a bomb. Then there’s the outrage, the shock, the horror. The police under pressure. Something must be done. And, remarkably soon, there’s an arrest. The country pastes up the yellow Job Done sticker congratulating the hard-working, good coppers - and be sure, in this context they are both - on their successful anti-terrorist bob-a-job. But while the suspect is in custody, the hate still runs free.