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    news Wednesday, Oct 08 2008 From Princess Di to the man who invented mini-roundabouts ...fifty people who have wrecked Britain Last updated at 3:27 AM on 06th October 2008 So much money, so many high-tech advances - yet today Britain is such an unhappy country, so drained of community, so robotic as it staggers towards oblivion. Who landed us in this mess? Who are the halfwits, the mooncalves, the clotpolls whose touches and yanks on the national tiller steered us onto the rocks? It's time to name and shame the guilty. This is my personal roll call of the people who made our country the ugly, ignorant, beer-ridden and brawling place it is today. Here are the fools, knaves and vulgarians who ripped up British honour and glory and set in its place the tawdry and the trite. Will my list of prime suspects match your own? Read on and find out ... On the list: Princess Diana is accused of making our society neurotic and Jimmy Saville 'the villain who introduced shellsuits to Britain' 1 Jeffrey Archer Long before Tony Blair even thought about ennobling any of the Labour Party's donors, there was talk of how John Major stamped his feet up and down on the carpets of 10 Downing Street and insisted, in the manner of Violet Elizabeth Bott until he was nearly sick, that Jeffrey Archer be made a peer. It was as bad a piece of work as Major did during his premiership and it was an early sign that places in the Upper House of Parliament were being handed out like spaces in an executive car park. Archer's crassness, his boastfulness, his social mountaineering, his pushiness, his sheer screamingly obvious dodginess, were traffic signs to his character and should have prevented him getting as far as he did. But Archer was rich. He showed how easy it is, by offering free drink and the thought of access to glamour, to subvert the British elite. So this scandal-flecked clown with the resilience of an India rubber ball bounced through the trouble and straight through the stained-glass windows of the double doors which lead into the House of Lords. There he remains, despite having been convicted of perjury in 2001. In a way, he is rather better qualified now to bring something of value to the House's discussions. But that is rather beside the point. He should never have been there in the first place. 2 Richard Beeching YARDE Halt, Sharpness, Wressle, Arthog, Stepney, Ainsdale, Ince. Early in 1963 these were just some of the evocative names which appeared on a long list of railway stations to be closed, the Ministry said, to make the national railway 'economical'. The list of targeted stations, in its own way as melancholic as the names on a village war memorial, was the work of an accountant named Richard Beeching. Dr Beeching - later, inevitably, Lord Beeching - was a short-termist dunderhead, a bean-counter to beat all beancounters. His decision to cut 100,000 jobs and close 2,000 railway stations, along with 5,000 miles of rail track was one of the most anti-progressive steps of the past 50 years. To this day, there are traffic jams and bottlenecks which can be traced to Beeching. Pollution is higher than it need be, thanks to Beeching. Suburban sprawl is bigger, the highlands of Wales and Scotland more deprived, and hundreds of thousands of commuters unhappier than they should be - thanks to bloody Beeching. 3 Howard Schultz Once upon a time, not so long ago, it was routinely possible to buy a cup of coffee for the price of a popular news paper and in a container which did not contain nearly a pint of liquid so scaldingly hot it was undrinkable for at least ten minutes after you had bought it. Once upon a time. The time before Starbucks. The man to blame? Howard Schultz, who did not start Starbucks, but bought the company in 1987 and focused on global domination. In 1995, the company conceived a ' Synergistic Rollout Program' under which one new store was opened somewhere every day. Now look at them. Not even the grey squirrel spread and bred this fast. The trend may well pass. Brands are notoriously fickle things. So we must not despair. But for the meantime, Schultz is the king of the caramel macchiatos and there seems to be nothing to stop him. Unless he drinks one too many of his filthy brews and has a fatal seizure from all the palpitations. 4 James Callaghan In March 1966, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callaghan, made an announcement which changed - shortchanged - the British way of life. For centuries our kingdom had maintained a quirky duo-decimal system of currency which sharpened our mental arithmetic, burnished our national identity and baffled foreigners. It had survived the Norman invasion, the Hundred Years' War, plague, Oliver Cromwell, the Industrial Revolution, Napoleon, the Luftwaffe. But Callaghan, bluff old 'Sunny Jim', sly and matey, bespectacled yet glinty of eye, was one atrocity too far. Heritage was trashed in the name of modernity. Callaghan announced that pounds, shillings and pence had had their day. The date, February 15, 1971, when it came, was known as 'D-Day'. Decimalisation was a victory for the 'make it simple' brigade. Multiples of 10 are easier than multiples of 12 (there were 12 pence in the old shilling, and 20 shillings in the old pound). In pre-decimal Britain, shop assistants thought nothing of doing agile arithmetic calculations, the like of which would baffle most of us today. With our ancient coin names we had a link back to the currency of Anglo-Saxon times. We differed from much of Europe, certainly, but we were proud to be distinct. Jim Callaghan and the political class of 1966 thought otherwise, alas. Damn them. 5 Diana The 'People's Princess' was a liability, a souffle of false ideas, a supermodel with all that that entails. She was the glamorous tool of cleverer men, a plaything for the powerful, a delusion worshipped only by the impressionable. The Princess may have been a loving mother. She may also have been photogenic and able to convey an easy charm. But the sorry truth is that this adored concept, this packaged, airbrushed Diana, weakened our society. She made us more neurotic. After Diana, it became so easy to emote it was hard to tell if people meant their tears or if they were simply trying them on. Diana robbed us of the stoicism and understatement which had served Britain well. Thanks largely to Diana we have become a country in which the words 'crisis' and 'disaster' are devalued from overuse, a country of emotional incontinence where adults will weep if they fail to win a talent competition yet where no one bothers to welcome home soldiers from a war zone. Diana was a danger to the stability of our kingdom. She mixed in circles that were disreputable and, in some cases, neurotically anti-British. Her death was shocking, horrible and a waste of beauty. But Diana was a naive menace, an odd mixture of simpering shyness and galloping egomania. God rest her soul, she was a mirage, a false harbinger of egalitarianism, and we were foolish ever to think otherwise. 6 Greg Dyke It was his lack of understanding for the 'other' Britain, the Britain of the regions, the Britain of quiet, Murray Mint-sucking introspection, which allowed Dyke to make his biggest mistake while he was Director-General of the BBC. I do not mean his admirable defence of Andrew Gilligan in the David Kelly affair - a matter which led to the Hutton Inquiry and Dyke losing his job. The decision I'm referring to was of far greater consequence. It was his insistence on moving BBC1's main news bulletin of the day from 9pm to 10pm. The Nine O'Clock News used to allow you to take the dog downstairs, switch off the lights, clean your teeth and be in bed by 9.45pm. Prayers. A quick chapter of P. G. Wodehouse, perhaps. A dutiful good-night to the wife, if relations were sufficiently cordial. Then lights out and away with the fairies before Radio 4 had a chance to issue its pips and nine hours of sleep before reveille at 7am. For years Britain cantered along perfectly cheerful, often overworked but normally sufficiently rested. Then Director-General Dyke had to go and fiddle. When ITV killed off the News At Ten, he saw an opportunity to compete for ratings. The ideas of public service, of the BBC's charter commitments and most of all to letting the poor, knackered folk of Middle England get sufficient zeds, were overlooked. The news was parked an hour later, at 10pm. And all because the man who invented Roland Rat wanted to muck up ITV's ratings. 7 Charles Saatchi Iraq-born Charles Saatchi has done more to foul up Britain than Saddam Hussein managed before he went swinging from his gibbet. Saatchi is the former advertising executive who turned himself into an art dealer. In this guise, Saatchi set new standards for depravity in public taste, which distorted the London art market and made himself not only richer, but more famous. Saatchi is the man who 'invented' Britart, the phase of modern art in this country which drove traditional artistic skills to the margins and ignored the concept of beauty. If a society loses its idea of what is beautiful, it tends to lose its grip on good behaviour. What are manners if they are not a quest for a form of beauty? Does Saatchi never stop to consider what it does to the nurse or the soldier on a basic wage to see such fecklessness as Tracey Emin's 'Everyone I Have Ever Slept With' hailed as a masterpiece? He has been responsible for a demoralising infection of our national aesthetic. Oh, Nigella. How could you? 8 Graham Kelly Forget, for a moment, the amoral, venal world of big-time soccer. In the lower divisions, a local football club can give its town or city a strong sense of identity and comradeship. It can provide local heroes, pin-ups whose behaviour can help set an example. But if that local football team is going bust, thanks to a rotten deal signed by the Football Association, such admirable things will not happen. This is what came to pass in 1992 when a myopic, mumbling former Blackpool bank teller named Graham Kelly - who had, somehow or other, become chief executive of the FA - signed away the TV rights to top football. Money which would have gone to the provinces and to lower-ranked teams went instead to pampered international stars, allowing them to buy another Maserati for the garage, another mistress for the penthouse, another raucous night out in the city centre. It was this deal, signed by the gormless and inadequate Kelly, that created football's Premier League with its flash cars, trashy values, vast pay-offs and scavenging agents - one of the unchecked fountains of decadence in Britain today, gushing raw greed into society's open gutters. Kelly may have made the likes of Beckham and Owen and Drogba unbelievably rich. But he rendered the rest of us a great deal poorer. 9 Anthony Crosland Galloping egalitarianism has made few mistakes more destructive, more thumpingly counter-productive, than the introduction of comprehensive schools. They first appeared in the 1950s but their greatest champion - the man who well and truly buggered up the lives of millions of British children, their parents and teachers - was Anthony Crosland. It was during Crosland's time as Education Secretary from 1965-7 that comprehensives received their biggest push. If only Crosland had understood the magnitude of his mistake. As it is, he went to his grave sourly convinced that his policies were right. Sewn as tight into his certitude as a tobogganist into his thermal skimpies, he reportedly swore that: 'If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every f***ing grammar school in England and Wales and Northern Ireland.' He didn't quite manage that but he did manage to destroy a fair few of them, not to mention the secondary moderns which were reconstituted in the new comprehensive mode. Crosland's stupid system, driven by a vindictive hatred of elitism, has done the very opposite of what he intended. Our state schools are a stagnant pond. Private schools have never been busier. If he wasn't already dead, it would be tempting to strangle the idiot. 10 John McEnroe Any young games player today soon learns the ways of modern Britain: the referee's word may well not be final. This widespread undermining of the referee (and other official authority figures) as a font of impartiality can be traced back to an afternoon at the Wimbledon tennis championships in 1981. A call had gone against a young American player and he refused to accept it without a fight. 'Man,' he screamed, 'you cannot be serious.' Rant, rant, rant. Pout of lip. 'Man.' Ugh. John McEnroe, the American in question, was one of the most skilful tennis players not only of his era but probably of all time. But he cannot properly claim to be a 'sporting great'. No one who shrieks at officials, 'You guys are the pits of the world, you know that?' can rightly be called a 'great', unless 'great pain in the backside' is intended. McEnroe helped spread bad sportmanship to a generation of youngsters. 11 Stephen Marks One of the most miserable, shaming, dog-dirt-nasty things about Britain today is the coarseness of language in public. Among the under-30s in particular foul language flows unthinkingly, blurted out, sicked forth in one long projectile spurt of obscenity. What has this vile state of affairs got to do with a little-known, 60-year-old clothes retailer called Stephen Marks? Well, rather a lot. Marks has encouraged a generation of Britons to think lightly about foul language - indeed, to treat it as a joke. Stephen Marks is the man who literally 'f***ed up' Britain. As the owner of French Connection, his moment came in 1997. A fax arrived in his office containing a typing mistake. Instead of referring to FCHK (French Connection Hong Kong) it said FCUK. Marks saw this and an advertising campaign was born. French Connection clothes now carried these letters prominently, often on the outside of the garment. Packaging, coat hangers, shop fronts - everything was altered to proclaim 'fcuk'. Children were confronted by the letters and presumed it must be all right to be suggestive and brassy and foul-mouthed. Is bad language not often a precursor of other forms of anti-social and violent behaviour? If we do not protest about bad language, what hope have we of stopping thuggery and vandalism? Thank God King Cnut never thought of going into the rag trade. 12 John Prescott Prescott was the most gormless and ineloquent person yet to hold the non-office of Deputy Prime Minister. This so-called statesman spoke English like a bibulous chimp. In his Labour Party conference speeches, he cranked up class hatred in an era when most adult Britons were trying to place such social insecurity behind them. He debased himself and his rank by thumping a member of the public in the 2001 General Election campaign, by bedding his secretary, by flicking V-signs on the steps of 10 Downing Street and by licking the plate of privilege until it was almost spotless. In all these matters, Prescott, a revolting specimen with the manners of a flatulent caveman, demeaned our public life. More from Quentin Letts... 07/10/08 07/10/08 06/10/08 06/10/08 03/10/08 02/10/08 30/09/08 29/09/08 13 Frank Blackmore Next time politicians are addressing the unlovely subject of 'Britishness' they should think 'mini roundabouts'. Is there any truer symbol of our country today? Mini roundabouts are suburban, bossy little objects. They are an aesthetic blot. They kill the spirit of the road. And they cause car sickness, as the pongy interior of many a family hatchback will confirm. They were invented by a 1960s Ministry of Transport boffin, Frank Blackmore. But did he envisage how prevalent they would become? The mini roundabout has run amok. Mini roundabouts have replaced ancient crossroads, once site of the gibbet and the wind-gnarled oak. At a crossroads, moreover, you have a sense of one road being senior to another. Should the busy A-road not have priority over the piddling country lane? Not at a mini roundabout, it doesn't. Heavy traffic has to screech to a halt for even just one vehicle. Mini roundabouts are the very opposite of democratic. They are the many bending to the few. We should have no truck with them. 14 Sir Jimmy Saville There are other examples - Tony Blackburn, Sir Paul McCartney, Keith Chegwin, Chris Evans - of egomaniac idiots whose refusal to submit to age infects our society with immaturity. But Savile, this heavily bejewelled Peter Pan who seemed to have great chunks of polished metal riveted to every appendage of his withered body, was the worst. He epitomised a breed of shallow show-offs whose refusal to grow up cheapened the currency of authentic, heady youth. His wardrobe was designed to be so disgusting as to get him noticed. Savile was the villain who introduced the shell suit to the British public. For that alone he is worth pillorying. He was also, with Elton John, a proponent of novelty spectacles which he would lift up and down while yodelling in his Yorkshire accent. When Eric Morecambe did this, it was funny. When Jimmy Savile did it, you wanted to lift the spectacles off his nose and place them under your heel. 15 Edward Heath Sunday, April 21, 1968, was the moment our country yielded to the sorry creed of multi-culturalism. That evening, Edward Heath, leader of the Conservative Party, telephoned Enoch Powell and sacked him from the Shadow Cabinet for making his infamous 'Rivers Of Blood' speech about race relations. That decision made it almost impossible for British politicians to criticise immigration for the next 40 years. By slamming the desktop so hard on Powell's fingers, Heath created a climate of political terror about immigration. The ensuing silence was far more damaging to inter-community relations than old Enoch's mercurial rhetoric. When Heath became Prime Minister (the surprise election victory killed Powell's political career), he properly accommodated the Asian refugees from Idi Amin's Uganda but did little to address widespread doubts about immigration. Margaret Thatcher was equally timid when she gained power and under Tony Blair the numbers continued to rise fast. By 2005 we had become a country in which the separation of cultures had fed an ethnic grievance culture which bred British Islamic terrorists. Powell had spoken of 50,000 new arrivals a year as being too high. Today, the rate is more like 300,000. His language may have been unpleasant but his analysis was pretty much spot-on. Heath went on to prolonged failure. He resented the success of Margaret Thatcher for the last 30 years of his life. It ate away at him, turning him into a squat stewpot of boiling hatred. Enoch Powell may have made a racist speech but he was five times the man Edward Heath was. 16 Janet Street-Porter This ageing non-revolutionary helped to mould a London media elite who are now hooked on youth. They consider youth a greater commodity than long-acquired expertise. They produce programmes, such as Big Brother, which seldom contain a face older than 30, even though Britain's oldage pensioners are the biggest age group, and growing. The young, uninteresting and frequently unoriginal, are placed on a pedestal which should be reserved for the aged, mostly thanks to a 60-plus journalist who fancies she can hold back the Grim Reaper by going to parties with Kate Moss. 17 Margaret Thatcher Many of Margaret Thatcher's political decisions improved our country. She revived the acumen of our business tycoons. She prevented the Falkland Islands falling into the hands of a murderous junta and reminded us it was worth being British. She took a painful, but wise, decision to weaken the Unionists' grip on Northern Ireland. She allowed taxpayers to keep more of their earnings and enabled council tenants to buy their homes. But it was in the pursuit of the trade unions - specifically, Arthur Scargill's National Union of Mineworkers - that Mrs Thatcher did lasting damage to our country. The miners were industrial has-beens led by a politically suicidal maniac who could not be allowed to succeed. True. Yet there was something hungry in the way she persecuted the war. Her radicalism had an ugly, vengeful side. Think how much more skilful her friend Ronald Reagan or the media-savvy Tony Blair would have been handling such a strike. The miners themselves should not have been a target for her ire. They were a remarkable body of men who did unspeakably tough jobs with great stoicism and humour. They supported their families and had a strong sense of community and patriotism. They had the sort of values which Mrs Thatcher herself could and should have recognised. She failed to project any such understanding. She underestimated and undercherished her opponents. The subsequent closure of nearly all of Britain's coal mines makes it hard to deny that the Government intended, all along, to wreck the country's coal industry. Scargill lost, but not before he had convinced a large part of the North of the United Kingdom that he was the victim of a southern Tory Government plot. The North-South electoral divide slammed into place like a prison door. To see how emotive a subject the miners' strike remains, you have only to visit the musical Billy Elliot in London's West End: artful propaganda feeding on perceived victimhood. I'm sorry to say that Mrs Thatcher created that sense of pique - and unless Cameron's Tories get down and grovel, it will last for many more years. 18 Alan Titchmarsh To attack Alan Titchmarsh may seem an act of unwarranted violence, like aiming a water cannon at an occupied pram or dumping a gallon of the most toxic weedkiller on a lone dandelion. The man is just harmless. Isn't he? When he restricted himself to gardening programmes, Alan Titchmarsh was certainly no great threat to the nation and its sanity. But like mint in an English 'erbaceous border' (as our Alan would call it) or plantain on a 'manicured lawn' (Alan does love a cliche) he has run rampant through the television schedules, herpes on the lip of a promiscuous teenage girl. That jaunty little topknot of hair, that chirpy smile, those practised Yorkshire vowels. They're everywhere. Alan on The Nature Of Britain. Alan on The Great British Village. Alan's Melodies For You on Radio 2. Alan's ITV chat show. The Antiques Roadshow. The Paul O'Grady Show. Need a man to make suggestive jokes - in an unthreatening sort of way, of course - about giant pumpkins? Alan's yer man. He even found time to write fiction. There have been several novels, one of which won him the bad sex prize. Alan is also 'doing his bit for the environment' by joining something called the 'Saving Planet Earth' project. But after so much Alan Titchmarsh, will it want to be saved? Or will it plead for euthanasia? 19 Topsy and Tim Twins Topsy and Tim are sister and brother. They are aged five and have remained that age since they first blighted our culture in 1960. They live in a town and lead lives of blameless, centre-Left orthodoxy. This being the New Era, girls and boys must be considered the same. So sometimes it is Topsy who cries, sometimes wimpy Tim. Sometimes Topsy kicks a football, sometimes Tim admires a flower. Oh look, a pansy. This is also true of Topsy and Tim's Mummy and Daddy. They share the household chores. Their bland characters are interchangeable. Mummy never succumbs to a bad mood. Daddy is never distant, or batey, or hungover. He never has a snort of hard drink in the evenings. Not much of an introduction to modern Britain, is he? Over the years the soppingly damp stories of Topsy and Tim have, inexplicably, sold more than 21 million copies. A Britain peopled by disciples of Topsy and Tim would not last long in the world of international terrorism. If we succumb to the worldview of Topsy and Tim, we might as well give up now. 20 Tim Westwood Middle-aged Westwood is a Radio 1 disc jockey who has so immersed himself in the music of black rappers and American-style hip-hoppers that he has started to talk like one - and is leading thousands of young listeners down the same ill-guided alley. Westwood is said to be the model for the satirical character Ali G, that prize 'wigga' ('white nigga') who speaks in the gibberish dialect of the jewel-encrusted Los Angeleno rap guy while, in fact, being a white, middle-class nincompoop. Watch Westwood strutting his stuff for a few minutes and you are left with the uncomfortable suspicion that Ali G was, in fact, a dilution of the real horror. He talks of 'bigging up' his various acquaintances, of 'crews', 'cats', 'dudes'. When indicating an affirmative, he spits out the words 'zackly, man'. He wears the waistband of his trousers low on the buttock. You'd never think this berk was almost 50 years old. BBC executives desperately want to show how 'up' they are with hiphop, yet they entrust it to a fraud whose message, in short, is that we should dump our linguistic heritage. The inauthentic Westwood is an emblem of cultural defeatism, of broadcasting decadence. Switch him off. Man. • Abridged extract from FIFTY PEOPLE WHO BUGGERED UP BRITAIN by Quentin Letts, published by Constable & Robinson on Thursday, October 9, at ý12.99. Quentin Letts 2008. To order a copy (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720. Who'll be next for a lambasting by Letts? The list of shame continues tomorrow. Share this article: Comments ( 68 ) Here's what readers have had to say so far. Why not add your thoughts below? Number 11 made my day - sarah, uk, 06/10/2008 15:08 Well done Mr Letts, little to argue about in chapter 1. However, I do believe you should have run a two part list in parallel (a) Politicians (b) Others. I'll bet the (a) listers would predominate at about 4 to 1 thereby putting their misdemeanors in sharp comparative perspective. We don't "select" them Party's do. We don't vote for them, only 14% of the population voted Blair and Nu Lab into office, that's 86% who didn't. They do not have to have "achieved" anything, least of all a Qualification prior to standing for election. They do not suffer criminal proceedings if they fail or prove to be incompetent. - Iasgair, Amersham, ENGLAND, 06/10/2008 15:04 Margaret Thatcher surely must be higher up the list. She is the one who said that there was no such thing as society, which is surely one of the most destructive statements a politician has ever made. And where is Prince Charles and Tony Blair? - M, Beds, 06/10/2008 14:34 **yourComments** - **name**, **townAndCountry**, **creationDate** Add your comment Your email address will not be published You have 1000 characters left. FEMAIL TODAY My Top 50 Stories Click on the icon below an article to save to your favourite stories file Check box to remove Check box to remove ...PLUS EDITOR'S SIX OF THE BEST Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, Evening Standard & Metro Media Group