For every person Michael Heseltine has reassured with his revised explanation about the demise of his mother’s dog, he will have baffled many more. Originally the former deputy prime minister was quoted in Tatler magazine as saying that the alsatian, Kim, had turned violent so he “took Kim’s collar – a sort of choke chain – and pulled it tight. Suddenly he went limp. I was devoted to Kim, but he’d obviously had some sort of mental breakdown. There was no choice.”
Interviewer Charlotte Edwardes was under the impression that Kim had died at that moment, and tweeted as such. But since the ensuing furore, and criticism from the RSPCA, Lord Heseltine has insisted that Kim recovered after he had strangled him, that Kim was later taken to the vet to be put down in a non-strangulation manner, and that anything else was “terrible misrepresentation”.
Whether or not Heseltine intended a finely judged temporary incapacitation, his anecdote weirdly reminded me of the famous ending of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, in which the hero, Josef K, is brutally stabbed by two well-dressed gentlemen. As he loses consciousness, he murmurs reproachfully: “Like a dog!” It was “as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him”. It seems the shame of Kim’s demise has outlived him as well.
Lohan behold, a new accent
Trying out a new accent is a dangerous game for anyone in public life: Margaret Thatcher is said to have deepened her voice after spin doctor Gordon Reece advised it was too shrill; Harry Connick Jr experimented with a cool, hipstery voice, and Madonna picked up a British tone.
Now the London-based Lindsay Lohan seems to be making an attempt to sound European. Her Euro credentials were established when she lambasted Kettering on Twitter this year, after learning its inhabitants had voted to leave the EU – though she is mending fences with a promise to turn on Kettering’s Christmas lights.
But Lohan has startled everyone with a new voice, revealed as she spoke outside her club in Athens. She says it’s just because she’s very cosmopolitan these days. I think the explanation is that Lohan is suffering from a variant of Zelig-ism called the Steve McClaren Effect – in 2008 the former England manager, then in charge of FC Twente in the Netherlands, spoke with a Dutch accent to a Dutch interviewer.
Lohan is semi-consciously putting on what she imagines to be an echt European voice in a Greek setting. She sounds more like Joan Collins doing an impression of Inspector Clouseau.
Bring on the gripes of Roth
The uniquely poisonous US presidential election campaign is almost over, and I find myself having conversations about finding anything to compare it to. The only thing I can think of is the OJ Simpson trial 21 years ago, which dominated the media and had a similar mix of celebrity, irony, panic and disbelief. And yet the fate of the world didn’t hang on it.
Certainly this election has generated the most extraordinary corpus of witty, insightful yet ineffective thinkpieces about you-know-who. This summer, I was forever laying down my New Yorker or my New York Review of Books and saying: “Phew! That’s nailed him. Donald’s not coming back from that elegant, zeitgeisty takedown.”
And yet he kept on coming, the malevolent zombie. The only person who hasn’t yet spoken is Philip Roth, whose novel The Plot Against America has been cited as a vision of a fascist populist demagogue in the White House. Perhaps if Roth could intervene before 8 November, that would make a difference.
