Bono, Facebook And The Envy Of The Mogg

It was Socrates who said ὁ φθόνος ἕλκος τῆς ψυχῆς* and as with so many ideas gifted us by that great thinker, his words are as pertinent today as when he first uttered them beneath the olive trees of Athens some two and a half thousand years ago.

In the last twenty four hours 'Bono', the front-man of pop music group The U2 (pictured above) has been accused of everything from hypocrisy to rapacity for having the effrontery to make himself an honest billion from a day's work.

Having taken a stake of 2.3% in the 'social networking' site Facebook in 2009, Mr Bono's private equity fund Elevation now stands to make a decent sized return on that initial capital investment. Estimates have put the figure at anything between one and two billion pounds, which is by any reckoning a significant gain on a clever and savvy financial venture.

Mr Bono has done nothing illegal, nobody has been hurt, no horses have been scared and yet his accomplishment has been broadly lambasted and ridiculed, raked over and assailed.

The poor chap has even been driven to deny his good fortune telling the Belfast Telegraph: 'Contrary to reports, I'm not a billionaire or going to be any richer than any Beatle (sic).' Leaving Mr Bono's tenuous grip on even the rudimentary elements of grammar aside for one moment, this sentence says much about the modern insistence on 'debasing' success. Instead of celebrating his company's performance he has felt obliged to talk it down. Why?

The general sentiment seems to be that as this well-meaning beatnik has a history of wandering about the place, telling the great and good that they should save impecunious 'Third Worlders' from poverty, he ought to now put his money where his mouth is and jolly well rescue them himself. To which one feels the urge to respond as follows: Balderdash.

'Pop sensations' rarely wish to have MP's riding to their salvation and I very much hope that Mr Bono shall not object to me weighing in on his behalf. However, having perused the facts of this storm in a sherry glass, it is quite clear to me that this brouhaha has little to do with genuine indignation on the part of the 'mob' and quite a lot more to do with 'envy'. Those lambasting this 'windfall' clearly have little understanding of how an investment company works. It is not a 'piggy bank' into which one can dip at whim. It is a business, employing people, creating jobs, boosting the global market economy. Sadly, such arguments rarely wash with those most in need of a bath. One wonders how many of those dread-locked, vegetable eating, 'anti-capitalists' decrying  this singer his success, would do what they implore of him were the contents of their bank accounts to amount to much more than the sum earned from their 'weekly giros'.

Of course these British Isles (and I very much include 'Eire' in this) have a habit of decrying success. For Mr Bono to have been able to rise from the sort of abject poverty where his parents clearly could not afford the expense of a second name, or even elocution lessons, should be a cause for celebration. It frequently feels that those left behind in the 'pit of pauperism' are too busy throwing potatoes at the chaps who have clambered up a step to bother lauding their achievements, or better still set out to achieve the same for themselves.

Perhaps I am being unfair. It is of course not only the bottom rank who envy success. Most of us could, with the help of a few friends, quite easily have rustled up the initial £150 million investment made by Elevation and popped it into Facebook for ourselves. The fact that we did not is the real agent of this unseemly onslaught of covetousness. We are all too often prey to the unsettling sensation that 'every time another succeeds, a little part of one dies'. Let us strive to rise like Rome against this 'Alaric' of jealousy and slay it before it crosses the Triumphal arch of our reason.

I bid you all good cheer.

'JRM'

* 'envy is the ulcer of the soul'  

Salmond, Egg and 'Wee' Jimmy Krankie

Some months ago an old chum from Oxford days rang to impart some rather frightful news. It appeared that his wife Susan had fallen for the charms of a double glazing salesman called Lief and intended to desert her aforementioned husband, their grade II rectory, three dogs, two horses and four delightful children  for a  new and more 'exciting' existence. Lief (an Antipodean late of Wellington) was a boastful exponent of the 'tantric arts', who dabbled in Buddhism and had plans to open a 'meditative retreat' in a mock tudor bungalow in Swanage. Poor St. John naturally felt more than a little intimidated by his 'love rival' and swiftly caved in to his wife's demands for a 'trial separation'. I shall return to Susan, Lief and St. John (and their relevance) later, for the curious arc of their modern morality tale has been much on my mind over the course of the last few days.

What is the United Kingdom if not a marriage? Admittedly with four nations involved, it is perhaps more akin to the 'continental style' relationships enjoyed by French Presidents and certain members of the Bloomsbury Group, but at its heart for more than a thousand years there has been an indelible bond between Scotland and England. It is true that as with all marriages there have been ups and downs in our long interweaving history. Indeed between 1313 and 1575 there were no fewer than forty major battles between the two countries and countless skirmishes. Later wars, culminating in the Jacobite unpleasantness, sealed together the fates of the peoples of our island with a mixture of gunpowder, despair and blood.

One might reasonably argue that the birth of our modern Kingdom, like marriage itself, was born from a kind of sacrifice and yet from that sacrifice we, the benefactors, have thrived. Indeed, as has often been noted, many of the greatest figures in British history have been Scotsmen. Without Mungo Park, David Livingstone and the oceanographer John Murray, the Empire might never have stretched further than the Isle of Wight. Without Adam Smith our modern banking system would barely exist. And without the noble bagpipe, Great Britain's contribution to musical invention would have amounted to little more than a limp pair of morris dancers' bells and the incessant 'warbling' of 'The Beatles'.

The Scots have increasingly been led to believe that there is a conspiracy at work here. That the English have somehow 'done them out' of their talent in addition to their oil. I would argue that our relationship has been symbiotic. Had Arthur Conan-Doyle remained in his native land, Sherlock Holmes would never have walked down Baker Street. John Logie Baird, the inventor of television was born in Dunbartonshire but it was to London that he came in order to make his name and crucially to find finance. Had he not done so Carol Smillie, Andrew Marr, Wee Jimmy Krankie and Lorraine Kelly might never have amounted to very much more than crofters, kelp gatherers or Presbyterian Ministers. It was the wider window on the world that England offered that made them 'global' stars.

Mr Salmond and his party wish us to throw away all we have achieved. Like an errant spouse he has made his mind up and would rather divorce than seek 'counselling'. That is his choice, as much as it was Susan's, but is it really fair to drag the labradors, the horses and the children down with him?

And so let us return to my old chum St. John. A fortnight after arriving in Swanage, Susan came home unexpectedly one afternoon to catch Lief engaged in an activity that even the twenty volume OED would be hard pushed to define. Realising her mistake she pleaded with her estranged husband to take her back, but it was too late. The damage had been done. St. John had 'moved on' (with his Lithuanian au pair as it so happens) and quite frankly, after the initial pain of being 'cuckolded' by a citizen from a junior Commonwealth nation, felt much better for her absence. Indeed, in a manner similar to the superb Augustus Leopold Egg painting above, her fate had been sealed from the moment she had allowed Lief and his window catalogues through her door.

One hopes most sincerely that Scotland shall not repeat Susan's folly and fall victim to the velvety flattery of the devious Mr Salmond.

JRM