The consensus seems to be that Jonathan May-Bowles, aka Jonnie Marbles, the man who tried to liven up the Murdochs’ appearance before the Culture, Media and Sport committee is something of a berk, a wally, a twunt and possibly even worse. A few conspiracists have even argued that he has to be in the employ of News International, because his intervention provoked sympathy for the embattled Rupert (who of course would then deny having anything to do with him, and he certainly didn’t pay him).
The language used to cover Marbles’s contribution is interesting: most hacks have reported the empirical reality that his weapon of choice was “a paper plate of shaving foam” or words to that effect. Had it been defined as a pie or a tart – since, after all, shaving foam is the main constituent of the pies that a circus clown might fling, although you have to let them stand for an hour or two to get the sting out – the attacker might have been seen as a confrère of the heroic Noël Godin (aka Georges Le Gloupier) the Belgian entarteur whose victims include Bill Gates, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jean-Luc Godard.
Those who criticise Marbles suggest that his activities distracted from the bigger story, the ritual inquisition of those ultimately for the hacking scandal; the Labour Party has primly suspended his membership. In reality, with the exception of the redoutable Tom Watson, the committee’s questions were pretty bland, and I’m pretty sure that at one point Murdoch Senior actually nodded off. Marbles is on the naughty step, not because he attacked Murdoch, but because he implicitly attacked the whole rotten system that implicates politicians, police and media, smug pigs with their expensively manicured front trotters in the same trough. He’s in trouble not for what he did, but for what he meant. And the fact that his Twitter following rocketed in the minutes after that sublimely “WTF?” moment should also raise a question mark or several with regard to the shallow, transient celeb culture that the Murdoch press has helped to foster over the past few years.
Which is not to insist, of course, that he isn’t still a bit of a twunt.
PS: Mr Marbles in his own words; and, at Pickled Politics, Sunny Hundal comments on the comments.
The language used to cover Marbles’s contribution is interesting: most hacks have reported the empirical reality that his weapon of choice was “a paper plate of shaving foam” or words to that effect. Had it been defined as a pie or a tart – since, after all, shaving foam is the main constituent of the pies that a circus clown might fling, although you have to let them stand for an hour or two to get the sting out – the attacker might have been seen as a confrère of the heroic Noël Godin (aka Georges Le Gloupier) the Belgian entarteur whose victims include Bill Gates, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jean-Luc Godard.
Those who criticise Marbles suggest that his activities distracted from the bigger story, the ritual inquisition of those ultimately for the hacking scandal; the Labour Party has primly suspended his membership. In reality, with the exception of the redoutable Tom Watson, the committee’s questions were pretty bland, and I’m pretty sure that at one point Murdoch Senior actually nodded off. Marbles is on the naughty step, not because he attacked Murdoch, but because he implicitly attacked the whole rotten system that implicates politicians, police and media, smug pigs with their expensively manicured front trotters in the same trough. He’s in trouble not for what he did, but for what he meant. And the fact that his Twitter following rocketed in the minutes after that sublimely “WTF?” moment should also raise a question mark or several with regard to the shallow, transient celeb culture that the Murdoch press has helped to foster over the past few years.
Which is not to insist, of course, that he isn’t still a bit of a twunt.
PS: Mr Marbles in his own words; and, at Pickled Politics, Sunny Hundal comments on the comments.
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