Quality | 2009.10.31
Move over, experts. Our MPs want Amy Winehouse's dad | Marina Hyde
Just when we thought Britain\'s shameful politics had reached its nadir, parliament starts running celebrity sideshows
\'Amy has been drug-free for a year," celebrity parent Mitch Winehouse declared to an enraptured audience. "I felt it was incumbent upon me to put that right." "We\'re most grateful for that, Mr Winehouse," simpered his preening interviewer, as the TV cameras rolled on obligingly. "Tell us about your documentary …"
If you are unaware of the setting for this exchange, and perhaps fancied it a scene in the director\'s cut of Davina McCall\'s cancelled chatshow , then prepare for disappointment. It took place at a home affairs select committee hearing this week, chaired by our old friend Keith Vaz. Previously this column has designated Mr Vaz New Labour\'s Zelig – on account of his extraordinary knack of surfacing at moments of high drama in the New Labour story – and more latterly as a Widmerpool , the peripheral monster of Anthony Powell\'s A Dance to the Music of Time cycle of novels, whose journey towards the red benches is as wildly undeserved as it is inevitable.
Those comparisons are hereby withdrawn. In light of this week\'s efforts, Vaz can only be a hologram sent from the future specifically to plunge early 21st-century Britons into shame at the rancid state of their politics. OK, deeper shame.
On Tuesday, this mission took the form of inviting Amy Winehouse\'s father to give evidence before his committee\'s hearing into the cocaine trade – about which Mr Winehouse immediately confirmed he knew nothing. A cabbie by profession, he appeared to have been elevated to the status of expert witness on the basis of his daughter\'s heroin addiction, and his fronting of a forthcoming documentary. To Peaches Geldof on Islam, then, and Someone Out of Liberty X on binge drinking, we may soon add My Daughter Amy – or "this very detailed analysis that you have been involved in", as Vaz glossed it.
Of course, none of this is to belittle Mr Winehouse\'s grim experiences as the parent of an addicted child, nor his dutiful answering of the committee\'s summons. But what did they think he could bring to the table that could not have been infinitely better supplied by a genuine expert? The committee seemed pleased to make do with such responses as "I really don\'t know what the answer is".
And our legislators are likely to share Mr Winehouse\'s befuddlement on this and a host of other policy issues, if they continue this creeping trend of jettisoning genuine experts in favour of getting their ambitious little faces on TV (for that, naturally, is the only reason celebrities are asked along). Even when Vaz\'s committee was graced by the estimable Joanna Lumley , who was clearly infinitely better informed on Gurkha issue than any of them, their mining of her expertise remained at the starstruck level of "Have you had to come far?".
In the US this practice has long been out of hand. The rot began in 1985 when Jane Fonda, Sally Field and Sissy Spacek were called as expert witnesses before a congressional hearing entitled The Plight of the Family Farmer. They\'d all played farm wives in movies, you see. Forced to pick the nadir of such "expert" appearances, I\'d cite Elmo from Sesame Street appearing before a house committee on children\'s education. According to one congressman: "Elmo, in many ways, speaks for children everywhere." No. Elmo is made of fun-fur.
But it was when Backstreet Boy Kevin Richardson was called to testify on mountain-top mining that one politician had finally had enough, and refused to attend the hearing in protest. "It\'s just a joke to think that this witness can provide members of the United States Senate with information on important geological and water quality issues," he fumed, rather harshly, considering Kevin really nailed those harmonies in I Want It That Way . "We\'re either serious about these issues or we\'re running a sideshow."
How admirable it would have been had Mr Winehouse\'s invitation caused a home affairs committee member to do likewise. But then, with the exception of public accounts, our select committees are running sideshows, whose staggeringly minor achievements serve to underline their own irrelevance. Some do so unwillingly – this week the school\'s committee chairman complained that MPs\' ability to scrutinise government appointments was "a sham" – but others seem resigned. Oh, the Treasury committee\'s grilling of the disgraced banking bosses was a brief populist spectacle. But one couldn\'t help feeling it was that bit late to solicit such testimony, what with the entire system having gone belly up some weeks before. The committee\'s report eventually concluded that the bonus culture had encouraged excessive risks, an opinion at which many nine-year-olds had long since arrived.
Back when the expenses scandal destroyed the last vestiges of trust in parliament, noises were made about reforming the committee system, so against all odds and instinct we must hope for that. But the wider malaise – the mania for crowding expert voices out of the public discourse in favour of celebrities who range from the comparatively uniformed to the actively stupid – grows progressively worse. What must be done? Alas, on current form the answer will be to hold a committee hearing into it, and call Geri Halliwell to trill "I don\'t know the answer to that" as the flashbulbs pop.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]arliament-winehouse-vaz-lumley
