Bully beef

In 2010, as the General Election inexorably approached, the Conservatives thought they were onto a winner when they uncovered testimony about Gordon Brown's behaviour that could be characterised as bullying.  Steve Hilton, David Cameron's special advisor, thought it would drive a stake through the heart of Brown's claim to moral probity.  Instead, Brown's polling figures went up!  Suddenly stories came up about how Churchill was a bully and how one needs to be ruthless and not suffer fools gladly when one has one's hand on the tiller of the ship of state.  It backfired on the Tories because people had always kind of half-suspected it about Brown and this didn't change anyone's mind who had already made it up of the prime minister.  Instead, there were those who warmed to it as a display of passion that could occasionally go too far but only to ensure that the country could recover after the Great Recession.  However, did it also display a sneaking tolerance, if indeed not admiration, for bullying?
After weeks of intrigue and innuendo, the worst kept secret in media broke as Jeremy Clarkson was sacked from the BBC today for gross misconduct.  Because he was given cold cuts of meat at the North Yorkshire hotel (as it was late at night and the kitchen had closed hours before) instead of hot steak and chips, he launched into a rant about the catering to a producer - Oisin Tymon - of ten years standing, shouting at him with many expletives for twenty minutes, calling him a 'lazy Irish' and saying he would lose his job before punching him in the face and continuing to verbally browbeat a man shorter than himself thereafter.  All because he was given unwarmed meat instead of warm beef.  As the BBC report said, it was unprovoked and Tymon did not fight back at any point.
Even though Clarkson reported himself to BBC Compliance (suggesting he was looking for a way out and hoping the BBC would make him a martyr), more than a million people demanded that Clarkson keep his job as if the arrogance of privilege entitled Clarkson to any sort of action.  There were many who viciously aimed horrendous calumny at Tymon, who was blameless in all this and had kept it to himself, worried about losing his job.  If Clarkson's behaviour wasn't an example of workplace bullying at its very worst, I don't know what is.  A million people can't be wrong, can they?  Well, yes they can.  Millions have been seduced by bullies and tyrants and madmen throughout history.  The signatories liked to think of Clarkson as a 'naughty boy bending the rules' who just wanted 'a bit of laugh'.  How often was that used to defend the actions of school bullies, making it out to be the victim's fault?  Clarkson moreover portrays himself as raging against the establishment when he is at the heart of it - having intimate dinner parties with James Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks and David Cameron (as Leader of the Opposition and Prime Minister) and using his Sunday Times column as a, ahem, bully pulpit.
High-profile backers were not in short supply, not least in Cameron himself.  Allison Pearson, the influential columnist, saw it as a politically correct plot (but then she sees everything as plotted politically correct).  Louise Mensch seemed to condone bullying when she said people should stop being so 'wimpy', completely misreading the entire story, maybe wilfully.  James May, brought in (all those years ago) for the second series of the relaunched Top Gear and beholden to Clarkson as an odalisque to a sultan, said it was a 'tragedy' it wasn't all swept under the carpet instead of 'made into something big'.  Which kind of suggests it happens in the studio regularly but kept under wraps - this time it happened in the public setting of a hotel.
May concluded his lament to journalists with, "he's a knob [as if this is the maximum level of criticism Clarkson deserves]  but I kind of like working with him."  Imagine it in court, the defence barrister saying, "My client did rob that old lady and it is clear he is a knob but he is liked by a lot of people.  I expect an acquittal."  Apparently, Clarkson dished it out to May and Richard Hammond on that fateful night too.  I felt like tweeting to May "@James May - like a wife who suffers domestic abuse bt still excuses hubby. Obvs loves a bully (like many, sadly)" and girded my loins for the inevitable Twitter backlash from Clarkson's and May's supporters.  Yet when I came to May's homepage, I was disarmed by his easy-going cheeky charm - his hashtagging #StillUnemployed and #SU was self-indulgent and narcissistic but his annotated examples in relation to this was amusing and I succumbed.  Then I thought 'what good would haranguing James May do?  He's not going to change his mind.'  Worse, I felt it would turn me into a troll and I despise those.  Admittedly, I would be challenging him to confirm or deny whether he thought Clarkson was a bully rather than another contributor who wanted to "bum this c*** [asterisks added by me] into oblivion" (May pointed out it came across as contradictory).  Twitter is a place to vent but not at others - too often emotion trumpets judgement for keyboard warriors however.  Selfishly, they want to make themselves feel better by directing their anger in a way they would never do face to face.  Twitter should be constructive yet of course it frequently veers to the dark side.
May is not alone, as proved by those million signatories and others threatening to stop their licence fee payments because they only watched the BBC for Clarkson (plus May and Hammond).  I wonder how many of them were bullies or hangers-on of bullies at school.  Beyond that circle, there is wider complicity, implicitly if not explicitly.  I think bullies are those who never grow up i.e. mature - a nightmare version of Peter Pan.  There is talk of zero-tolerance of bullying at school and in the workplace but it seems worryingly large numbers of British are willing to provide the practitioners of cruelty with considerable latitude, especially if it's all 'for bit of a laugh'.  Like racism, it's a common stain that goes under the radar.