Thursday, June 15, 2006

Demos, Perri 6 and the New World Order

Interesting article in The Guardian - here - on the subject of the think tank Demos. Of course, like all such tanks, Demos is a futile exercise in vanity and self-indulgence, but, unlike the rest, it manages to be very funny. Reading the piece, I found myself vaguely wondering what happened to a Demos character called, for reasons never explained to me at least, Perri 6. He used to appear, numerical and enigmatic, at Independent news conferences. I always wondered if his children would be called 7, 8 etc. Anyway, I've found him here. Nice to know he's still around and that his bibliographic entries provide yet more comedy - he is listed as 6,P. which must be very confusing. Geoff Mulgan of Demos was once so outraged by a piece I wrote about his tank that he sent an angry letter to The Sunday Times. The paper wanted to print it but it was so badly written, they couldn't. I contacted Mulgan and offered to write it myself on the basis that I can be far more vicious and fluent about my own shortcomings than anybody else. For some reason, this only seemed to provoke him further.

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