The Words That Maketh [Right Wing Newspapers Scream Blue] Murder

Until now, the glorious Polly Jean Harvey has always come over politically as, if anything, vaguely most comfortable on the Right. She dismisses feminism as of no interest; she is a determined consumer of meat; she supports hunting. A famous encounter on Andrew Marr's sofa with a positively oleaginous David Cameron did nothing, really, to dispel this impression, only complicate it.

Now, every now and again Radio 4's flagship news programme Today hands itself into the tender care of a Guest Editor, people who have expertise in some other field than broadcasting and who are given carte blanche to commission pieces of interest to them. On the morning of January 2nd, PJH became one of these guest editors, and the results have, it is fair to say, not gone down universally well. For someone accustomed to universal acclamation for nearly a quarter of a century now, I wonder what she makes of this. I only caught bits of the programme on the day, but this morning skimmed through the whole thing.

The morning began shortly after 6 with a short piece read by Ms Harvey announcing her intentions - and making clear what her demands had been. She would pick her contributors and then set them going on the absolute condition that their items would not be altered without their consent. She would intersperse the journalism with poems and bits of music that illustrated the themes. Easily the most bizarre of these was prefacing the pre-7am weather bulletin with a full play of Tom Waits singing Strange Weather. She would not only affect the content of the flagship of British national radio but also its form, and, in fact, break it apart. The great shibboleth of all broadcast journalism, balance, was shown the door, although after a hatchet job on the economic role of the City of London a lady from some investment firm did make some attempt to justify it, and John Humphries rather effectively, I thought, cornered Phil Shiner from Public Interest Lawyers. At various points the presenters, Sarah Montague and Mishal Husain, floundered with the alterations to their usual iron timetables, and I'm sure, as someone who usually times their morning by what's on Today, I would also have done, had I not been on holiday. I imagine it was this that provoked as much ire from regular listeners as the actual content.

But what content. Personal accounts from Kenya and Ulster of torture at the hands of British forces, and testimonies from wounded servicemen about their experiences. Examinations of the role of money and power in the City and the arms trade, and even a rant from Dave Zirin about the effects of money in sport with special reference to the Olympics. A lot of it was deeply tendentious, and giving vent to the opinions of John Pilger and Julian Assange is not as radical as it seems: do either of them have anything very new to say? But they drive the Daily Mail into paroxysms of disbelieving rage so, yes, let them have their five minutes apiece. It's worth it. The bravest editorial decision of all was to let former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams read his poetry. God, Polly, you know how to dice with danger.

It was, cumulatively, draining. Usually the Today presenters defuse and lighten the appalling deluge of political and international crap they have to report on with banter and badinage, but there was precious little of that going on. Rather they seemed to feel constrained to keep having to explain to listeners why the programme was as screwed-up as it appeared to be. Nor do I necessarily go along with all of it: panegyrics to the NHS go down ill with me as the NHS arguably killed my father and had a pretty good stab at killing both my mother and sister at different times, but I have no doubt that Dorset County - the hospital local both to Ms Harvey and Clive Stafford-Smith who did the piece - is an impeccable institution. But the whole show, tough though it may be to take, served to remind us - if we knew - that there are deep structures which cause things to happen to individual people, and that those structures are themselves composed of individual people, making innumerable decisions and indecisions which affect how the structures develop and act. Accidental socialism, you might describe it.

At least, Ms Harvey in her introduction did her best to make it seem almost accidental. It was like most of her other pronouncements: apparently revealing while in fact intensely controlled and distant, edging on the disingenuous. What she did was immensely daring: to take an institution weighed with expectations, and just to rip it up, not just to slip her own interests into it, which is what the guest editors are supposed to do, but simply, brutally, to exploit the opportunity to make a statement. That deserves some respect, regardless.

You can, should you so desire, listen to the programme here.