God spare Channel 4 for mistaking Darcus Howe for a radical. One can imagine the commissioning process by which an ageing black man with a column in the New Statesman was named as an ideal front man for Slave Nation, a series about our enslavement to various defunct ideologies. What I can't come to terms with is how anyone who had actually met him could mistake this dopey old reactionary for anything other than the person he is. It must have been, in the words of Ali G, because he is black. There is no other explanation and it is simply impossible to imagine a middle-aged white man with similar views being given a three-part series in which to examine a loopy, libertarian version of freedom.
I am always to be found running up freedom street. Hilarious as this quotation is, it doesn't bear too close an examina tion. Howe's idea of freedom is anything he has ever said or done. He doesn't analyse the concept so much as embody it. When he cheated on his wife, he did so in brave contravention of the bourgeois mores to which all the rest of us are chained. For the same reason, he was proud to draw our attention to the baby born to his 15-year-old daughter. Having disapproved at first - because she was a girl and freedom, as we know, means something slightly different for them - he finally came to cite her as the very epitome of his lascivious philosophy. Berating a group of teenage virgins for not wanting to join his hapless offspring at the far end of freedom street, he implied that their frigidity was an affront to Martin Luther King and everyone else who has ever fought against oppression so that young girls should have the right to get shafted by condomless lads. The same goes for people who, enslaved as they are to some fairy-tale notion of marriage, try to hold theirs together when these days there are divorce laws to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen. Howe has been divorced twice - a vital qualification for an anti-establishment role model who believes the world would be much improved if everyone made his mistakes.