At Tuesday’s anti-Semitism ‘summit’ in Downing Street, Sir Keir Starmer achieved a personal first. He used the word ‘Islamists’. But in order to utter a word he had previously avoided in relation to the subject, Sir Keir had to approach it crabwise. Instead of identifying Islamists as the main ideological and physical threat to British Jews, he said: ‘We’re clear-eyed about the fact that anti-Semitism does not have one source alone: Islamists, far-left, far-right extremism, all target Jewish communities.’ Islamists were thus inserted into the conversation but also downplayed. It is obsolete not to recognise that the far right in Britain – for the moment at least – more or less leave Jews alone. The far left is indeed a breeding ground for anti-Semitism, but not a factor unrelated to the Islamists. Indeed, the two have forged the modern equivalent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Prime Minister cannot say this, because he is not brave and because that pact is now so strong that he feared further punishment in Thursday’s local elections if he suggested its existence. If you watched Kemi Badenoch dealing firmly, two days earlier, with a verbal attack by a pro-Palestinian activist, you could see a leader who speaks freely because she knows what she thinks. Has poor Sir Keir ever known?
David and Danielle Frum, both well-known writers in North America, are old friends of ours. He is the leading anti-Trump Republican journalist. Her witty social commentary, under her maiden name of Danielle Crittenden, and her wonderful ebullience caused her friends to call her ‘The Minister of Fun’. A little over two years ago, as she puts it in her new book Dispatches from Grief: ‘I retired from that position.’ Their elder daughter Miranda, in her early thirties, had a compromised immune system after an operation five years earlier to remove a large brain tumour. In January 2024, she succumbed to an infection and died suddenly. Danielle’s short, touching book resists the pattern that people demand in such tragedies – the ‘smiling through tears’ effect, in which what is unbearable is supposed to produce something life-enhancing. Danielle scorns false comfort: ‘Miranda’s death is not my spiritual gain. I was happier with my child than without her. Nothing better will grow in her place.’ But she keeps beside her a photo of Miranda which expresses her daughter’s ‘the-whole-world-is-before-me joy’, and that inspires her to seek joy herself. As time passed, she and David agreed to return to social rituals in which they ‘pretend to be human’. If any couple can turn that necessary pretence into reality, it will be them.
The Speaker of the House of Commons, ex officio, does not speak, except to maintain order. The present one, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, has piped up, however, by writing a protest to the Pope. This is because the Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool, Archbishop John Sherrington, is trying to close St Joseph’s, Brindle, which is in Sir Lindsay’s constituency, for lack of priests. It is a rare 18th-century church in the one part of England – Lancashire – which stayed strongly Catholic. The parish was founded by Benedictines in 1677, when penal laws were still enforced. The present church was built in 1786. The parishioners, who are numerous, complain that the consultation process has been ignored. Mr Speaker supports them, saying: ‘What is happening in Brindle must be taken to Rome.’ Catholic emancipation was passed by parliament nearly 200 years ago, so his support is fitting. The lack of enthusiasm of the hierarchy is unfitting and untimely.
Eton’s Parent Bulletin for ‘short leave’ (the May mini-break) offers the usual information you might expect about when to return to school. It also advertises the school play The Comedy of Errors, accompanied by what it calls ‘Content Warnings’. The play ‘Contains mild violence and stereotyping’. Does that need saying? Show me a comedy which is completely free of stereotyping. Or is Eton just having a laugh?
Dave Ker, a – stereotype warning – fat man and self-identifying snob who died recently, made everyone laugh. Last week, about 800 friends who are grateful to him crammed into St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, for his memorial service. The difficulty was to convey the wit. This was partly because some of it lay in his imitations – of, for example, Mohamed al Fayed, the Prince of Wales (now our King) or Cherie Blair’s security man – and you shouldn’t imitate an imitation. Even more, it was because he deliberately exceeded the bounds of good taste. In his eulogy, Henry Wyndham navigated these problems with great skill, so the house of God was not profaned. Perhaps for the same reason, the clergyman preaching, an old friend, failed to mention the invitation to a fancy-dress party which Dave once issued to him and his wife: ‘It’s Vicars and Tarts – so neither of you will need to get changed.’
Ker also specialised in practical jokes, a comic form now (often deservedly) out of fashion. I like one which Wyndham related. Staying at Badminton, the Duke of Beaufort’s house, Dave noticed the luggage of a fellow guest, Andrew Parker Bowles, sitting unattended in the hall. He therefore hurried into the dining-room, grabbed some silver candelabra and shoved them into the Parker Bowles suitcase.
Comedy can require apparent heartlessness for its effects. Wyndham offered his own Ker story: ‘I received a call in hospital from Dave three hours after being shot badly on a grouse moor. He rang to say he was very sorry but wanted to know where I was due to be shooting over the next few weeks as he was more than happy to fill in for me.’ One of the hymns we sung was ‘Be thou my vision’. Fittingly, the verse which begins ‘Riches I heed not’ was omitted.
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