Look, I get it. Look, I get it. I know how it is. You’ve got a lot on. You’re overdue a haircut, your parking permit is about to run out, and you got something from the tax man the other day, which you wrote a phone number on and took to work, and brought home again without actually reading, and put... where?
Matthew Parris offers Another Voice It so happened that last Friday, before my partner and I set off from Derbyshire for the Lib Dem conference in Liverpool, he drove over to Cannock, to report a meeting called to discuss the consequences for South Staffordshire of looming spending cuts. He (his name is Julian Glover) writes for the Guardian and wanted to describe the meeting for his column that Monday. This, inter alia, was what he wrote: ‘Education spending in Staffordshire this year is £805 million, or £4,078 per pupil — 63 per cent up on the level of 2003 to 2004. In just three years, South Staffordshire Primary Care Trust’s resources limit has risen from £663 million to £888 million: up 44 per cent.’ Great Scot.
James Forsyth reviews the week in politics ‘Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government,’ David Steel told the Liberal Assembly in 1981. Twenty-nine years, six leaders and a merger with the Social Democrats later, the party is at last in government, but not in the way it had hoped. The Liberal Democrats have historically prescribed higher spending as the cure for most government problems. Yet today, in coalition with the Conservatives, they are proposing the largest public spending cuts since the 1920s (the last Lib-Con government). So far, the Liberal Democrats have held it together. Not a single parliamentarian has defected. Only a few councillors have quit. But the same cannot be said for the party’s supporters.
Don’t get me wrong, I love farmers’ markets. I love going to the fashionable one in Borough, London, and that wonderful rich feeling you get whenever you don’t buy anything. And I love going to the one near me in south London and bantering and haggling with the fish man till he succumbs to giving me some amazing bargain like five decent-size Dover sole for a tenner. I also really like the idea of putting money direct into the farmer’s pocket rather than helping finance yet another bloody edge-of-town Tesco. And I like the espresso man with his espresso machine. And the jolly sausage ladies. And the free-range eggs. And the Eastern European man who gives me a discount on the veg.
Do you think it might be possible to plot a link between the apparently vast pool of girls who dream of sleeping with Wayne Rooney for cash, and how rubbish The Vicar of Dibley was? I’m keen that we should. In general, in fact, I feel the rubbishness of The Vicar of Dibley should be considered the cause of as many world evils as we can throw at it. Disease, war, earthquakes, whatever we’ve got. You know those teary-eyed socialists who loathe Tony Blair because they used to love him, but then he betrayed them over Iraq? I’m like that with Richard Curtis. When I was a teenager, the man was my god. He wrote Blackadder. And then, The Vicar of Bloody Dibley. Jesus Christ, what a thing to do.
James Forsyth reviews the week in politics The coalition has a problem communicating with the middle classes. As 20 October and the spending review approaches, the government’s message to other groups in society is easy to understand. The vulnerable will be protected from the cuts. Low earners will be allowed to keep more of the money that they make. But what about Middle England? It is much harder to discern what the coalition wants to say to them. Politically, this is a dangerous vacuum. It is easy to see why anxious bourgeois voters — and there are many of them — might think that the coalition is going to attempt to balance the budget by lumping an unbearable fiscal burden on their backs.
When I was a toddler in Newsham in Yorkshire we had friends at Hilltop Farm, and Mrs Todd used to send me to look for eggs in the boxes by the chicken run. The excitement and pleasure of lifting the lid and finding an egg — or two — in the straw is still sharp in my mind. Likewise the glee of spotting a mushroom in the woods when, later in life, I went on a mushroom hunt. The joy of finding half a crown half-buried in the sand on a beach in Cyprus, when I was six, is still fresh, and I’ve had an eye out for lost coins ever since.
I don’t care about Tony Blair’s book. I don’t care about Tony Blair’s book. I’m sorry, but I just don’t. Unless I really think about it, it’s frankly quite hard to remember who the man was. He’s just become this pious lurking bit-part character in tedious books by other people that I’ve forced myself to read. As though they all lived in houses with attics suffering chronic infestations of Sir Cliff Richard. Didn’t Cherie write a book already? I can’t quite remember; I suppose she must have done. Everybody else did. Now I think of it, there was some story about her forgetting to pack her ‘contraceptive equipment’ on a visit to Balmoral, wasn’t there?
James Forsyth reviews the week in politics In the last parliament, it was Tory MPs who were the odd ones out at Westminster. While they socialised among themselves, Labour and Liberal Democrat members could regularly be seen in each other’s company. As the prospect of a hung parliament loomed, this fraternising stepped up. By contrast, the few Liberal Democrats who had Tory friends tended to cut off contact as the campaign progressed. One Lib Dem spokesman took his Tory opposite number out to dinner a few days before it began and told him regretfully that he couldn’t see him anymore and that he’d no longer be able to admit how much he agreed with him. But then came those five days in May. Now, Labour MPs delight in shunning the Liberal Democrats.
At a dinner party a couple of years ago I was lucky enough to be sat near one of my heroes, Roger Scruton — like being a couch away from Socrates at a symposium. But then, halfway through, the great man began sounding off on one of the two things he is completely and utterly wrong about (the other one being pop music): drugs. By ‘drugs’, of course, dear, brave, brilliant Roger didn’t mean to include the alcohol he had been quaffing all evening nor yet the highly addictive yet legal nicotine death sticks of which the Fawn and I had partaken before dinner. What he meant was yer proper, actual, tabloid horror drugs: cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, heroin, and the deadly, evil ‘gateway’ drug they call ‘spliff’.
James Forsyth reviews the week in politics Coalition politics has thrown political journalists for a loop. For years we have been used to members of government claiming that there is not a cigarette paper of difference between them and their colleagues — even when the disagreements were obvious. But now Cabinet ministers happily admit that they differ. And when they disagree, the coalition partners set about resolving their differences in a civil and reasonable fashion. The lobby journalist’s bread and butter — the splits story — is in danger of disappearing. But the old politics is not dead. There are still vicious rows going on in government, but they are blue on blue: Tory versus Tory. This is not as odd as it might seem.
Joining friends grouped around a piano one evening last week, I sat down to hear another friend play. A man of extraordinary talent, he both composes and performs; and this time he had three new compositions to perform for us. The piano can be a spectacular instrument. An hour sped, for my friend is touched by genius. His style is extravagant, his energy enviable, his mastery of the keyboard stunning. The boom and tinkle, the crashing chords, cascading arpeggios and breathtaking runs impressed me more than I can say. And because my friend refuses to take himself completely seriously it was done in a manner so lavish as to be almost self-mocking — like a thoughtfully playful artist taking the mickey out of Liberace.
What I thought I’d do this summer holidays is catch up with all those classics I’ve been meaning to read for ages: A la recherche du temps perdu, Moby-Dick, David Copperfield, Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, Vanity Fair, everything by the Brontës, anything German, Metamorphosis, the Odyssey, the Iliad, most Balzac, anything by P.G. Wodehouse, Our Mutual Friend, Anna Karenina... But where to start? Our Mutual Friend is out because the wife is reading it and it’s surely a waste to buy two copies. Also, Dickens generally is very Dickensian and I’m not sure how much of that I can cope with on holiday. The Brontës, I think, are more a girl thing than a boy thing. I’ve seen Vanity Fair on TV.
Did you know that David Miliband’s favourite snack is a Twirl? I learned this yesterday while trawling the various Labour leadership websites, desperate to find some reason — any reason — to care about any of it. In his photograph at the top, David’s odd grey patch of hair seems curiously prominent, in a manner that suggests there might be a seagull circling somewhere overhead. I stared at that for a while. The Twirl thing was number 10 on ‘10 Things You May Not Know About David’. I already knew the other nine. It’s quite sparse, David Miliband’s website. Not like Diane Abbott’s website. Hers is great.
Like many members of the Tory tribe, I’ve struggled with the Big Society doctrine. As with the doctrine of the Holy Trinity there have been moments when I thought I’d grasped it, but upon being asked to explain it to somebody else, found that it had given me the slip again. After an impassioned Cameron interview I’ve been enthused — but then, challenged to justify my enthusiasm to a sceptic, faltered. Unlike the doctrine of the Trinity, the Big Society philosophy is not arcane. It’s a homely pudding made of voluntarism, local knowledge, local democracy, self-help, civicmindedness, community spirit — and a dash of strawberry jam (homemade) thrown in.
James Forsyth reviews the week in politics You wouldn’t know it from listening to the Prime Minister, but the coalition is on course to be a great reforming administration. In its first 11 weeks, it has announced plans to reform all four major public services. At the same time, its first Budget mandated the largest public spending cuts since the creation of the modern welfare state: a shrinking which goes beyond anything Margaret Thatcher ever attempted. But to achieve its reforming ambitions, the coalition must work out how to steer past the reefs on which past reformers have been wrecked. Tony Blair was so passionate about reform that speeches on the subject used to bring him out in a sweat.
I do wish the Prince of Wales weren’t such a terrible prat because then I wouldn’t have to say it in print and quite ruin my chances of a knighthood. But he is a prat. A dangerous prat at that — as he reminded us yet again just the other day in a speech he gave to ‘business leaders’ at St James’s Palace about what he thinks is happening with ‘climate change’. He said: ‘It has been profoundly depressing to witness the way the so-called climate sceptics are apparently able to intimidate all sorts of people from adopting the precautionary measures necessary to avert environmental collapse.
People don’t half talk a lot of dross about the burka. Or rather, the burka doesn’t half make people talk a lot of dross, about everything else. Nicolas Sarkozy, the four-foot-tall French President, has decided that his countrywomen don’t have a ‘right’ to wear the burka. Damian Green, our own, taller, immigration minister, has decided that British women do have a ‘right’ to wear the burka. I haven’t a clue what either of them are on about. I wonder if they do. It’s easy to get bogged down in this one. There’s altogether too much going on.
It’s been a good month for spy commentators. Experts on espionage have been popping up everywhere in the news media, offering views, news and background information on secret intelligence. The exposure of a Russian spy-ring operating in the United States, followed by a spy-swap in which America retrieved four of theirs in return for Russia retrieving ten of theirs (but ‘we got back really good ones’, explained the US Vice President, Joe Biden) has brought the whole business of Great Power intelligence-gathering to the forefront of media attention. Almost everybody loves a good spy story, as spy novelists will attest.
It’s odd, says Rod Liddle, that we mollycoddle our children while insisting that they can decide what’s right or wrong When I was six years old and on holiday at my grandparents’ house I would spend every day, with a lunch box of egg and cress sandwiches, up at Darlington railway station, watching the trains. I would walk the half-mile or so along Clifton Road by myself and camp out — usually on the southbound platform — well away from the occasional adult trainspotters with their flasks, anoraks and notebooks. I think we all recognise today that adult trainspotters are invariably paedophiles, but this was something I knew, at the time, only instinctively.