Columns

Presenting Pick of the Week on Radio Four the other day, I was determined to feature (and did) BBC Radio One’s Annie Nightingale, and Radio Two’s Janice Long — both excellent presenters who take us through the watches of the night; but my producer and I didn’t find it easy to identify any short clips that triumphantly demonstrated their brilliance. The skill of a presenter/disc jockey (or what use to be called a compère) rarely resides in showpiece tours-de-force, but in the whole atmosphere in which by chit-chat, humour, wit and sympathy they contrive to cocoon their hours on air, so that we feel we know them, and are sharing our morning cup of tea with them. Which brings me to Ken Bruce.

Rubbish has always fired my imagination and set my pulse racing. I don’t know why; it may be an inherited trait. My late father used to rifle through our bins lest anything useful had been thrown away, and in unhappier circumstances might in old age have extended his research into the streets, parks and railway stations. Perhaps one of our ancestors was a vulture in another life. Little gives me greater satisfaction than my old flip-flops — rescued (broken) from a crow-patrolled tip in Rurrenabaque in the remote Bolivian lowlands and lovingly repaired using some bailer twine and an old nail in place of a needle.

Cricket. Aargh. My gorge rises at the very word. Days — months — years of schoolboy misery; long, wretched, empty afternoons of boredom, fear and wasted time. Which is no way to say thank-you to Sir John Major for inviting me to a remarkable book launch for what looks and sounds like rather good book: More Than a Game. But the truth is that I made my way to the John Major suite at the Oval in south London on Monday last week more out of affection for Sir John than for cricket. I’m so glad I did. That busy, crowded room will fix itself in the memory as a sort of still-life of Majorism and his seven long years as prime minister from 1990 to 1997, a strange time in British politics.

There is a thing that many Scots do when they meet with other Scots. They start to sound more Scottish. Their consonants either grow jagged or fade away all together, their vowels twist, collude and extend. They start to say ‘aye’ in place of ‘yes’. They may even, if among friends, be tempted to risk the odd ‘och’. I wonder if this ever happens in Cabinet. I can see Gordon Brow kicking it off, perhaps with a modest, Fife-ish, slightly extended ‘r’. John Reid might retort with a competitive Lanarkshire ‘gonny’ or ‘canny’.

‘I was much surprised,’ wrote Anthony Trollope in 1873, ‘at the fortifications of Sydney Harbour. One would almost wish to be a gunner for the sake of being at one of these forts.’ He was right. Guarding the entrance to the city’s great inland harbour system at North Head and South Head are lookouts and fortifications in the most beautiful of situations. The coincidence last week of the short walk to South Head, the long journey to Australia, and a book, led me to a curious sideways reflection on the fine old cannon still pointing across the harbour mouth. Which way to face? Who are the next enemy?

As we go to print the five kidnapped tourists in Ethiopia have been returned alive, but mystery still surrounds the circumstances of their capture and the motives of their kidnappers, while some of the Ethiopians who were captured with them are still missing. I expect a good deal of theorising in the week ahead. Some of it, like the speculation we’ve been hearing over the last ten days, will be wide of the mark. The released tourists are themselves likely to be confused about what was going on. This, I believe, may well be because their kidnappers themselves were confused. Chaos and misunderstanding are the explanation for so much that baffles us in Africa, and attempts to explain events within the framework of European logic are often misplaced.

Minette Marrin, the columnist with whom I most often agree, put it best in the Sunday Telegraph last week. Couldn’t we just have fudged this gay adoption/Catholic objection thing, she asked? She herself, she said, supported the new anti-discrimination rules to which the Roman Catholic hierarchy is objecting; she thought their objections wrong-headed. But she wondered whether both sides might have found a classic British compromise, or — to be frank — a fudge. It’s what I’ve wondered from the start. Life (and career) finds roles for us all, and one part of my job description has become ‘Tory gay’. Another is ‘insistent non-believer’.

From the moment that the snatched camera-phone footage of Saddam Hussein’s execution emerged, it was hideously clear that the sentence had been carried out in a deplorable manner. The Americans immediately briefed that their calls for a delay had been ignored by the Iraqis. On 4 January George W. Bush felt obliged to admit that he wished that the proceedings had been ‘more dignified’. Yet it took until 9 January for Tony Blair, normally a far more astute politician than the President, to speak publicly about how the manner in which the sentence was carried out was ‘completely wrong’. Even then Blair was visibly irritated, giving the impression of having been forced to the lectern only by Gordon Brown’s  condemnation of the execution.

The last time I was in Chile it was the anniversary of the accession to power of General Augusto Pinochet. I had been unaware of the holiday. My companions and I had walked down from the high Andean plateau of south-western Bolivia into the little desert town of San Pedro de Atacama in the extreme north of the country. About 1,000 miles from Santiago, this is close to the great copper mine of Chuquicamata, source of so much of Chile’s wealth; not far from the sticky, seedy mining port of Antofagasta; not far from the Pacific. But San Pedro inhabits a different world.

Crikey, this really will have to be another voice. Has The Spectator taken leave of its senses? I could hardly bring myself to take last week’s edition out of its see-through plastic wrapping when, pictured on the cover, I saw a huge cartoon bulldog being walked on by a Muslim terrorist, and beside it four bald statements in big blue capital letters with a scarlet tick placed against each: • THIS IS WAR• WE ARE LOSING• WE NEED TOUGHER POLICIES• WE WILL BE ATTACKED and, underneath, ‘The view of the British: exclusive poll’. To my certain knowledge this is not the view of the British. I understand my countrymen well enough, and they are neither as hawkish as some at The Spectator would like them to be, nor as dovish as I could wish.

So there I was last Monday at 12.20, standing outside All Saints Church in Elton, in the Peak District of Derbyshire where I live, with a small suitcase, on my way to London. The bus to Matlock meets the train, and a No. 172 Hulley’s bus was due at 12.22. It’s a five-mile journey. Silly as it may sound, the new green edge to David Cameron’s blue has caused me, as a Conservative, to think a bit more before I drive. We really do have to rescue the ideal of environmental responsibility from the left-tinged puritans for whom threats about global warming are just a weapon with which to beat free-market economics. Be under no illusions: these eco-apocalypticists don’t want there to be any way we could carry on living as we do.

Most of us know what it is to finish a task undertaken for the first time, having made every mistake in the book, and regret we are unlikely ever to have to do this job again. We would know the ropes next time: the pitfalls, the useful little short-cuts. The job would be a doddle second time round. Were I ever again to need to cut three round holes in a wooden faceplate, to offer nesting access to small birds while excluding jackdaws, I would know that a determined jackdaw can slip through a tiny hole: much smaller than you would guess by looking at the jackdaw. But I have finished the job now and will never have to do it again — more’s the pity. The hash I made of it the first time would make it easy and fun, the second. I’d be really good at it.