Columns

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.

Many readers will have read The Spectator Easter survey — ‘Did Jesus really rise from the dead?’ — with intense interest. I did. The results of a survey posing the simple question, ‘Do you believe that Jesus physically rose from the dead?’ were sharply different from what I expected. Just one avowed atheist was interviewed, plus 22 believers. Yet between almost all of them, including the atheist, a most arresting consensus arose: one which only Charles Moore and perhaps Fergal Keane seemed reluctant to join. The atheist, Richard Dawkins, put it like this: ‘If the Resurrection is not true, Christianity becomes null and void and [Christians’] life, [Christians think], meaningless.

Briefly last week the nation chortled over its cornflakes at newspaper headlines about the ‘black spider’, and reports of letters to ministers from the Prince of Wales, and pictures of letters from ministers to the Prince of Wales heavily annotated in the sort of spidery black ink, which did look obsessive when spread across the front of a newspaper above a giggly caption, but hardly differed from the exasperated marginal scribbling we all produce but never expect to see in newspapers. I found my mind wandering to a different scene. I had described it in The Spectator at the time, six years ago.

Suppose a public body owned tens of thousands of acres of real estate across England, mostly in prime residential areas. Suppose it showed little inclination to rationalise its holdings in any tough-minded way, but drifted on, barely able to maintain the property it owned. Would there not be a strong case for HM Government to step in and reclaim some of these assets from the inertia-bound body? Such a body exists. She is called the Church of England. There can hardly be a reader who within a few minutes’ walk from his own doorstep could not identify acres of land with a crumbling building in the middle of it, often of no architectural interest at all, which is locked and empty for most of the week or, when open, used to only a fraction of its capacity.

Do you not find that when a wrong has been done, time may elapse before the wrongfulness pricks through into our consciences? I mean not only wrongs we do ourselves, or which are done to us, but also the sense we may have that a small or large injustice has been done in the world, and nobody has acknowledged this or tried to put it right. In the dead of night, goaded into wakefulness by something sharp the unconscious mind has sifted from the rubble and will not let drop, we run again through events under which we, or those we know, or our politicians, have supposedly ‘drawn a line’ — and conclude that we do not want to draw a line; we do not want to ‘move on’.

David Hearsey, DFC, was a bomber pilot. Here he recalls participating in a raid over Leipzig in his Handley Page Halifax in February 1944. We set out on an easterly heading across the North Sea towards the Danish coast. I told the gunners, Wally and Ted, to test their guns and fire a few rounds — mainly because I found the smell of burnt cordite through the aircraft comforting. I have a theory that combatants can stand the awfulness of battles such as Waterloo or Jutland because the smell of explosives acts as an anti-depressant drug. The crew had many ways to contain fear.

Patrick Hagen served as a wireless operator with 4 Commando Brigade signals troop. Here he describes the moment when, while guarding their exit route during a four-man hit-and-run raid on a radar site on the French coast, he and his friend Harry were discovered by two Germans. ‘There were only two types of commandos, the quick and the dead. This is what we’d been taught. So we both shot at once. Harry gave his man on his side two shots and I gave my man two shots. There was a small hole in his front — where the other shot had gone to, I don’t know — but a very large hole in his back and there was a lot of tomato sauce.

Ask any former drug addict. You’ve got to hit rock bottom before you are ready for cold turkey. What France is facing now is the equivalent of waking up on a soiled mattress in a crack-house you cannot remember entering. It may be what France needs. It may be what Germany needs too. Until the peoples of France and Germany are confronted by a palpable sense of national failure, they will never embrace the Anglo-Saxon model of market reform, and our continent’s economic logjam will never shift. For all its horror, and although no feeling person can welcome death and destruction, France’s convulsions this week could be for the French people and for the European ‘social market’ the beginning of a coming to terms with reality.

So far, at least, we are none the wiser about why God sent an earthquake to kill so many people in Kashmir, Pakistan and Afghanistan. We can only hope that sooner or later his purpose will be made evident, so that we all might learn. Why would he torture his people so? The mullahs have been remarkably silent. The earthquake struck during the onset of Ramadan in two of the world’s most devoutly Muslim countries. It is almost unbelievable that not a single bearded cleric from this most certain and steadfast of religions has offered some sort of explanation for the appalling loss of life and destruction of property. Is it not a judgment upon the Western-imposed infidel, General Pervaiz Musharraf? Or perhaps he wishes for the restoration of the Taleban government in Kabul?

Voltaire was a superb polemicist but a cheat in debate. He never laid a finger on the Christian argument which in Candide he mocked as claiming that ‘all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds’. He showed that the world was a dreadful place. In a sparkling and brutal parody he demonstrated that life was cruel and unjust, and that millions of people were wretched. He scorned the idea that there was anything remotely pleasant about the world which Christians claimed God had made as pleasant as possible for us. But the argument Voltaire parodies never did include the claim he mocked. He tilted brilliantly at the supposition that life was sweet, but Catholic theologians had never claimed life was sweet.

The late Peter Campbell, sometime professor of politics at the University of Reading, would have enjoyed the irony. He died just before the general election. His funeral was hastily arranged for Friday 6 May, mid-morning, in Reading. For me these were a couple of days of little sleep and intensely hard work. So Peter will forgive my confession that when his executors asked me to give the eulogy at St Luke’s Church in Reading at 11.30, the timing did not seem ideal. But to speak for him was an honour. I am so glad I did. As all the ill temper of an exceptionally negative election campaign came to its angry climax last Thursday, the setting aside of some hours to think about Peter’s life helped me recover my own bearings.

Catch your opponent unawares. Hit him with an accusation which he cannot come straight back at and answer. While he flails, change the subject fast. Move to a new charge. Keep changing the subject before your opponent has got to grips with the last one. Be like a Boy David with his sling, light on his feet, dancing round an infuriated Goliath of a rebuttal machine which wheels round too late to hit back. This was William Hague’s technique at Prime Minister’s Questions when he led the Conservative party. In the Commons it worked. Mr Hague was the last Tory leader able regularly to get the better of Tony Blair. Mr Blair is not easily tripped, so Mr Hague’s success was fun for us parliamentary sketchwriters to report.