Features

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_3_July_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Harris and Madeleine Teahan discuss the Assisted Dying Bill" startat=874] Listen [/audioplayer]If you were around in the days when the US series M*A*S*H was a regular feature on British television, its sing-song theme is probably still lodged in your memory: ‘Suicide is painless/ It brings on many changes/ And I can take or leave it if I please’. However catchy, it is broadly untrue. The human life force is stubborn, and it takes a visceral struggle to extinguish it.

In a one-horse town called Hestrud, on the Franco-Belgian border, there’s a monument which encapsulates Europe’s enduring fascination with Napoleon. The story carved upon this plinth is more like poetry than reportage. As Napoleon passed through here, on his way to Waterloo, he struck up a conversation with a bold little boy called Cyprien Joseph Charlet. ‘You think victory will always follow you, but it always disappears,’ this audacious lad told him, apparently. ‘If I were you, I’d stay at home. Tomorrow your star will surely dim.’ Well, that’s the story, anyway. Fact or fiction, or a bit of both? In a way, it hardly matters.

Thirty years ago, as editor of the Salisbury Review, I began to receive short articles from a Bradford headmaster, relating the dilemmas faced by those attempting to provide an English education to the children of Asian immigrants. Ray Honeyford’s case was simple. Children born and raised in Britain must be integrated into British society. Schools and teachers therefore had a duty, not merely to impart the English language and the English curriculum, but to ensure that children understood and adhered to the basic principles of the surrounding society, including racial and religious tolerance, sexual equality and the habit of settling conflicts by compromise and not by force.

Taki What a pity this competition is not open to members of the fairer sex. Marie Christine of Kent would make an ideal winner. Among the men, of course, we have an embarrassment of riches. Tony Blair, John Bercow, Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross, A.A. Gill, Charles Saatchi, I could go on until the next millennium. However agonising it was to pick the cad of all cads, do step forward Matthew Freud, a man I’m fortunate to say I have never met but have heard and read enough about to convince me he’s the one. In his never-ending quest for power, riches and fame, Freud has managed to reach the depths of narcissism, lubricity, arse-licking and bullying, always couched in a Uriah Heep manner towards those richer and more powerful.

Few people, don’t you find, are as irritating as those who define themselves as Spiritual But Not Religious? There was a riveting  piece in the Sunday Times ‘Style’ magazine last week about them, featuring people who were both fabulously stylish and spiritual. Among the names checked was a shop called Celestine Eleven (‘when you buy a new dress, you’re buying into a beautiful piece of energy’) and a website called Numinous (motto: ‘material girl, mystical world’). So, you can be spiritual and design-conscious, as in Pamela Love’s pentagram ring, £1,500.