The Spectator's Notes

The last time we had a royal wedding of comparable dynastic importance (i.e. only a bit important), Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson, in 1986. The Spectator of those times, which I was editing, carried almost nothing about it. The only piece was a television review by Alexander Chancellor, complaining that ‘The royal family are at the moment completely out of control.’ He found this very upsetting. He was ‘absolutely in favour of the royal family. I have always liked the way they keep their heads down, avoid controversy, shun jokes, and conceal whatever personalities they may have.

This ‘Windrush’ story comes from a friend called Michael McKay, a British broadcaster based in Geneva. His father, Jeff, a Jamaican, joined the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in 1941. He sailed to England, and served in Montgomery’s army in Egypt. Michael’s mother, Pearl, already in love with Jeff, joined the WAAFs in Jamaica and came over to find him. She was eventually stationed at RAF Melksham. They married shortly after VE Day. When they returned to Jamaica, Jeff could not get his pre-war job back. In 1948, Michael was born. In 1949, they took the boat to England. Kind white wartime friends of Pearl invited them to share their small house in Glastonbury. Jeff got a job in Clarks, the shoemakers, and the couple had two more children.

Hilary McGrady, the new director-general of the National Trust, sent me (and no doubt other journalists) a nice email hoping we can meet. I wish her well, and whenever I find myself criticising the Trust, I am conscious of the fact that, compared with its equivalents abroad, it is a miracle. But I was a bit irritated by her first interview, with the BBC: ‘I want to reach out to more people… The days of walking into one of our beautiful houses and saying a family lived here, that’s not going to do it.’ Obviously, any organisation offering public benefit wishes it to reach as many people as is sensibly possible, but there is something about her framing of the point that is wrong. It implies that the thing for which the Trust is best known is its problem.

Everyone speaks about the Windrush. The boat was actually called the Empire Windrush. The full name reveals what the story was about. The boat was one of a series called Empire X, X being the name of a British river, as if each were a tributary to a common stream. Mass coloured immigration to Britain was the act of an imperial power — almost, one might say, an imperialist act. In 1948, a Labour government (Attlee’s) created a common ‘Citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies’. Just as we wanted the raw materials of our colonies, so — later in the day — we wanted their labour. This also explains the context of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech 50 years ago this week.

The Good Friday Agreement (GFA), which celebrates its 20th anniversary this week, is not a peace, but a truce. This does not mean that it has no value. Most people in Northern Ireland wish to abide by its terms; it has helped them get on with normal life. But it does mean that difference, rather than being gradually dissolved, is institutionalised. You almost have to sign up to one side or the other. A friend sends me the diversity form of the Northern Ireland civil service which, as a candidate for the service, you must fill in. Unlike some such forms, it offers no ‘prefer not to say’ option. Each candidate must declare whether he or she has ‘a Protestant community background’ or a ‘Roman Catholic’ one or neither.

For almost as long as I can remember, Eurosceptic Tory MPs have been defined by the media as ‘head-bangers’. As a result, few notice that they scarcely bang their heads at all these days. The European Research Group (ERG), now led by Jacob Rees-Mogg, is surprisingly united, and makes most of its arguments blande suaviterque. The noise of craniums bashing themselves against Pugin panelling is much louder on the other side — Anna Soubry in the Commons, Andrew Adonis in the Lords. The Eurosceptic head-bangers are being particularly cautious about this week’s transition deal. Although they dislike most of it, they broadly accept the whips’ arguments that if the party can agree the transitional arrangements, Brexit is assured, and if not, not.

Bev died, aged 61. She was the wife of ‘Foxy’ John, kennel huntsman of our local hunt. Bev was the matriarch of the clan, with six children, 14 grandchildren, and other young people in need of help whom she cared for. Both John and Bev have Traveller ‘heritage’. That requires a Traveller funeral. Only the best would do. Bev was laid out for three days in an open coffin, lined in pink, in their rural council house — the only council house I know which plays host to a hunt meet. In the course of the wake, 500 guests somehow crammed in. As custom demands, the people of the house did not sleep. As is also the custom, a pyre consumed her possessions. On Monday, I drove there.

The Queen is Head of the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth is headquartered in London, in the splendour of Marlborough House. The Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Lady Scotland, is British (and also Dominican). Britain is about to take the chair of the Commonwealth for the customary two years, and so the next Heads of Government Conference — probably the last to be attended by the Queen — will take place in London in April. At the same time, Britain is leaving the European Union. So it would seem that circumstances combine to favour a push by the British government to make the Commonwealth work much more actively in our favour. Being a Brexiteer, I am tempted by this idea; but in fact I fear it could all go horribly wrong.

A reader writes: ‘In my last letter, I called you a numbskull. However I should have qualified this with “sometimes you are a numbskull”.’ I must apologise for an example of my sometimes-numbskullery in this column last week when I asserted that Joe Chamberlain had opposed votes for women in Parliament in 1917. This would have been impossible, as he had been dead three years. I saw the ‘Rt Hon. J.A. Chamberlain’ in Hansard’s division lists and lazily failed to check. J.A. was, in fact, Joe’s son, Austen.

‘Dignity lost half its value yesterday’ began a news story in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph. As I read on, it turned out that Dignity is a large firm of undertakers, but I had momentarily taken these opening words as a general statement about our times. As such, they seem well supported by the facts. As I walked across Horse Guards one day last week, everything seemed eerily quiet. No one was about, and the only object I could see was a sleek limousine parked where one is not allowed to park, facing Downing Street. As I approached, I could read its number-plate, which said ‘1 VEN’. Was this the beginning of the long-awaited Corbyn coup, backed by fraternal aid from Nicolás Maduro?

Gavin Stamp, who died just before the year’s end, will be mourned by many Spectator readers. For years, particularly in the 1980s, he was the paper’s main voice on architectural questions, notably as they affected the public space. His voice, both angry and compassionate, would be raised whenever he thought someone in authority — in church, state, local government, big business — was damaging what belonged to the people. He was very important at changing official attitudes imbued with fag-end modernism. No one expounded better the conception of a building’s public purpose, so to hear him talk about, say, Lutyens’s Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval, was revelatory.