The Spectator's Notes

Sir Tom Stoppard, who died last week, never wrote a memoir, but he did sort of speak one. Just over ten years ago, he told me that he and his new wife, Sabrina Guinness, had become tenants of an old rectory in Dorset. I asked him if he would therefore speak as guest of honour at the AGM of the Rectory Society, a fan club for existing and former clergy houses which I invented in 2005. The AGM always takes place in a central London church, and in 2015, the year I invited Tom, it was held in the Queen’s Chapel beside St James’s Palace. Beyond expressing a tepid wish that speakers make some small reference to the society and its purposes, I never specify their subject.

About seven years ago, I bought two pairs of pyjamas, one British, the other Chinese. At the time, they seemed of roughly similar quality, the important difference being that the Chinese ones were half the price of the British. Given that they have the same ‘lived experience’, I can make a direct comparison. The British ones, by Peter Christian (‘gentlemen’s outfitters’ accompanied by an image of two hares boxing), show few signs of the passing years. Their reddish colour with green and yellow stripes holds fast. There is very little wear and no tear at all. The Chinese pair (labelled ‘sleepwear’) tells a different story – the drawstring disappeared, the elasticated waist (which the British one wisely eschews) decayed, the blue checks faded, the cotton thinned.

When the BBC denies ‘systemic bias’, it denies the main, the crucial thing exposed by Michael Prescott’s now-famous leaked internal memo. Prescott was not presenting a ragbag of mistakes, but examples from many different areas of subjects where an institutional view prevailed – against Donald Trump, pro-trans, pro-immigration etc, all of them defensible views but none of them following rules of impartiality or accuracy. For this reason, the Prescott material about Israel/Gaza coverage is the most important by a long way, though less expensive for the BBC than its doctoring of Trump’s words.

As others, including Nigel Farage, were quick to point out, Sarah Pochin got it wrong. She uttered words which, shorn of their context (as they obviously would be), made her sound racist. But the almost compulsory use of persons of colour to promote products and services is a bit of a wonder of the world. Modernisers often speak of the need for institutions to ‘look like Britain as it is’ (depressing thought), but this seems not to apply on screen. In the style of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, I offer a definition of the phrase ‘television ads’, as follows: ‘Short filmic fictions about the blissful and virtuous lives of persons of mixed race or with non-white skin.

Poor old Hamas, losing all those dead Jews. The BBC reports that Hamas ‘could not locate the remaining hostages’ bodies’, of which there are 28. One can understand the problem. When you have been starving and torturing so many for so long, you may not necessarily remember where you left them when they died. In the words of the Balliol student who called for it this week, you have ‘put the Zios in the ground’. Why do more? Don’t your critics know there is (or was) a war on?

‘The facts of life are Conservative.’ This sentence is often attributed to Margaret Thatcher, whose centenary falls next week. The exact words are ‘The facts of life invariably do turn out to be Tory’ and were not hers. They appeared in the first major policy document produced under her leadership, ‘The Right Approach’ (1976). The author was probably Chris Patten, the document’s drafter and more of a ‘wordsmith’ – her coinage – than she. (There might even have been a deliberate Patten double-entendre of the sort that always escaped Mrs T since, in those days, the phrase ‘the facts of life’ meant the sex lessons given by embarrassed parents and teachers to children.) The operative phrase in the sentence is ‘turn out to be’.

It amuses me that the two main parties most averse to the idea of honours, monarchy, chivalry etc are led by knights – Labour by Sir Keir Starmer and the Liberal Democrats by Sir Ed Davey. This is entirely fitting, since they accurately reflect the dominant Blob establishment world-view and so were rewarded by being made Sir rather than staying plain Mr Blobby. But I wonder if the title has electoral disadvantages. Some voters must be subliminally more annoyed by Sir Somebody telling them to be radical, make sacrifices, save the planet and not to be racist than they would be by an untitled politician. On the other hand, it looks as though Sir Tony Blair, a Knight of the Garter, may soon be ruling in Gaza, at the orders of the Emperor Donald.

How can the nature sector respond to the genocide in Gaza? These are not my words. They appear in the subject box of an email which has been sent to members of the Wildlife and Countryside Link (WCL), though not, I think, by the WCL itself. It invites recipients to an ‘open forum for discussion and support’ on Zoom on 30 September. It seems that the Mammal Society, which supports pine martens, dormice etc, is involved. A sane answer to the subject box question would be a) that there is no genocide in Gaza and b) that the ‘nature sector’ has other duties. But the email tries to answer its own question: ‘At first glance the actions of Israel… are issues far outside the purview of any conservation or climate-focused organisation.

Daniel Kruger is a good and thoughtful man, whom I used to employ as a leader writer before he left for the higher calling of improving prisons. His choices in life have always been influenced by his sense of Christian purpose. That is what will have driven him to defect from the Tories to Reform. The trouble is that this sort of pilgrimage can lead to political misjudgments. There was a time, for instance, when Danny supported the leadership bid of Suella Braverman – a woman of blazing sincerity but not a good political navigator. Commentators are saying that Danny’s defection will make career-minded Tory MPs think they have a better future with Reform than with the Conservatives. That may be their calculation, but they should not base it on Danny’s example.

The current ‘Britain is on a knife edge’ mood is understandable. Our discontents are great and Sir Keir Starmer’s government is even more incompetent and divided than we critics expected. But do not forget how the British system works. We are not like France, paralysed because its executive president can, constitutionally, hold out until 2027, even though his governments last only for months. The tired phrase ‘overwhelming majority’ has meaning. Labour can overwhelm all parliamentary opposition. It may find it harder to overwhelm internal opposition, but an early general election remains most unlikely, since MPs do not demand an election if they think they will lose their seats.

A currently fashionable conservatism is militantly against Ukraine and, by more cautious implication, pro-Russia. We who disagree are, I quote Matthew Parris in these pages last week, ‘prey to the illusion that the second world war was a template for future conflict, and Hitler a template for Putin’. Others put it more unkindly, speaking of ‘Ukraine brain’ as a mental affliction among the Cold War generations. One should not project the entire second world war on to now, but some similarities with the 1930s are undeniable.

Successful political leaders hold in their minds some idea of what Mrs Thatcher called ‘Our People’. In this context, I do not mean the whole population of the country they seek to lead, or the core of the party they belong to. I mean that group of people with whose aspirations they most wish to identify. In making that identification, they combine direct self-interest – getting their floating vote – with a wider view about who are most important for the nation’s future prosperity and good order. In the Thatcher era, such people were the famous C2s, first-generation home-buyers, millions who could expect not only to earn but also to own. In Tony Blair’s time, the group was not so different, but a bit softer, as one expects when growth has seemed secure for many years.

Danny Kruger’s brave defence of Christianity in the history of this country, which he recently delivered to an empty House of Commons, has won much praise. His words reminded me of when the same thing happened the other way round. As fourth-century Rome was Christianised by imperial decree, the distinguished senator Symmachus spoke up for the old pagan religion which had been degraded by the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Senate. He expressed his thoughts in the voice of the city herself, thus (Gibbon’s translation): ‘Pity and respect my age, which has hitherto flowed in an uninterrupted course of piety. Since I do not repent, permit me to continue in the practice of my ancient rites. Since I am born free, allow me to enjoy my domestic institutions.

Behind the latest push for recognition of a Palestinian state – even though there is no agreement of what it is that might be recognised – is a sort of impersonation of the story of Israel. Palestinian activists want their own Balfour Declaration. President Macron wants France and Britain to come up with their own Sykes-Picot agreement, but pro-Palestinian. You might think that the clamour would have been shamed into silence by the massacres and hostage-taking committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023. On the contrary, these have somehow empowered the mimicry in wilder and more horrible ways. The genocide, we are now told, is being committed not by Hamas, but by Israel’s response. The ‘concentration camps’ are being set up by Israel in Gaza.

This column comes to you from Auckland Castle, former palace and hunting lodge of the Prince Bishops of Durham. We, the Rectory Society, are here by kind permission of its saviour, Jonathan Ruffer, celebrating our 20th anniversary. Jonathan rescued the castle not from the heathen but from the Church of England. The last Anglican bishop to inhabit it was Justin Welby, in his brief year at Durham before being translated to Canterbury, but it had been run down for many years before that. Bishop Auckland is in one of the poorest parts of England but it did not occur to the Church authorities to use the heritage of this astonishing place to minister to the poor.

There probably never has been a time when a governing party much liked its MPs. If you are on a mission, as governments imagine they are, you are always impatient when your own side raises objections. But it is only recently that governments have seemed positively affronted by the idea that their MPs should have a say. This was encapsulated by Sir Keir Starmer when he dismissed Labour’s backbench revolt over welfare cuts as ‘noises off’. Off what, exactly? Legislators have the sole right to legislate and that includes the right to refuse legislation. Those, like Rachael Maskell, who parade their consciences may be tiresome, but there is no way of governing this country except through parliament (though people like Lord Hermer are striving mightily to alter this).

It was airily pleasant to walk round Parliament Square on Monday morning. I had come up to London to go to parliament and to interview Kemi Badenoch at a Policy Exchange event across the square. Palestine Action had announced a protest march against Donald Trump’s and Israel’s ‘genocide’ for that time. Although the Met had banned it from the area, I had recently witnessed so many ill-contained and threatening protests there – almost all for Palestinian causes – that I fully expected delay, disruption and occasional harassment. This time, however, it turned out that the Met meant business. The protest was well-contained in the designated streets round Trafalgar Square. May this mark the permanent change many of us have long been calling for.

Cardinals elected the new Pope within a fortnight but it will take almost a year to choose our next Archbishop of Canterbury. The beloved Anglican interregnum is intended to ‘take soundings’. These are unproductive if held in an echo chamber. The chairman of the Crown Nominations Commission for the successor to Justin Welby, Lord Evans of Weardale, is an efficient and discreet public servant. But most of the large group of voting members, including both its C of E bishops (York, Norwich), come from the fastest-declining part of the Church, its liberal wing. Thanks to Welby’s reforms, the commission now has no fewer than five members from the wider Anglican communion, only one of whom is from the burgeoning, usually traditionalist African churches (total membership c. 43 million).