The Spectator's Notes

Last year, we stopped sending Christmas cards. We are not sending them this year either. I still feel guilty about it: friends take the trouble to send such nice ones. Part of the problem — as well as laziness — is technology. Emails make one extremely conscious of the number of separate operations required by ‘snail mail’. You need the card (whose choice is also a complicated matter), the envelope, the addresses, the stamp, the pen, the post box, and the energy to write your name hundreds of times. This all seemed worthwhile when one had confidence in the postal system.

Kenneth Clarke’s reform of prisons is an example of the target culture which the coalition says it wants to stop. Kenneth Clarke’s reform of prisons is an example of the target culture which the coalition says it wants to stop. His target is to reduce the prison population by 3,000 by 2015. Since the projected increase in the population (absent the new policy) is somewhere between 2,000 and 7,000, this will be a very hard target to hit. It is therefore almost inevitable that people will be kept out of or released from prison for bad reasons. As soon as the public sense this, they will lose confidence in the policy.

Quite possibly the government is right. Perhaps it is impossible to win a case against the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights that prisoners must be given the vote. Perhaps it was impossible last week to prevent an increase in the EU budget. Perhaps one can never get what one wants from the European institutions. But if so, isn’t it — I speak in the mild tone of one schooled not to ‘bang on about Europe’ — a bit of a problem? Television reports of the service of blessing for a tourist couple in the Maldives, which was actually, unknown to the couple, a stream of insults, deliberately avoided the nub of the story.

There was dismay in Whitehall at the way decisions on the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) were left until the very last moment. But those who were at Oxford with David Cameron explain that this is his preferred method. He collects information and views for as long as he possibly can, or a bit longer. Then he decides. They call it ‘government by essay crisis’. The result looks awful, because there seems to be so little relation between the National Security Strategy, which sets out and calibrates the threats, and the Review, which cuts. We are in the weird position of buying aircraft carriers because of the last government’s crazy contracts, while not really intending to buy the aircraft which they are supposed to carry.

The idea that those who can should pay for their university education has taken more than a quarter of a century to become full government policy. Even now, in the week in which Lord Browne reports, people hate it. It is the first issue that I can remember where I came up against the ability of the well-off to defend themselves. In 1984, Sir Keith Joseph, then Secretary of State for Education, sprang the idea that parental contributions to their children’s university fees should increase, with the better-off paying more than the poorer. I was in my first few months of editing The Spectator, and the paper argued that this was a reasonable idea which should lead, in time, to universities being more independent of government.

Once upon a time, it was the easiest thing on earth to read what the press calls ‘the mood of conference’. Birmingham Once upon a time, it was the easiest thing on earth to read what the press calls ‘the mood of conference’. The Conservative party was a great tribe, authentically representing large swaths of British life. It was not very political, so on the rare occasions when it expressed real anxiety about something, you could tell it was serious. Political parties of this sort no longer exist and cannot be revived. Most people have better things to do. Party politics has undergone ‘producer capture’.

It is a convention of modern politics that cuts in public spending must be made sorrowfully. Etiquette seems to demand that phrases like ‘unpleasant task’ and ‘sharing the pain’ be used. Just before writing this, I heard Francis Maude on the Today programme deploying such terms with studious moderation. But one notices that most top-quality politicians, including Mr Maude, actually take some professional pleasure in the work. They are right to do so. It should be an absolute condition of taking money from the public through taxation that the person taking it minds wasting it. It is an absolute certainty, given the amounts of money taken, that huge amounts will be wasted. In the Gordon Brown years, it was wasted more than ever before.

When I asked him whether we needed any waterproofs for our visit to Afghanistan, our leader, Sandy Gall, was firm. No need whatever, he said. But when we reach Bamiyan on a UN plane early in the morning, we look down from the cliff above the town and see our hotel cut off by flood. A lorry has capsized in the torrents, and men with their salwars hoisted high are wading ineffectually about. Sandy’s solution is to book ten donkeys to carry us across later, and meanwhile breakfast in the rather broken-down hotel where, pro tem, we find ourselves. From where we sit, we can survey the niches in which, until the Taleban bombarded them to smithereens, stood the two colossal Buddhas — one from the fifth and the other from the third century — which were wonders of the world.

This column may not, I admit, have praised the Foreign Office at all times, so it is pleased to reveal an admirable FCO operation which has been going on, quietly and successfully, since early last year. In 2008, it became clear — many would say it was clear much, much earlier — that the plight of British citizens in Zimbabwe was desperate. Hyperinflation, and the refusal of Robert Mugabe’s government to honour their pensions, had made many destitute. In February 2009, the British government set up a resettlement scheme for British citizens over 70 who had right of abode here. If they agreed to settle permanently in the United Kingdom, they were flown to Gatwick and then placed in care homes and sheltered accommodation across the country.

Hillsborough, Co. Down The castle here, which, despite its name, is really a handsome Georgian house, has seen some changes. It was built for the Marquises of Downshire, who laid out the elegant, almost French village, but sold up at Partition in 1922. Then it became the residence of the Governors of Northern Ireland. Since direct rule began, each secretary of state for Northern Ireland has lived here. ‘Saint’ Mo Mowlam was one, well known for throwing her wig at the staff and shouting, when offered excellent local produce, ‘Go out and get me a f***ing pizza!’ Peter Mandelson lived here too. In his memoirs, he tut-tuts about Mowlam and her drunken guests ‘bouncing up and down on the Queen’s imposing bed’.