The Spectator's Notes

‘Paul Johnson has killed Gordon Brown.’ This news was brought recently to Tessa Jowell, Anji Hunter, Margaret Jay and other Labour luminaries gathered in the Sabine hills near Rome. Shocked, they reached for their BlackBerries to find out more and make arrangements to fly home. Luckily, matters were quickly explained. After Mr Brown’s failure to call an election last October, Carla Powell, host of the above, named her pet rabbit after him. She possesses eight dogs, including a large, amiable stray called Tony Blair. Tony Blair never dared molest Gordon Brown. But six of Carla’s dogs are dachshunds, and the fiercest she named Paul Johnson, after this magazine’s distinguished columnist.

Outside the Joint Support Unit HQ here stands a cross rising from a mound of cobbles. On each of the four sides of the mound is set a brass plate for the names of those British soldiers who have died in Afghanistan. The second of the four plates is almost full. At the precise moment that we walk past it, the Union flag is being adjusted to half-mast — the 96th man has just died, killed by a mine. The CO has told us that the camp will take from seven to ten years to complete. So, at the present rate of death, by then the memorial will need at least eight plates — for which there is no room. Although the camp is well organised and neat, the place is unutterably bleak. The landscape has almost no features at all. ‘The lone and level sands stretch far away.

When it was announced in 1999 that Cherie Blair was pregnant, the controversy about the proposed hunting ban was at its height. I discussed the pregnancy at a hunt tea with the terrier-man. ‘It won’t be a baby,’ he predicted sullenly, ‘It’ll be a two-headed calf.’ Actually, it was dear little Leo. Now, in the extracts from her forthcoming memoirs, Mrs Blair explains the circumstances of his conception. In the previous year, when she and Tony had stayed at Balmoral, ‘I had been extremely disconcerted to discover that everything of mine had been unpacked. Not only my clothes, but the entire contents of my distinctly ancient toilet bag with its range of unmentionables.

The growing power of Islam in Britain has forced the British public to learn more about its component parts — Sunnis and Shiites, Deobandis and Barelwis, and so on. By the same token, I feel it is time for a more thorough understanding of Etonians as they start their reconquista of our country. They divide into two groups — Collegers and Oppidans. At any one time, there are only 70 Collegers and more than 1,200 Oppidans, but Collegers are scholars and represent the original purpose of the foundation, so they have an importance beyond their numbers. Collegers tend to live off their wits, Oppidans off their inheritance. Oppidans are more relaxed and confident, Collegers more twitchy and more original.

The opinions of the Sun newspaper are not noted for nuance, so it has been interesting to follow its unusually careful choice of words about the Olympic torch on its way to China. On Monday, under the headline ‘Freedom Wins’, the leading article called the fact that the torch managed, though with difficulty, to continue its relay through London ‘a triumph for democracy’. It claimed that the British government was speaking out for human rights in China and Tibet, and ran a line presumably planted by the government about how Mr Brown would meet the Dalai Lama next month. It declared that the torch stands for ‘peace, friendship and unity’.

For some weeks, I was thinking of writing against the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, but despair crept over me. What is the point, I asked myself, when opinion seems to have moved so decisively against the idea that a human being is an inviolable entity? Nothing will stop this Bill, I thought. Now it turns out that I may be wrong. In the funny way British opinion has of noticing something only when it is almost too late, people are suddenly worried that the human and animal could be commingled, created and then destroyed by scientists. And their worry has coincided with the political weakness of the government. Hence Gordon Brown’s ‘climb-down’ about whipping the vote. But is it, in fact, a climb-down?

The battle over the evaded referendum on the Lisbon treaty seems to be following the pattern of all European arguments in this country. The pro-integrationists have used the favourite tactic of claiming that it is all a fuss about nothing. The treaty, they say, is technical, too boring to be worth discussing (although also, mysteriously, essential to pass), let alone asking the people to vote on. This has encouraged large parts of the media to ignore it. At the time of writing, it looks as if, in terms of parliamentary arithmetic, the tactic has worked, with the added bonus of making the new Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, appear foolish. But the Eurosceptics have won the battle of public opinion.

This is what Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England says: ‘That individual members should not be called to account for their behaviour in Parliament, or for words there spoken, by any authority external to the house in which the offence was given, seems to be the essential safeguard of freedom of debate. It was the boon guaranteed by the king to the Speaker when he accepted him, under the general term, privilege.’ This is still the case, but people don’t understand it any more. They keep thinking that some external authority should control MPs. They do not realise that, if this happened, they would be taking away their own power, which resides in the men and women they have elected, and giving it to unelected people.

The United Nations declared last week that, for the first time in human history, more people in the world live in the town than in the country. If true, this feels momentous, though it is not, obviously, sudden. The imagination of mankind has been shaped by rural life more than by anything else, but this has been fading for 200 years in the West, and now is fading almost everywhere. What are its effects? A crisis for the great religions, whose language of elemental truth assumes an understanding of what it is to be a good shepherd, to sow and reap, to have murrains of cattle and crops that fail. But also, one would hope, a deeper acceptance that the life of the city is what we all have to work on if society is to prosper.

Entering my name in the visitors’ book at the British Embassy in Paris last week, I saw, a couple of lines above, the signature ‘Tony Blair’. The ex-leader is in France a lot just now. Tony is very fond of President Nicolas Sarkozy, and vice versa. Tony is making it increasingly clear that he would like to be the new ‘President of Europe’, and Sarko is urging his candidacy. Mr Blair is admired by many in France, and the style of the new President owes a good deal to the man who invented New Labour. Sarkozy came in promising ‘La rupture’ — the break with the stuffy and sclerotic politics of the last quarter century. As with Blair, part of this break is a call for reform, and part of it is a matter of image.

Derek Conway maintains his position. ‘I still believe I have done nothing wrong,’ he told the Mail on Sunday. To understand why he could possibly think that, one has to dig deeper into British class feeling. In wanting to become a Conservative MP, Mr Conway, a working-class boy from Gateshead, seems to have believed not only that he could serve his country, but that he would become posher. He exclaims that ‘An MP is paid less than a sous-chef in the Commons’, as if this were a self-evident absurdity. He says everything would be fine if only MPs were given ‘the salary for the job’, which he thinks would be between £80,000 and £100,000.