The Spectator's Notes

It is not possible to speak of a terrorist incident as being a good thing, but if it were, these latest would qualify. First, no innocent person was killed in London or Glasgow. Second, information was immediately collected by the authorities, thanks to the would-be killers’ bungling, and more will follow. Often when terrorists are captured they do not break under interrogation because they have been trained as ‘soldiers’. But I gather from experts that failed suicide bombers are in a different category. They were trained only to die, and so they have not been trained to live. Having survived, they start blabbing. There is good reason to hope that this will happen in the case of the singed fanatics in Glasgow (at least the one who is not badly injured).

Tyranny is most successful when most extreme. Because we all know that North Korea is absolutely foul, we do remarkably little about it. The new report into mass killings, torture and arbitrary imprisonment there by Christian Solidarity Worldwide (North Korea: A Case to Answer) is amazing not only for the horror of what it reveals, but for the fact that no such work has been produced before. It could be that as many as a million people have been killed by the father-to-son dictatorship. The case for international investigation is overwhelming, yet, until now, so little has been done. On Tuesday, I chaired the press conference in London to launch the report.

Anyone who believes British Muslim hostility to the war in Iraq is the big motivator of terrorism should read the fascinating cover piece by Shiv Malik in the latest edition of Prospect. Investigating the background of the 7 July London bombings for a television drama (which the BBC, of course, eventually rejected as ‘anti-Muslim’), Malik found how Wahhabist Islamism did its work. Ten years ago, it took hold of the young Mohammad Sidique Khan. It was he who eventually led the suicide plot. What emerges from Malik’s inquiry is that Islamism, far from being a ‘mediaeval’ doctrine, as it is often described in the West, can be seen by its adherents as enticingly modern. One of the great issues among Pakistani immigrants here is whom they may marry.

It is highly likely that Tony Blair will become a Roman Catholic after he leaves office. He regularly attends a Catholic Mass rather than Anglican services — nowadays, because of security problems, usually in No. 10 Downing Street or at Chequers. It seems logical to him that he should follow the religion of the rest of his family. What has held him back, apparently, is not doubts, but his job. Although conversion is a personal, not a political decision, Mr Blair could not have made it as Prime Minister without having to face hostility which would have spilt into politics. As a Catholic convert myself, I find that people have funny ideas about what it involves. They think, despite explicit teaching to the contrary, that one is forced to hold that all non-believers are damned.

Tony Blair gives a date for his departure. Many say that he would have been able to stay if he had not supported the war in Iraq. But what would have happened in British politics if he had opposed the war? He would for the first time have been the prisoner of the Left. The same voices in his party who ensured electoral humiliation with their support for unilateral nuclear disarmament in the Eighties would, along with the Euro-fanatics, have captured him. The Conservatives, given an opportunity at last, would have argued that, in the end, Labour can never be trusted to maintain good relations with our most important ally. The main international blame for the fracture between America and Europe would have fallen on Mr Blair, and the war would still have taken place.

‘A conflict of interest’ is now almost the worst thing known to modern theories of governance. It is considered disgraceful, for example, that the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, who is a government minister and was made a peer by Tony Blair, will be the man who decides whether or not there should be prosecutions in the ‘cash-for-peerages’ affair. But it is a strange fact that attempts to sort out such conflicts can make matters worse. Who can doubt, for example, that the Church of England is so scrupulously moderate because it knows that its position as the established Church conflicts with modern ideas of freedom of thought, not to mention the divine injunction to take no thought for the morrow?

Hitler said, ‘I know my enemies. I met them at Munich. They are little worms.’ He turned out to be wrong, thank goodness, but the impression that his enemies gave him emboldened him for war. The Iranians must now think that we, the British, are little worms; and on the basis of our conduct in the last ten days, they would be right. They are emboldened too: no sooner had they let our captives go than they proudly announced their membership of the nuclear club. Here are some reasons why the fiasco of the ‘Shatt-al-Arab 15’ is even worse than the critics have said. 1. Comradeship. The Sunday Times quoted one of the captives, Dean Harris, an acting sergeant in the Royal Marines, asking for £70,000: ‘I know Faye has been offered a heck more than that.

From the astonishing film of Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams together you can see at once that it is Paisley who has lost. Birthrights and messes of pottage come to mind. Smart-looking, cool-headed, smug Adams has gained respectability and power, and the chance to unite Ireland under his leadership without having to renounce any of his evil past. What has sagging old Paisley gained? A seat for his wife in the House of Lords and the exquisite discomfort of being called a ‘man of destiny’ by Peter Hain. He has weakened the Union; that is not something he would mind if, in exchange, he became the ruler of Ulster, but this will not happen. The system he will have to operate as First Minister is one in which all decisions will be shared with his hated opponents.

Sir Alistair Graham is presented as one of the heroes of our age. He is the chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which was originally set up by John Major as what he (Mr Major) called ‘an ethical workshop called in to do running repairs’. Now Sir Alistair has lashed out at Tony Blair. ‘The most fundamental thing is that Blair has betrayed himself,’ says Sir Alistair. ‘He set such a high bar for people to judge him and he has fallen well below the standards he set for himself.’ Then he mentions not only cash for honours, but also the Iraq war, postal voting, ‘sofa government’, and ‘undue reliance on spin’.

Every winter morning I take a scuttle down to the cellar, fill it with coal and carry it up to light the fire in my study. The coal-dust clings to my shoes and so, as the carpets testify, I have a carbon footprint. David Cameron wants to make it — and everyone else’s — smaller. He is now reaching the dangerous point when his generalised, benevolent sentiments about the planet start to translate into policies which would load new cost on to individuals. His suggested tax on flying is a political mistake because it will be seen, rightly, as hurting poorer people and those who have to pay with their own money.

When I employed him at the Daily Telegraph, I found John Kampfner, now the editor of the New Statesman, a pleasant and able man. But his recent conduct towards one of his writers deserves a passage in the annals of editorial eccentricity. Nick Cohen, who is a leftwing columnist in the New Statesman, has written a brilliant book called What’s Left (4th Estate). Its essential argument is that large parts of the Left are so disoriented by the death of traditional socialism and so crazed with hatred of Bush and Blair that they ignore the fascism of the Islamists and the sufferings of their comrades on the Left — feminists, gay rights activists, trade unionists, secularists — at their hands.

One must keep repeating that the bicentenary being celebrated this year is of the abolition of the slave trade by Britain. From the amount of breast-beating, you would think that it was 200 years since the trade got going. There is huge concentration on the Atlantic slave trade, which is not surprising since this was the one chiefly pursued by our white British ancestors. I am an interested party in the great reparations debate since some of my maternal ancestors had fortunes dependent on slavery (my sense of guilt is mitigated by the total disappearance of those fortunes), while one of my paternal ancestors, William Smith, was a lieutenant of Wilberforce in the House of Commons. Will these two strands cancel each other out and leave me having to pay nothing?

The Anglican Communion, trying to hold itself together in Dar-es-Salaam, is like the Commonwealth. Indeed, it exists for the same reason — the inheritance of the British Empire. Like the Commonwealth, it began as a white-dominated organisation, and has gradually ceased to be so. The Episcopal Church of the United States stands in relation to the Communion as white South Africa stood to the Commonwealth 50 years ago. Its insistence on pursuing its own obsessive doctrine — in this case, the ordination and marriage of practising homosexuals, in South Africa’s case, apartheid — isolates it from its fellows, particularly its black fellows.

Was it really an ‘own goal’ for 10 Downing Street to invite people to petition it on subjects of interest to them, and then find more than a million people saying that they opposed road pricing? It was information worth knowing. Politicians should not be frightened to look at new ways of getting people to participate in democracy. One reason that fewer people vote now is that voting has become, compared with other forms of choice, so ‘clunking’. A single decision on who should be your MP for four or five years does not feel very empowering.