The Spectator's Notes

Last week our local hunt met at a subscriber’s farm. Because it was a weekday, the mounted field was small — half a dozen or so. As soon as they moved off, they were pursued by 31 masked men, many of them carrying fence posts. When three of the field rode up to them to tell them to leave the private land, some raised the posts above their heads, two-handed, and tried to bring them down with full force on a horse’s face. The rider, a woman aged 60, turned so that she, not her horse, took the force of the blows, and the happy side-effect was that the horse floored one of the gang with both hooves. The main body of the antis then caught up with a 30-year-old farmer’s son on a quad bike.

Tory criticism of David Cameron has begun. Robin Harris gives the best articulation so far of the case against the new leader in the latest issue of Prospect. This attack was inevitable, and some of it is correct. It is wrong, for example, to disparage grammar schools — and this was a mistake which no non-public-school-educated Conservative would have made. But the critics still have not understood the premise on which Mr Cameron’s actions are based. They work on the assumption that the Conservative party has a secure place in the political landscape. It has only to achieve the right policies, therefore, and it will win the election.

The best thing would have been for all the British papers to have published all the cartoons of Mohammed that appeared in Jyllands-Posten. As well as collectively asserting the right of freedom of speech, this action would have given readers the chance to see what is actually being discussed. The context, satirised in many of the cartoons themselves, is the very point over which all the rioting has taken place — the danger of provoking anger by drawing the Prophet. One of the pictures shows the cartoonist hunched over his drawing board, nervously shielding his picture from the eyes of menacing, bearded phantoms. Although the cartoons differ quite strongly from each other, there is a shared tone, one of student jokiness and of tail-tweaking.

In their New Year newspaper advertisement in the Sunday Telegraph, the Conservatives say, ‘The right test for our policies is how they help the least well-off in society, not the rich.’ That is a good approach, but will it be invariably applied? For example, the clearest way that the rich are privileged in modern Britain is not through the tax system, which even now penalises them more than the poor, but through the planning acts. Because it is extremely hard to build new houses anywhere, particularly in beautiful places, the price of existing houses rises all the time, particularly the price of large and beautiful houses.

One of the basic divisions in human character is between those who expect the imminent end of the world and those who don’t. This can take a religious form, but in modern times it often appears in other guises. In the early 1980s, the apocalyptists feared nuclear war. Martin Amis wrote that the idea of it made him feel sick, as if that were a knock-down argument against the Bomb. Today, when the danger from the Bomb is actually much greater because Pakistan has it, North Korea more or less has it and Iran is getting it, the millennial fear of it has not revived in the West, perhaps because the people most neurotic on the subject tend to be those with an obsessive suspicion of their own civilisation. The possible return of nuclear power will bring back their fear.

After a week in Florence, astonished all over again by the unsurpassed beauty of its painting and architecture from 1350–1550, I wonder about the odd mixture of features which characterises a high civilisation. This includes: 1. A respect for what appears to be ‘useless’. Greek was barely known in the city until a teacher called Manuel Chrysoloras arrived at the university in the late 14th century, and even Latin was not commonplace. Someone somehow decided that learning what appeared to be dead would make people more alive. High learning was an innate good. This appears not to fit with ... 2. Vulgarity. The unbelievable effusion of artistic display in Florence at that period was, among other things, a colossal form of showing off.

The Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill, currently before Parliament, is often discussed in terms of absolute morality. It can never be right to take a life, says one side. The right to choose extends to the right to choose to die, says the other. I wish more attention focused on a prudential argument about an underlying tendency of human nature. People have a very strong desire for the old to hurry up and die. Sometimes this is straightforward greed for their money and possessions; sometimes the Darwinian impatience of the young to get more power and destroy what is unproductive; sometimes our selfish, though natural, dislike of caring for the decrepit.

Blackpool ‘With his designer wife, his two children (there is a third on the way) and his Notting Hill home, Mr Cameron does not look like a traditional Tory,’ I read in the papers. In what sense is this not a traditional Tory set of attributes? True, most Tories do not have designer wives — either in the sense of ‘designer t-shirt’ or in the sense meant here, that Mrs Cameron is a designer (of handbags) — but it is perfectly normal for them to have two children with a third on the way and, if they are rich, to have a house in Notting Hill. The thought behind sentences such as that quoted is that Mr Cameron is the candidate for change and therefore, as night follows day, cannot be a traditional Tory.

Even in successful parliamentary democracies there comes a time when no political party is confronting the questions which matter most, and so the voter feels cheated. The worst time for this in Britain was the 1930s. Conservative appeasement seemed more and more inadequate, but the Labour party, then in pacifist mood, did not offer a convincing alternative. It is similar today, only the other way round in party terms. The biggest problem facing the country is Islamist terrorism, not so much because of the security threat (grave though that is), but because of the cultural and political war that is behind it. An effort is being made, like the effort once made by communists, to undermine our Western, plural, free, semi-Christian way of life.

When a disaster or a war happens, very large estimates of the number of dead quickly emerge in the media. These tend to be propagated by two groups — those seeking money to deal with the problem, and those wanting to blame somebody for it. Thus, on 11 September 2001, some early estimates spoke of up to 40,000 dead, and even the more serious ones referred to 5,000. The actual figure was about 2,800. In Iraq a report in the Lancet, using an extraordinary method of extrapolation from a tiny sample, came up with the figure of 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians; yet it seems that the true figure, though bad enough, is a small fraction of that. Now we have the effects of Katrina. As soon as I read last week’s press figure of 10,000 dead, I did not believe it.

At the weekend, I was in Frederick the Great’s palace at Potsdam, attending a conference inspired by the indefatigable George Weidenfeld. As the elections approach, excitement is beginning to mount that Germany might be run by a woman for the first time. Angela Merkel must be irritated by the comparisons with Mrs Thatcher, because they disadvantage her both with people who hate the Iron Lady and with those who love her. Mrs Merkel is divorced, consensual, down-played, not very smartly dressed. But the coming of a woman on the public scene is always interesting because it still provokes reactions which are odder than the people who have them realise.