Alexander Chancellor

Eight years ago I was in Rome for The Spectator to write a piece about the election of a new pope after the death of John-Paul II. Within two days, and after only four ballots, some wispy white smoke emerged from the little chimney on the roof of the Sistine chapel. The College of Cardinals had made its decision and chosen the German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to be the 265th occupant of the throne of St Peter. He was already 78 years old and said to be longing for speedy retirement from his taxing job as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the oldest of the great Vatican departments (once popularly known as the Holy Office or the Inquisition).

I am pleased to report that my eight ducks have survived the great chill, when their pond was frozen over; for during all that time no fox ever ventured across the ice to kill them. And now that the ice has melted they are looking much more frolicsome and less forlorn. But strange things have been going on among my chickens. All eight of them, too, are alive and well (maybe all foxes now live in towns), but their laying habits have become very eccentric. Finding eggs never ceases to be exciting, even for someone of my advanced age, but I got a nasty shock the other day when I picked up one egg to find that it was all soft and squidgy — no shell, just membrane. I put it down in horror and disgust.

One ‘bridge too far’ should have been enough, but it looks to me as if Michael Gove has already embarked on a second one with his new plan to tackle obesity in schools. Despite having been forced to drop his cherished proposal for an ‘English baccalaureate’, the Education Secretary is reported to be preparing to tell young schoolchildren what they are allowed to eat and what they aren’t, and to compel them to take lessons in cookery. The resistance, I predict, will be at least as formidable as that of the teachers and civil servants who sank the baccalaureate project.

This is a big week for gays on both sides of the Atlantic. By the time you read this, the House of Commons will have voted to permit gay marriage, despite an angry revolt by a large number of Tory MPs; and in Texas the Boy Scouts of America may also have voted (less certainly) to lift its ban on ‘open or avowed’ homosexuals joining the youth movement. In both cases, the reforms are being presented as reflecting popular enthusiasm for ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’ and tolerance of diversity (little evidence though there may be of this) while at the same time showing tolerance of people lacking such enlightenment.

I went to a funeral last Saturday, a depressingly frequent occurrence at my age. But it was an exceptional funeral, not only because of its gloriously peaceful rural setting amid the still snow-flecked hills of north-west Hampshire, or because of the beauty of the service that took place in the tiny village of Tangley’s charming Victorian church. It was exceptional because the person there being laid to rest in a wicker coffin was himself exceptional, one Peter Thomas Staheyeff Carson. I became a good friend of Peter’s more than 50 years ago, when we were both undergraduates at Cambridge — he at Trinity College and I at Trinity Hall next door.

I am writing on what is known as Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year. Or so the Daily Mail tells me. The newspaper claims that Blue Monday was invented by a psychologist called Cliff Arnall, who seven years ago identified the third Monday in January as the day on which people are at their gloomiest. ‘He came up with a scientific formula based on the length of time until next Christmas, holiday debt, and the likelihood of giving up New Year resolutions,’ it says. The remoteness of next Christmas might seem, on the contrary, to be something to cheer about; and failure to keep New Year resolutions could have been easily avoided by following my example and not making any, as could ‘holiday debt’ by following the example of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge.

The advent of freezing weather in Northamptonshire is making me worry about my ducks. I have eight of them of four different breeds now sitting on the base of a stone sculpture in the middle of my ornamental pond, some of them with their heads tucked under their wings, as if hiding from the world, and others staring disconsolately across the great stretch of ice surrounding them. The pond normally protects them against foxes, because foxes don’t swim; but as soon as it is covered with ice, the foxes can walk across it and massacre the entire flock if they feel like it. A man at the local garage told me that exactly this had happened to his ducks one winter. The booklet I bought on duck ‘management’ warns of another danger faced by ducks when their pond gets iced over.

We have now entered the New Year in which we know that everybody, with the exception of those who have not yet been born (like our future king or queen), will be one year older by the end of it. I have already passed that milestone this week, which means that I will be 73 for the rest of the year and will only achieve 74 in the fateful year of Scotland’s vote on independence. Still, 73 is quite old enough. It is an age at which it has become difficult to look far into the future with great confidence and one begins to narrow one’s horizons a little. There are things now that I am starting to rule out — going to China, for example, or learning to play Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 on the piano. On the other hand, I have a sporting chance of living for a while longer.

At the time of writing, a few days after the school massacre in Connecticut, the National Rifle Association remains creepily silent. This normally loud-mouthed, blustering organisation has made no comment on the killings and has even taken down the Facebook page on which it was boasting at the time of having 1.7 million ‘likes’, meaning people who approve of the NRA. Never has it been so self-effacing in response to a gun rampage of this kind. It normally goes straight on the offensive, reiterating for the umpteenth time that guns don’t kill people, people do, and that the right to bear arms is the inalienable constitutional right of every American.

I have a daughter called Freya, aged seven, who sometimes makes suggestions for this column but complains that I never take any notice of them. In particular, she is cross with me for never mentioning her dog Lena, a large mongrel that looks a bit like a black curly-haired Alsatian but has on the other hand the sweetest of temperaments. Given this is Christmas, I thought I would please Freya by finally doing so. But I should add that this is not the only reason, for Lena is a dog worth celebrating. Lena comes originally from Umbria in Italy, where Freya once used to spend holidays with her mother in a rented farmhouse. She appeared at the house one day, starving, emaciated and about to give birth to a litter of puppies.

I was sad to read that Larry Hagman had died. As J.R. Ewing, the conniving Texas oilman in Dallas, he may have been ‘an overstuffed Iago in a Stetson hat’, but he was curiously lovable in a way that no Iago ever is. This could be because he was rather lovable in real life and this niceness may have seeped through into the evil television character to temper its hatefulness. Unusually for a Hollywood star, he remained happily married to the same woman for 50 years; and even more unusually, he did so despite being at various times a very heavy drinker, smoker and drug-taker.

The first thing that strikes you when you arrive for an investiture at Buckingham Palace is how polite the police are. In contrast to their colleagues in other grimmer branches of law enforcement, they are friendly, jokey, and brimming with goodwill. Even the security men who search your car for explosives before you drive through the palace gate are jovial and easy-going. You might think that herding recipients of honours into Buckingham Palace might be exactly the kind of constabulary duty W.S. Gilbert had in mind when he decided that a policeman’s lot was not a happy one, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen policemen looking more cheerful.

The Daily Mail last week risked alienating its millions of women readers (whom I assume from its normal priorities to be interested only in health, beauty and plastic surgery) by running pages of indigestible stuff about a conspiracy to curb the freedoms of the British press. It was perhaps a selfless initiative in the public interest, disclosing things that the Mail felt its readers ought to know even if they probably didn’t give a fig about them. The burden of its message was that a network of ‘elitist liberals’ from the Blair era had been exerting undue influence on the Leveson inquiry to get it to recommend statutory regulation of the British press.

The BBC and the Church of England are two rather similar institutions, both designed for the comfort and consolation of modest, well-meaning Englishmen who don’t like to be shaken about or threatened by anything disagreeable or jarring. The BBC is in trouble because it allowed a major current affairs programme, Newsnight, wrongly to accuse a ‘leading Conservative politician’ of monstrous sex crimes against children without even the most basic of traditional journalistic checks. In the midst of this crisis came the appointment of a new Archbishop of Canterbury, in the person of Justin Welby, the Bishop of Durham. Welby seems like a very decent fellow, but could he nevertheless constitute a threat to the essential character of the Church of England?

I write before knowing the results of the American presidential election, but I am still wondering whether Barack Obama might have done better if he hadn’t given up smoking. That may sound silly when everyone knows that America is a country full of anti-smoking fanatics where even hardened criminals migrate humbly from the bars to the sidewalks of New York to have a cigarette. I even remember reading somewhere during the 2008 election campaign that Obama’s smoking habit would be more of an impediment to his winning than the colour of his skin.

Edward Heath may have been one of the most unsuccessful prime ministers in British history, having presided during his four-year term (1970–1974) over shortages, power cuts, a three-day week and hyperinflation, with nothing much to boast about except getting Britain into the European Common Market (admittedly an historic achievement); but this did not prevent him being a power-crazed egotist of astonishing conceit. He may have been of modest social origins, the son of a maid and of a builder in Broadstairs, Kent, but he was convinced nevertheless of his own superiority to practically everybody and of his pre-ordained destiny to be an unchallenged leader.

One of the ways by which I pay for the maintenance of my two Inigo Jones pavilions at Stoke Park in Northamptonshire is to let one of them out for wedding receptions. These buildings, originally a chapel and a library,  were once attached by colonnades to a large country house; but this burnt down in the 1880s, leaving only the pavilions and the colonnades still standing. They had fallen into an advanced state of dilapidation when my late uncle Robin bought and restored them in the 1950s. I suppose that, if I didn’t need the money, I wouldn’t hold these events here, for they always involve dancing to loud pop music that reaches a deafening climax just before closing time at midnight.

I have just got back from a few days in Provence, staying with a friend in her delightful house in a hilltop village north of Avignon, where in-between eating and drinking, visiting markets, and going for walks in the autumn sun, I read Peter Paterson’s life of Lord George-Brown, who was Harold Wilson’s mercurial foreign secretary for a brief period in the 1960s. Peter Paterson was a good friend of mine who died last year; but while I had owned his book since it was published in 1993, I had to my shame never actually read it; so thinking it was about time that I did, I took it with me to France. It has been a splendid reminder of those exciting days when Britain had probably the rudest foreign secretary in its history.