Interconnect

Multiculturalism is in crisis. By that I don’t just mean that political correctness has ‘gone mad’, as the Daily Mail likes to put it: the British public worked that out long ago, and merely shrugs when it learns (for example) that the Lake District National Park is to abolish its guided walks because they attract insufficient numbers of black people. ‘Political correctness’ is shorthand for the etiquette and working practices of the most influential ideology of our age: multiculturalism, or ‘identity politics’. And that ideology is falling apart. This collapse is not evidence of multiculturalism’s weakening hold on public life.

If you like looking down on your fellow men, take a trip to Gipsy Hill. So transfixed was I, on a recent visit, by its panoramic views over the City, Kent, Sussex and Surrey that I became embroiled in an uncomfortable exchange with a man in a stetson and a bootlace tie who accused me of staring at him as he walked up the hill. Once the domain of smugglers and highwaymen, the area got its name from a gypsy encampment buried deep in the Great North Wood, which stretched from Camberwell to Croydon until the early 19th century. Following the Enclosure Acts, the gypsies were driven out to allow prosperous Victorians to move in.

When they showed on television the cave on the island of Flores where the remains of little people had been found, I felt, I admit, a Yeatsian frisson that the world of politics cannot give. It was not delight at a new branch on the hat-stand of anthropoid evolution, but the thought that in the thick Indonesian rainforest there were (or had been, perhaps as recently as the time when dodos lived) creatures with whom we could converse, but which were not men. The appetite for talking to other creatures is amply exemplified by our often exasperated one-sided conversations: ‘Get off the bloody table, Tigger, there’s a good cat.

Raphael, affirmed Sir Joshua Reynolds, ‘stands in general foremost of the first painters’. In other words, he was the best artist who ever lived. When Reynolds wrote this — in the second half of the 18th century — Raphael’s reputation had remained on that peak for centuries. He was the ideal, the model for students to imitate. He certainly isn’t that any more. The forthcoming exhibition of early Raphael at the National Gallery may cause his popular stock to rise again, but surely not to that extent. Raphael is a prime example of an artist whose renown has slumped; he isn’t unknown but nor is he ever likely to be again the acme of everything that a painter should be.

Each morning, when I opened my eyes, there was another clump of hair on the pillow. Within two weeks, I was two-thirds bald with an absurd black tuft projecting two inches over my forehead. It was radiotherapy, of course, supposedly the only remedy after the surgeon failed to remove every bit of a brain tumour. Yes, it was worrying, but in hindsight it was also a time of high comedy. After three weeks of treatment, I went on holiday to Cornwall. My young children looked a little more appalled each day and my wife Philippa pretended not to notice. After the holiday the treatment went on for another three weeks: a made-to-measure plastic mask bolted my head to the table, and the nurses directed two shafts of coloured light at the same tiny point on my brow.

Next month a group of British MPs will launch impeachment proceedings against Tony Blair. This is a very dramatic and powerful act, rooted deep in British history. Though once a commonplace sanction against abuse of power by the executive, the instrument of impeachment has not been used since 1848, when it was alleged that Lord Palmerston, while foreign minister, had entered into a secret treaty with Russia. Nevertheless, impeachment remains part of parliamentary law, a recourse for desperate times. Many MPs feel certain that the moment critique has now arrived. They remain in a state of despair at the way the Prime Minister systematically misled the House of Commons and the British people over the Iraq war.

To Portcullis House at Westminster, to take part in a Reuters debate on war and journalism. I notice John Reid, the Prime Minister’s most prominent capo regime these days, lurking at the back. His minder tells me that ‘the boss would like a word’ but a division bell saves me from finding out whether I am to sleep with the fishes. John Redwood asks a question founded on the premise that ‘the UK fights too many wars’, and I notice several Tory heads bobbing up and down in the audience. No doubt about it: the Conservatives are completely rethinking their instinctively robust attitude to military intervention.