Matthew Parris

The recent 25th anniversary of 9/11 reminded me of a detail from that time. A short while after that terrible day, a memorial service was held at St Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Tony and Cherie Blair attended, and in his address Mr Blair quoted the final paragraph of Thornton Wilder’s small jewel of a novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Here, one of Wilder’s characters is remembering the five people who at the beginning of the story plunged to their deaths when a rope suspension bridge over a canyon in Peru snapped. She reflects that people still living remember them, but before long these people too will be dead.

By my bed at home is a little shelf on which I put useful things for the morning. Coins, keys, my smartphone, some eardrops and… I looked at it, and it looked back at me. ‘You won’t be needing me any more,’ it seemed to say, ‘probably ever again in your life.’ I confess a tear pricked my eyes. It was true. My BBC pass, on its blue lanyard, is often beside my bed, ready for when I go straight from Derbyshire to the BBC studios in New Broadcasting House near Oxford Circus. Some of my most memorable programmes have celebrated a life most listeners won’t have heard of How many times have I walked from the Tube station, up Upper Regent Street, past the ‘pepper pot’ church, John Nash’s All Souls at Langham Place, and in through those BBC revolving doors.

It’s now 24 years since I started writing about the urgent need to reform or quit the asylum provisions of conventions to which Britain is party. My Times column in June 2002 was headlined ‘This foolish Convention on refugees should be scrapped’. My argument was simple. The 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (the lodestone of the application of the European Convention on Human Rights to the problem) was designed for a very different era. The second world war had redrawn our continental map and a principled framework was needed to rescue beached groups at risk.

There can be few foreign cities where the Spectator, Times and Telegraph are more widely read than Cape Town. In a queue where I waited before coming home this week, readers volunteered to me – a columnist whom they recognised – their thoughts about these journals, their contents and their columnists. I love Cape Town but it’s not Africa. Along with Nairobi it’s perhaps the African city where white English people could now most easily imagine settling or retiring; but, though visits are always pleasant, I can never quite escape a nagging feeling that something’s not quite right about this lively, wealthy, cultured city in its breathtaking setting – and I’m not just talking about the appalling black slums you pass as you drive to or from the airport.

Winston Churchill had a name for it. ‘Happy thoughts’ was his description of policy proposals that gave the proposer a warm feeling but were unfeasible, unaffordable or for other reasons no more than desiderata. Our new prime minister offers a master-class in this method of spreading happiness. And foremost among Andy Burnham’s now almost daily exercise in sharing his desiderata are his suggestions – surely too vague to be proposals – for a new system of universal social care for the elderly, free at the point of use. To the extent that the idea has any discernible shape at all, it seems that a sister-body to the National Health Service might be set up to meet and administer this massive new entitlement.

What has been remarkable about Henry Nowak’s case was not the story itself, tragic though it is, but the potency of it to spark public anxiety. The anxiety is born of an in-built and nascent popular resistance to the idea that certain groups, the victims of unconscious bias, need special consideration in order to counteract that potential disadvantage. The expression ‘two-tier’ has in the Nowak case been applied to policing, but the principle is more general, and lies behind (for instance) campaigns to nudge public attitudes (and sometimes public policy) towards the disabled, older jobseekers, plus a ‘group’ which in fact comprises half of us: women. You can call it positive discrimination.

The BBC’s tracking-down of Kardo Ranya as a people-smuggling mastermind is a triumph of investigative journalism. But anyone who thinks this will seriously help ‘smash the gangs’ is deluded. As the drugs trade illustrates, where there is demand there will be supply. What’s to be done? Imagine you were the party leader of a mainstream British political party. Daydreaming, you see a vision – pouffe! A bang and a flash, and there stands the Fairy Queen herself. ‘What, oh party leader,’ she demands, ‘is your heart’s desire?’ Your reply is unhesitating but – you suppose – hopeless. ‘A winning strategy for the next general election,’ you wail. ‘I ask only for that.

Can there be any thinking person who has passed a lorry filled with live animals peering out through the slats on their way to slaughter, without a momentary shudder? How many of us would take an opportunity to inspect what happens there? Be honest: you recoil from the thought. ‘Slaughterhouse’. So unpleasant we frenchify it as ‘abattoir’. Hunting leaves me cold yet has an honesty about it: you see and choose your prey, and kill it yourself: morally a million miles from the systematic industrial slaughter of creatures we never look in the eye, couldn’t bear to see killed, and so turn away, pay others to do the killing, and deny our own agency. There are things we’d rather not think about. Take note of them. They’re the first signs of rejection.

A friend met Mary Wilson on the Isles of Scilly, where she and her husband, Harold, had a home. She confided in him that Harold, now in the grip of senile dementia, was slipping away from her; and she felt the lonelier because in the eyes of the world his achievements as prime minister were slipping away as well. My friend rehearsed with her the list: the Open University, etc. Then he added this: there is a kind of achievement in high office which by its very nature is unlikely to burn brightly in the world’s imagination after a leader has gone, but is no less luminous for being forgotten. I mean (he said) declining to do something foolish. On behalf of our country (he said), your husband politely declined Washington’s invitation to join the Vietnam war.