Matthew Parris

The decision to release John Worboys has been overturned in a ruling by the High Court, which said that the Parole Board must reconsider its verdict, and also make its decision transparent. In the piece below, which was first published in the Spectator in January, Matthew Parris questions whether parole boards’ decisions should be open to challenge. Here, James Forsyth argues that more transparency is a good thing. Hard cases make bad law. The release on parole of the ‘black cab rapist’, John Worboys, is a hard case. But ministers should not be panicked into throwing open parole board decision--making to public inspection. The police have blundered, the sentence was surely too lenient, and the failure to inform his victims was disgraceful.

As I write, a great gale is blowing in from Lake Turkana. The dry hills on the other side, always faint, have disappeared. Sheets of warm rain lash our tent, rollers crash on to the white sandy shore, huge pelicans struggle against the wind, the flamingos are gone, and fishermen like thin black sticks — Lowryesque — from the Turkana tribe can be seen streaking up the beach ferrying equipment from their now-beached wooden fishing canoe to a clump of doum palms where they’ll shelter. But nobody is cold. The lake feels like a tepid bath when we swim (where humans fish, the Nile crocodiles stay away), while the air temperature has plummeted within hours from about 45˚C (113˚F) to more like a muggy English summer.

Few readerships of any intelligent national magazine will be more alive to the perils and downsides of 21st--century cyber-life than you, fellow Spectator readers. Many of you might share my use of the generalised expression ‘the internet’ for the whole damn thing — while not being quite sure what we’re referring to. Few, on the other hand, will be more likely to show a lively appreciation of community, locality, the sense of belonging and of place that even in this fast-paced and mobile age, our country at its best can still nurture. You might think those two dispositions make comfortable bedfellows.

Every now and then one suddenly misses somebody. I miss Bron, who died 17 years ago last month. There’s an Auberon Waugh-sized hole in British satirical journalism. Listening to the radio last week — it was all about famous women, women in history, women’s suffrage, sexual harassment of women, equal pay for women at the BBC, women this and women that — I felt vaguely irritable. Not that I seriously disagreed with anything being said, or wished to rain on any suffragist’s parade, or have ever been remotely sympathetic to inappropriate male behaviour towards women … no, I’d place myself on the ‘politically correct’ side of the argument on every one of these issues. So why the urge to switch off the Today programme? How can I put this?

This piece first appeared in last week's Spectator.  Britain does not have a housing shortage. We have a problem with the cost not the availability of homes. This can’t be solved by building more houses, because it is not caused by an insufficiency of houses. I’m no economist. My understanding of the dismal science is rudimentary. I may be shot down in flames as an ignoramus. But here goes. Residential property has become a kind of currency, prized more for value than utility; and its role as a financial asset is messing with its ability to perform the function of actually housing people. Straining to increase the supply of housing will no more restrain price than straining to increase gold production would make much difference to the price of gold.

Britain does not have a housing shortage. We have a problem with the cost not the availability of homes. This can’t be solved by building more houses, because it is not caused by an insufficiency of houses. I’m no economist. My understanding of the dismal science is rudimentary. I may be shot down in flames as an ignoramus. But here goes. Residential property has become a kind of currency, prized more for value than utility; and its role as a financial asset is messing with its ability to perform the function of actually housing people. Straining to increase the supply of housing will no more restrain price than straining to increase gold production would make much difference to the price of gold.

Hard cases make bad law. The release on parole of the ‘black cab rapist’, John Worboys, is a hard case. But ministers should not be panicked into throwing open parole board decision--making to public inspection. The police have blundered, the sentence was surely too lenient, and the failure to inform his victims was disgraceful. But it was not upon some careless whim that Parliament barred parole boards from giving reasons, and the new Justice Secretary, David Gauke, should think hard before reversing the interdiction. Much of the furore provoked by the release of this serial attacker of women after ten years in prison really arises not from the parole board’s decision but the original sentence and the flawed prosecution process which helped produce it.

I return often to Cambridge and was there recently. Julian Glover, my partner, was talking to the History Society at Trinity about his new biography of Thomas Telford, the 18th-century roads, bridges and canals engineer. We spent the night at Trinity, and I had time to update my acquaintance with this fast-changing city. ‘Fast’ hardly does justice to the speed of change. ‘Silicon Fen’ may be a smart-Alecky sobriquet, but something huge is happening here, something very much of our time. Though the university nucleus remains reassuringly familiar, the river Cam sits at the centre of the biggest and most sustained expansion and boom I’ve ever seen in England.

Prince Harry does not exist and soon Meghan Markle will cease to exist too. None of the royal family exist. This truth, which has come to me rather late in life, has taught me how to stop worrying and love the monarchy. Despite my boyhood admiration for King Sobhuza II of Swaziland, I was always a bit of a republican. Not a tumbrils and guillotine kind, nor even, really, a campaigner for abolition, because as the decades have rolled it has become impossible not to feel respect for the Queen’s hard work; and besides, as the Australians have learned, there’s not a lot of point in removing the monarchy unless you can agree on the alternative. What alternatives suggest themselves?

There are four of us in this relationship: my partner and I, his horse and my truck. His horse is 12, my truck 18. I’m jealous of his horse. He’s beastly about my truck. In our household Julian has only to say ‘nitrogen dioxide’ over dinner and my jaw tightens. ‘Particulants’ saps my appetite. ‘Scrappage scheme’ will drive me from the table. But, yes, I cannot dispute it: my beloved machine is a filthy polluter. The grey 1999 Vauxhall Brava five-seater ‘king-cab’ pickup illuminates every red light on the Guardian environmentalist George Monbiot’s dashboard. It’s noisy, smelly and smoky, and it’s older-generation diesel. But it’s my faithful friend and has barely done 100,000 miles.

Entering the Bulawayo Club, you step out of the blinding African sunshine on that safe and friendly city’s wide streets, and into the cool of a generous, mahogany-lined reception hall, its glorious art-deco doorways and fittings taking you back to another age: the early 1930s when the Club, already about 40 years old, rebuilt the clubhouse in the grand style of a confident colonial southern Rhodesia. Facing you are two large portraits. One is of Cecil John Rhodes in tunic and wing collar. This you would expect, though the finest representation of that capable, restless, vainglorious, morally ambiguous and sometimes duplicitous achiever hangs in the Lobengula room: a light and sensitive pencil sketch of Rhodes as a very young man.

Friends arrived last week to find me in a mudhole, inside a cave-like tunnel into the hill, fiddling around with our spring-fed water supply. Hearing their car, I slithered out to greet them, covered in slime like a monster from the deep. It would be natural to say this took them by surprise. It did not. They know me. Since infancy I’ve loved playing with water. Every river I could dam, every channel I could dig, every pond I could drain or fill, every stream I could divert, every castle wall I could build against the encroaching tide, seemed to point to a promising career as a water engineer. Sadly I showed no talent for any of this; and, later, the maths bored me. I just loved digging, damming and diverting: a master of my little water world.