Matthew Parris

An infuriating benefit of readers’ online comments beneath the efforts of a columnist like me is that as you read the responses an understanding dawns of the column you ought to have written. Some readers are stupid, unpleasant or obsessive; but most are not. As you learn their reactions you see where your argument was not clear, where you were short of information, and where you were simply wrong. But more than that, you sometimes tumble for the first time to where the nub of a problem that perhaps you danced around may lie. Last Saturday I wrote for the Times about the self-righteousness of spokesmen for public services threatened by government cuts; about veiled threats by the police to stop policing, and by barristers enraged by cuts to legal aid.

At the time he will barely have noticed me. In his mid-forties and (to me at 18) middle-aged, he was our host at a dinner in his beautiful old house in Kingston, Jamaica: a wooden mansion that in its time had seen the town spread up from the harbour and push back the sugar plantations. But as you’d expect from a man for whom garden design was a passion, Paul’s house had kept its generous grounds from the age of sugar. Everything about Paul Methuen was generous: from his hospitality, to the sheer variety of his guests, to his warm and wicked sense of mischief and the measures of the whisky he dispensed (and consumed).

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeathoftheleft/media.mp3" title="Matthew Parris and Freddy Gray debate whether assisted dying will ever become accepted" startat=1781] Listen [/audioplayer]Throughout the short life of the Assisted Dying Bill which failed last week in the Commons, the ‘faith community’ (a quaint term for that category of human beings who throughout history have been more assiduous than any other in trying to kill each other) have with skill and persistence deployed an argument of great potency. Such is the argument’s intuitive appeal that the pro-assisted-dying brigade never found a way of countering it. They have resorted simply to denying that what the faith squad say would happen, could happen. But it could.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremycorbynsbritain/media.mp3" title="Matthew Parris and Theo Hobson debate the role Christianity in the migrant crisis" startat=1383] Listen [/audioplayer]Proximity shouldn’t make a difference — should it? We were on a beach on the European side of the Mediterranean, it was a beautiful late August day, and I felt so happy. The sea was fresh, the sky was clear and a stiff breeze was whipping white horses out past the headland. ‘Rough weather for migrants,’ I thought, then checked myself. What an awful thing to think.

'All I ever tried to do was hold a mirror up and show you how beautiful you really are. Shine on, you crazy diamond.’ I have just read one of the finest ambassadors’ ‘valedictory’ dispatches ever composed, except it isn’t one: it had to be posted on the internet, and was, last month. What was essentially a sometimes-exasperated love letter to Lebanon will never see the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s printers. The valedictory died in 2006. So Tom Fletcher, who after four years as ambassador in Beirut had come to the end of his posting (‘Unlike your politicians,’ he tells Lebanon, ‘I can’t extend my own term’) had to write his loving, infuriated, despairing and hopeful tribute to the country as a personal blogpost.

‘Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?’ asked C.P. Cavafy in his poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’: Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come. And some who have just returned from the border say there are no barbarians any longer. And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution. All through your and my life the Labour party have been at the gates of Downing Street, and often enough stormed them, only to be beaten back at a subsequent election. What might happen to the Conservative party if those barbarians disappear? We must not assume that Jeremy Corbyn will take the Labour leadership.

Many years ago I was encouraged to read Roger Hutchinson’s Calum’s Road. The small and quirky book made a deep impression on me: deeper, perhaps, than I realised at the time. Since then the story has always been there in the back of my mind. It began a story of my own. As there is unlikely to be a book, Matthew’s Lay-By, I shall tell the tale myself. The late Calum MacLeod’s story deserved its book. One of the last inhabitants of Arnish in the north of the island of Raasay in the Western Isles, the crofter campaigned with others to persuade the local authorities to connect Arnish to the rest of the island with something better than their footpath. They got nowhere. So he decided to build the road himself.

We were breakfasting outside on the morning of the Greek referendum. The result could only be guessed at and all the polls were saying it was neck-and-neck. I thought ‘yes’ would win because surely Greek people believe in membership of the EU. Our friend Marie, however, who is French, announced that it would be a decisive ‘no’. Marie is neither a left-winger nor a Europhobe. ‘Why?’ her husband asked, ‘how do you know?’ ‘Avantage acquis,’ she said. Few of us were fluent French speakers, but I made a guess: ‘You mean people’s sense of continuing entitlement to something they have already got?’ Yes, she said, such things are very hard to take away.

The Snoopers’ Charter. I ought to care about this. I’m a sort of libertarian. I believe in personal freedom. I’m a trustee of Index on Censorship. The state as Big Brother is everything I’ve always fought in politics. So why can’t I quite summon the requisite indignation? Why do I find all this Edward Snowden stuff vaguely irritating? Why does the crusading column for the Times, railing against state surveillance, somehow keep failing me, though time and again I’ve opened my laptop and tried to make a start?

I see. So now we have the result of the Irish referendum on gay marriage, and now we’ve heard the Roman Catholic Church’s chastened response, we shall have to rewrite Exodus 32, which (you may remember) reports Moses’ (and God’s) furious reaction to the nude dancing and heretical worship of Moloch in the form of a golden calf: the Sin of the Calf in the Hebrew literature. Moses had come down from Mount Sinai bringing God’s commandments written on two tablets of stone.