Matthew Parris

In the Palace of Westminster a fortnight ago, I spoke at a reception celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Tory gay rights movement now called LGBT+ Conservatives. And last weekend I read a book to be published on 9 October. It turns out that its author and I are saying the same thing. Professor Ronan McCrea has chosen the title The End of the Gay Rights Revolution: How Hubris and Overreach Threaten Gay Freedom. My speech bore no such title, but here’s more or less what I said. I began by recalling, for a young audience, the dismal beginnings of what was to prove a cultural revolution. ‘I will never forget the sniggers and winces at our then name: the Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality.

How can you ever put your finger on the comfort, the joy, the absurdity, of being English? Not, perhaps, through some attempt at definition: but in a hundred moments linked by that invisible thread, Englishness. Such a moment occurred for me last Friday. The place was Kidderminster in Worcestershire, the occasion the re-opening of the heritage Severn Valley Railway to Bridgnorth in Shropshire, at the lovely station from which the line, formerly Great Western Railway (GWR) and closed by British Rail in the 1960s, runs. If scripture doesn’t specifically mention steam engines, they are implicit in the psalmist’s rapture Let’s not be sentimental about Kidderminster.

Last week the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) released its State of World Population report. According to the Guardian: ‘Millions of people are prevented from having the number of children they want by a toxic mix of economic barriers and sexism, a new UN report has warned.’ Dr Natalia Kanem, executive director of UNFPA, said: ‘The answer lies in responding to what people say they need: paid family leave, affordable fertility care and supportive partners.’ Nonsense, of course. Does Africa (4.1 births per woman) have better family leave and fertility care and more supportive partners than Sweden (1.4)? The reason for UNFPA’s counter-intuitive findings is simple. They have not ‘found’ (the word almost every report uses) the reasons people don’t have babies.

The trouble with history is that it is topiary. History is what’s left after the unwanted foliage has been clipped and cleared away. The topiary birds, pigs and pyramids are just yew bushes minus the clippings, these forms having emerged from the topiarist’s shears. Your yew-based pig is a product of selective disposal, even down to its curly tail. Likewise with a historian’s shears. The raw material may be facts (in the words of the 19th-century German historiographer Leopold von Ranke, ‘what actually happened’) but the history book’s account, the shape and meaning we give to an era, relies as much on the happenings we choose to discard as on those we decide to notice. In like manner, Ancient Greek astronomers conjured up fantastical constellations by topiarising the stars.

So far, so routine. Labour wants to update and if possible upgrade the United Kingdom’s arrangements with our immediate neighbour and by far our biggest trading partner, the European Union. As any new government would. The recent destabilisation of world trade adds urgency to the task. So our government goes to Brussels and (after the customary silly European ‘to the wire’ theatrics) hammers out what looks like a sensible improvement on the existing unnecessarily irksome restrictions and procedures. The deal involves – inevitably – a few concessions on both sides (we concede a bit on fishing) but overall looks modestly advantageous for us and for them. A thoroughly workmanlike result.

Harold Wilson once declared that the Labour party ‘is a moral crusade or it is nothing’, a proposition whose logical consequence is troubling. Returning now from the United States, the comparable proposition both haunts and comforts me, because America is not nothing. Travelling through several Midwest and western states, I’ve been struck by how many Americas there are even in one region, how different they are and how, like the individual wooden staves of a great barrel, they depend upon the metal hoops that bind them. If the hoop stays strong, tight and in place, the construction is formidable. Loosen that steel belt, and the staves fall into a useless clutter. The central hoop of the American barrel is, I think, the moral idea of America.

On Thursday 16 August 1739, the young John Wesley met and for an hour argued with the middle-aged Bishop of Bristol, Joseph Butler. It was an ill-tempered encounter. Wesley believed that God communicated directly with individuals, invested his promises and purposes in them personally, and charged them with missions to reveal and explain the divine will. Butler, famous for his rationalism, reacted with cold indignation. ‘Sir,’ he told Wesley, ‘the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing.’ The Bishop spoke for England. We do not ‘do’ God – not even the 49 per cent of us who actually believe in God.