Matthew Parris

Another Remembrance Day app­roaches as I write. Another autumnal Sunday; another Last Post; those poppies again; in Derbyshire the church parades; another nationwide two-minute silence. The occasion always sets me thinking about what people call ‘perspective’ in history. Sir Percy Cradock, leaving Peking as ambassador nearly 30 years ago, said something about history’s rear-view mirror in his valedictory despatch: ‘In the socialist state,’ he wrote, ‘it is the past that is unpredictable.’ And not just in the socialist state. The longer one lives the more the past appears as a landscape in perpetual, usually gradual, sometimes radical upheaval.

Do you remember that classic 1980s American TV series about a group of elderly American women, The Golden Girls? You could call the sitcom the geriatric equivalent of Friends: equally sharp, and every bit as addictive. One of the central characters (she was called Rose) was forever lapsing into interminable accounts of uninteresting events. Her companions would try different means of cutting her short, doing so with a brutality born of desperation. One such intervention became almost a catch-phrase among her circle: ‘Where is this story going, Rose?’ I’ve always remembered it. And the more time I spend in the company of those now my age or older — men and women in their sixties, seventies or eighties — the more am I struck by that candid remark.

If you’re near a laptop and in search of a giggle, go to http://tinyurl.com/6gamb73. Otherwise, let me explain in words: that links you to a gallery of scores of photographs of Muammar Gaddafi in silly clothes. There are images of him in absurd, invented, full military dress, festooned with the gilt and silverware of bogus medals; sashes of every kind, colour and cloth, all gaudy. There are images of the tinpot dictator decked out in purple like a Roman emperor, swathed in silk with turbans, in mid-desert in combat gear, taking the salute in braid and twill, or crowned in gold.

It feels odd to start a column having failed to persuade oneself that what one proposes is sensible. My problem is this: whenever I put the thoughts that follow to friends whose judgment I respect, they talk me out of my conclusion. Convinced by their counter-arguments, I banish the idea. Then I wake up in the small hours — and the idea’s back.

It isn’t often that political commentary presents us with a perfect portrait — a neat and simple miniature in oils — of where a faction is going wrong. It isn’t often that political commentary presents us with a perfect portrait — a neat and simple miniature in oils — of where a faction is going wrong. Just such a picture, however, was painted unwittingly for us by Tim Montgomerie in the Telegraph last Sunday. Tim Montgomerie is an admirable and capable figure, and co-editor of ConservativeHome. Without him the world of political commentary would lose one of its most interesting and significant voices on the right. Never unheeding, never unthinking and never unarmed, he’s a formidable protagonist.

It is no criticism of our redoubtable corps of foreign correspondents to remark that once an arena goes (in the modern military jargon) ‘kinetic’, sociology goes out of the window. It is no criticism of our redoubtable corps of foreign correspondents to remark that once an arena goes (in the modern military jargon) ‘kinetic’, sociology goes out of the window. When there are battles to report, a correspondent’s instinct is to find the action and describe it. News is what good journalists do, first and foremost. In the claimed Arab Spring this year, therefore, the ebb and flow of conflict is at the centre of media reports. And of course the ebb and flow of conflict matters, urgently. But (for me at least) the urgency becomes a problem.

Politicians are not normal people. They are weird. It isn’t politics that has made them weird: it’s their weirdness that has impelled them into politics. Whenever another high-profile minister teeters or falls, the mistake everyone makes is to ask what it is about the nature of their job, the environment they work in and the hours they work, that has made them take such stupid risks. This is the wrong question. We should ask a different one: what is it about these men and women that has attracted them to politics? Politicians are not normal people. They are weird. It isn’t politics that has made them weird: it’s their weirdness that has impelled them into politics.

When the Alabama governor George Wallace described intellectuals as ‘pointy-heads who couldn’t ride a bicycle straight’, he coupled two insults. When the Alabama governor George Wallace described intellectuals as ‘pointy-heads who couldn’t ride a bicycle straight’, he coupled two insults. The first — ‘pointy-heads’ — went straight into the legend and remains there, though I’d always thought intellectuals had domed heads. Less remembered is the second barrel of Wallace’s revolver. But in five words it contains a potent argument.