Matthew Parris

Wherever the civilised English gather to discuss the state we’re in, it is almost axiomatic to allow that we’re getting less refined. Discourse, public and private, is (we tell each other) getting cruder; wit is duller; our culture is dumbing down. A vulgarity and obviousness is gaining ground over the art of delicate suggestion. Nowhere do we assume this to be truer than in the use of language for the purposes of discourtesy. Twenty years ago, when I first began putting together an anthology of insult and abuse, I would have subscribed to this view.

In these straitened days, when the international money markets teeter nervily between relief and panic, and stock exchanges hang upon the slightest twitch of one of Alistair Darling’s implausible eyebrows, I must be mindful of my position in the camelid world. If I sneeze, the British llama market may catch pneumonia. Not that I am any sort of a spokesman. Llamas and alpacas have greater authorities than me to pronounce on their welfare and prospects. Wise and expert breeders in Britain constitute a community in which I’m a very minor player — indeed I fear my subscription to the Camelids Chronicle may even have lapsed.

Until recently I never realised that triangulation had entered theology as well as politics. But listening to Thought for the Day on BBC radio the other day, it struck me that modern churchmen, too, are triangulating the deepest question of all in religion: the question of faith. Faith is now advanced as the triangulation between disbelief and certainty. An idea which has been developing for more than a century is close to becoming the accepted wisdom on faith. The idea is that not only is faith perfectly reconcilable with doubt, but that in some sense doubt is at the core of faith. Doubters are thus encouraged to believe that they have already reached first base in their journey, and their doubt has qualified them. They can see the chasm. Faith is the leap.

Matthew Parris provides an A to Z of things that at one point scared us rigid but the dangers of which now appear to have been greatly exaggerated.    Britain, says the poet Kate Fox, quoted on Radio 4’s Saturday Live last week, is a country ‘eternally poised between a hosepipe ban and a flood’. Or between fearsome, knife-wielding youth gangs and a teen generation of obese couch-potatoes. Knife crime is a horrible thing; and for offering the list of comparable scares which follows you may call me flippant. But in every case it was for a while true that what would have been thought flippant would have been to question the scale of each threat.

‘How the Guardianistas changed their tune,’ was the heading to a Sunday Times factbox published in the paper last weekend. The intention was to mock those Fleet Street columnists, erstwhile fans of Gordon Brown, who have turned against their former hero. ‘Only five more dreaming days until Gordon Brown’s coronation,’ the famously independent-minded and fiercely left-of-centre Brown loyalist, Polly Toynbee, was quoted as having written a year ago. ‘Brown’s first month looks like a striking success,’ Jonathan Freedland, always a thoughtful and progressive voice, had written a month later. Hopeful, trusting voices, both. No longer. ‘On current evidence he is simply not up to the job,’ thought Mr Freedland on 18 June this year.

There are no ‘good’ teachers: the teacher who is good for you may wreck another’s prospects The funny thing is that I’m not sure I ever knew her Christian name. No doubt she had one, and for no reason at all I think it might have been Jean, but to us she was so much, and so completely, Mrs McLeod that as a boy I probably imagined her husband called her Mrs McLeod at breakfast. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I even knew about a husband — but her title was ‘Mrs’ and there was a daughter, so I suppose she must have had one.

‘You have reminded me, Mr Speaker, that for a minister resigning, permission to make a Personal Statement to the House is granted entirely at your discretion and should be of an explanatory nature. With the speech of the Noble Lord, Lord Howe, in mind, I too will keep mine short: to a thousand words. Members opposite will forgive me if the burden of what I have to say is addressed to my own party even if the implications are perhaps of interest to a wider audience. ‘I can no longer serve as a minister in this Cabinet. I have come to doubt I should have accepted office in the first place. I was unsure my party was doing the right thing last year in effectively replacing one prime minister with another without a contest either within our party or at the polls.

My heart bleeds for cold-callers — it must be the most depressing job in the world It’s always happening. It happened again last Friday. I had finished my Times column for Saturday and, taking advantage of the two hours left of daylight, fetched the wheelbarrow, pick and spade and set to work finishing the construction of a stone table outside our house in Derbyshire. But hardly had I started work than from inside the house I heard the telephone ring. Downing tools, running up from the garden, shedding gloves and kicking off boots I reached it, breathless but just in time. ‘Good afternoon, have you thought about a new kitchen? Our company would be happy to visit free of charge and give you a quote...’.

Rather less than two years ago, bored and with time to kill at a Conservative party conference, I decided to do what is for a British journalist a rather unusual thing. I decided to read a whole speech, a long speech by a politician, a speech with no particular news value. I decided to read every word. The full text happened to be lying on my bed. I had taken it from a huge pile left largely untouched on the counter of the Press Office. It was Senator John McCain’s speech to the Tory conference. I knew that it had not caused much of a stir, had said nothing new, and that fellow-journalists had reported it as ponderous, overlong and dull. So I read it. And it was ponderous, overlong and often dull. Nor did the speech say anything surprising or new.

The truth about the Auschwitz ‘gimmick’ row is that Labour exploited Jewish sensitivities David Cameron, said the Times last Saturday, ‘was facing intense political criticism last night after including student “trips to Auschwitz” on a list of government gimmicks.’ The Daily Mail was more shrill: ‘Pressure was piling on David Cameron last night to apologise,’ said the paper. ‘Senior figures from the Jewish community expressed dismay after an attempt by the Conservative leader to attack the Prime Minister spectacularly backfired.

‘How was it,’ asks George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observ-ed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?’ I cannot reread that passage without thinking of a more modern marriage: the Church of England’s with her latest Archbishop. Given the tremendous row, we really should read Dr Rowan Williams’s recent speech on Islam and the Law properly, from start to finish.