Matthew Parris

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.

This January Prometheus paid our era a call. Scientists (it was reported at the end of the month) have ‘announced the creation of a synthetic chromosome, knocking down one of the final hurdles to building the world’s first artificial life form’. In Maryland, at the institute of an American biologist and entrepreneur, Craig Venter, a team are now working on the final step to ‘create’ life. They aim to transplant into a cell the synthetic DNA they create, in the hope it will ‘boot up’ the cell and take control of its growth and reproduction. At last. The breathing-into-clay of the Promethean fire; the insertion of the ghost into the machine.