Matthew Parris

Voltaire was a superb polemicist but a cheat in debate. He never laid a finger on the Christian argument which in Candide he mocked as claiming that ‘all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds’. He showed that the world was a dreadful place. In a sparkling and brutal parody he demonstrated that life was cruel and unjust, and that millions of people were wretched. He scorned the idea that there was anything remotely pleasant about the world which Christians claimed God had made as pleasant as possible for us. But the argument Voltaire parodies never did include the claim he mocked. He tilted brilliantly at the supposition that life was sweet, but Catholic theologians had never claimed life was sweet.

The late Peter Campbell, sometime professor of politics at the University of Reading, would have enjoyed the irony. He died just before the general election. His funeral was hastily arranged for Friday 6 May, mid-morning, in Reading. For me these were a couple of days of little sleep and intensely hard work. So Peter will forgive my confession that when his executors asked me to give the eulogy at St Luke’s Church in Reading at 11.30, the timing did not seem ideal. But to speak for him was an honour. I am so glad I did. As all the ill temper of an exceptionally negative election campaign came to its angry climax last Thursday, the setting aside of some hours to think about Peter’s life helped me recover my own bearings.

Catch your opponent unawares. Hit him with an accusation which he cannot come straight back at and answer. While he flails, change the subject fast. Move to a new charge. Keep changing the subject before your opponent has got to grips with the last one. Be like a Boy David with his sling, light on his feet, dancing round an infuriated Goliath of a rebuttal machine which wheels round too late to hit back. This was William Hague’s technique at Prime Minister’s Questions when he led the Conservative party. In the Commons it worked. Mr Hague was the last Tory leader able regularly to get the better of Tony Blair. Mr Blair is not easily tripped, so Mr Hague’s success was fun for us parliamentary sketchwriters to report.

A growing band of us do not believe the opinion polls. We cannot entirely explain our doubt. We argue backwards from our hunch — that the voters do not wish to give Tony Blair anything like the thumbs-up they gave him before — to an array of rationalisations about how, whatever today’s polls may suggest, tomorrow’s general election could go wrong for New Labour. The relationship between the present Prime Minister and the British people has broken down. Repair is about as likely as the unsouring of soured milk. Conversations overheard — on buses, in aeroplanes, pubs and on the street — imply an attitude of widespread derision. Ministers on Question Time or Any Questions?

‘Put your left foot here, into this stirrup’ — I glanced down at a decorated steel half-shoe hanging on a leather strap — ‘and grip this stubby thing with your left hand....’ — I looked up at a sort of leather knob about the size of an orange set into the prow of the saddle — ‘and now lift your weight on to your left foot in the stirrup, swinging your right leg over the back of the horse.’ A bit of an effort, this, but it was how I was taught to get on to a boy’s bicycle and I found I still could. ‘Put your right foot into the stirrup on the other side, and settle into the saddle.’ I write this from Colombia where I am travelling this month and about which I shall hope to write for the Times.

Unless I am much mistaken, obituarists and tribute-writers have this week been poring over the Fleet Street archives, beset by a difficulty as unexpected as it has been puzzling. We have been looking for brilliant, extended passages of the late Bernard Levin’s writing to offer modern readers a sample (and older readers a reminder) of the work of a man who we all agree was one of the 20th century’s greatest British columnists. We remember his greatness. We recall the thrill as Bernard laid into the idiots and idiocies of the age. How we wished we’d said that! How we wished we had his courage, his effrontery, his learning, his mental treasury of quotation, his gift of language.

I hastened last Friday to the Grays Inn studios of five news on Channel 5 to be interviewed for their 7 p.m. bulletin alongside Nick Watt of the Guardian, on the sensation of the hour. The sensation was the planned appointment of Mr Peter Mandelson as an EU commissioner in Brussels. On time, Mr Watt and I were in place on the sofa. Channel 5’s Charlie Stayt asked us about the appointment. Starting with me, he asked what I made of his Channel’s public opinion poll which had suggested that nine out of ten respondents objected to Mr Mandelson’s appointment. I replied that this said more about the British public — most of whom object to anybody whatsoever joining the Brussels gravy train — than it did about Mandelson.

Tom and I borrowed our friend’s Mini to drive to Canary Wharf. We had been lent it to collect for him a consignment of lighting fittings ordered from John Lewis, which he had no time to collect. This was kind of us. Motivated thus by charity we drove off towards the smart new shopping centre within the Docklands development on the Isle of Dogs in east London. We must have looked an odd pair. Tom, who (it is fair to say) does not over-dress, is twenty-something and resembles a younger Hugh Grant dragged through a hedge. My habit is to throw on whatever assortment of clothes lie on my bedroom floor. I had not shaved for a few days, and had mislaid my hair comb. Still, the security man let us past the barrier where they stop you and ask your business in Docklands.

It came upon me powerfully, momentarily and quite unexpectedly. Perhaps a couple of vodkas at a bar by the railway station in St Petersburg were to blame. But all at once I realised that if I were a 50-something Russian living in the former Soviet Union today, I would be a communist. It happened a few weeks ago. I was boarding the overnight train from the city formerly known as Leningrad, to Moscow. In a short, spine-tingling moment I understood something to which my mind had been closed all my adult political life: the thrill of the communist ideal. My train was due to leave at five minutes to midnight. Around this time there is a tight cluster of departures from St Petersburg to Moscow.

David Aaronovitch writes for the Guardian. He has suggested (‘Why do they hate Blair so much?’, 18 May) that opposition to Tony Blair has driven some of us crazy. I fear Mr Aaronovitch is right, and will try to explain why. His argument is straightforward and, though directed more to Mr Blair’s critics on the Labour Left than on the Tory Right, it has application too to Conservatives like me. Essentially, says Aaronovitch, we Blairophobes are in denial. We cannot accept what in our hearts we secretly fear: that Blair is right and — worse — that Blair has won.

Last Sunday I collected a waistcoat made from my own pet. From the same source came a hat, gloves, scarf, and a teddy bear wearing a little waistcoat of its own, though (saucily) no trousers. A lady called Chan Brown, from Chesterfield, has organised this for me. I keep llamas, and she spins. She belongs to a group who call themselves the Spinsters and are sometimes to be found on a summer Sunday demonstrating their craft down at Cromford Mill, Joseph Arkwright’s magnificent and until recently neglected first mill, on the Derbyshire Derwent near Matlock Bath. The mill and its surroundings, which are beautifully situated, are being restored by a dedicated band of volunteers; there are things to see, refreshments to be taken and shops to browse in.

New South Wales The name of the station seemed to ring a bell. An hour or so south of Sydney, and through the window of my double-decker Australian railway carriage, I could read the sign ‘Thirroul’. Wasn’t that the little seaside town where D.H. Lawrence stayed with his wife, Frieda, and where he began his novel Kangaroo? Did the couple not stay in a bungalow here close to the Pacific and where the story starts? I did not much care for Kangaroo when I first read it. But as with Patrick White’s work, I later found that having thrown the book aside, thoughts it had aroused stayed pulsing strongly in my imagination. Thirroul. I could picture the bungalow. In my mind it is not far from the beach. It is dark.