Matthew Parris

Very occasionally in the life of a nation comes the need for a short period of dictatorship. Not for major reform: democracy can easily manage historic change. No, it’s the little things which dictators do so well. General Franco, for example, rationalised Spanish spelling. In the sorting out of obstinate silliness, democrats lose heart and autocrats alone can stay the course. Any populist can sweep away major injustice, but only a dictator can standardise plugs or bring back the proper use of the letter ‘z’. To remove the minor anomalies of life, decree absolute can be the only way.

Bradford is to demolish huge swaths of its own centre. Acres of hateful Sixties concrete are to be pulverised in the year ahead, according to a tiny article in the Guardian this week. Much of Broadway, Cheapside and Petergate are to be bulldozed as part of the city’s programme of ‘reinventing’ its core. An architect, Will Alsop, has made plans for surrounding the Victorian city hall with a lake; a buried stream is to be uncovered; and great blocks of brutalist mid-20th-century building will be coming down, storey by storey. Three cheers for this news, almost unnoticed in London. A cheer for a dawning 21st century which has the guts and self-confidence to own up to the mistakes we made in the last and start again.

Should liberal internationalists feel irritated when neoconservative hawks piggyback on to the successes of our own approach, and take the credit for themselves? No, we should feel satisfied that they want to, for it is a kind of repentance. Their tantrums past and the damage obvious, we can be pretty confident that they will not repeat such mistakes. We can feel quiet pleasure in their implicit acceptance that liberal internationalism works, after all. There will be no more Iraqs — you may count on that. Towards Tripoli, towards Tehran, and hopefully towards Damascus too, détente is back in fashion, thank heaven. The important thing is that the firebrands in Washington are being marginalised and the traditionalists are winning.

How incredible it is,’ wrote Stephen Glover in last week’s Spectator’s Media studies, ‘and how depressing,’ that Richard Desmond might buy the Telegraph. He went on to paint a most unflattering picture of the minor media magnate, his main complaint being that Mr Desmond is a pornographer because he owns publications that print pornography. I am rather relaxed about pornography. Some of it isn’t very nice, but then much that we entertain in our heads isn’t very nice and it is at least an open question how far expressing our imaginings, or enjoying their expression by others, makes us worse (or better) people, or alters us in any important way. The current fuss about Internet porn strikes me as hysterical.

Swimmers, scanning the sea for signs of danger, look beyond what breaks the surface. It is by the slight but unexpected troubling of the waters that hidden peril is often best located. Where something jagged lurks beneath or where two currents collide, a sudden agitated choppiness in a small patch of sea may tell us more than the great, regular rollers which we know how to breast. Most people seem to think that as regards the David Kelly affair, the Prime Minister himself is out of the roughest water; that Lord Hutton’s evidence-taking has somehow ‘cleared’ Downing Street — or at least that lesser figures are conveniently placed to take the rap. I too expect Mr Blair to escape.

The view, I thought, appeared much as it would to a young barnacle goose. I was diving out of a blustery, dove-grey sky, my wing tips tipping cloud. Far below I could see the browns and greens, the heather and grass, of a big, low-lying Hebridean island. To the east lay the Scottish mainland. From the west the ocean, whipped by a stiff breeze, drove tiny white horses on to long sandy shores. The Atlantic rollers were just visible beneath my wings. But my wings were manufactured by Saab. Nose pressed to the window, I was aboard a 30-seater twin-prop passenger plane heading from Glasgow airport to the landing strip on the island of Islay. I would land there at ten in the morning on Monday, 13 October. About 30,000 barnacle geese had landed just ahead of me this month.

A charge should be laid at the door of those who urged America onward into Iraq this year, and it should come not from pacifists, United Nations groupies or Uncle Sam-baiters, but from those on the Right who think that a great power does have special responsibilities, including – sometimes – a responsibility to intervene. We should charge the neoconservatives with fouling it up. We should charge them with spoiling the case. We should charge hotheads in the media with egging an administration into making a fool of itself when wiser friends urged restraint. The yee-hah tendency in the Pentagon and in the press has besmirched, by misapplication, a decent philosophy of muscular great-power diplomacy of which the civilised world may have future need.

Various explanations have been offered for the decision by the Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, to leave for his summer holiday before the funeral this week of Dr David Kelly. Mr Hoon himself has let it be known via 'friends' that he would be in trouble with his wife Elaine if he delayed a holiday that was already planned. Others have speculated that he would not have been welcome at Dr Kelly's funeral. It is possible that the speculation is accurate, but I wonder.

Let me tell you the story of the Docklands Eight, otherwise known as the Docklands ducklings. They came into my life briefly and by chance, ushered in by Kim. Kim helps me keep my London flat, by the Thames in Limehouse, clean and tidy. A great animal-lover, she comes in on Monday mornings bringing new stories of the family of ducks which has been hatching on the stones in a shallow section of canal near where we live. Last year there was a disaster when a water-disinfecting operative eliminated a whole generation of ducklings in a single morning, so this year Kim has been watching over the brood and feeding them with bread. A couple of weeks ago, most of the family were grown up enough to fly, waddle or sail away. A couple, however, stayed behind in the canal.

Has the power to curse lost its meaning for modern man? Might we, in losing it, lose something precious: the power to bless? I was made to think about this last week, in Bristol, recording for later broadcast a couple of programmes in a series I present for BBC Radio Four. Off the Page is a modest little affair in which three writers discuss with each other and with me the short columns I have commissioned from them on a single, simple subject. Each week we take a different topic and I invite different writers (some famous, some new or unknown) to join me in talking and writing about it. The result is discursive, very informal, sometimes rambling, often sharp, never thoughtless or dim. At its best it is like half an hour with The Spectator.

Why is it that not only I but millions (I suspect) of my fellow-countrymen too are left cold by the dispute raging within the Church of England about gay bishops? One has only to see the newspaper headline for the eye to slide away. It was not always thus. Such controversies used to fire many of us on both sides of the argument with passionate conviction. There was a time when I would have leapt to my laptop, determined to join the debate. Chosen as a panellist on BBC 1's Question Time in a week when such a question was likely to come up, I would have counted myself lucky.

What would you have done? Would you have left Saddam Hussein in power? The inquiry, familiar to all of us who opposed the war, is put in a finger-stabbing sort of way – as though that clinched it; as though the answer is so obvious that the peaceniks can only stammer. Just ask them what they would have done and watch them squirm! Elsewhere, the tactic is more typical of left-wing polemicists than of the Right. 'How could you stand by and see...?' is a favourite way of arguing for state intervention (and taxpayers' money) for any amount of expensive interference with nature. Any Tory with guts learns to summon them when reminded of dying patients, hungry jobseekers, sinking industries, failing railways or freezing pensioners, and asked, 'What would you do?