Matthew Parris

It was a hot late evening on the Greek island of Tinos, and we were sitting at a quayside restaurant outdoors, enjoying a nightcap glass of ouzo. One or two other tables were still occupied by diners, all of them Greek. Foreign tourism is only slowly coming back but Greece has a strong internal holiday market, and Tinos, a lovely island, is only an hour or two by ferry from the mainland. A couple of children, small girls, were playing around the edge of the quay. The tranquil scene was now disturbed. The girls were looking in alarm at something under an unoccupied table. A big fish, beached, more than a foot long, was flopping around on the concrete, gasping. Other diners looked on, unconcerned, but I thought the children were distressed.

I’m off. In the week when you may read this, my partner and I will be winging our way to the European mainland, exploring, visiting friends, and immersing ourselves in new places, among new people who speak languages other than our own. Even as I write this, I can anticipate a sour response from some who read it. Over the past year I’ve learned that any mention of travelling abroad draws from certain quarters three types of disgruntlement. Three, in fact, of the Seven Deadly Sins. The first is Envy. ‘Oh, bully for you!’, ‘It’s all right for some’, etc. This I disregard.

Before plunging into a vexed question, it’s sometimes wise to point out that one is aware how vexed it is. I haven’t been living in a cave these past few years. Even as I speak, doctoral theses are doubtless being written on ‘identity politics’: whole books have been devoted to what has become very much the topic of the day, and (without always being precise about what we mean by the term) we in the world of politics and the political media sometimes seem to talk of little else. But during a recording for my BBC Radio 4 Great Lives programme this week, it came home to me what these ideas have displaced. Out have gone the beliefs and ideals that meant so much to me as a boy.

I was looking forward to my dinner at Daquise in South Kensington, a Polish restaurant that’s been there for ever yet feels curiously up-to-date; but that wasn’t until 7.30. I’d finished my afternoon’s work, I’d brought in the washing and written two thank-you cards, and it was still only five o’clock. I hate hanging around. By Tube to South Ken is only half an hour — so what to do? ‘Why not go the long way, on foot and by river?’ I thought. My flat is by the Thames in east London, so I could walk along the river to the Canary Wharf jetty and hope for a river bus to Chelsea.

By the side of the road from Sudbury in Derbyshire to Ashbourne, there is a lone eucalyptus tree. This is rolling country, small fields bordered by oak, ash and hawthorn. A eucalypt in this unlikely place stands out, its grey-green foliage so different from the more vivid greens of rural England, its pale trunk slimmer, its trailing swishes of narrow leaves more elegant, its thin branches more graceful than those of its stout and stubby British counterparts. You notice. You wouldn’t if you were in Australia.

Should the name of Dominic Cummings ever make it into the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, there’s one Cummings phrase our successors are sure to see. ‘Weirdos and misfits’ were what he valued. He said so in his blog, describing his preferred applicants for a job with his team at No. 10. I like the phrase. Such misfits can so often light the pathway where more timid minds and characters lose their nerve or their way. Cummings has always valued disruptors; always railed against Orwell’s ‘groupthink’; always rated the kind of people who question the conventional wisdom, the nostrums of the hour. And good for him. He’s one of them, and we need such people.

I couldn’t quite believe it when first I read the newspaper subscriber’s letter. Columnists for the Times and Spectator do still get real letters, and this one from (shall we say?) Mr Jones had enclosed the copy of a letter he had written to a lady whom we shall call Mrs Smith. Mr Jones had read about the public protest she was leading last year against an Emmerdale episode in which a couple, after much agonising, choose to abort their Down’s syndrome baby. Mrs Smith has a Down’s syndrome child, whom she adores. Mr Jones’s letter to her defended the broadcaster’s right to show parents who make a different choice. He believed the reasoning of such parents should at least be heard.

‘If anybody can write an interesting column about buses, Matthew,’ the then comment editor on the Times told me decades ago, ‘it’s you. And you’ve failed.’ Here goes again, because the government has just published an energetic 84-page report outlining a strategy for the future of English bus services. There’s even an affectionate foreword by Boris Johnson. Buses deserve our attention. Trams are newly fashionable but eye-wateringly expensive and in many ways, being less flexible, slower and more dangerous, a regression from buses. Many of the recommendations in Bus Back Better are sensible, though there’s the usual infestation of acronyms, consultations and new structures.

‘Get Brexit done, then Arpa’ read Dominic Cummings’s WhatsApp profile. Arpa was what’s now the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Mr Cummings has departed, but our very own British Arpa has arrived. Downing Street has tweaked the Yankee acronym to ‘Aria’ — the Advanced Research and Invention Agency. Its aim? ‘High-risk, high-reward’ scientific research. The cost? £800 million over four years. Ludicrous, no doubt: one of those fast-forgotten ‘eye-catching initiatives’ beloved of our leaders. But it got me thinking. We’re responsible for so many of the world’s great technologies and inventions.

His courage is exhilarating. Even if you think his cause hopeless, Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and Putin-baiter, deserves our admiration. To return to Moscow after being poisoned, surely knowing arrest awaited him, is beyond brave. The chances are he will be crushed. But annihilation is not certain; and if one day he wins his battle with Putin, his return to Moscow this winter will become the stuff of legend. Navalny is not crazy: he has made a rational calculation, weighing the relative safety of a tedious future in grey and indefinite exile against a small possibility of making Russian history. With open eyes he has chosen risk. That sooner or later Vladimir Putin will be swept away is likely — but when? Might it be sooner?

A common sight across Britain these past ten months has been those rainbow flags fluttering in urban and village streets: ‘Thank you NHS.’ Many add an afterthought: ‘And other key workers.’ And who would dispute either sentiment? To these expressions of gratitude are added ministers’ and their medical advisers’ thanks to everyone who just ‘stays home’. We are saving granny. We are, if only by inaction, doing our bit in a great national effort, pulling together with the team. We join the ranks of the public-spirited, the selfless, the just. And again, who would cavil? Prudence, caution, carefulness… in a pandemic these are needed qualities.