Simon Heffer

Ours would be a grim age if we were to deny millions of people cheap and satisfying entertainment, and so, therefore, perhaps we should be especially grateful to the Prince of Wales and Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles as they approach their wedding day. Few people in Britain seem to welcome the happiness the couple clearly feel as they approach the regularisation of their relationship. However, the joy the public finds instead in engaging in acts of spite, hypocrisy, gratuitous vilification and outright republicanism seems to more than make up for that. Among politicians even one so supposedly senior as the oafish Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, allowed himself a sneer when the engagement was announced.

A friend of the royal family’s lamented the other day that the Princess Royal, for reasons about which he could only speculate, has declined her mother’s offer of a dukedom and, therefore, a place in the nobility for her son and his heirs. This does seem an extreme act of self-effacement by one who, unlike some of her tribe, works extremely hard and doesn’t insist on using the company helicopter just to nip out to Tesco. Also, thanks to Mr Blair’s brilliant reform of the House of Lords, even if her son became the 2nd Duke he would not inherit the right to sit in the legislature. It was allegedly fears about Sir Mark Thatcher ending up in the Lords that dissuaded his mother from taking the earldom that was her due when she left the Commons in 1992.

I wonder whether our Prime Minister is historically minded enough to have compared himself lately with Stanley Baldwin? When Mr Blair was told that the Prince of Wales intended to marry Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles, would his first thought have been of what starchy old Stan went through in 1936, when a King of England wanted to marry his divorced mistress? Would he have recalled that, then, such a thing was deemed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and respectable society to be impossible? Would he have considered advising the Queen that, like Edward VIII, Prince Charles could not be crowned King if he chose to marry? I doubt it.

Simon Heffer deplores the fashion for dressing down. It’s ugly and disrespectful and leaves men looking like idiots We all know that life under the Blair Terror can be pretty grim, but I am beginning to fret about the increasing signs of a collapse in national morale. I do not refer to the well-documented exodus of Britons to live abroad, or to our sense of defeat in the face of rising crime and seemingly unlimited taxation, or even to the semi-formal establishment of the Church of England as an arm of the light entertainment industry. I refer, of course, to the demolition of our pride and self-respect to the extent that many even quite civilised men can no longer bring themselves to dress appropriately when they go out in public.

Simon Heffer on the insidious new taboos that govern society — and how those who break them risk their careers and credibility It is hard to imagine that at the time when Britain entered what is now called the European Union, in 1973, there would have been such a fuss about the religious beliefs of Mr Rocco Buttiglione, the nominee for the post of Italy’s commissioner. In a predominantly Catholic community, the views for which he is now being vilified would have been regarded as perfectly reasonable.

Whenever I feel psychotically depressed about this country — which, as I contemplate another nine years of Labour rule, is more and more often — I find myself being thankful that I do not have as my head of state President Chirac. I have come to believe that he is the price France pays for having Ravel, Manet, Cheval Blanc, Paris, foie gras and all those gorgeous pouting actresses. At the time of writing, slimy Jacques has not resolved the latest problem facing his country, the kidnapping of two French journalists in Iraq. Their captors have demanded that France drop the law forbidding the wearing of religious symbols in schools: they want girls to be able to wear la voile to preserve their modesty.

Over the next few days we shall see countless images, in photographs and on film, of the men who won the second world war. The D-Day generation can claim to have been the last that had a genuine measure of greatness. These were not, for the most part, professional warriors, for whom the services had been a vocation. They had been plucked from civilian life, in many cases straight from school, to defend their country and win the bloodiest war in history. Such an achievement required beliefs, values and attitudes that few young people today can begin to imagine. We shall also, over the next few days, see modern images of the same men, or at least of those who survived. Now in their eighties, many will be making their last visit to Normandy and the scene of their claim to immortality.

For the 500 or so at the Thatcher jubilee dinner it was, if not the high point, certainly one of the more important. Having cheered themselves hoarse at the entry of the lady herself, and roared their joy at a gem of a speech by Norman Tebbit, the diners applauded Michael Howard. He said he was a Thatcherite, and that the party would follow a Thatcherite direction. They loved it, for they believed it was necessary. They could be right. Certainly, when Tony Blair had the previous day accused Mr Howard of being a Thatcherite, many Tories felt the Prime Minister had given them a huge boost. Now Lady Thatcher is flavour of the month again, there is no longer guilt by association. The old doctrines of reducing the state and empowering the individual are acceptable once more.

On 11 September 2001 Sir John Stevens, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was on an aircraft heading for America. He was about to meet his counterpart in the FBI for talks about combating organised crime. Instead, crime organised on a scale neither of them had anticipated was being committed. Sir John’s plane did a U-turn over the Atlantic. The captain of the plane urgently sought the counsel of his eminent passenger. ‘I went to the flight deck to talk to them and give my advice. You could see the shock that they were going through with the closure of American airspace. The purser in particular was in a state of great distress. I think most of us realised the world would never be the same again.

The recent story in the Sunday Times about the hundreds of people who have declined honours in the past 50 or 60 years was fascinating. Contrary to the usual interpretation, it showed that the system is actually fairer than I thought. The list was dominated by people of immense worth whose apparent neglect by the establishment had seemed inexplicable. The other day the self-advertising poet and retired burglar Benjamin Zephaniah rejected an honour as a protest against colonial oppression (yawn). How much better to have the inward satisfaction, and the good manners, to refuse privately. Only one refusenik was well known to me, and that was the composer George Lloyd. He declined a CBE in 1996, two years before his death.