Simon Jenkins

Saturday

Simon Jenkins

Who do you Trust?

From our UK edition

Visitors to Thomas Hardy’s birthplace in Dorset, a small thatched cottage built by Hardy’s great-grandfather, used to be met by a bare house and a guide book. Now they are greeted by a fire in the grate and a curator at the parlour table, dispensing tea and cakes and chatting about the author’s childhood. Those irritated at such intrusion can walk through the house and enjoy the garden undisturbed. Most are entranced. When I arrived at the National Trust as chairman two years ago, I received two clear messages. One was to relieve its 330 houses open to the public from the ‘dead hand’ of the Trust’s house style, and the other was to cut the suffocation of its centralised bureaucracy.

Saturday

Simon Jenkins

Complete the Thatcher revolution

From our UK edition

Simon Jenkins says that the Iron Lady’s work will not be complete without the devolution of power to local communities. Is the Tory leader ready to embrace this mission? The Tory party still has to come to terms with Margaret Thatcher. As she broods this week in Chester Square, the revolution associated with her name is still swamping British politics. Labour and Conservative front benches wrangle over the upheavals she initiated like crews clinging to the same wreckage. But with Gordon Brown possibly about to swim free, the Tories must redefine their Thatcherite heritage if they are to persuade electors that they are genuinely new Tories. But redefine does not mean deny.

Saturday

Simon Jenkins

Nobody has been left out

From our UK edition

Histories of Victorian London now come two a penny. They are the left-wing historian’s answer to biographies of Good Queen Bess. What is there new to say? We start with fog and smells and move on to disease and the working classes. We meet Charles Booth and Henry Mayhew. We chastise the rich and welcome the shift from charity to democracy. Over the Great Wen hovers the great messiah, Improvement. It brings gas, drains, electricity, Peabody homes and rights for women. The millennium arrives with Selfridges and the Underground. Then the Great War spoils everything. Stephen Inwood is a master of the genre.

Saturday

Simon Jenkins

People power

From our UK edition

The rebuilt town hall of the ancient Borough of Henley still stands brave over its market place. This was Henley’s forum and seat of government, a one-stop shop of civic welfare. From here Henley’s streets were lit, paved and policed, Henley’s traders regulated, Henley’s children educated and its poor relieved, all under the aegis of Henley people. Anywhere abroad this would still be the case. In France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and throughout America municipalities the size of Henley continue to exercise such power. Town halls and mairies remain centres of local politics and administration and their people like it that way. Yet in England such buildings are empty shells, as if hit by a neutron bomb denuding them of people and power.

Saturday

Simon Jenkins

Nothing to fear but fear itself

From our UK edition

Simon Jenkins says that Tony Blair’s Sedgefield speech was just another attempt by the Prime Minister to scare us into believing that we are all in mortal danger. We are not ‘And the clouds came flying through the air bringing winds and hurling lightning and arrows, and it rained hail, fire and swords, and killed a great number of people.’ So cried the Florentine monk Savonarola of the coming Day of Judgment in 1492. The terrified citizens duly rose and followed him into a disastrous alliance with Italy’s new conqueror, Charles VIII of France. Four years later they had had enough of Savonarola’s apocalyptic waffle, dragged him from his monastery and hanged him. Whenever I hear Tony Blair nowadays, I think of Savonarola.

Saturday

Simon Jenkins

Speaking of God

From our UK edition

Where is England’s smallest church? The question must have preoccupied nerdish retired vicars for centuries and is probably best answered then forgotten. Despite the title of this survey, John Kinross fails to give a clear answer. ‘Smaller’ churches would have been fine, but smallest raises expectations. The apparent shortlist is Culbone (Somerset), Dale (Derbyshire), Wide- mouth Bay (Cornwall) and Lullington (Sussex), though readers may devastate me with alternatives. Culbone is a delicious place nestling above the Bristol Channel beneath Exmoor, accessible only on foot a mile through the forest. On a sunny day with birdsong in the trees and sea glinting through the leaves, it is as sublime as any spot in England.

Saturday

Simon Jenkins

Famous and forgotten faces

From our UK edition

Paperback edition £29.95 I was much attached to Kaled. She stood at the corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane, pert, stylish, mocking the scribes and hacks scurrying round her feet. She was faintly androgenous, a pageboy Tiresias who saw and knew all that passed along that street of shame. She is there today, much battered but still with her swagger. Nothing peoples a city as do statues. The more inhumane the architecture the more desperately we cling to relics of humanity, even if they are in stone and metal. Nobody seems to notice them. How many Fleet Street hands salute as they pass effigies to King Lud, Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, Northcliffe, Edgar Wallace, Prudence, Justice and Liberality? But that makes our enjoyment of them the more intimate.