THE SPECTATOR’S NOTES
CHARLES MOORE
Labour has run out of steam. Like the Conservatives after about 1988, they cannot think straight, and they are more interested in their own quarrels than in anything the public might need. Tony Blair is very conscious of the parallels with the 1980s. He says he does not want the disorder and bitterness that followed the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher, but I wonder if, at a psychological level, this is true. Why should he desire a successful handover if he believes that what comes after him will be bad, and if the timing is forced by people who hate him? Like Mrs Thatcher, he has never been rejected by the voters at a general election, so he feels superior to his critics. Political parties are very strange institutions: their greatest energies in the past 20 years have been devoted to undermining the two most successful peacetime leaders in their histories.
Watching the BBC coverage of the local elections, I noticed how they use slow motion in film to indicate evil. The scene of the victorious BNP councillors in Barking standing in a row and clapping one another was slow-motioned again and again so that the viewer could look at their short-haired leader and think, ‘He’s like Hitler.’ An interesting conversation with a senior army officer who recently left after serving in Iraq. He strongly dissents from the prevailing view that the Americans are crude and stupid and the British know how to do everything. The American army, he says, ‘is the best in the whole history of the world’. It is true that the British have deeper experience of counter-insurgency, but he thinks we are forgetting that when we conducted our most successful operations against insurgents — as in Malaya — we combined friendliness towards the general population with killing thousands of rebels. The Americans, he says, are now learning more of our subtleties, without compromising their quality, essential in any army, of sheer aggression. In Basra, the British tactic of being nice has failed.
Ican honestly say that incipient baldness has not driven me to imitate Mark Oaten, the Liberal Democrat MP for Winchester, and seek comfort in male prostitutes. But I feel that we should take Mr Oaten’s cry for help in the Sunday Times more seriously than most people seem to be doing. He writes that when he appeared on television to talk about Liberal Democrat home affairs policies, all he got afterwards was ‘a barrage of emails, not about the issues I’d raised but about my lack of hair’. It is very distressing. Until recently, being bald for a man was just one of those rather sad things, but it is now made unbearably poignant by the fact that we must be almost the last generation so afflicted. It seems certain that genetic manipulation will soon make our condition avoidable for our grandsons. People will talk of baldness as they talk today of giraffe-women or the bound feet of Chinese girls.
Another rather desperate Liberal Democrat, though I see from his website that he had a full head of hair, is Chris Davies. He had to resign last week as leader of his party at the European Parliament because he insulted a Jewish constituent. She had complained when he compared Israel to apartheid in South Africa. He replied that she was racist and added, ‘I hope you enjoy wallowing in your own filth.’ Despite his apology, Mr Davies proudly records his meeting with various representatives of Hamas. This week he appeared on the Today programme to support Lord Joffe’s Assisted Dying Bill. Isn’t there something odd about people who so enthusiastically promote new freedoms to kill other people? When it’s combined with a sympathy for Hamas, you see the appositeness of Pope John Paul’s phrase about a ‘culture of death’.
As the film of The Da Vinci Code approaches, it is difficult for Christians to know what to do. If we were Muslims, and Dan Brown was insulting us, we could run round burning the book and threatening cinema-goers, and before long the Foreign Secretary, or an equivalent dignitary, would condemn the film-makers for being ‘provocative’. Being Christians, we enjoy no such favour in high places, and so have to be more ingenious. It’s a good idea to reveal the plot, obviously — preferably loudly in the queue at the cinema. The villain is ‘British Royal historian’ Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen), and the general idea is that the Holy Grail is the body of Mary Magdalene, whom Jesus married, a fact which the Church has suppressed. The code that needs cracking ‘O, draconian devil! Oh, lame saint!’ is an anagram, or, as the author puts it, ‘a perfect anagram’ (note the need to spell ‘O’ two ways in order to make it fit) of ‘Leonardo da Vinci! The Mona Lisa!’ But I fear people will still flock to the film. Spectator readers, however, can judge the authenticity of the book just by following its British references. Sir Leigh speaks sometimes in a ‘thick English accent’ and sometimes in ‘highbrow British’. When he flies with lovely Sophie to Britain in a private plane over the ‘misty hills of Kent’, he gets her through immigration because he has been knighted (‘Membership has its privileges’). He carries ‘an embossed card identifying him as a Knight of the Realm’, which causes security guards to let him in everywhere. Sir Leigh orders his driver Remy to park in Horse Guards Parade. There he poisons him with peanut butter, leaves his corpse in the car and strolls off to Westminster Abbey, where he tries to shoot the hero (Tom Hanks) in the Chapter House. Brown’s understanding of church history is as good as his knowledge of the British class system and of parking in central London.
Afriend’s daughter recently received an official certificate saying that she had got an A grade in history A-level. In fact, she had not even taken history A-level (she’s doing GCSEs) and so, with admirable but foolish honesty, she handed the certificate to her teacher. The same thing happened to another pupil in the school. How much longer before exam passes can simply be traded without even having to sit the thing at all?
Once a year this column tries to whip up xenophobia against the Spanish bluebell. It is the grey squirrel of the botanical world, driving out the far more delicate native variety. As with the grey squirrel, no one has found a way of stopping it, though patriotic gardeners poison it (unfortunately, the poison seems to run off its nasty, slimy leaves) and smash its bulbs to pulp. Is it already too late to enjoy the spring and beat the Spaniards too?
Previous page
