THE SPECTATOR’S NOTES
CHARLES MOORE
From time to time, the parliamentary lobby journalists invite us to admire a particular politician. Minister X or shadow minister Y is suddenly presented as quite intensely able etc. For some time, Hilary Benn, the International Development Secretary, has occupied this enviable position. Has anyone any idea why? Obviously he is less mad and vain than his father, but so is almost everyone in the world. Besides, he appears entirely to lack his father’s charm and eloquence. If he were merely boring, though, one would have no complaint against him, but I think it is time to look harder at what DFID does under his stewardship. The rise of the department, often at the expense of the Foreign Office, has proved politically useful because the fact that it is devoted to aid makes people think that it acts benevolently without any political agenda. In reality, there is nothing more political in the world than aid, and it is often the chosen method of propping up an unpleasant regime. Mr Benn is the lead spokesman on Darfur, lulling people into thinking that the only problem is the logistics of getting emergency aid through to suffering people. In reality, the people of Darfur suffer because of the oppression of the Islamist government in Khartoum, and Mr Benn is a leading apologist for that government. He appears in the media to explain that the Darfur peace agreement is just fine, and it is the fault of the ‘rebels’ that it is not being implemented. Meanwhile, more than 90 per cent of the violence is perpetrated by the Janjaweed and other proxies of Khartoum, and people continue to die because people like Mr Benn resist an effective international intervention force. David Cameron has interested himself in the subject of Darfur. The sooner he exposes the government on this subject, the better.
The late Peter Simple column used to note how some scientists, especially astronomers, love jokey metaphors to describe the phenomena of their sublime subject. He disliked their joshing, laddish way of indicating that they had mastered something so difficult, believing that it actually indicated the opposite. I thought of this when reading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (which I reviewed in last week’s Spectator). Dawkins talks breezily of things like ‘The ultimate Boeing 747’ and quotes with approval a conversation he had with Jim Watson, codiscoverer of DNA. Watson’s answer to those who say that religion is about what we’re ‘for’ is, ‘Well I don’t think we’re for anything. We’re just products of evolution. You can say “Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don’t think there’s a purpose”, but I’m anticipating having a good lunch.’ What does Watson’s remark prove, and why does he think it’s funny? The Watson/ Dawkins vision of the world is that science has solved the key problems that religion mystifies. It makes universal claims. Yet its tone is very ununiversal — it is clever-silly, Cambridge hightableish, Western white men congratulating each other on being so clever. ‘A good lunch’, ha, ha, ha. Let them try 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness.
At the weekend, the anti-climate change lobby ran full-page spoof ads in the newspapers for an organisation called SPURT. Spurt’s president, a fictional being called Sir Montgomery Cecil, spoke up under the headline ‘Let’s not worry about climate change’, praised the government for resisting a tax on aviation and declared, ‘Everyone wants a holiday in a hot place, so what’s the problem?’ The ad ended with the words: ‘Sod Them. Let’s Fly.’ The aim of this clunking satire was presumably to make us all go green, but I found myself (globally) warming to Sir Montgomery. There is something quite revoltingly priggish and snobbish about the attack on ‘cheap flights’. Cheap flights are one of the greatest providers of opportunity and pleasure to people who previously led very confined lives. If any flights should stop, it is expensive ones — all the flights in which politicians go to Earth summits and the like. As when Prince Charles complains of ‘our obsession with cheap food’, or when people try to stop house-building everywhere, greens’ genuine concern with the environment gets inextricably muddled up with their instinctive disdain for poor people who show signs of getting richer. Sod Them. Let’s Fly.
Because David Cameron’s speech in Bournemouth last week was treated as being lefty, not much attention was paid to what he said about house-building. He challenged his party to recognise that there had to be a lot more houses built if young people were going to be able to set up home at all. Unless supply can get closer to demand, the Two Nations will become the dominant motif of our politics, and the split will be between generations as well as classes.
In this column recently I gave readers addresses to which they could send letters and parcels to British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many have kindly responded but several have reported difficulty. Some were told that parcels could not be accepted because of the fear that fellow British citizens might send the troops bombs in the post, an extraordinarily depressing thought. Actually, the reason for the difficulty, according to the BFPO, is that things sent to unnamed soldiers slow down the post sent to named ones. The BFPO therefore recommends that readers should inquire of the Soldier Magazine, with a stamped addressed envelope, at Ordnance Road, Aldershot, Hants GU11 2DU, or find it through www.soldiermagazine.co.uk. Isn’t this system quite ridiculously inefficient? The message it sends is that unsolicited presents and letters are unwelcome, when one knows from reports on the ground that this is not the case.
Of all the tasks that one might take on pro bono, the gloomiest must be that of executor of the late Sir Edward Heath. Heath’s will provides for Arundells, his beautiful house in Salisbury, to be preserved as a sort of mausoleum in his honour. Heath originally got the house on a lease from the Dean and Chapter of the cathedral, on the gentlemanly understanding that it would return thither on his death. Instead he took advantage of John Major’s iniquitous leasehold reform act and secured the freehold (in contrast to Enoch Powell, who refused to exercise the same right from the Grosvenor estate on the grounds that ‘I won’t rob a duke’). Arundells is a beautiful house, but Sir Edward’s possessions are the trophies of a desolate public life — golden miniature dhows from Arab emirs, certificates of the freedom of various Continental cities and so on. Who will want to visit this melancholy temple?
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