SHARED OPINION
If only more prominent people dared to be pompous
FRANK JOHNSON
In common with millions of other Irvineists up and down the country, I sometimes wonder whether we, as a people, really want Lord Irvine. Consider this latest fuss concerning the cost of his upkeep. Chippy, levelling Conservative backbenchers and newspapers have whipped up class resentment against the annual Irvine refit, which this year stood at a mere £22,000.
That is a fraction of the cost of refitting, say, the average aircraft carrier. Sadly, Lord Irvine has felt it necessary to give in to this vulgar clamour. One of his palace officials has had the unhappy task of informing the press that Lord Irvine has forgone the £22,000. It was calculated in one of the more responsible newspapers, the Independent, that 'Lord Irvine's decision not to take up his full pay rise will cost him nearly £220,000 in extra pension payouts'.
Where is the Daily Telegraph now? That paper rightly regretted that Her Majesty should have to pay taxes. It recently opposed Prince and Princess Michael of Kent's having to pay rent for their accommodation just off Kensington Gardens. I must admit I did not join the mass march to Hyde Park for that one.
But, on the issue of the cost of Lord Irvine, the Telegraph has embraced the politics of envy. Perhaps it wants Lord Irvine abolished. But replaced with what? We are not told. Would the British really want a Scandinavian Irvine on a bicycle? I think not.
This 'row' over the financing of Lord Irvine has been followed by the asking of the question: what is he for? In fact, he is not 'for' anything, except of course himself. To paraphrase Bagehot, he must be seen in the context of the halves of our constitution: the dignified and the useless. He manages to be both. All who have had the privilege of coming into contact with him attest to his performing his duties with a complete and simple lack of charm. No one is too unimportant for him not to take the trouble of being offensive to them.
The attempt to abolish him raises the whole worrying issue of the future of pomposity in our public life. Very few prominent people now dare to be pompous. This decline can be traced back to the so-called 'satirists' who emerged in the early 1960s. that baleful decade which is also responsible for sex. Before then, our public life contained much pomposity. There was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, and, a little later, Lord Fisher. There was the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard. There was Richard Dimbleby. That magnifico's two sons, David and Jonathan, are prepared to talk to anyone if it is to do with a television programme, even the viewers.
We look in vain for them in the Commons. There the Conservative party, once the heartland of pomposity, almost entirely consists of ingratiating liberals seeking to reassure us journalists that they are more left-wing than Mr Blair. Some of us have high hopes of a still obscure Tory frontbencher, Quentin Davies. Alone of them, he looks as if he would have been at home in the Tory party in the 1950s. He has a red face, greased dark hair and a reasonable amount of toffee stuck up his nose. He also has an expensive suit; though possibly, since boards are now reluctant to take on Tories as non-executive directors, only one. Moreover, he seems to be no intellectual. He could be our man. But I have merely observed rather than met him. For all I know, he could be as affable as the rest.
Sir Patrick Cormack, the Conservative Member for South Staffordshire, and something of a constitutionalist, is sometimes described as pompous. He talks in rotund sentences. Or perhaps it is because the rotund sentences emerge from a rotund person. But I am not sure he is what we are looking for. He tends to laugh at other people's jokes, not at just his own. That is fatal to true pomposity.
On the Labour side, there is hardly anyone. I cannot make up my mind whether Mr Tam Dalyell is pompous. For years I thought so. But this may have been because, when I first started working in the press gallery — aged 24, and for a provincial newspaper in the late 1960s — he did to me what no other politician has ever done; not child abuse, worse. I was first in the queue for taxis in New Palace Yard. Officially, when a taxi arrives, MPs are allowed to assert precedence over non-MPs. The only one I have ever seen do it was Mr Dalyell. He said something to me like, 'MPs do come before.' The incident made me still more of an antisocialist, or possibly anti-social. I took some comfort from it having been a Labour Member who had exercised this droit de seigneur. Admittedly, he was an Old Etonian, who inherited a great property now under the sway of the National Trust, and spoke under the influence of a big plum in his larynx.
Mr Dalyell is also, so far as one can tell, humourless. He is under the impression that only he has spotted the important question. As he makes his way around, he screws up his eyes and, being tall, stares over people's heads. But he is also a man of causes. The pompous are men of place. At the moment, Mr Dalyell thinks that he is solely responsible for preventing war. No true pomposo would have got himself thrown out of the House by the Speaker, which in effect was what he contrived this week. It involves a long walk with everyone looking at you. Lord Irvine only does that with a page-boy holding his train.
There are still pompous businessmen with, even more valuably, pompous wives. A few years ago the wife or ex-wife — I cannot quite remember — of a national newspaper manager was involved in a court case, the proceedings of which entailed her allegedly asking a Heathrow airport official, 'Do you know who I am?' — a fatal question to ask an employee in Britain since they never do know. Her predicament caused us much pleasure. But members of the business class are coached into abandoning their pomposity when they become important enough to go on television, the great leveller. We must reconcile ourselves to an egalitarian world in which no one else has the self-confidence to be Lord Irvine.
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