W hen it was announced in 1999 that Cherie Blair was
pregnant, the controversy about the proposed hunting ban was at its height. I discussed the pregnancy at a hunt tea with the terrier-man. ‘It won’t be a baby,’ he predicted sullenly, ‘It’ll be a two-headed calf.’ Actually, it was dear little Leo. Now, in the extracts from her forthcoming memoirs, Mrs Blair explains the circumstances of his conception. In the previous year, when she and Tony had stayed at Balmoral, ‘I had been extremely disconcerted to discover that everything of mine had been unpacked. Not only my clothes, but the entire contents of my distinctly ancient toilet bag with its range of unmentionables. This year I had been more circumspect and had not packed my contraceptive equipment, out of sheer embarrassment. As usual up there, it had been bitterly cold and what with one thing and another... ’. Several things strike me about this passage. The first is that I am not sure I believe its details. Was it really a complete surprise that her bags were unpacked? Was it really impossible for her to carry her ‘contraceptive equipment’ (she makes it sound as big as a toolbox) in a handbag which the Balmoral staff would not molest? Second, the passage is rude to the Queen, who allegedly keeps her house so cold that she drives the Prime Minister and his wife beneath the sheets. Third, it reveals that Mrs Blair, the good Catholic, defies her Church in using contraception. This is not at all unusual, but what point is Mrs Blair making by telling us? Fourth, the passage is coy and knowing — the dreadful ‘what with one thing and another... ’. Finally, the essential story is not, in fact, new. The news that Leo was conceived at Balmoral was released at the time. The editor of The Spectator made a valiant attempt to defend Mrs Blair in his latest Sunday Telegraph column. He is right that some of the attacks on her are misogynist or vindictive. But no one damages Cherie Blair more than herself.
At the Conservatives’ Spring Lunch last week, I bumped into a crestfallen Stanley Johnson. Stanley wants to succeed his son Boris as Conservative candidate for Henley, but he told me he had just raised the matter with David Cameron (also at the lunch) who had said: ‘I think we need a local candidate.’ I felt sorry for Stanley and sympathetic with his gallant water-flowing-uphill version of the hereditary principle, but afterwards I reflected on Cameron’s courage. Almost anyone else, faced with Stanley’s bouncy enthusiasm, would at least have played along. But Cameron was determined not to let sentiment overcome hard politics. He has the coldness necessary to command.
My wife was born in Markham Square, Chelsea, in a house her parents bought for £7,800 in 1955. So I felt a melancholy interest in the story last week of the police killing of the young barrister, Mark Saunders, who was said to be drunk and depressed, and started firing a shotgun out of his window in the square. We do not yet know why Mr Saunders behaved as he did, but I wonder if absurd house prices — the explanation for almost everything that is wrong with this country — had something to do with it. He and Mrs Saunders lived in a flat in Markham Square said to be worth £2.25 million. I am trying to imagine what the police would have done in the same situation in 1955, when there was almost no gun crime in London and no control of any kind on the ownership of shotguns. I cannot help thinking that, instead of putting on silly balaclavas and shooting Mr Saunders dead, they would have found a way of calming the situation. One knows that policemen usually do not like barristers, but this was going too far. Obviously, Mr Saunders was dangerous, but did he really have to die? It is noticeable that as the civilian population is more restricted in its legal use of guns, the police seem to get more trigger-happy.
This column finds itself almost alone (see last week’s Notes) in defending Wendy Alexander, the Labour leader in the Scottish Parliament, for changing her mind and calling for a referendum on Scottish independence. She is said to have annoyed Gordon Brown and to have made a political gaffe, as if these were the same thing. But the referendum logic is ineluctable. In the 1990s, many Scots wanted a referendum on devolution. Labour gave them one, and they voted for it, and they got what they voted for. Now many Scots want a referendum on independence. Scottish politics cannot be resolved until this is granted. When it is, we shall know, one way or the other, where we stand. It is stupid of Labour to try to resist the referendum tide it created, and allow the Scottish Nationalists to make the cause of the popular will their own. Surely the wisest thing is for Labour, nationally, to take the matter upon itself. Since the result will ultimately affect the whole country, the House of Commons, not the Scottish Parliament, should legislate for it (as happened, of course, with devolution itself), making rules for its proper conduct. The most likely result of a referendum is that it would go against independence, thus strengthening the Union. But if it goes decisively the other way, it must be accepted. Why the Tories, who have only one seat to lose in Scotland, do not promise a referendum, I do not understand.
It would be interesting if an opinion poll would test whether the English know what ‘the Union’ means. I suspect many do not. They may think it has something to do with trade unions. Those who defend it need to remedy this. Is there another way of putting it? The end of the Union would, after all, mean the end of the United Kingdom. Put like that, it matters to all of us.
The recent perfect weather has allowed us to eat supper out of doors. As we did so last weekend, we noticed a commotion across the valley. A bird of prey, a good deal larger than a kestrel, was being mobbed by little birds as it swept over the tops of the trees. Perhaps the bird was unfamiliar to them, as it was to us, so they were taking the attitude of the urchins in the ancient Punch cartoon (‘Who’s ’e?’ ‘A stranger.’ ‘’eave ’alf a brick at ’im.’). Thinking about it afterwards, considering the size, the russet colouring and the black ‘primaries’ (main wing feathers), we decided that it was a red kite, often seen near the M40 between London and Oxford, but not, so far as I know, in our part of Sussex. Red kites were shot out of Britain, except wildest Wales, by the end of the 19th century. Now, in some parts, they are almost too common. But for us, for that moment, rarity and beauty combined, the former intensifying the latter.
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