21 JANUARY 2006, Page 7

J ack Straw says that military action against Iran is ‘inconceivable’.

The President of Iran says he wants to wipe Israel ‘off the map’. Why doesn’t an interviewer ask the Foreign Secretary whether, if Iran tried to do this, military action would still be inconceivable? If he says yes (and if that is the policy of the West), then Iran will know that it can go ahead.

There has been no more touching story in recent days than the complaint of Alexander Chancellor, the great former editor of The Spectator, that he has been dropped from Today’s Birthdays in the Guardian. Alexander, who is 66 this month, protested, and was told that he was dropped ‘because of space’, which somehow only makes it more wounding. And it seemed particularly hurtful that the paper which jettisoned him — he still appears in the Daily Telegraph and the Times — is the one for which he writes a column. ‘You know how touchy we OAPS can be,’ Alexander wrote, brooding on this subject (in the Guardian). His case is a small illustration of the wellknown modern problem that not enough respect is shown to the old — ‘old’ here being defined as anyone of pension age, though it seems a particularly unsuitable word to apply to Alexander Chancellor. You would have thought, since there are far more old people than ever before and they are, on average, richer than ever before, that they would wield ever greater power. The opposite seems to be the case. There is a worship of youth. The oldest person in David Cameron’s shadow Cabinet (David Davis) is 57. I suspect that the answer lies in the laws of supply and demand. There is a glut of oldies and an undersupply of the young. People always value more highly what is scarce, so the young are sought out and cherished like rare orchids. Since modern medicine makes life ever longer, there would seem to be no end to this problem except, perhaps, a concerted drive to increase the birth rate. Note to the relevant employee of the Guardian: I shall be 50 on 31 October.

It seems likely that the Conservatives, led by Stephen Harper, will win the election next week in Canada. The Liberals there, in government at present, are making a lastminute attempt to stop him by making him out to be a stooge of George Bush. If he does win, however, it will be further evidence (following the re-election of Blair, Bush and John Howard in Australia) that support for the war in Iraq is no bar to, possibly a precondition for, electoral victory in the Anglosphere. No one could be keener than I that David Cameron does not trash the achievements of Margaret Thatcher, but some of the most fervent Thatcherites tend to forget that she herself, like all successful political leaders, understood the doctrine of ripe and unripe time. She recognised that the first thing you have to do when you become leader in opposition, particularly after a period of your party’s weakness, is to get yourself a hearing from people who do not automatically support you. In roughly the same period of leadership as David Cameron has so far experienced, Mrs Thatcher made a speech suggesting a greater move to the centre for the Tories, another praising Scottish devolution and several on the glories of closer European integration....

Everyone drones on about the ‘North/South divide’ in Britain, but in terms of character, if not always in wealth, the East/West divide is surely more significant. I have just spent three days in the east of England, some of it looking at Margaret Thatcher’s roots. From Essex right up to Aberdeenshire, there are shared characteristics of economy of words, unsentimentality, hard work, toughness, courage, a lack of romance and imagination, sometimes a certain bleakness. These qualities seem to go with places which are more cold, dry and open than they are wild, wet and woolly. If you want the opposite, go west. The only part of mainland Britain where the North/South divide governs everything is Wales.

An example of resourcefulness — from the East Midlands, in fact — that I heard last week. A leading local businessman with a knowledge of the transport trade, driving home from a jolly dinner, crashed his Range Rover into the back of a van. The driver jumped out, and the businessman feared road rage and the breathalyser. Then he spotted a sign in the back of the van saying ‘For sale’. ‘How much do you want for it?’ he quickly asked, and did the deal on the spot. By the next week, the new owner had repaired the door and sold the van at a profit.

This column is conducting a campaign to save the word ‘mediaeval’ from being used as a term of insult. When Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the head of the Muslim Council of Britain, condemned homosexual behaviour the other day, he was immediately denounced by Alan Duncan, the Tory frontbencher, who said his attitude was ‘mediaeval’. This is quite unfair. The whole concept of homosexuality only came into being in the 19th century. It is a notion deriving from psychology. The passionate denunciation — or advocacy — of homosexuality is a modern phenomenon. If you had somehow been able to raise the subject with mediaeval people, they literally would not have known what you were talking about. ‘Mediaeval’ should not be a synonym for ‘barbarous’. Ely Cathedral and trial by jury and Giotto are mediaeval. The Scottish Parliament and on-the-spot fines and Tracey Emin are modern.

The latest campaign in Parliament about animal welfare concerns tail-docking. It is cruel, say Labour MPs, and should be banned. One says that a dog without a tail is like a face without a smile. I agree that docking is best avoided if possible, not because of the pain of the operation, which is minimal, but because dogs have tails for a reason. But this is one of the many, many examples where a blanket law is worse than codes of practice devised by people who know what they are doing. There are studies, one from Sweden, which show that dogs in some occupations, particularly watery ones, suffer greatly from infections unless their tails are docked. The analogy with smile on face breaks down if face is disfigured by avoidable disease. Why generalise by statute? Soon someone will notice that most sheeps’ tails are docked, and try to stop that. The result would be far more sick sheep.

It says something about our culture that George Galloway took very little knock in public esteem when he told Saddam Hussein that he saluted ‘your courage, your strength, your indefatigability’ but provokes execration when he crawls round the floor on Celebrity Big Brother pretending to be a cat.