H ow strange that Gordon Brown’s suggestion this week that MPs
should have no say in setting their own pay is being welcomed as a curb on sleaze. If their pay is to be set, as is proposed, by a government-funded agency instead of by their own votes, MPs will cease to be independent legislators and become government employees. Most of British constitutional history (‘I see the birds have flown’) has sought to avoid government control of those we elect, and control of a person’s pay is perhaps the most effective curb of all. We are so disillusioned by our MPs that we now welcome anything they do which discards their usual functions. Thus most of the public seems to think that David Davis is standing up for his principles by resigning his seat over ‘42 days’ and promising to fight a by-election. But surely the point of being in Parliament is to try to turn your principles into parliamentary practice. That is what Mr Davis was doing by leading his party’s powerful campaign against the measure. Yes, he lost the vote, but by such a small margin that the parliamentary system will almost certainly see it off. Now he flounces out, in order to flounce back in. The fact that people applaud this shows that MPs have allowed us to forget what Parliament is for.
Last week, I went to the oddest book launch I can remember. It began with a sung Tridentine Mass in the Little Oratory, an annex of the Brompton Oratory. The officiating priest was Father Julian Large, whom I used to employ in his pre-clerical days as No. 2 on the Peterborough Diary column of the Daily Telegraph. We had the full, wellordered Latin works, with birettas, ‘bells and smells’, etc. Then there was a speech upstairs by Princess Alessandra Borghese, the author. She used to be a famed socialite — an early boyfriend committed suicide, her ex-husband, a Niarchos, died of a cocaine overdose. Now she has returned to the beliefs of her baptism and is joined in doing so by her great friend Princess Gloria Thurn und Taxis, who spoke for her at the dinner afterwards. I remembered Princess Gloria from the gossip columns of 20 years ago when she wore very little and decorated her husband’s 60th birthday cake with 60 wax phalluses. Now the two women go on pilgrimages together round Bavaria, studying every place known to the present Pope, who was born at Markl am Inn. The resulting book by Alexandra Borghese is called In the Footsteps of Joseph Ratzinger, and she gave us a simple and touching account of it. It is not always fun to get older, but one of the real pleasures is watching how members of one’s generation change.
Or don’t change. One of those in the audience at the Oratory was the Revd Nicky Gumbel, from Holy Trinity, Brompton, across the way. In the old days, the idea that an evangelical would darken a Catholic door would have been unthinkable, but now there is a lot of common ground between the two. I was at school and Cambridge with Nicky Gumbel. At the time, I thought he was very nice, but it did not occur to me that he would walk with destiny. When we were at Trinity, he told me that he had written ‘reading’ as his hobby on his CV for university entrance because he could not think of anything else. When, at interview, the dons asked him what he had read recently, he blurted out ‘The Day of the Jackal’, which was not what they meant by reading. Today, Nicky has claims to be the most successful of my fellow schoolboys, a man to whom hedge-fund kings, SAS generals and Cabinet ministers should defer. He is the chief begetter of Alpha, the course in basic Christianity which is now conquering the entire world and has been studied by literally millions of people. His mission has probably reached more people than that of any Englishman in history except for John Wesley. Yet he seems exactly the same as 30 years ago — the jolly young man who used to toast me crumpets while explaining why I should pay more attention to St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.
TV Licensing (continued). Mr P, who runs a care home in West Sussex, tells me that he frequently receives whole batches of threatening letters from TV Licensing, one for each resident, accusing each of evading a television licence. They are usually addressed to ‘Occupant, Room 1’ and so on. All but one of his residents are over 75, and therefore get their licences free, and the authorities have been informed of this. The sole resident who is under 75 benefits from the group licence for the entire home and therefore has to pay only £5 (a cost which the home bears), so every single letter from TV Licensing is inapplicable. The letters still have the power to confuse and frighten old people, though. Mr P therefore ‘stores’ most of the letters without passing them on. No doubt this is a crime.
The Mayor of Casterbridge was one of the many great books on my conscience because I had never read it, and so I am reading it now. Here is Hardy’s description of the landlady of the Three Mariners: ‘The latter, who remained as fixed in the arm-chair as if she had been melted into it when in a liquid state, and could not now be unstuck, looked the girl up and down inquiringly, with her hands on the chair-arms’. This reminded me of something. Eventually I remembered what. In Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest, Bertie Wooster is called on without notice by Lady Malvern, an ‘overpowering’ friend of his aunt Agatha: ‘She fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing arm-chairs tight about the hips that season.’ Presumably, P.G. Wodehouse had read The Mayor of Casterbridge, and it had echoed in his mind. It is interesting that a professionally funny writer and a professionally non-funny one should have toyed with similar ideas. Hardy often has images of great comic potential, but usually prefers not to play them for laughs. He seems to take this attitude on principle. Young Elizabeth-Jane, who is staying at the Three Mariners, believed that ‘though one could be gay on occasion, moments of gaiety were interludes, and no part of the actual drama’. That was Hardy’s own view. It is a pleasing thought that he could have been an absolute scream if he chose, but had the courage to choose not to be.
Neighbours told me of a walk they took last weekend through a pretty piece of country near us. As their footpath approached a carefully tarmac’d drive, they were confronted by a large notice. ‘Please wipe your boots before walking across the drive’, it said. For some reason, this small piece of information made me feel more depressed than news of flood, famine or war.
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