A ctually, there never was much sense in a ten pence
rate of income tax. It added complication, and Gordon Brown is right to get rid of it, though wrong to charge income tax on people so low on the income scale. But you cannot help laughing when you look at the history. Chancellor Brown himself introduced the ten pence rate in 1999. In a coup de théâtre, he said then that it was such a pressing thing that he would ensure that it came in at once, rather than waiting a year, as would have been normal: ‘nearly two million people will see their income tax bills cut in half’. It was, he said later, one of his ‘major changes to reward work’. When he got rid of his own ‘major change’ last year, he thought he was paving the way for a general election. He calculated that the abolition of the rate in return for a lower standard rate was a better thing in prospect than in reality, and so promised it for 2008. There was no election, and now it has all gone wrong. The funny thing is, Mr Brown has made the same mistake twice. He suddenly lost the confidence of the business community earlier this year when he abolished the ten pence rate resulting from business taper relief on capital gains tax. Again, he was attacking his own earlier — 10p — gimmick.
Afriend once told me that when she was about to be 18, she asked her mother how, physically, one voted. ‘Oh, it’s very simple, darling,’ was the reply, ‘you just go to a polling station, take the ballot paper and put an X beside the one that says “Conservative”.’ It is a great virtue of the ‘first-past-the-post’ system that almost anyone can understand it. Unfortunately, the London mayoral election next week takes place on a system of first and second preference, and I find that a good many people who want to vote for Boris Johnson are either unaware of this, or do not know how it works. So let me pass on the authoritative explanation: when you enter the polling station, you will be given a pink paper for the mayoral election. The ten candidates will be listed, with two columns against their names, one saying, ‘1st choice’, the other, ‘2nd choice’. Beside the name ‘Boris Johnson’, you should put an X in the box marked ‘1st choice’. You may leave the ‘2nd choice’ box empty if you want, but not the ‘1st choice’ box. Because of the system of redistribution, second-preference votes benefit only the top two candidates. So if you want to vote for, say, the Liberal Democrat candidate first and Boris second, that might help Boris, whereas a vote for Ken Livingstone first and the Liberal Democrat second does nothing whatever for the Liberal Democrat. Apparently the postal version of the ballot is harder to understand, so I hope it is good news for the Boris camp that far larger numbers of postal votes have been cast in Conservative boroughs such as Wandsworth and Barnet than in Labour ones like Tower Hamlets, and not some ghastly mistake.
Vera Baird says that the right of males to succeed to the throne before females is ‘a load of rubbish’. ‘I have always thought that what we have to do with the royal family is integrate them as far as possible into the human race,’ she adds. Who is Vera Baird, you may very reasonably ask. She turns out to be the Solicitor-General, one of what she accurately describes on her own website as ‘the Law Officers of the Crown’. So she is paid as the Queen’s Minister, charged with upholding the Queen’s law. I wonder if she sees no faint incompatibility between her attitude and her post. If she had said that she wanted to integrate black people/ homosexuals/Muslims into the human race, she would (rightly) have been dismissed from office; but she can insult the formal source of her authority, and nobody seems to notice. Mrs Baird’s interests include ‘travel, reading, running and Zack, her rescued Bedlington terrier dog’ and she is the author of several books, including one called Rape in Court, but is she quite sure that she knows more about the human race than the woman who has reigned over us for nearly 60 years?
Istrongly suspect that Max Mosley is telling the truth when he claims that there was no Nazi element to his sado-masochistic orgy recently exposed by the News of the World. He is the victim of a game newspapers play when they want to run a sex scandal. (This column noted it two years ago in relation to John Prescott.) They know that allegations of this kind are libellous, but they also know that a libel is only a libel if you have a reputation among what the law calls ‘right-thinking people’. Once a sexual misdemeanour is established, your reputation in that area is undermined, and so the newspaper can make up more lurid accusations about your sex life, believing that you won’t dare seek legal redress. This is the ‘inverted pyramid of piffle’ of which Boris Johnson (see above) once complained — at the bottom of the inversion is a bit of truth, and the piffle is piled on top. In this case, the News of the World would have seen that if they could link the Mosley name with anything Nazi that would sell more papers and provide a bogus moral justification for their story, so they stuck it in. Mr Mosley defends his private sexual behaviour ‘provided it doesn’t hurt anybody’. That does not seem the mot juste — surely sado-masochistic activities are supposed to hurt somebody. But he is brave and right to fight this battle. Having spent a life trying to escape from the effects of his father’s politics, why should his career be destroyed by a false application of them to him?
The other day, my old friend Adam Nicolson kindly showed me round Sissinghurst Castle, where he now lives. In the tower are four paintings commissioned by Adam’s late father, Nigel, to recreate, for educational purposes, the house at various stages of its historical development from the Middle Ages to the present. The first shows a mediaeval house and the second a whole new early-Tudor house built only about 50 years after the first, on a site nearby. Adam explained, affectionately, that this was wishful thinking, based on no real evidence. The two houses which Nigel particularly loved were Ightham Mote and Compton Wynyates, and so he gradually convinced himself that Sissinghurst had resembled first the one and then the other. This is a literally graphic example of the dangerous but endearing tendency which all of us have to make history what we want it to be.
There has been a dramatic fall-off, apparently, in the numbers of certain migratory birds reaching this country. How long before there is a correspondence in the Times from people who claim to have heard the last cuckoo?
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