H ere, in full, is the current newspaper advertisement for the
coming programmes on ITV1: ‘THIS SUMMER Ant and Dec will give away £1,000,000. Famous faces will face the music (and Simon Cowell). David Beckham will bare his soul to the nation. A man will be drowned alive. Robbie Williams will support Unicef. Gazza will support Robbie Williams. Celebrities will be marooned on Love Island. The Beckhams will throw a World Cup party. Dinosaurs will be saved from extinction. Oh ... and then there’s that WORLD CUP footie thing too. ONLY ON ITV1.’ This seems an almost complete summary of things that I do not want to see.
Or so I thought. But my moles from the Beckhams’ World Cup party given on Sunday night tell me that I am wrong. The Daily Mail reported that the party at ‘Beckingham Palace’, Sawbridgeworth, Herts, ‘barely sputtered into life ... after a catalogue of disasters. ... With her dreams crashing around her Victoria reportedly flew into a screaming fit,’ etc. Gordon Ramsay, the cook, suffered from a ‘crippling injury’, said the Mail, and ‘the heavens opened’, ruining everything and making the fireworks ‘a damp squib’. Wayne Rooney ‘appeared sullen’ and the waiters wore ‘gypsy-type Spanish dress’. But according to my friends with the tickets, none of this was true. Posh was all smiles, Gordon Ramsay danced energetically without limping, Wayne Rooney was extremely polite, there was no rain at all and no fireworks, and the waiters wore plain, non-gypsy, nonSpanish costumes. The Archbishop of York also got in a rage with the party, saying how disgraceful it was that people paid £100,000 for a pair of tickets when a hospital porter gets only £131 per week. I don’t understand why it is wrong for people to spend huge sums on such things when the proceeds go to charities — in this case the Beckhams’ own charity for disabled children, as well as for Unicef and the Prince’s Trust. But the main point, according to my sources, was that the occasion was funny and friendly. Frankie Dettori was thrown round by the England team as if he were Pass-the-Parcel, Ozzy Osbourne managed to get a five-figure sum by auctioning, uninvited, his services as a cook for a dinner party, and P. Diddy auctioned a weekend with him in New York where ‘you won’t wake up till Wednesday’. Presiding over everything was the gentle, kindly figure of David Beckham himself, with a solicitous word for everyone, dancing with all sorts, and making a touching speech in which he said, ‘There’s a lot of people I’d like to spank,’ at which he blushed hotly and, after deafening cheers, went on, ‘I mean there’s a lot of people I’d like to thank.’ He showed himself a true gentleman throughout. ‘Our society has sold its soul when even Royals bow down before the cult of celebrity,’ shouted Melanie Phillips, also in the Daily Mail. Actually, the only royal person present was Princess Beatrice, who is a teenager.
At Michael Wharton’s memorial service in St Bride’s last week, we sang F.W. Faber’s hymn ‘There’s a wideness in God’s mercy’. One couplet goes ‘There is room for fresh creations/ In that upper home of bliss’, which made me think, I’m afraid, of the House of Lords. Modern politicians have to say that they favour direct election to the second chamber (though Tony Blair went through a period of rejecting this), but if this were to happen, the smooth running of political life would be threatened. At present a peerage is a reward, not a job. Sometimes it is a reward for genuine merit, sometimes a means of getting someone out of the way, sometimes a sort of receipt for payment. There is no theory which can fully defend this sort of thing, but the practice has not been too bad, especially when a hereditary element adds chance to the mix. No one can honestly claim that the House of Lords in modern times has oppressed the nation to anything like the extent that the House of Commons has done; generally it has been the Lords who have stood up for liberty against the arbitrary power the Commons has been all too willing to endorse. And even ‘cronies’, once elevated, have proved independent. But if we have an elected second chamber, a peerage will be a job — attracting salary, pension, career structure, jockeying for position and so on. The idea is that the people will at last be authentically represented. In reality, though, political parties will not want the executive to lose power, and they will still feel the need for a structure of patronage. With the help of proportional representation, they will make sure, therefore, that peers are the products of party lists, owing their places to party machines. More control than ever before will be exercised, under the guise of less.
There are 646 Members of Parliament, and when they debated their salaries last week many of them complained that they were not being paid enough (they get roughly £60,000 a year) for what they do. One thing they are paid to do is ask questions. Since the bomb attacks in London on 7 July last year, only three MPs — Louise Ellman, Andrew Dismore (both Labour) and Michael Gove (Conservative) — have asked questions in the House about Islamist radicalism in Britain.
This column has not been kind to The Da Vinci Code, but it strikes me that there is a useful lesson to be derived from Dan Brown’s fiction. His idea that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children, a line of descent ending up with gorgeous Parisian police cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), shows the wisdom of the Catholic Church in insisting on priestly celibacy. Where families and power meet, dynasties are created; and where dynasties are created, rivalries abound; and where rivalries abound, killing and war ensue. The history of Christianity has been bloody enough as it is; imagine what it would have been like if Christ really had had children. Actually, you don’t need to imagine it — you can simply study the history of Islam. Because Mohammed had many wives and many children (though no surviving son), there was, almost from the beginning, a dispute about who was his rightful successor (caliph). That is why Sunnis and Shias fight one another to this day. For his next novel, Brown should ‘uncover’ an amazing Muslim conspiracy to conceal the fact that Mohammed had no children and that the early caliphs made it up. That should do a roaring trade at airport bookstalls.
Little stays the same in the fast-moving 21st century, but two stories seem to have appeared in newspapers every week for almost as long as I can remember. One is that someone is trying, and failing, to buy the London Stock Exchange. The other is that Gordon Brown wants Tony Blair’s job.
Previous page
