F or some weeks, I was thinking of writing against the
Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, but despair crept over me. What is the point, I asked myself, when opinion seems to have moved so decisively against the idea that a human being is an inviolable entity? Nothing will stop this Bill, I thought. Now it turns out that I may be wrong. In the funny way British opinion has of noticing something only when it is almost too late, people are suddenly worried that the human and animal could be commingled, created and then destroyed by scientists. And their worry has coincided with the political weakness of the government. Hence Gordon Brown’s ‘climb-down’ about whipping the vote. But is it, in fact, a climb-down? The new edict is that Labour MPs may have a free vote on three clauses in the Bill, but must then vote for the Bill in its final form. Because the amendments to these three clauses will probably fail, this means that they will still be forced to vote against their consciences in the end. It is like the farce by which ministers have opposed post office closures but then voted for them — a very New Labour ethical solution in which appearance trumps reality.
Reviewing Stephen Robinson’s new biography of Bill Deedes in these pages last week, Peregrine Worsthorne was fierce against his old colleague. Worsthorne said that Deedes lacked the ‘willingness to tell the truth to power’ which is ‘indispensable’ to journalism. Bill did indeed hate confrontation, to a fault, but there is something arrogant about the assumption, always made by journalists about ourselves, that we know so clearly what the truth is. Besides, if we do know it, surely our first duty is to tell the truth not to power — that is our second duty, flowing from the first — but to the readers. It amazes me how little consideration the readers get in the memoirs and conversations of journalists. If they appear at all, it is as an offstage comic army of bores who write foolish letters which we rarely bother to answer. Too many of us write for our friends or our enemies, for a few experts in the Foreign Office or the City (or whatever), or for self-aggrandisement. Part of the reason that Bill Deedes really was a genius of journalism was that he never forgot that he was writing for the readers. It was to them, not to proprietors, that he ultimately deferred. He struck up a kindly conversation with them, on their terms. This was not a lack of moral courage, but a form of good manners, and it is why the readers loved him more than any other writer. The latest victim of environmental zealotry is the wastepaper basket. Because of our sacred duty to separate rubbish into different sorts — paper, plastic, ‘residuals’ and so on — offices are now infested with boxes and bins with instructions all over them and little pursed mouths to prevent the wrong sort of rubbish being inserted. The undiscriminating wastepaper basket is banned. Some businesses go further. A friend who works in a very large company tells me that any sort of basket or bin anywhere near you is forbidden, the hope being that you will cease to generate any rubbish at all. If you are really desperate to throw something away, you have to make a humiliating journey to the other end of the building. He says that the attitude of colleagues to this new rule is a sure mark of their political views — Tories and libertarians all against, New Labourites ardently in favour.
More and more people — I may have done it myself — include the phrase ‘any time soon’ in their articles, as in ‘Don’t expect it to happen any time soon’. Apart from sounding tough and worldly-wise, does the phrase add anything not conveyed by the solitary word ‘soon’?
In Ferdinand Mount’s forthcoming memoirs, Cold Cream, the author’s father, falling on hard times, takes a room in Oakley Street, Chelsea, and is pleased to fulfil his own dictum that ‘Everyone lives in Oakley Street once in their lives’. Obviously the definition of the word ‘everyone’ here is eccentric, reminding one of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s famous claim, ‘I was the first person to live in Maida Vale’; but it is true that there are certain London streets which are the favourites of the more mobile (though not necessarily upwardly mobile) section of the upper middle classes. In any list, I would also include Prince of Wales Drive in Battersea, Linden Gardens in Notting Hill, and Fentiman Road in Lambeth. What is the gravitational pull?
Our part of England contains the largest population of what DEFRA calls, tautologically, ‘feral wild boar’. About 200 of them are thought to be roaming the Kent/ Sussex borders. They are very hard to find (my only sighting was of eight in the gloaming at the end of a day’s hunting), but they certainly do damage crops. DEFRA does not like them much, muttering about the ‘risk to biodiversity’ and of spreading notifiable diseases. It has ‘secured the agreement of our delivery partners’ to a national three-year Action Plan, which will be monitored to see how it ‘may impact on DEFRA’s intermediate outcomes’. I don’t know what that means, but the general idea seems to be that wild boar should be killed (though not, of course, hunted with ‘dogs’). This contrasts strongly with the official approach to badgers. DEFRA points out that it is illegal to kill a badger or to ‘interfere with a badgers’ sett’. Yet badgers can undermine houses, kill chickens and spread TB in cattle. Why the difference between the two? Is it aesthetic, moral, what? Both badgers and boar are interesting animals, and both can cause harm. Both should exist, and both should be controlled, not by government, but by the people concerned. Strange how controversial this simple point is.
Returning from school, our son offers an important and, so far as I know, new theory, developed by him and his friends. He says that the taste buds in the roof of the mouth are duller than those on the tongue. Therefore food on bread, tarts, cheese-biscuits etc., is always eaten the wrong way up. I have conducted a series of experiments — with toast and marmalade, with hummus and oatcake and even with yesterday’s parsnips and oatcake — and find that the theory is true. The relatively boring bread/toast/biscuit should stick to the top of the mouth, allowing the rest to give greater pleasure below. The problem, of course, is that most food thus inserted into the mouth upside down falls off before reaching its destination. Our son’s only answer to this is to make the toast perform an elegant somersault, rather like flipping a pancake, just before it passes the lips. But if his rule — which I have christened the Upper Crust Theory — takes root among chefs, I am sure a more technological solution can be found.
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