The Spectator's Notes
CHARLES MOORE Ivas there a single respect in which Gordon Brown made a good speech at Bournemouth? Its delivery was dull, but don't puritanically fool yourself that the matter was better than the manner. It offered no new idea and made no attempt to reason with the audience about any of the phenomena in the modern world which might worry us. What is the nature of international Islamist terrorism? What is our foreign policy and what part are our troops playing in it? Why did we have an apparently sudden banking crisis last week? Mr Brown explained nothing about any of these things Instead, he produced boilerplate faux-conservative phraseology about 'our island's story' and 'tough new powers' against crime. He hymned the NHS for having had a 50 per cent success rate in saving his eyes. In a deliberate echo of Mrs Thatcher's speeches about her father's moral influence on her, he praised his father's on him He also, as she did, referred approvingly to the Parable of the Talents. But when Mrs Thatcher used that story she had an actual and controversial point to make. She argued that the parable showed that entrepreneurism is blessed by God because it produces good fruit from the seed He plants. Mr Brown's interpretation was merely that 'everyone has a talent and each and every one of us should be able to use that talent'. But the parable is not about what we should be free to use: it is about how to use that freedom. Mr Brown then hurried on to compare himself to Christ (suffer the little children') in support of his plans to nationalise family life. Yet 'Middle Britain', the press kept saying, was thrilled. Why?
It is strange that people keep being surprised at Mr Brown's 'all the talents' technique of including slightly wistful non-Labour people in his 'big tent'. In this, as in so much else, he is only continuing Tony Blair's practice. I wonder whether the next Tory to be seduced will be Michael Ancram. You might think this impossible, since Mr Ancram recently, subversively reminded everyone that he was truer blue than David Cameron, and called for a return to Conservative principles. But Mr Brown, speaking against a blue backdrop at Bournemouth, is happy to play up to such people. I doubt if Mr Ancram will actually join the Labour party, but he has reached that stage in his career when he would obviously like an interesting job of some kind. I notice that the president of his foreign policy think-tank, the Global Strategy Forum, is Johann Eliasch, the multi-millionaire who has drifted away from the Tories to help the Prime Minister with something or other. I notice, too, that Mr Brown has suddenly become very strong on the wickedness of Robert Mugabe, and this is a cause that Mr Ancram (to his credit) has long espoused. In the early Blair years, the former Tory deputy chief whip, Alistair Goodlad, became the high commissioner to Australia. Is it unimaginable that Mr Ancram should get something similar? Perhaps he could be our ambassador to the United States. That post was once held by his grandfather who, unlike Mr Ancram, traded under his real name, the Marquess of Lothian.
If you like reading this magazine, you should pause this week to thank Ian Gilmour, who has just died. It was Ian, as owner and editor from 1954 to 1959, and as owner but not editor until 1967, who gave The Spectator the beginnings of its modern shape. Until he came along, it was definitely rather stuffy, almost Victorian Things that we now take for granted — such as comic sketches of politicians (Bernard Levin), columns by intelligent women (Katharine Whitehorn), articles about cooking good food (Elizabeth David) —were his innovations. Both in real life and in print, Ian understood that what might be called the Tory conversation could range wide, be funny and, in the good sense of the word, liberal. Perhaps he made a mistake by becoming a politician. Like many people criticised for being arrogant, he was very shy, and he found the necessary crudities of public political argument distasteful. There was also a pathos in his relationship with Margaret Thatcher, who bore a curiously striking physical resemblance to his wife, Caroline. He simply couldn't bear her, whereas she, who likes tall, good-looking, gentlemanly, clever men, long believed that his intellectual talents were important to the Conservative party. If only he could have requited her admiration, much could have been done. Like many able people who go into politics, Ian had an attractive, romantic idea of its possibilities which did not match the reality. But that idea was what made his Spectator so good.
Tast week the Rectory Society, of which I am chairman, went on its first expedition. About 50 of our members piled into a bus and visited the gorgeous Humphrey Repton creation of Sarsden Glebe (a former rectory), Oxfordshire, and the astonishing Victorian Old Vicarage of Kintbury, Berkshire, which rises gothically, suddenly, all fmialled and pointed, by the banks of the Kennet Canal. Perhaps the greatest kindness of our hosts, Rupert and Amanda Ponsonby and Robert and Gill Harris, was to allow us over every inch of their respective houses and gardens. What people (including myself) really like doing is peering into everything, the more domestic, small-scale and personal the better. It was wonderful. I asked directions in Kintbury, and the man I stopped said: 'Do you mean the real Old Vicarage or the other one?' I said I thought I meant the real one, and this proved to be the case. Because the church authorities love selling off their buildings, the Harrises' house is the first Old Vicarage. Its replacement, a smaller and much inferior building, has also been sold off, and the owners cause endless confusion by calling it the Old Rectory, which it certainly isn't. Jesus said, 'In my Father's house are many mansions', but I doubt whether He would have included most of the efforts that the Church Commissioners erected to replace the goodly heritage they squandered.
The difficulty for most of those who wish to overthrow the capitalist system has historically been that they lacked the power. I wonder if that is still the case. In August alone, 102,000 Americans defaulted on their subprime mortgages (as opposed to just over 40,000 for the same month in 2006). These sub-primers are reported to be chiefly black. If a revolutionary leader were to come forth and persuade them all, in their millions, to default on their mortgages, their problem would become the bankers' problem, and their 'can'tpay, won't-pay' cause would become legendary in the annals of civil disobedience.
ne needs a word to describe the monotonously chirpy, conventionally iconoclastic, relentlessly informal tone of voice that is typical of the blog. Does the phrase tlog-standard' already exist? If not, it should.
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