T he appointment of a Permanent Secretary at No. 10 Downing
Street shows that the office of Prime Minister is swelling fit to burst. Everyone says that the man with the new post, Jeremy Heywood, is excellent. Nothing is known against him beyond his atrociously New Labour recreations in Who’s Who — ‘child-care, modern art, cinema, Manchester United’ — but it is not clear why his job needed to be invented. The Prime Ministership is not a government department. It is easy to list all the people who are annoyed by the new role — the permanent secretaries of real government departments, the Cabinet Ministers for whom they work, all the private secretaries in No. 10, and particularly the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, who has been taking literally Mr Brown’s promises about a politically neutral Civil Service. Not so easy to list the people who are pleased. Mr Heywood left his job as Principal Private Secretary to Tony Blair in 2003 and then worked for Morgan Stanley, but he did not need the title and emoluments of a permanent secretary to lure him back to No. 10: he returned there when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, as Head of Domestic Policy and Strategy. So presumably his title had to be further aggrandised because of the recent appointment of Stephen Carter as Head of Strategy. There is also someone called Jon Cunliffe, who was made ‘Head of International Economic Affairs, Europe and G8 Sherpa, Prime Minister’s Office’ when Mr Brown came in. So in No. 10, which is traditionally famous for not having proper kitchens to feed the Prime Minister, too many cooks are spoiling the broth. Mr Brown used to let it be known how much he disapproved of Mr Blair’s ‘sofa government’, but now he is cramming more and more people onto the sofa.
In the fuss about MPs employing family members, one important reason why they often give jobs to their wives is ignored. Their wives often start off as their secretaries and only marry them later. Sometimes, the marriage involves getting rid of the MP’s first wife. If the wife is the secretary, the MP cannot have an affair with his secretary. If the secretary leaves the job on marrying the MP, she obviously, as Jimmy Goldsmith famously said about the man who married his mistress, ‘creates a vacancy’.
It is surprising that more attention has not been given to the case of Robert Fidler. Mr Fidler wanted to build a house on his farm in Surrey. Fed up with delays from the local planners, he noted that if a building has been ‘substantially completed’ for four years without any planning objection, the authorities cannot order its demolition. He therefore constructed what the newspapers call a ‘castle’ behind hundreds of bales of straw covered with a blue tarpaulin, and lived in it secretly for the time required. He had been worried about the ‘boring view’ while he and his family lived for years behind the bales, but found that many robins made their nests in them and a duck hatched 13 ducklings there, which cheered them up. Now the castle (really a middle-sized castellated house) is revealed, and it looks sturdy and handsome. Reigate and Banstead Borough Council wants it knocked down, and the matter has gone to the Secretary of State. I watched the local BBC News interview Mr Fidler in his large and impressive kitchen. The slant was that Mr Fidler was the one who should explain himself. But surely it is the council which should be scrutinised. It is typical of planning attitudes that nothing was done to prevent Mr Fidler’s enormous and ugly blue tarpaulin with tyres hanging off it as it defiled the landscape for years. Only when he unveiled his house was there an outcry about desecration of the Green Belt. What an absurd country where we can only build attractive buildings under camouflage. It will be a scandal if the demolition of Castle Fidler is now ordered. It is a monument to human ingenuity.
Hunting last week over sodden marshes, we welcomed a delegation of visitors so splendid that it was almost a replay of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. We were joined by 14 Frenchmen from Poitiers where they have, unusually for France, a fox-hunt (deer and boar are more common). They wore green corduroy breeches and green lapelled waistcoats with gold buttons and braid. They were led by Guy, the only mounted member of the party. He is a retired general with a magnificently shaped moustache and a long, unlined coat which looks like a camel-hair dressing-gown. Everything is different about French hunting. They don’t jump; they rarely canter or gallop. In the case of the Poitiers hunt, there is no field under the control of a master, but just a spread of anyone who wants chasing after the fox as each pleases, most of them on foot. Their glory is their horn-playing, and they blew for us as we moved off from the meet. It was beautiful, but they apologised for having only two horns, saying that they normally perform with ten. Apparently, horn-blowing is such an art that it is pursued by thousands who have very little interest in hunting, rather as, in England, bell-ringers are not necessarily churchgoers. It would be good for this country’s now curtailed sport if we adopted this art, though it would be dispiriting to blow the elaborate notes with which the French honour the dead quarry without, as it were, habeas corpus.
Which reminds me. On the day after Boxing Day, the press was full of reports and pictures of the Prince of Wales going for a solitary ride (and getting angry with photographers) at Sandringham. The Prince had declined to take part in the family shoot. I think I can account for his ill temper. He was thinking that he would rather be hunting, which he prefers to shooting. He was acutely conscious that he is one of only four people in England who cannot, for reasons of prudence, take part in the sport, even if no law is broken. The other three are his two sons, and David Cameron.
The sad story of the allegedly imitative suicides of young people in Bridgend seems to confirm that self-slaughter can be a fashion. A don I know, who likes to pretend to be heartless, tells me that undergraduates quite often come to him and tell him that they want to kill themselves. He judges that when they say this, they are showing off, and tells them, ‘All right, then, go ahead and do it.’ When they discover that he is not interested, they lose their enthusiasm. None has committed suicide.
Many years ago, The Spectator lost a lot of money in the libel courts when it alleged — truthfully, but unprovably — that the Labour politicians Aneurin Bevan and Morgan Phillips had been drunk in Venice. I therefore shall not endorse the accounts that I keep hearing about Ken Livingstone’s strange behaviour at a party in Davos last week.
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