The Spectator's Notes
CHARLES MOORE 1 t is highly likely that Tony Blair will become a Roman Catholic after he leaves office. He regularly attends a Catholic Mass rather than Anglican services — nowadays, because of security problems, usually in No. 10 Downing Street or at Chequers. It seems logical to him that he should follow the religion of the rest of his family. What has held him back, apparently, is not doubts, but his job. Although conversion is a personal, not a political decision, Mr Blair could not have made it as Prime Minister without having to face hostility which would have spilt into politics. As a Catholic convert myself, I find that people have funny ideas about what it involves. They think, despite explicit teaching to the contrary, that one is forced to hold that all non-believers are damned They also think that the Church orders you to say things Such falsehoods, if credited, would certainly have damaged Mr Blair's party electorally. In a way, it is a pity that we have missed the chance to discover whether Britain is ready for a Catholic Prime Minister. But it may be a good thing that the first Catholic PM will not now be a man who was once told by his (Presbyterian) successor: 'I can no longer believe a word you say.'
LWhat stood in their way?' asks Ian McEwan in his new novella, On Chesil Beach, about a couple suffering sexual embarrassment on their wedding night in 1963. He concludes that it was, in part, . the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself'. Although the book is subtle and interesting, it does not wholly avoid an air of condescension about the past. We don't have this sort of sexual problem these days, is the implication: we have conquered that awkwardness, just as we can now make a telephone call easily, instead of having to find a telephone box, insert the right coin and press button A before speaking. Perhaps, but we won't be true historians if we laugh at our forebears' inhibitions without recognising our own. Watching Andrew Man's enjoyable History of Modem Britain the other day, I noticed that he was very ready to satirise the Macmillan era of what he called `the chaps' — grouse moors, nepotism, old boy network etc. — but curiously reticent on another subject. Marr stigmatised the pre-Look Back In Anger world of British theatre as 'completely irrelevant' to the new Britain of the 1950s. He blamed the power of Binlde Beaumont and his coterie — Noel Coward, Cecil Beaton, Terence Rattigan and John Gielgud. What he did not say was that all these men were homosexual. Yet it was just as relevant to his thesis about clubs of men who kept other people out as was the fact that a third of the Cabinet were Etonians Trapped in his own era, Marr felt safe with clichés about the old school tie, but not with clichés about screaming queens.
The past is indeed another country. The 40th anniversary of the Six Day War has reminded me that at that time the BBC correspondent in Jerusalem, Michael Elkins, was pro-Israel. In fact, he was almost as biased as his successors today are biased to the Palestinians. He was an able reporter, however, and because of his good sources, Elkins heard much earlier than any other journalist that the Israelis had destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground. For several hours the BBC refused to broadcast his news. Today, the BBC has been very hard on Members of Parliament for their keenness to exempt themselves from the Freedom of Information Act, but it has fought hard and so far successfully in court to resist the application of that Act to itself. It refuses to publish the text of the Balen report on its bias against Israel, although it commissioned the report itself. What does the report contain?
rr he first stirrings of revolt in our area against the recycling tenor. We who are waiting for our green wheelie bins to be delivered learnt last week that they had been set ablaze by an arsonist. Of course one is against violence in all its forms, but isn't it time, as the Left likes to say after an atrocity by Islamists, to address the 'root causes' instead of engaging in 'the politics of condemnation'?
This column has recently commented on confusion about the use of first names only. A reader has dug up the following poem about two people with an unusual version of the problem: Said Jerome K. Jerome to Ford Madox Ford: 'There's something, old boy, that I've always abhorred.
When people address me and call me 'Jerome' Are they being stand-offish or too much at home?'
Said Ford, 'I agree.
It's the same thing with me.'
An unusual scene at Luton Airport last .week, witnessed by my brother, who was flying to Greece. EasyJet, as often happens, had overbooked their own flight and so chose two people to bump off with the inadequate compensation of a night in a Luton hotel and €250. The couple they picked on turned out to be particularly unsuitable as they had their four young children with them. They were Boris Johnson and his wife, Marina. Rather than trying out the pompous 'Don't you know who I am?' line (they clearly didn't), Boris, who naturally did not want his family broken up for part of their half-term holiday, immediately tried to pay £500 to stay on the flight. When that didn't work, he stood on a ledge at the departure gate and loudly offered to bribe travellers with £1,000 a head (a sum at which Marina was seen to blanch), on top of easyJet's measly deal, to any volunteer. Soon there was a stampede for the night in the Luton hotel, and eventually a couple walked triumphantly away with Easyjet's €250 and Boris's £2,000. 'It was a top-up fee,' says Boris, who is his party's higher education spokesman.
My mention of Bromo lavatory paper last week has provoked a flood of memories. The Lord Lieutenant of East Sussex tells me that when she was a girl it was quite usual for guests' bathrooms to contain two holders — one for Bromo and one for soft paper — so that people could choose. It turns out that, as with so many things in England, there were social distinctions surrounding the subject. The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire writes: 'OH BROMO! . . . Bronco was its cheap and shiny cousin which didn't work. At Swinbrook [her childhood home], Bromo was for the guests, Bronco, alas, for the nursery.' Debo Devonshire adds, 'My sister Pam, exemplary housewife, kept a packet of Bromo. She didn't allow anyone to touch it, just look. I wish I could find it in her jewel case.' The description on the roll emanates this social confidence. Bromo, it says, is 'known in most civilised countries' and is `so well known that lengthy description is not necessary'.
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