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CHARLES MOORE
The growing power of Islam in Britain has forced the British public to learn more about its component parts — Sunnis and Shiites, Deobandis and Barelwis, and so on. By the same token, I feel it is time for a more thorough understanding of Etonians as they start their reconquista of our country. They divide into two groups — Collegers and Oppidans. At any one time, there are only 70 Collegers and more than 1,200 Oppidans, but Collegers are scholars and represent the original purpose of the foundation, so they have an importance beyond their numbers. Collegers tend to live off their wits, Oppidans off their inheritance. Oppidans are more relaxed and confident, Collegers more twitchy and more original. Collegers make better companions at high table, but you would rather go into the jungle with Oppidans. George Orwell was a Colleger, James Bond was an Oppidan. Just because Collegers and Oppidans are both Etonians, it should not be supposed that there is a natural alliance between the two. David Cameron is a typical Oppidan of the top class. Boris Johnson is a typical Colleger ditto. That, in essence, is all you need to know about them. (I am a Colleger, by the way, so my witness may be considered tainted.) Eurosceptics will be pleased that the tenacious Stuart Wheeler has managed to embarrass the government. Last week, he was granted judicial review of Gordon Brown’s decision not to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty despite Labour having promised that, when the treaty was known as the European Constitution, it would do so. I long for the court to find against the government when it hears the case on 9 June, just before the House of Lords is supposed to vote on the treaty, because I hope it will reopen the referendum argument. But it is actually a bad thing that judges can now lay down the law about political decisions. The promise to hold a referendum was a manifesto commitment at the last general election. Manifestos are not contractual documents. They are broad statements of attitude and intent, usually containing one or two enticing specific promises. It would be a bad thing if governments were bound by law to implement them: it would damage parliamentary sovereignty and the necessary freedom of governments to change when events change. If you feel that you have been cheated by a government which promised one thing and did another, your remedy, in a parliamentary democracy, is surely the ballot box, not the law courts. One of the strongest strands in Euroscepticism is a rebellion at the idea that unelected and unrepresentative authorities can run our lives. The political power of the judiciary, reinforced by ‘human rights’ and European legislation, is part of the problem. It will be very droll if Stuart Wheeler manages to turn it into part of the solution.
Congratulations to Wendy Alexander, the leader of the Scottish Labour party, for proposing the referendum on Scottish independence which (see previous Notes) the Conservatives should have been advocating for ages. Gordon Brown’s power is declining, so Miss Alexander is no longer worried about making him, by her action, look sillier than ever in his opposition to a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. She has spotted that the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond, is actually holding back on his promise of a referendum, looking for the best time (which he calculates would be just after a Tory general election victory with almost no Tory seats in Scotland). It is good politics, and probably good for the Union, to anticipate him.
To save priestly time, the Roman Catholic bishops of England and Wales decided a couple of years ago to commute those Holy Days of Obligation which are Feasts of Our Lord to the nearest Sunday. This means that Catholics are no longer obliged to attend Mass on the weekday in question. This year’s celebration of Ascension Day — which fell on Thursday last week — brought home to me how bad the change is. Just as Ash Wednesday takes place 40 days before Easter, so, by necessary symmetry, Ascension must be 40 days after. Therefore, even if it can now be marked on the Sunday following, it surely should not be abolished on the day itself. But when I went to Mass on Thursday, I found that Ascension Day did not exist, and we were celebrating St Joseph the Worker instead. To make matters even more confusing, I noticed that some Catholic churches did treat Thursday as the feast day. At Mass on Sunday, our parish tried to celebrate Ascension Day, but this was drowned out by the fact that it was the first Sunday in May and so the garlanding of the statue of the Virgin was the main attraction. A priest friend tells me that the whole thing is just too complicated. He wants the date of Easter fixed to the same Sunday every year. ‘After all,’ he says, ‘we only do all this because of the Jews and the moon.’ Hard to imagine Christianity without the former, though.
It would be nice if the interest in electoral contests, renewed by last week’s events, would revive the reporting of by-elections. By-election campaigns were well reported by newspapers in the past. They would send star journalists to the constituency for two or three weeks before polling. Their dispatches were a readable way of interleaving national concerns with local issues, which is how voters think about things. They taught the reader a great deal about the texture of the nation. In recent years, these reports have died away, partly because, thanks to better medicine, there are far fewer by-elections than in the past, and partly because the results had become much more predictable than in the days of the great upsets of the Sixties and Seventies. Two by-elections are now pending. One result — in Boris Johnson’s Henley — is almost a foregone conclusion, but the other, and more imminent — in the late Gwyneth Dunwoody’s Crewe and Nantwich — will be exciting. Please let us read the story as it unfolds.
In a recent conversation with Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, our talk turned to great central bankers of history. Mr King reminded me that the best known, though probably the least suitable, was Che Guevara, who was President of the National Bank of Cuba while maintaining his rank as a general. The famous picture of Guevara in his beret was taken when he worked for the Old Lady of Avenida Libertad o Muerte (or whatever they call it in Havana). It shows the natural bad taste of the human race that we scorned the dozens of distinguished central bankers whom we could have put on T-shirts and chose the one who was a financial incompetent (he declared that he wanted to do away with ‘material incentives’ altogether) and a murderer. In a rightly ordered society, young people would queue to buy T-shirts of the admirable Mr King smiling benignly through his thick gold-rimmed spectacles.
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