I t would be a lie to say that I feel
sorry for the Tory MEPs who have been attacked for paying their staff allowances to companies of which they or members of their family are members, but they are not the most at fault. Giles Chichester, for example, and Den Dover, did at least follow the instruction which came from David Cameron after the Derek Conway affair: they disclosed. The information being used against them is information they have published. More interesting are those who are refusing to disclose. Roughly, the way the European Parliament’s system for staff allowances works is that an MEP can have the full amount (£15,000 per month) sent to his designated paying agent. But the parliament runs no check on whether all the money is in fact dispersed. Once you have retired for six years as an MEP, you can no longer be pursued for any debt to the parliament. So the likely scam is that MEPs pay out only a proportion of the money and invest the rest. Once they have been out for six years without being questioned, they then invite the paying agent to pay the sum into a Swiss bank account, or whatever, thus enriching themselves at public expense. It would, of course, be libellous to suggest that any particular MEP is doing such a thing, but it is interesting that such a small number of them have answered the ‘transparency initiative’ of Open Europe which asks MEPs how much they pay out and to whom. About half the Tory MEPs have answered at the time of writing, four out of 19 Labour MEPs, and only two out of 11 Liberal Democrat MEPs. All seven Tory MEPs who want to leave the Europhile European People’s Party to form a Eurosceptic grouping have answered the questions. Of the 13 Tory MEPs who opposed leaving the EPP, only four have answered. It is those not yet reported in the press from whom we most need to hear.
The Long Walk to Finchley, the BBC drama about the young Margaret Thatcher, which was broadcast on Thursday night, was, superficially, wildly inauthentic. There were anachronisms of speech — Alderman Roberts says ‘Politics is about people’; Denis declares ‘Like I said before: it’s not a level playing field’; Margaret complains she is being ‘discriminated against’, and says that she will ‘get a nanny sorted’. None of these people could have used these expressions in the 1950s. There were also huge untruths — that Margaret pushed Denis to propose to her, or (even more preposterous) that she tried to manoeuvre Ted Heath to do the same. And yet the programme was enjoyable for two reasons. The first was that it tried to engage with the fact that Margaret Thatcher is not a would-be man, but about as quintessentially female as it is possible to be. The second is that it captured something of the mythical, melodramatic character of her story. As I watched, I kept thinking that her tale should really be told in the form of grand opera.
Our Mass recently was said by a visiting priest, the regular one being away. He began the service arrestingly. ‘I woke up at three o’clock this morning,’ he said, ‘and I couldn’t remember who I was. Not that that matters; but I also couldn’t remember where I was going today. So I feel very lucky that I have got here.’ He then preached two homilies, one at the beginning of the Mass and one in the usual place, both about the body and blood of Christ. They were interweaved with his other theme, which was that he thought he was going senile. From time to time, he seemed to be right about the latter point, as he digressed magnificently about the battle of Agincourt (‘650 choleric English archers slew 14,500 of the French aristocracy, most of them drunk’) and about the iniquitous result of the Eurovision song contest. He also forgot some important bits of the service, such as the Creed. But each time that one felt overwhelmed by sadness that the poor man could no longer perform his function, he would prove by some prodigious feat of memory or brilliant turn in his argument that he did indeed know what he was doing, and his thoughts about the greatness of the mystery of the Eucharist became all the more resonant. Afterwards, I kept coming back to what he said first: ‘I couldn’t remember who I was. Not that that matters.’ We hear endlessly about the terrible effects of old age, but I sometimes think that no longer knowing who you are may be a privilege, bringing a sort of holiness. Why should we all need to know who we are? God does. As we approach death, we realise that that is what matters.
This column complained recently about the removal of some Catholic holy days of obligation, such as Ascension Day, to the nearest Sunday. I have now discovered that a novena — the classic nine-day cycle of prayer — takes its name and form from the nine-day gap between Ascension Day and Pentecost. So the new timetabling has undermined the basis of an ancient devotional aid.
It is interesting, but not surprising, to read that there now seems to be much more oil in the North Sea than previously thought. Whenever there is a big rise in oil prices, people say that the world supply will soon be exhausted. (This was a great theme in the 1970s.) But then the high price makes bolder forms of exploration more promising, and new sources begin to gush forth. It must, in principle, be the case that the earth does not contain limitless supplies of oil, but doomsayers consistently underrate the market’s way of ensuring the production of whatever it seeks.
Thinking of scarcity, who would have thought, at almost any previous time in British history, that straw would be hard to come by? Yet so it now is. We grow strawberries which, as their name suggests, benefit from straw. When they are grown commercially these days, they are more commonly planted on artificial, weedresistant fabric, but we did not want this because slugs lurk beneath it, and we are persecuted by slugs (we caught 160 slugs in our small beer-based slug-trap in one night last week). Besides, we want the strawberries to put out runners and spread, which the fabric forbids. It is hard to get straw from farms because very few people now find it worth their while to produce what you or I would think of as a typical, small bale — contractors come in and make huge bales for silage. My wife therefore asked for straw from the local garden centre. She was told that it was rationed. We were allowed one bale only, and had to pay £3. Soon, instead of being a joke object clamped in the teeth of a yokel, straw will be a rare, exquisite fashion accessory, to be worn like an orchid.
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