T his year the Daily Telegraph has decided not to produce
its annual Christmas cards by Matt. I complained when I heard this, because we usually send them and I feel that it must always be a pleasure for the recipients to get a joke from the world’s greatest pocket cartoonist. The reason is interesting, though. Apparently Christmas cards from businesses are now considered ‘old-fashioned’. I bridled at this at first. To my shame, the phrase ‘political correctness gone mad’ may even have floated into my head. On reflection, though, I think it may be a good thing. There is something dispiriting about a big business sending out Christmas cards. It cannot genuinely know its customers in the way that a local butcher or restaurant might, so its message is likely to be rather pro forma and impersonal. The computer has made it possible to send out far more cards (I read somewhere that George Bush posts two million) but this has the unintended consequence of making everyone suddenly feel that the whole thing is ridiculous. It is time to cut back. Christmas cards began, after all, as something between friends and family. They should return to that state of innocence.
For us, though, the change has caused a problem. Learning rather late about the lack of Matts, we cast in our mind what manner of salutation we should substitute. All the main art galleries produce surprisingly few cards and quickly run out of the best lines. I thought the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge was bound to have the right thing, and sure enough it offers some attractive reproductions from illuminated manuscripts. It was a bit depressing, though, to find one card in its online catalogue entitled ‘Angel and king’ when what it actually shows is a king, yes, but not a seraph or cherub. The king has a tenstringed harp, so he must be King David, and the ‘angel’ in the sky above him has a beard and no wings and is carrying an orb with a crucifix attached. That’s no angel, that’s Jesus — presumably appearing to David because the Psalms prefigure so much of the Passion narrative and because Jesus becomes king himself, in a sublime, unworldly sense (the catalogue does not give the source). The picture has nothing whatever to do with Christmas except, I suppose, that Jesus was ‘of the house and lineage of David’ and that is why Joseph was taxed in Bethlehem. The Fitzwilliam has just produced an exhibition called ‘The Cambridge Illuminations (Ten centuries of Book Production in the Mediaeval West)’, universally acclaimed. You’d have thought that knowing the difference between Jesus and angels was something that came with the rations.
Iwas brought up to believe that it was the height of vulgarity to have Christmas cards made depicting oneself or one’s own family, house, car, etc. It was the sort of thing that was forgivable in Americans, but about which the English Knew Better. I notice, however, that the cards with such pictures that we do receive tend to come from the posher end of our acquaintance, who seem quite unembarrassed. The fact is that it is these cards, more than any others, which one enjoys and remembers. The photographs are visual substitutes for what would otherwise have to be laboured written round robins. Never complain of vulgarity in a Christmas card: it is like moaning that Father Christmas’s outfit is ‘too red’.
The posting of Christmas cards is a great test of how efficient people are in the dispatch of business. As these Notes show, we have failed the test, and hereby apologise for lateness to all our friends. Every year our three first cards to arrive are — always in the same order — one from Wilton’s, one from Lady Thatcher and one from Max Hastings.
Peter Simple’s column sometimes has a feature called ‘screaming point’, relaying a short item of current horror. Here is my entry for it. An email from an online magazine about ‘animal wellness’ asks me: ‘Is your pet suffering from passive smoking?’ One idea floating from David Cameron’s Conservatives is that since there is consensus on some environmental issues, they could be taken out of politics and monitored by an independent panel of experts set up along the lines of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee. I’m not sure this is such a brilliant notion, since the important questions about pollution are more political than they are technical, but the thing will catch on if the Tories follow a friend’s advice and call it the Bottle Bank of England.
This column has pointed out before that the BBC has tremendous difficulty with the word ‘terrorist’. In particular, it will never apply the word to anything in the Middle East, preferring ‘militant’, a word which covers everything from housewives protesting about rising prices, through the Church ‘militant here in earth’, to people blowing up women, children and themselves on buses. Why no similar caution, though, about the phrase ‘peace activist’, which the BBC uses constantly? Wouldn’t it be more enlightening if, depending on context, the word ‘peace’ were replaced by ‘pro-Palestinian’ or ‘anti-Bush’?
So the editor has been given the portfolio of higher education, and will edit no more. I hope Boris persuades Oxford and Cambridge to go independent, and everyone to embrace tuition fees. But for us hacks, there is always a sadness when a great journalistic talent is lost to politics. We feel rather like women do when they discover that a handsome and charming bachelor is gay — a strong though unreasonable sense of being cheated. I don’t suppose Boris will miss our company: in fact, I hope that when I meet him as he rises up the political ladder, he will have the chilly selfdiscipline to say, ‘I know thee not, old man’, and pass quickly on. But I am sure that he will miss editing The Spectator. It is a deeply enjoyable job because you work in a proper building and spend almost all your time dealing with people who are interesting, writers who can write, and other rarities. I remember passing the offices of The Spectator, then in Gower Street, when I was 17 or so, and thinking, ‘I want to edit that paper’, even though I had barely ever read it at the time. When I actually did become the editor ten years later, the job therefore gave me a dreamlike pleasure which never faded. The best thing is that you can become close to your readers. More readily than in bigger papers, you can develop a constant conversation with them — and Spectator readers are people who, to put it mildly, can converse. Boris Johnson has brought that conversation to new heights of wit, surprise and intelligence. We shall all miss him, but we should miss him even more if we seriously believed that he will be able to kick the habit of journalism for ever.
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