T he New Labour assault on John Humphrys was inevitable, not
because he is a Tory (I have no reason to suppose he is) but because he defies Labour’s Gestapo, being always scrupulously fair. He interviewed me last week in a debate with the genial Mr Billy Bragg. When Mr Bragg misrepresented something I had said, Mr Humphrys immediately corrected him and set the record straight. Instead of being castigated by a director-general who manifestly lives in fear of his masters in No. 10, Mr Humphrys should be given a huge pay rise and put in charge of improving the training of other BBC journalists.
One offence he would never commit is to join in the BBC’s insulting use of the phrase ‘right-wing’. I first noticed this a couple of years ago when interviewed on The World This Weekend. One of my fellow interviewees was introduced as a journalist, the other as a Lib Dem peeress, and I as ‘a right-wing controversialist’. At least one of my opponents (if not both) could quite fairly have been described as a left-wing controversialist, but that would not have matched the presenter’s desire to ensure that I alone was labelled — doubtless as a health warning to the listeners — before I had opened my mouth. On the seven o’clock news one morning last month Migrationwatch was branded by the newsreader as ‘the right-wing pressure group’. Perhaps someone complained, because by eight o’clock the adjective was gone. Then, last week, Dr Madsen Pirie was introduced in a debate on The World Tonight as director of the ‘right of centre’ Adam Smith Institute. Dr Mad instantly observed that his Institute was ‘right of centre’ just as his opponent’s think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, was left of centre. The lady presenter, who had not of course flagged the IPPR man in this way, was unabashed. The BBC’s head of news, Helen Boaden, is shrewd enough to see that every time a politically motivated underling utters such a remark, another nail is driven into the Corporation’s coffin. Oh for the days when they saw the need at least to pretend to be impartial.
Several of the BBC’s reporters in New Orleans will have done themselves no harm with the ruling caste in their barely suppressed expressions of rage at the US government’s failure to help those afflicted by Hurricane Katrina. Mr Matt Frei especially distinguished himself; if I were Hillary Clinton I would sign him up forthwith as my spin doctor for 2008. Despite watching much of the BBC’s coverage, I found little or no emphasis placed by correspondents on the devastating failure of Louisiana’s Democrat governor, Kathleen Blanco, to agree at once to President Bush’s early offer to send in help. Nor was the attack on Mr Bush interrupted too often for comparable comment on the wickedness of a feral section of the population in engaging in their traditional pastimes of looting, raping and mugging, even though there was a national disaster in progress. My only visit to New Orleans, 18 years ago, was during a tornado, and these same plucky characteristics of the locals were much in evidence in the aftermath. When, the morning after, I asked the hotel concierge in my extreme naivety — to suggest interesting places I might walk to, he instead suggested that I might, in that case, consider making a will. God knows why they want to rebuild the place. Its underclass having been dispersed to 13 states, there is surely hope that, separated from each other, they might aspire to something better. And it would be far cheaper for Uncle Sam to bulldoze the whole mess into the sea, concrete the rubble over to make an impregnable barrier, and bequeath the site to a higher form of wildlife.
Full marks to John Julius Norwich not just for editing the largely unexpurgated diaries of his father, Duff Cooper, but for his filial bravery in accepting the bad light in which they frequently show the old boy. I do not refer to Cooper’s adulteries, which might be considered an appropriate pastime for one whose father, as a Harley Street proctologist and venereologist, was better acquainted with the private parts of high society than anyone in the land. I am more concerned by how shallow Cooper so often appears. Anyone seeking to compose a case against the old establishment will find a positive ammunition dump in these diaries. He seems to exemplify a ruling class of dilettantes who, however well-intentioned, put a blinkered view of the world well before any rational attempt to analyse it. For all the faults of the modern world, I don’t think anyone as mediocre as Cooper would now get into Eton, or Oxford, or the Foreign Office. He would, of course, still sail into politics and into a ministerial job, but I suppose we should accept that it is such fine traditions that make our country so special.
Talking of such things, how I (like so many other millions of Spectator readers) have enjoyed the tussle between the editor and the political editor about whom the magazine supports for the Tory leadership. I cannot help noticing, though, that ever since The Spectator’s official endorsement of Mr David Cameron, who will be forever trapped in my memory as Norman Lamont’s bootboy on Black Wednesday, his campaign has run like a dry creek. This is despite his mixing a potent policy cocktail of propitiating homosexuals, legalising drugs and bringing back National Service — which would presumably be much more fun than before because of the ready availability of drugs and homoeroticism. Given the consequences of its support for Mr Cameron, it is now surely time The Spectator threw its weight fairly and squarely behind Gordon Brown too.
An opinion poll showed the other day that cricket is a more popular sport than football. Football is not, in my view, a sport: it is somewhere between a business racket and a mental illness. Like many Britons, I associate it with all the worst aspects of our society — violence, drunkenness, drugs, racism, exploitation, greed and stupidity; and that’s just for starters. As a lifelong cricket obsessive, my main fear now, following our Ashes triumph, is that cricket becomes the new football. I trust our players are too sensible for that, though I am not sure about their cash-obsessed employers at the England and Wales Cricket Board. To reassure us, the ECB should take two immediate measures: discouraging players’ wives from appearing in the media, and banning our boys from wearing vile multicoloured sponsored clothing — especially preposterous baseball caps — when off the field. I like to think there is no danger of a man in a blazer and flannels, blessed with a demure wife, ever having his head turned by fame or riches, at least not since the late Captain Robert Maxwell MC fell off his yacht.
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