T hese notes are being written on 17 October, the day
when, at the invitation of the History Matters campaign, we are all supposed to keep a diary for a day. Like Tom Lehrer on National Brotherhood Week, ‘Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year.’ We are overwhelmed with diaries. The politicians’ ones are the least satisfactory of the lot. Exministers rush out their diaries (and memoirs) in the brief period when people can remember who they are and the colleagues they dislike are still in office. The authors play a double game — encouraging the publishers and television companies to pay big money with promises of revelations, and then suddenly getting pompous about confidentiality when it starts to look too awkward for them. Of the Ecclestone affair in Tony Blair’s first year in office, David Blunkett writes, ‘I’m not putting a lot down here in my diary’, which suggests he was already planning publication, and already editing with that in mind. As publication looms, the poor old Cabinet Office has to rush round trying to take interesting things out of the book, a mug’s game which only makes people more excited, and critical of ‘censorship’. In this case, for example, I gather there is outrage at the removal of Mr Blunkett’s remarks about Cherie Blair’s interference in political affairs, since this is not thought to be a genuine matter of national security. Finally, the diary’s victims start to answer back. Poor Martin Narey, then the director-general of the prison service, is much upset by Mr Blunkett’s criticism of him for supposed weakness over the riot in Lincoln Prison in 2002, and so has ‘set the record straight’ by revealing that Mr Blunkett rang him in a curry house in the Isle of Wight and told him to ‘machine-gun’ the inmates (of the prison, not the curry house). So everyone is unhappy, except newspapers. Really it all comes down to money. The solution might be that when a minister takes office he be told to choose then and there: he can either publish his memoirs/diaries when he leaves office, or have a pension, but not both.
Here’s Pepys, by the way, on 17 October 1667: ‘. . . and merry we were; but it was an odd, strange thing to observe of Mr Andrews what a fancy he hath to raw meat, that he eats it with no pleasure unless the blood run about his chops.... This afternoon my Lord Anglesy tells us that the House of Commons have this morning run into the enquiry in many things; ... and God knows what will be the end of it, but a committee they have chosen to inquire into the miscarriages of the Warr.’ One day last week I walked past Horseferry Road Magistrates’ Court and noticed a man dressed as Charlie Chaplin standing in the street. Thinking that it was some advertising stunt, I hurried on. It turns out, however, to have been a criminal case. The Chaplin figure is a Mr Neil Goodwin. Mr Goodwin dislikes the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 which prevents spontaneous demonstrations near Parliament. He walks stiffly because of arthritis, and he tells me that this helps him perfect his Chaplin imitation. He enters the forbidden area in his bowler hat etc., and never says anything, but only mimes. He has been arrested on five occasions, though not yet machine-gunned. He was particularly pleased when he was arrested holding a placard saying ‘THE RIGHT TO SILENCE’, since the police then had to confiscate this representation of a right they are bound to uphold. In the latest case, Horseferry Road magistrates were told by the arresting police officer that ‘I asked Mr Goodwin if he was going to drop his sign and disperse. He shook his head indicating NO. I asked Mr Goodwin, “Where are you going now?” He pointed towards Downing Street. I said, “Is there any way I can persuade you to go?” Mr Goodwin shook his head. He then stuck up four fingers and then did an impersonation of a glass. This I assumed meant that at 1600 hours he was going for a drink ... He nodded his head in agreement. He put his sign up which read “NOT ALOUD”. I said to Mr Goodwin, “Are you trying to tell me that you are not going to move until 1600?”... Mr Goodwin nodded “Yes”.... I said, “I am reporting you for the purpose of a summons as you have organised a demonstration in a public place in a designated area.”’ Mr Goodwin pleaded guilty and was given a conditional discharge for six months for his Serious Organised Crime.
Having recently struggled through flash floods to visit Northampton Academy, I am feeling more than usually angry about attitudes to state education. One of several academies — including the one in Manchester whose pupil Jessie James was recently murdered by a drug gang — set up by the United Church Schools Trust, Northampton has quite a handsome, though hot and noisy, new building and other advantages which flow from attracting more money than the average. Its principal is a bishop, rather than a state-system lifer. But the reason it is already proving a successful school is simple: it is in charge of itself. The governors are chosen because they are interested in the school rather than because they represent local politics. The school can create its own culture, which becomes a sort of ark against the multicultural or anticultural storms outside. Everything about the school, with its insistence on uniforms and politeness, its reduction of truancy, its improvement in results, is just basic good sense. It is horrifying that this obviously better way of running all schools is bitterly contested by politicians. Children are being stabbed in schools every week; 1,557 schools are declared failing or requiring ‘significant improvement’ by the House of Commons public accounts committee. Yet, in terms of numbers, the academies are only a tiny fraction of education, and most Labour MPs want to get rid of them altogether.
Aschool I know is trying to recruit staff but finds itself up against a bureaucratic impasse. The new law against ageism forbids the school to ask for a candidate’s date of birth or dates of other appointments held. On the other hand, the laws about the protection of children from abuse insist that all these dates be given in full. In theory, then, it is illegal to recruit any adult to work with children. The school in question prefers to take precautions against abuse and ignore the age law. Will it be prosecuted?
Some Victorian relations of mine were so godless that one of them asked their parents what all those buildings with ‘plus signs’ on them were. Now that crucifixes are incurring official disapproval, I feel that their wearers should claim that they are mathematical symbols and try to get their employers to prove otherwise.
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