S ir Alistair Graham is presented as one of the heroes
of our age. He is the chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which was originally set up by John Major as what he (Mr Major) called ‘an ethical workshop called in to do running repairs’. Now Sir Alistair has lashed out at Tony Blair. ‘The most fundamental thing is that Blair has betrayed himself,’ says Sir Alistair. ‘He set such a high bar for people to judge him and he has fallen well below the standards he set for himself.’ Then he mentions not only cash for honours, but also the Iraq war, postal voting, ‘sofa government’, and ‘undue reliance on spin’. Many would agree with him on these points, but is it right for someone in a publicly funded position to embark on personal political attack? The Committee’s remit explicitly ‘excludes investigation of individual allegations of misconduct’. Could it be that Sir Alistair is cross because Mr Blair has not renewed him in his post? In the same angry interview, Sir Alistair praises Gordon Brown. He tells the Sunday Times that he has met the Chancellor four times in recent months and ‘feels he is paying close attention to standards issues’. I feel that we should not be surprised if Sir Alistair were to stay in his job, or receive another one, under a Brown premiership. Does it conform to the highest standards of ethics in public life to trail one’s coat in this way? Does the ethical running repairer need a bit of servicing himself? Mr Major’s decision to attack sleaze by setting up bodies like Sir Alistair’s — and Mr Blair’s endorsement of that decision — were disastrous because they externalised the moral duty incumbent on all politicians. In the end, elected representatives, unlike public servants, must regulate themselves, because the buck stops with them. The best sanctions against them are the ballot box and their consciences. As soon as you start all this ‘independent scrutiny’ you infantilise the politicians and make them more determined to get round the rules. You also give undeserved power to self-important, unelected, priggish bores like Sir Alistair.
If you are a parent whose child is contemplating applying to a university, you can find out more on the website of Ucas, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service. Click on the button marked ‘Parents’ and you are directed to the question, ‘Why choose higher education?’ There are five answers to the question. Four of them could easily be expressed as one. They all concern employment prospects. One says that higher education gives your sons and daughters ‘important transferable skills’, another that it can ‘enhance long-term financial success’, a third that it is ‘an absolute must’ for some vocational courses. It is also pointed out that nowadays you can mix courses to suit your preferences — for example, art and politics. That is all. Any suggestion that higher education might broaden your mind, deepen your reading, improve your understanding of science, history, literature, civilisation? No, not even the faintest, tiniest hint. Squeezed between egalitarianism on the one hand and utilitarian production for ‘the needs of business’ on the other, the life of the mind has been suffocated.
Sometimes your subliminal perception tells you more than your fully conscious mind. I was walking down Whitehall the other day when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a man wearing a policeman’s helmet. He was black and he was very scruffy. These facts are not in themselves related (indeed, on average, whites are scruffier than blacks), but I have noticed recently that the 25-year campaign to recruit black people to the police really has at last got somewhere, and also that most of the police, of all colours, who clamber in amazing numbers out of vans in the Westminster area, are shambling, ill-dressed, slobbish. So I assumed the man was a policeman. I looked again and realised that he was a tourist in a plastic helmet. If he had been a fine, upstanding fellow in full-dress uniform, I would probably have assumed he was an actor.
The new film about William Wilberforce, which I have not yet seen, is called Amazing Grace. The title is a reminder of how strange is the process by which people come to change their moral opinions. John Newton, the author of the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’, wrote it in 1772, by which time he was a clergyman and associate of the poet Cowper in Olney. But the original inspiration of the hymn — ‘the hour I first believed’ — was the day in 1748 when Newton, until then more or less an atheist, blasphemer and sometimes drunkard, was saved from a terrible storm at sea. In his later years, Newton campaigned with Wilberforce against the slave trade. But it was after his conversion that he became the captain of a slave ship. It took him many years to link his Christian duty with the cause of emancipation, proving in his own life how one can be sincere in trying to do good and yet unaware of wrong one is still doing. For the bicentenary of abolition, people are pointing out that slavery still goes on today, in fact if not in name. It is good to draw attention to this, but at least almost no one argues today that slavery is justifiable. The greater moral challenge is to identify whatever ill we do in our age which we find harder to see for what it is (‘I once was lost, but now I’m found:/ Was blind, but now I see’). What barbarity of ours will be the subject of films in 200 years’ time? It might be mass abortions; it might be our readiness to put children as young as two in crèches among strangers while we go off and earn money, or our belief that the care of our aged parents should devolve upon the state, not upon ourselves.
If, like 99.999 per cent of the population, you have no plans to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome this weekend, you might turn your attention instead to the 25th anniversary of the Falklands war. Under the new system which allows the public formally to petition No. 10 Downing Street by email, you can sign up to the following: ‘We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to honour the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, by naming a ship in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy “HMS Iron Lady”.’ You can find the petition on http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/HMSIronLady/ Idon’t know what qualifications are required to be a weather forecaster on television or radio, but you would have thought that there were plenty of people who would like to do the job. Why, then, do the selectors find so many who are unable to pronounce the word ‘Arctic’ (it has two cs in it, neither silent) or the word ‘Ireland’ (it has an r in it, making it sound different from ‘island’)?
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