CHARLES MOORE This week, my family celebrated a ce
CHARLES MOORE This week, my family celebrated a century of continuous occupation of the house in Sussex where my sister now lives. The place came into the family in the 19th century, but was let to the Church of England Temperance Society as a home for 38 'adult male inebriates' until my greatgrandfather and his second wife reclaimed it. Their reoccupation is commemorated by a carved panel in the dining room which quotes the first line of the 127 Psalm — 'Except the Lord build the house, their labour is but lost that build it' — in Latin. The couple's initials are picked out from the rest of text in gilt and the date — MCMVII — is shown by raised lettering. By chance, 38 of us — only a minority of us adult, male and inebriate — sat down to lunch on Sunday. The obvious point that the first half of the century traversed had been very, very much harder than the second struck me. Two world wars had killed one man in the family, wounded and imprisoned two others, and made life poorer and tougher for the rest. This explains the sense of a golden past lost which I remember from growing up in the 1960s. The English educated classes are very unusual in history in having led a life in the past more secure and attractive than the one they experienced for most of the 20th century, so their folk memory is quite different from that of 99 per cent of the population of the world, which links the past with poverty and oppression. But although we tend to think of the present as pretty dreary, I suspect it will look very good compared with most of what history brings. In some respects, 2007 in Britain is like 1907 — rich and peaceful and fairly free, but with threats to European civilisation becoming darker. The second line of Psalm 127 'Except the Lord keep the city: the watchman waketh but in vain' may prove relevant. Will our descendants reunite in the same place in 2107?
In the new edition of Anthony Seldon's biography of Tony Blair, there are revelations about how Gordon Brown's team, especially Ed Balls, urged him to conduct a coup against his leader and were furious with him for 'bottling' it. The way the participants spoke to one another was, as reported, unlovely. Seemingly copied from gangster films or football, the language was aggressive and playground show-off. The newspapers had to keep on asterisking parts of the words used e.g. s***, f******. I think they should take it one further and protect our sensitive eyes from the obscene people involved. In future, we should read about It is fascinating that Tony and Cherie B**** are thinking of buying Winslow Hall. It is a very large and beautiful house within an hour of London, almost certainly built by Sir Christopher Wren. The house is unusual in having its own chapel which serves as the local Catholic parish church. The former Conservative leader, lain Duncan Smith, worships there. Despite wanting to visit in conditions of secrecy, Mrs B****, I gather, turned up at Sunday Mass, and so attracted attention. The next week, both B****s came to view the house. It costs £3 million, a low price for such a place because it needs a good deal of work doing, but an enormous amount of money for a couple who, until recently, were earning no more than £400,000 a year between them and are already borrowing, it is reported, more than £2 million for their house in Connaught Square. I hope the B****s buy Winslow Hall. It is a good thing for an exPrime Minister to have somewhere swish, and the chapel will allow Tony to continue in his Vicar of St Albion's role. But I cannot resist vulgar curiosity about how they can possibly pay for it. This column has pointed out before that John M**** and Tony B****, the first Prime Ministers to force MPs and peers to make a full register of their interests, quickly left the Commons after stepping down and refused to go to the Lords, so we have no right to know where the money is coming from. But I do wonder what undertakings the B****s gave while Tony was still in office in return for the prospect of his dream homes.
James Watson has been excoriated for saying that science proves that black people are less intelligent than white. I have no idea whether he is right, but it is a natural consequence of the worship of the theory of evolution that such ideas gain currency. In the early 20th century, Darwinian views were endlessly used to back up race theory. A more religious idea of the worth of each human being — the sort of thing which makes Richard Dawkins furious — affords protection against the political imposition of these theories. I should like a scientific study to be made of why it is that clever atheist evolutionists, almost invariably male, love shocking us with ideas of this sort.
you can always tell the BBC's attitudes by its nomenclature. Famously, it calls people who blow other people (and often themselves) up in the name of Allah 'militants', not terrorists. I notice that BBC reports have now started to refer to the 'Scottish government'. It is true that Alex Salmond, the First Minister, has decreed that the body which he runs should be so called, but its legal name is the 'Scottish Executive' and the law has not changed. Would the phrase 'provisional government' be more appropriate? The BBC also reports Scotland as being a 'country' in the same breath as the United States (the two countries with the fattest citizens). A nation, perhaps. A country? Not yet.
-LI very Remembrance Day a drum and , pipe band from a nearby town has played at the commemoration service in our village. The band first appeared in 1969, and was given uniforms and a silver bugle by the then head of the local British Legion branch. This year, the band will not be coming. It has closed down, and the British Legion has been informed that this is because Health and Safety regulations insist on a higher proportion of adults to children than the band can guarantee. Such stories are now so commonplace that people almost shrug their shoulders at them. But they illustrate how painful regulation is for any organisation which exists on a thin margin. It is the natural condition of most small local societies to lack money, legal expertise, clerical time and spare bodies. So things like Health and Safety become, in effect, a cultural attack on the voluntarism which, in other contexts, the government praises. It is a classic example of the best being the enemy of the good. Local organisations are seldom the best, but are almost always good. Now they are closing, and no one can even blow the Last Post for them.
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