‘A conflict of interest’ is now almost the worst thing
known to modern theories of governance. It is considered disgraceful, for example, that the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, who is a government minister and was made a peer by Tony Blair, will be the man who decides whether or not there should be prosecutions in the ‘cash-for-peerages’ affair. But it is a strange fact that attempts to sort out such conflicts can make matters worse. Who can doubt, for example, that the Church of England is so scrupulously moderate because it knows that its position as the established Church conflicts with modern ideas of freedom of thought, not to mention the divine injunction to take no thought for the morrow? The governance of the BBC has now been rebuilt, after the Hutton affair, so that the chairman now has a clear duty only to licence-payers, where before he faced both ways, acting to defend the Corporation as well. The change sounds logical, but I expect it will marginalise the chairman’s power in the institution. Again, the Blair government is ending the ancient custom by which the Lord Chancellor is both a Cabinet minister and the head of the judiciary. Yet history suggests that previous lord chancellors, worried about attacks for conflicted interests, have generally been scrupulous in protecting the law from political interference: it is under the present government that things have turned nastier than before. Conflicts of interest are part of everyone’s experience of life, and we need to have consciences to resolve them. It may be unwise to try to sort them out too neatly in the allocation of public positions. The anomalous nature of Lord Goldsmith’s position will tend to push him to the right decision.
Ihave always been very sorry that I offended Terry Major-Ball, who died last week, by referring to his brother John Major as ‘the son of a failed trapeze artist’. As the Daily Telegraph obituary reported, Mr Major-Ball rang me up at home to complain, but instead found my wife, who charmed him out of his wrath so successfully that he went on ringing her quite often for a year or two. Once or twice I took the call myself, and Terry and I made it up. The funny thing was that, in the piece which Terry did not like, I had actually been praising Mr Major (whom I did often criticise) for having achieved so much from a background which does not usually supply prime ministers. Besides, as I understood it, it was a fact, not a slur, that his father was a failed trapeze artist, and it was because of this failure that he began his garden ornaments business. Mr Major — and Terry on his behalf — often thought that he was being attacked for snobbish reasons, but it was the Prime Minister’s tendency to conform to what the grand and official classes told him, not his origins outside them, which seemed a pity. It was Terry who more perfectly represented the independent common sense of the lower middle class, but unfortunately he never became prime minister.
So far as we know, there is no actual evidence that any courtier or friend of Prince William ever said ‘Doors to manual’ in reference to Kate Middleton’s mother’s career as an air hostess, but that has not stopped an outpouring of vituperation against the prince’s circle. ‘Haven’t we got over all these out-of-date class attitudes?’ screamed the papers, hoping against hope that we hadn’t. But let us suppose that someone did make this joke — why is it, objectively, so despicable? Surely we often make jokes about the jobs that people’s parents do, especially when we are young and have not got round to doing all that much ourselves. I seem to remember people saying to the children of rich bankers, ‘How would you like the money?’ or to doctors’ children, ‘What seems to be the trouble?’ Anyone who has ever travelled on a plane will surely see that there is something intrinsically funny about the work of an air hostess. Like being a policeman, a vicar, a nurse, a monarch or, indeed, a trapeze artist, it provides the raw material of comedy. I bet that Kate Middleton’s friends make jokes about Prince William’s parents. They would not be human if they didn’t. Sometimes the motive for a change of name, though attacked as politically correct, is also morally correct. Although I objected at the time, I now see that the phrase ‘Down’s Syndrome’ is an improvement on ‘mongol’ because it passes no comment on appearance. Some changes, though, are plain wrong, and should never be accepted. ‘Native American’ for ‘Red Indian’ is a case in point. The use of the word ‘native’ disparages all other Americans who were born in that country by suggesting that they are not really native. And the word ‘American’ is anachronistic, indeed colonial. The word ‘American’ derives from the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Red Indians, being the only inhabitants of the continent who descend from before the European conquests, are therefore not Americans, except in their citizenship. It is as inaccurate as calling the Scottish Highlanders ‘Native English’ or even ‘Native British’. I admit that I do not know from personal experience what it is like to be a Red Indian in the modern world, but I do remember that, as a child, it was my highest ambition to be one.
Afriend shows me a questionnaire issued by Councillor Matthew Offord, Cabinet Member for Environment and Transport for Barnet (Conservative) Council entitled ‘Reviewing the Golders Green Controlled Parking Zones’. It is six pages long. The whole of page five tries to ascertain your age, gender (‘Tick one box only’) and ethnicity (you can be white British, white Turkish, white Greek Cypriot, black Caribbean, Asian Bangladeshi, Chinese etc., but not, though this is Golders Green, Jewish). Page six is devoted to your disability (ten different categories specified), your faith (here you can be Jewish and, again, must ‘tick one box only’) and, finally, your sexuality. You can be bisexual, gay, heterosexual or lesbian; but although, yet again, you may ‘tick one box only’, the questionnaire loses its nerve and adds, ‘In addition, if you prefer to define your sexuality in terms other than those used above, please let us know.’ The great pensions scandal in which Gordon Brown is embroiled is great indeed because so many people now live so long. A friend of my family was offered a commercial job in the Gambia shortly after the war and inquired what the pension arrangements might be. ‘The problem has never arisen,’ he was told. Perhaps it is a subconscious desire to get rid of ‘the problem’ which makes New Labour so zealous in ruining the National Health Service.
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