A s a political scandal rolls on, people always seem to
fasten on the wrong reason why the minister concerned should resign. It is surely good news that John Prescott and his team were playing croquet at Dorneywood on a Thursday afternoon. What has happened to our traditional admiration for finishing the game and beating the Spaniards too? Admittedly, Mr Prescott is not taking on any latter-day Spaniards, and his aides made everything worse by saying that their game was constantly broken into by mobile telephone calls, important emails and other rubbish. But the fact that he can be relatively out of mischief for an hour or two is to be applauded. Trouble only starts with John Prescott when he tries to do anything. He has no useful role in the constitution since, to adapt Bagehot’s famous distinction, he is neither dignified nor efficient; but if he has his uses in harmonising No. 10 and No. 11, I don’t think we should begrudge the £800,000 a year. Public patience seems exhausted, though. The croquet is a metaphor for something we no longer like. In Alice in Wonderland, the heroine finds herself having to play croquet under the shadow of the frightening Queen of Hearts (who looks a bit like Mr Prescott), using a flamingo as a mallet and a hedgehog as a ball: ‘“I don’t think they play at all fairly,” Alice began in a complaining tone, “and they all quarrel so dreadfully one ca’n’t hear oneself speak... ”.’ This Sunday is Pentecost Sunday. The lesson from Acts records the astonishing scene in Jerusalem when the apostles, though Galileans, started to speak ‘with other tongues’, using the languages of the Jews who lived in the city ‘who came out of every nation under heaven’. These included ‘Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene... ’. The boundaries of the various places named were fluid, but Medes, Parthians and Elamites spread over much of what is now Iran; Phrygia, Pamphylia, Cappadocia and Pontus roughly correspond with modern Turkey, and Mesopotamia with Iraq. It is sobering to think that, today, no Christians living in these places would be wholly safe (though the situation in Turkey is not appalling). Even moderate Arab states, like Egypt, where the Coptic Church is having a very rough time, are fierce in their persecution of Christians. So, increasingly, are the Palestinian Muslims. As for Jews, in almost all the places The Revd Lynda Barley, the ‘head of research and statistics’ for the Archbishops’ Council (Church of England), says that the roadside shrines erected to people killed in car accidents show that we have recovered our mediaeval preference for expressing ourselves in images rather than words: ‘Faith is bubbling under the surface of modern-day Britain,’ she thinks. She may be right, and there is certainly something about these shrines which is touching. But it always seems a pity to me that the bunches of flowers stay wrapped in their non-mediaeval cellophane. Instead of decaying naturally, they deliquesce in their bags, a sad, modern sight.
Last week I attended a surreal occasion at the British Library. The Newspaper Publishers Association had organised a gripping exhibition for their centenary of 100 years of front pages, and the viewers of Newsnight voted the Daily Telegraph the winner for its coverage of 11 September 2001, beating among others the Sun’s ‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster’. In deference to the latter, a man dressed as a hamster sweated round the exhibition. This was bad taste, I suppose, but certainly less bad than if someone had been dressed as the World Trade Center. The hamster handed the list of winners to Martha Kearney, the presenter, on air so that she could read them out. Actually, no one had bothered to write the names on the card, so the list was blank and Martha could not remember who came second. As the editor of the Telegraph at the time, I was asked what made our front page so successful. What I meant to say, but can’t recall if I did, was that we benefited from the concurrence of new technology and old shape. Colour pictures on the front were still fairly new then, and this was almost the first colour news picture of truly astounding quality. At the same time, as a broadsheet we could exploit the power and depth that shape gives you. The Twin Towers, being so tall and thin, fitted with a creepy perfection. Today, the Telegraph is the only non-specialist broadsheet daily. If — which God forbid — there were a second 11 September, the advantage which several papers had then would be unique to us.
Why was the television version of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty so unwatchably bad? Partly it was the prevailing unsureness of tone. The 1980s were only the day before yesterday, but already directors and actors seem unable to remember what people sounded like and how they looked. Partly it was a problem with sex. The sex is central to the novel. Somehow, as so often on television, it was simultaneously tame and gratuitous, as if the director didn’t need to bother too much with characterisation because a bare bottom would be coming along soon to stop people from switching off. The Line of Beauty had the same faults, though much more severely, as the overpraised dramatisation of Brideshead Revisited 20 years ago — a transmogrification of precise, artistic writing into something ponderous and cold and arch. Perhaps this is not a coincidence. The Line of Beauty is a modern version of Brideshead, in a way. Evelyn Waugh said that Brideshead was about the action of divine grace upon his characters. The Line of Beauty is about a similar human situation, but with no God. As a result, Hollinghurst is probably more successful than Waugh (his task is less ambitious), and the subject of the book becomes death.
Goodness, what disappointment I felt when Sir David Attenborough started mouthing that special combination of platitude and untruth which the subject of global warming seems to bring out. The BBC, with its customarily balanced approach to green issues, had a whole evening called ‘Climate Chaos’ of which Sir David was the star turn. As a direct interpreter of nature for the ignorant like myself, he has always been the best. Now he is just a bore with opinions (that’s the job of us columnists). A few days later I found myself next to him in the car park at Glyndebourne, but fortunately restrained my desire to berate him. At least his environmentalism seemed to extend to his vehicle, which was very small and fuel-efficient.
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