The Spectator Notes
CHARLES MOORE Enoch Powell once said to me, 'I love the humbug of the English. I worship it. But I reserve the right from time to time to point it out.' I thought of this last week when I took part in Radio 4'sAny Questions?, set up in the nave of Dorchester Abbey, Oxfordshire. The programme always has a `warm-up' question before it goes live, and this time it was something to do with travel. Jonathan Dimbleby, the chairman, then asked the audience how many of them would be going abroad for a holiday this year. About three-quarters put up their hands. On air, a question about the floods (in which Oxfordshire suffered particularly badly) produced much nodding and clapping when my fellow-panellist Peter Tatchell blamed it all on climate change. A question attacking the British Airports Authority for trying to injunct a protest camp on the site of the fifth terminal at Heathrow inspired a similar reaction. Presumably most of the three-quarters of the audience going abroad will be flying there, yet roughly the same proportion seemed to think it was a good idea to stop airport development. If it is true (which I doubt) that the energy consumption of aeroplanes is destroying the planet, then the duty to ground oneself is clear. Yet the English middle classes are not proposing seriously to alter their behaviour: they prefer to disapprove of those who try to fly them to their destinations instead. Brilliant, beautiful English humbug. I felt ill-mannered for pointing it out.
It has gone into history that Tony Blair was George Bush's 'poodle'. A key piece of evidence advanced is the President's overheard 'Yo, Blair!' greeting to the then Prime Minister. Surely the words proved no such thing. They suggested equality, not subservience. They implied mateship. The just objection to 'Yo, Blair!' was to its informality. It is not reassuring when world leaders josh like student pals. The reality is that their relationships, even when warm and trusting, stem from their public roles — rightly so. We need constant reminding of this, and using courteous, correct language is one way of doing it. So is dressing quite formally. The closest modern relationship between President and PM was that of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, but it seldom involved shirtsleeves on his part or slacks on hers. George Bush senior, like his son, favoured open-neck shirts and drinking out of a can at Camp David, and this tended to make Mrs Thatcher uneasy. So I found it comforting that President Bush and Gordon Brown wore dreary suits for their meeting this week. It showed a better understanding that the relationship, if special at all, is so primarily because of the nature of the offices which the two men hold. 'Personal chemistry' may help, but it isn't the essence of the thing.
Aphrase at summits even more beloved of reporters than 'personal chemistry' is 'body language'. It is a game all we journalists can play without fear of formal contradiction. Now, however, body language is considered so important that it is becoming a specialist subject. Newspapers hire experts to comment on it. The Times even found a Professor of Occupational Psychology. Why stop there? If the body does have a language, how about simultaneous translation? Just as interpreters instantly turn Arabic, French or whatever into whispered English, shouldn't the BBC have someone with a PhD saying 'Stiff back denotes tension', or 'Absence of eye-contact suggests distance' as Mr Brown and Mr Bush stand side by side at their lecterns?
people who live together without being married often say that they do not need 'a piece of paper' to validate their relationship. Then they find that when their relationship breaks up, they dispute who owns what, and the legal position is confusing. This week, the Law Commission reported on the subject, yet again. What the aggrieved couples are looking for, really, is a piece of paper. How about marriage?
This week marks the formal ending of the 38 years of Operation Banner, the work of the British army in Northern Ireland which began with the recrudescence of the Troubles in 1969 (although it does not, thank goodness, mean the complete departure of the army from the province). One thing left hanging, though, is the inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday. Tony Blair announced this in January 1998 as one of his sops to the IRA. Since then, the inquiry's chairman, Lord Saville has, as one distinguished veteran of the peace process put it to me, 'spent nearly ten years studying 32 seconds'. Will anyone be helped by his conclusions, if they ever come?
As a teenage film buff, I thought that Ingmar Bergman was the greatest of all film-makers. In a book of interviews with Bergman which I pored over, he gave an account of how he saw the work of the artist. He said, so far as I remember, that his artistic ideal was to be like a master mason in a mediaeval cathedral. You would be working on a project of great beauty, importance and longevity, and you would be using your creative skills to the uttermost, and yet you would not need personal renown. Your work would last, Bergman imagined, but not your name. I found this notion of exalted anonymity in the service of art inspiring. But of course the paradox, of which Bergman was presumably conscious, was that people only attended to his thoughts because they believed almost in the opposite — in the post-Romantic idea of the author as tortured, individual, big-name genius, which he embodied. Indeed, one reason why he was such a great film-maker was that, as with Hitchcock, his films had the most unmistakable authorship: they could have been made only by Ingmar Bergman. This week, Bergman died; his obituaries set out all the accoutrements of being a famous artist in the modern world — the multiple marriages, the problems with tax, the 'trademark' beret. His fame was both a necessity and a torment to him Bergman was the son of a Lutheran pastor. His ideal of art without credits and star status came from an age of faith. He did not share that faith, but its transcendence of self was what lit his creative, egotistic fire.
By chance, I saw Wild Strawberries again a few weeks ago. Only Bergman could have turned an elderly doctor's journey to receive a jubilee honour in Lund cathedral into one of the greatest films ever made.
In Venice recently, I noticed a big banner for the Biennale hanging from a palazzo on the Grand Canal. 'Endless Lust', it said, and then, underneath, 'Luxembourg Pavilion'. No, the would-be daring of modern art just does not fit with the bourgeois municipal subsidy which pays for it.
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