The Spectator's Notes

22 July 2006

‘Lord, make me leave the EPP, but not yet,’ seems to be David Cameron’s policy towards fulfilling his own campaign promise to get out of the Euro-fanatical grouping at the European Parliament. This reverses the position of the European factions which applied when it was British government policy to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism ‘when the time is right’. Eurosceptics reluctantly accepted the policy and argued on all occasions that the time was wrong. Now it will be the few remaining Tory euro-enthusiasts who will have to pursue that tactic and prevent their party leaving the EPP by 2009. They have quite a good chance of success, I fear, because maintaining the status quo is always easier than change, and they will be able to argue by then that things have ‘moved on’. Mr Cameron’s cunning (and mistaken) ruse neither to break nor to fulfil his pledge should be a lesson to all those who assume that the Conservatives, if they return to office, will keep their promise to repeal the hunting ban. The precise commitment is to allow a government Bill, in government time but on a free vote (a mirror of what Labour did). Although Mr Cameron is completely in favour of hunting and is, I think, the only Conservative leader in the past 40 years to have hunted, he will want to avoid the subject if he becomes prime minister. It will be too controversial and potentially bitter, he will be advised. This advice is wrong, I suspect, since there is a widespread recognition, even among people who are no friends of hunting, that the law is absurd. But Mr Cameron will be tempted to play along with those who argue that he will have a quieter life if he lets the ban stay, unenforced. Some hunts may even support this, since they find they can operate more or less unimpeded under the ban, and would prefer theoretical illegality to a system of licensing. This is surely a mistake: bad law has bad effects, and if it is there, it can, at any time, be used. Hunting people constitute a very high proportion of Tory activists. They must make sure their MPs insist on repeal, and withdraw their voluntary labour if they are dissatisfied.

A cross wife in a novel by Carol Shields observes that there is an unspoken convention that if a chair on public transport has armrests, men will always use them, forcing women to keep their arms by their sides. I had never noticed this before, but if you look at people near you on a train, you will see that it is true. Is there a physical reason for this, or is it cultural?

A retired Scottish schoolmaster sends me his learned contribution to the debate in this column about the use of ‘may’ and ‘might’. Using the example cited by Philip Pullman of the difference between ‘Napoleon may have had homosexual tendencies’ and ‘Wellington might have avoided the Battle of Waterloo’, he writes that the difference ‘is, in effect what we Classicists call the principal clause (apodosis) of an unfulfilled past conditional sentence, with the omission/ suppression of the If clause (called the protasis)’. I think this should be the last word on the subject.