The Spectator's Notes

9 May 2009

Thirty years, almost to the day, after we greeted our first woman Prime Minister, we greet our first woman Poet Laureate.

Like Miss Lumley and everyone else, I love the Gurkhas. I first liked the sound of them, aged about seven, in The Wonder Book of Daring Deeds, which said they were ‘active little fellows’ with their kukris. But this column has not joined in the hue and cry against the government on the subject, because I have a horrible feeling that if the Gurkhas get all their demands and can come and live in the faraway country which they have served so well, they will become just as whingey and ‘rights’-oriented as the rest of us. The point about the Gurkhas, surely — and I do not mean this is a criticism — is that they are mercenaries. They are loyal, yes, but they have served the British Crown for so long because it has paid them much more money than they could otherwise have obtained in Nepal. The Gurkha example proves that mercenaries, if well organised and commanded by non-mercenaries, can be ideal soldiers. They cost less, fight well, and do not have votes and families back home. Just suppose that the Gurkhas had not previously existed, but were invented by us and the Americans to help fight the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What cries of outrage there would be. Yet it would be a rational thing to do, and in fact various security companies, some of them British, play valuable parts in both these wars, and often recruit Nepalis.

It is, indirectly, thanks to me that Rod Liddle is my fellow Spectator columnist, since I ran a successful campaign to get him sacked from his job as editor of the BBC’s Today programme. My complaint was that his public denunciations of hunting were incompatible with the impartiality of his job. On the whole, I did Rod a favour. He is a free spirit and therefore much better suited to this magazine than to the Corporation. But freelance Rod now adds to the many tales of woe I receive about how the BBC behaves. He says that it is the only institution to which he contributes which will not pay his VAT directly but insists upon ‘separate forms being a) requested by me and then b) sent out by them and c) returned by me’. These are for tiny sums — his last was for £4.58. He reckons the BBC calculates that ‘small people will not bother’. If they do bother, the forms are sent back, pointing out some very minor error. The BBC now owes Rod more than £1,000. He thinks he might join the great licence fee revolt until he gets paid.

Just over a year ago I floated, in passing, the suggestion that if only Labour made Alan Johnson its leader (thus winning the south) and Hazel Blears his deputy (securing the north) it might still be in with a chance. Until now, this disinterested and sincere suggestion has been ignored, but surely it is an idea whose time has come.