The spectator’s notes

24 November 2007

Charles Moore's thoughts on the events of the week

Ian Smith, who has just died, was ‘overthrown by Robert Mugabe in 1979’, said the BBC News. No. He stepped down after the more or less free and fair multi-racial elections which he held in 1979. Mugabe refused to take part in them, and came to power in different elections the following year, arranged by the British. I met Smith in Zimbabwe in the 1990s, where he lived bravely (he was always brave) in an unguarded house next to the Cuban Embassy in Harare. There was, by then, a pathos in his situation because he was in his heart a citizen of a country that no longer existed. He was not really British, not really Zimbabwean. He was Rhodesian, and Rhodesia was no more.

One of the troubles about modern marriage is that people constantly worry whether they are happy in it. By being married for 60 years, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh remind us that it is possible to outlive this wearying question. I am sure they are happy, but the passage of time makes the precise state of a couple’s feelings less important than the grand and beautiful fact that they have endured. A single choice, long, long ago, has made them almost permanent, like part of a landscape. We should wish them the fate of Ovid’s old couple, Philemon and Baucis, who, when they died, were turned into trees whose boughs intertwined.