Diary

11 July 2009

The shadow chancellor George Osborne has been lunching privately with the textiles magnate Richard Caring, the Labour-supporting businessman who got caught up in the cash for peerages investigation.

In the event it was a superb service, terrific hymns and a rousing sermon from the Bishop of London who concluded proceedings, without ever seeming hurried, in two hours flat.

On Monday night I discussed the ‘future of progressive politics’ at the think-tank Policy Exchange. Everyone else present felt that David Cameron’s conservatives should be ‘progressive’. This is hopeless. Think of the ‘progressive’ educationalists who have systematically destroyed our schools over the past few decades with the result that children can no longer spell and know no history. The Iraq war, and the proposition that you can impose democracy on a foreign country, was a progressive notion. So was the Blair method of government, with its incompetent, centralised meddling. Conservativism is based on a more realistic idea of human nature than the naive optimism of the progressives. True Conservatives realise that there are problems which no politician can solve, and are sceptical of grand projects. They appreciate the fallibility of human beings and the importance of inherited institutions. The idea of progress died in the trenches and gas chambers of the 20th century. If David Cameron tries to put his nonsensical concept of progressive conservatism into practice he will fail.

For the last six months I have travelled around Britain making a film about child homicide. One child a week gets killed by its parents — if it was swine flu we would call it a pandemic and do something about it.

But the sheer courage of the survivors of these terrible tragedies is so inspiring. In one violent backstreet I came across a 14-year-old who had been shot four times by his sister’s partner the previous year. He was lively, cheerful, full of hope, fully recovered and — thanks to the Prince of Wales Trust — about to sail round Britain from Southampton to the Orkneys. Meeting this splendid and brave young man, I thought that the human spirit could conquer anything.