The Spectator's Notes

18 July 2009

It may well be true that some equipment given to British soldiers fighting in Afghanistan is inadequate.

At the weekend, I went to speak at the Way with Words literary festival at Dartington. Across the aisle from me on the train was a very fat woman with her teenage son, eating sweets. For two hours or so, she engaged the couple opposite to her in unsolicited conversation. She was going down to Devon to collect her 15-year-old daughter, who had been sent there for several weeks ‘because of her behaviour’. The girl had run away from home and fallen in with a group of very bad boys. One of the gang was now in prison for rape and attempted murder. When she had split from the gang, and returned home, they had come round and broken her windows, so she had run away again. In Devon, though, her daughter was ‘doing her nut’, her mother said. A cow had come and looked in her bedroom window one morning, scaring her terribly: she was longing to return to the safety of good old south London.

Reaching Dartington, I took part in a debate with Gillian Reynolds, the radio critic of the Daily Telegraph, about the BBC. Gillian was ‘pro’, and I, refusing to renew my licence fee unless they sack Jonathan Ross, was ‘anti’. There were more than 400 people, highly intelligent and respectable, mostly grey-haired. With such audiences, I notice a change since I first started speaking to them about 25 years ago. At that time, their natural conservatism made them strongly in favour of the BBC and the National Health Service: they believed in the morality underpinning both organisations. Today, that belief is still present — and people remain highly suspicious of purely ‘market’ arguments for reform — but, in both cases, they feel that the institutions have strayed from their purpose, and so they are more open to new ideas. Gillian, who knows and loves the bit of the BBC that such an audience likes best (Radios 3 and 4), beguiled everyone, and she won the show of hands at the end, but not by anything like the margin her cause would once have commanded. Those of us who want to change matters need to think harder about arrangements which preserve the core of quality — most of it on radio — which still, rightly, commands such loyalty, and jettison the dross and pus. We are pushing at a door which is beginning to open.

Nicholas Penny, the Director of the National Gallery, has courageously spoken out against the endless noise in Trafalgar Square. It is horrible to have to work or even walk in places which arts administrators describe as ‘vibrant’. Why can’t they just erect a statue of a great airman on the fourth plinth and shut all the fun down? Only by filling the square with representations of men of war will we attain peace.