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Thursday 4 December 2008

The Spectator’s Notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

In the debate about their pay, MPs always complain that the decision falls to them. It is invidious, they say, that they should decide what they are worth. It is difficult, certainly, but not invidious. MPs jealously, correctly, guard their right to be the ultimate guardians of the public purse. That right is abridged if they invite someone else to tell them what they should be paid. The most honest way to deal with their pay is for them to debate it in public and vote on it annually. But if MPs refuse, and try to pass the buck, I have a suggestion. Let a quango decide the aggregate, unvariable amount of money that the House of Commons may have for its Members for the course of each Parliament, and then let MPs argue among themselves how best to divide it. They would quickly realise that they would get richer if they reduced their own number, and their entourages. We would probably end up with a mere 400 Members, instead of the ludicrous 646 there are at present. Greed would be good.

In the car on Sunday, I turned on Radio 3 and found myself listening to Andrew O’Hagan reading Robert Burns’s poem ‘Handsome Nell’. I was very struck with it, not so much because of the poem itself (I’m not quite convinced by the poet’s pious claim that ‘virtue warms my breast’), but because of how well it was read. O’Hagan understood that a poem read out loud must do two things which are not in conflict. It must make meaning as clear as possible, and it must sing. It is sad how rare this is. Old-fashioned actors tended to reduce sense in the interests of sonority. The more modern and more common fault is to think that the form of the verse must be suppressed in order to convey the sincerity of its intent. Recently, lots of poets read out their entries to the T.S. Eliot Prize on the Today programme. In most cases, their flatness of tone meant that their words, however good, were hard to take in or enjoy. No poetry prizes should be awarded without the judges hearing the entries declaimed, and the winner should show, in the declaiming, how poetry is a richer form than prose.

TV Licensing (continued). A reader draws my attention to the case of  Kenneth Brierley, aged 46, who died of bowel cancer last October. In December, the late Mr Brierley was fined £200 by Rochdale magistrates for not possessing a television licence. That’ll teach him!

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