On Monday, I tracked down my father to his hotel in Liverpool. He was there for the Liberal Democrat conference.
On Monday, I tracked down my father to his hotel in Liverpool. He was there for the Liberal Democrat conference. He has attended every single one of these since 1953, when he represented the Cambridge University Liberal Club and made a fiery speech about how the Liberals should be more enthusiastic about Europe. So he has spent an entire year of his life at these occasions — surely a record. In the year of his first conference, which was held at Ilfracombe, the party stood at 3 per cent in the opinion polls. Its leader was Clement Davies who, even at the time, no one had heard of. ‘We did nearly die,’ my father said. Today, the party is in government. Even my father, who is 79, is too young to remember it holding power in peacetime. I asked the usual journalist’s ‘How do you feel?’ question. He tried to deflect me with a disquisition on the complexities of the coalition, but did eventually admit that this was ‘the most exciting moment’ for the party that he could remember. This surprised me a little. No one spends 60 years in the Liberal party if he thinks power is what matters most, and I thought my father might be worried by the compromises being made. Not at all. This is better than the time of the SPD-Liberal Alliance, said my father, because then there was the foolish illusion that they could actually form the government. Today, the position is more modest but more real. Nick Clegg had prepared admirably for a hung Parliament, and now here he was, winning ovations, and looking ‘shiny and blooming’. There were some worries, but ‘it is very unlikely now that we shall sink back into insignificance’. My father seemed so content that I wondered if this was his secular Nunc Dimittis, but I concluded that it was not. He has spoken at 54 of his 57 conferences, and I suspect he intends to achieve his Diamond Jubilee.
In the great debate about controlling the deficit, it is notable that it is not only countries which are considered ‘right-wing’ which clamp down hard. The goody-goody Swedish example is of particular interest to the Conservatives at the moment. One of Sweden’s innovations, after its crisis of the 1990s, was to get an agreement between all the main parties that they would never run a deficit which exceeded 2 per cent of GDP. Do not be surprised if the Tories offer something similar to Labour soon. It is a classic political ploy — hard to accept, hard to refuse.
Gratitude is not big box office in journalism, so I apologise for this item. But one reason the Pope’s visit to Britain turned out to be a success was that our government got it right. It deserves thanks. In Francis Campbell, we have the best informed ambassador to the Holy See in our history. He opened all the right lines of communication. Under the last government, though, demoralised officialdom back at home lacked political leadership and fell to quarrelling among mid-level officials about whose budget should bear the cost of the state visit. Teenagers in the Foreign Office produced the memo about how the Pope should launch a range of condoms. There was talk of the Pope being arrested when he arrived. It did, at one point, seem possible that the visit would be scrapped. Quickly after becoming Prime Minister, David Cameron gripped the problem. He realised that you cannot have a state visit which the state does not take seriously; if Britain failed to handle the matter properly, this would be a religious, cultural and political disaster. He asked Chris Patten to sort it out, which he adroitly did. At the last minute, the mood among ministers, which had been almost mutinous (there was comic outrage at having to attend the state banquet when the Pope himself, as is always the case, would not), turned sunny. More important, the public utterly confounded the BBC’s predictions, welcomed the Pope warmly, and listened to him seriously. As Mr Cameron said, faith remains ‘part of our national conversation’. He felt it worth his while to co-opt the Pope’s message for ‘the new culture of social responsibility we want to build in Britain.’ He kept a slight distance from the Pope, but a respectful one — exactly right surely, for a culturally Protestant country in modern times. Imagine how Tony Blair would have gushed, how Gordon Brown would have grandstanded.
In Westminster Hall last Friday, the ceremony was not elaborate, which is as it should be for a parliamentary occasion. The only constitutional surprise was that John Major held hands with Lady Thatcher, but I think he did so to assist her as she stood, rather than to bury the hatchet about the Maastricht Treaty. The only blot was Mr Speaker. Treating his speech of welcome as a chance to boy his independence of mind round the world, John Bercow pointed out that Parliament often reached conclusions ‘which are markedly different than those of the Vatican’. Like Mr Cameron, he was putting some distance between himself and the Pope, but, unlike the Prime Minister, in a twerpy way. I turned my mind to higher things — the angels which support the ceiling. They are very beautiful, and I am interested in them because I have always been told (probably erroneously) that the wood was supplied, both originally and for the restoration in the 20th century, by the Whiligh estate near us in Sussex. I couldn’t hear a lot of what the Pope said, but towards the end, his voice rose as he pointed out the angels: ‘…they summon us to acknowledge the vital contribution that religious belief can continue to make to the life of the nation.’
Soldiers’ talk is famous for its directness, but formal military terms tend to be the opposite. Perhaps because of the unpleasantness of war, refuge is taken in euphemisms, such as ‘collateral damage’ for killing civilians by mistake. In Afghanistan last month, I noticed the use of the word ‘complex’. People now speak of a ‘complex attack’. The phrase originally meant that multiple weapons systems were involved, but it now is a synonym for ‘particularly nasty’. ‘It was a complex attack,’ spokesmen say, and you know they are about to give you bad news.
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