We don’t have Thanksgiving in Britain, but this does not stop us giving thanks and Christmas is a good time to do it. Last year, when I made a visit of farewell to the great medievalist Jeremy Catto, who was dying, his American partner of 57 years, John Wolfe, said that they always kept Thanksgiving. I asked Jeremy what he gave thanks for. ‘I give thanks that the Pilgrim Fathers left,’ was his characteristic reply. We fell to deploring the growth of modern puritanism in all its nauseating forms.
Thanksgiving should glow in every English heart for the fact that Queen Victoria married Prince Albert and brought to this country that wide-ranging, humane European of genius, who could have excelled as an engineer, a politician, a soldier, a musician. Our Sidney and our perfect man. People sometimes ask me if there is any modern equivalent and the closest I can get is to mention the current director of the V&A, Tristram Hunt. I had lunch with Tristram about a year ago during which he predicted, almost to the number of seats, what would happen in the inevitable general election — a Boris landslide, catastrophe for Labour. Neither of us guessed, however, that his former seat, Stoke-on-Trent Central, would go Tory. I am a Stokey myself, though I grew up in Hugh Fraser’s nearby safe Tory (and ultra Catholic) seat of Stafford and Stone. No judgment on Jeremy Corbyn could be more devastating than that of the people of Stoke who, going back to Chartist times, and right through the glory days of old Colonel Wedgwood, ‘the last of the radicals’, would ever have never dreamed of voting Tory.
Another thing for which I am thankful is having days out from London with my wife Ruth.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in