Norman Stone

Diary – 22 May 2010

Norman Stone opens his diary

The last election in which I voted was that of 1997. On Blair’s brave glad morning I flew to Edinburgh for something, and as we touched down the intercom said, ‘Welcome to Scotland, a Tory-free zone.’ I thought — not a good thing for the national airline to be taking sides. On the way back I ran into Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was looking bloodily unbowed from an attempt to wrest Kirkcaldy from Lewis Moonie. Now he has made the House, and good luck to him. When he was an undergraduate at Oxford he was very good at organising Thatcherite events, which was where we met. Back then — 1988 or so — there was a clear split among the Thatcherites between the Enlightenment and the Romantics, between people such as Kenneth Baker who would have done everything by pie-chart and people such as Norman Tebbit who probably wishes, like me, that nothing — and I mean nothing — had been changed in England since 1 January 1955.

I said ‘England’. There are now tiresome problems as regards the Scots: three quarters public-service Lib-Lab, one quarter nationalist, all of them with more weight in a London parliament than they should have, given the much smaller voting population. The distortion badly affects English politics, and has produced this present strange coalition government: David Cameron saved from his own right by unreliable and no doubt parasitical allies. The Act of Union of 1707 has already been amended, with the abolition, more or less, of the Scottish places in the House of Lords. Time to do it again for the House of Commons, and have constituencies of more or less equal size throughout the land. But those allies would get in the way, and so we will muddle on, maybe with an absurd, independent Scotland at the end of it all.

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