Diary – 14 April 2007

St Ives, Cornwall

Emailing a friend in Boston, I reported that winter had been so benign in southern England this year that it was bound to snow in Cornwall at Easter. Not so. I write just after dawn as a fishing boat chugs across the tranquil bay in bright sunshine. The week’s weather promises to be as near perfect as any since my siblings and I first started our annual family reunion in rented cottages here in 1983. Wonderful. And the Sloop Inn (‘circa 1305’) has now installed a wireless connection for the laptop.

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Not all is calm. This region is steeped in military history, but its media seems almost as indignant as Fleet St about the Iran hostage incident. The Western Morning News calls the detainees ‘15 West Country-based sailors and marines’ just as 2nd Lt. Joanna Dyer, killed by a roadside bomb in Basra, is a ‘West Girl’. Missing as usual from the debate is the media’s own thespian role. Tehran’s government knows the Western media (Western Morning News included) will over-react; that armchair generals of Right and Left will denounce a supine/bellicose Blair government; that Brigadier Max Hastings will take yet another poke at the navy. And who buys the ‘hostages’ harrowing stories’? Why, the same media which denounces their sale to rivals. I thought the Tehran 15 conducted themselves well enough during a brief but unpleasant ordeal and that the nation’s moral fibre remains intact. It usually does, despite the seasonal bleating of the bishops. But remember: lifeboatmen risk their lives for free.

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Of course there should be a proper Labour leadership contest. In theory. My objection to one in practice is that being Anyone But Gordon is an insufficient qualification to run and lose to the most influential Chancellor since Geoffrey Howe.