On Monday in the Lords, Michael Heseltine, 90 next month, orated (I employ that Welsh usage because it fits him so well) in favour of the European single market. He regarded its regulations as ‘one of the most successful concepts ever developed by humankind’. He deplored the fact that the government is trying, post-Brexit, to escape them. He attacked Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black and compared Jacob Rees-Mogg to Robespierre. His stirring words reminded me of another great nonagenarian performance in the upper house – Harold Macmillan’s maiden speech as Earl of Stockton in November 1984, which I watched from the gallery. The old actor rose slowly and totteringly, but quickly gained strength as he praised the gold standard, Keynesianism and his own achievements as prime minister for more than half an hour. The peroration was quite something, involving faith, hope, charity and St Paul and Arthur Scargill’s miners’ strike which was being carried on, he said, by ‘the best men in the world’. These men ‘beat the Kaiser’s army and they beat Hitler’s army’. They ‘never gave in’. Many of us wept. However, four months later, those men did (thank goodness) give in to Margaret Thatcher. Quite soon, I suspect, EU regulations will have to give in to the logic of Brexit. Macmillan then, Heseltine nearly 40 years on – great, misguided orators, perfect examples of 1066 And All That’s famous characterisation of the Cavaliers – ‘wrong, but wromantic’.
One thing strikers’ leaders say is ‘We don’t want the public to suffer’. Another is ‘We have no choice’. Both remarks are untrue. If the public did not suffer, public-service strikes would be ineffective. And if it is the case that strikers have no choice, what about the many people who vote not to strike? In a free country, there is always a choice whether to strike and, in 99 cases out of a hundred, the more decent people choose not to. It is because strikes are so damaging that, in really crucial services, they are either professionally disapproved of, or, as with the police and the armed services, actually forbidden. The high standing of some services and of all professions derives partly from the fact that they do not strike, so that standing is lowered when they do. Every time you see nurses, ambulance workers, junior doctors, teachers, train drivers, shouting on picket lines, you see people who are systematically, though presumably not deliberately, trashing their own reputations. Half-aware of this, nurses and other NHS workers in the current dispute have developed a line that it is only partly about pay and mainly about patient safety. They are right that patient safety has been endangered by the hopelessness of governments of both parties in running the NHS for many years; but since their own actions are designed to threaten patient safety, they are losing the right to pass judgment.
Here is a quandary which Dear Mary might be able to solve. An old friend recently died. I wanted to write a letter of condolence to his adult son and thought that it would be a nicer thing to receive if written on paper and in ink. I know that when I have been bereaved, I have been very pleased to receive actual letters, which can be looked at again in after years and become redolent of the person who wrote them and the age in which they were written. I therefore asked a friend for the son’s postal address, but was advised that it would be a bad idea to write since the young man never opens anything in an envelope. So do I send an email alerting my late friend’s son to the fact that a letter may land on his doormat, or is that somehow condescending? There probably are now millions of people under the age of 30 who do not really know what a letter is.
Here is another quandary about the postal system. Once upon a time, it was considered the height of bad manners to send human excrement through the post, but nowadays this is done for the NHS on a massive scale. Men of my age are regularly sent boxes in which we are supposed to place samples of what the leaflet tweely calls ‘poo’. We then seal the boxes and send them back so that someone can work out whether we have bowel cancer. I normally comply, but this year, so far, I have not. I do not like the idea of all these boxes piling up in strikebound sorting offices, and I fear that by the time the strikers return to work and start delivering them all over the country, the samples will have lost whatever clinical accuracy they may have possessed when farm-fresh. Then, in order to meet targets, the health service will randomly decide that thousands of people have got cancer when they haven’t or, to restrain spiralling costs, that they haven’t got cancer when they have.
Instinctively, I support Dominic Raab against all these anonymous people who say he is a bully. If a cabinet minister can be brought down by such an indefinable accusation, lots of them will be, and the permanent secretaries will gain yet more power to veto and terminate the careers of ministers. In Yes, Minister, it was always Sir Humphrey who bullied Jim Hacker, not the other way round. That is truer to life. One thing does give me pause, however. The late Auberon Waugh liked to list what he called the ‘stinkers’ – those Conservative MPs who voted for the hunting ban. At the time, there were a handful of them. Bron alleged that they all had severe personal defects, and I found no reason to disagree. Surely all Conservatives are supposed to respect tradition and liberty, and if some want to ban a sport which exhibits both, they clearly do not. Mr Raab was not in the House of Commons at the time of the ban, but he is a founder patron of Blue Fox, a Tory anti-hunt group. I doubt I’ll try to call off the hounds that are after him now.
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