I do not know Chris Packham, the BBC nature broadcaster, personally, but he wrote me a letter last month, enclosing a book called Manifesto, The Battle for Green Britain by Dale Vince which, he tells me, ‘has something very important to say at this most important time’. In his letter, Chris says that ‘irrespective of any party politics’, ‘The coming election will be the most important of our lifetimes’ because we are ‘halfway through the last decade’ left to avoid ‘the worst of climate breakdown’. So ‘we must help young voters navigate the new voting rules’. Politics has ‘become the final frontier for a real greener Britain’. What Chris does not mention is that party politics is very important in this most important book. Dale Vince (‘a mate of mine’, Chris explains) has been a multimillionaire donor to the Labour party for more than ten years and was also, until he buckled under the criticism, a big donor to Just Stop Oil. As Dale himself puts it, ‘I pivoted from Just Stop Oil to Just Stop the Tories in late summer 2023,’ a pivot not unrelated to the coming election. Labour, he says, ‘will be the greenest [government] we have ever had and potentially the world has ever seen’. If it gets in, we shall have online voting and proportional representation which, he implies, will get rid of the Tories for ever. At present, Chris Packham is also pursuing his own court case against the Tory government, seeking judicial review of its changed timetable for phasing out petrol and diesel cars. To see the oddity of this, imagine, say, Mishal Husain being allowed by the BBC to help take the government to the International Court of Justice for selling arms to Israel. By promoting his mate Dale’s book, Chris is specifically working against the Conservative party and in favour of Labour. As its title implies, the purpose of Manifesto is a Labour victory asap. Packham’s fame rests almost entirely on presenting nature programmes for the BBC. And yet, because he is technically freelance, he is being excused the full rigour (ha, ha) of its impartiality rules. I would like Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, to explain to us all over again how its impartiality works.
‘The Iranians probably did not intend to cause serious damage or casualties,’ writes William Hague in the Times, almost as if it was really quite nice of them to hurl more than 330 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles into Israel last weekend. But if I had been an Israeli citizen enduring Tehran’s efforts in the night sky, I would not have believed I was watching a son et lumière. And if Lord Hague had been a British cabinet minister and Iran (or anyone else) had put on a similar show over London, would he have advised the British people, as he currently advises the Israelis, that ‘The smartest move now is to signal de-escalation of the immediate confrontation’?
A couple of weeks ago in this space, I murmured against the London Library bombarding its members with emails pushing contentious events upon us. My point was that this uniquely great lending library is a place for the study of books, not the striking of attitudes. Since then, the library has further woked up and doubled-dumbed down. It is inviting us to a ‘member-exclusive’ for Pride month and ‘an evening dedicated to the great literary taboo of Shakespeare’s real identity’. The most irritating thing about the latter is the word ‘taboo’. Sad to say, there is no taboo against Shakespeare identity speculation. The world is awash with batty theories about Bacon, Oxford, Shakespeare being a woman etc. Even as I write this, I know, with a sinking heart, that I shall be inundated with some of them. Yes, there is reputable scholarly inquiry about the collaborative authorship of several of Shakespeare’s minor plays by other hands, such as George Peele’s and Fletcher’s, but there is no sane theory that Shakespeare is not Shakespeare. Why is a serious library staining its reputation in this way? It is the literary equivalent of Elvis being still alive or Jews having bombed the World Trade Center.
Last week, the baby son of friends was baptised in Hastings. The parents, who are predominantly Polish, used the ‘extraordinary form of the Roman rite’, which is chiefly in Latin. It begins with a ceremony of which I had heard but had never before seen. Most of it takes place outside the church door, the purpose being, with the help of the godparents, to expel the Devil before entering. The celebrant breathes three times on the face of the child, then exorcises a plate of salt (‘creature salt’) so that it becomes a sacrament for ‘the putting to flight of the enemy’. He applies a tiny pinch of it to the infant’s tongue. Then he exorcises the child, saying that Christ commands Satan (‘maledicte, damnate’) rather as, walking on the sea, He stretched out His hand to ‘sinking Peter’ (‘Petro margenti’) to ‘give honour to the true and living God’. Then we entered the church and baby Antoni became a Christian. I could see why such a ceremony is frowned on today. It is too visceral, arguably primitive. But therein lies its dramatic power. It is saying that baptism is not only a lovely moment but the vanquishing of the fallen world. From the windows of the East Hastings Angling Club, where we celebrated, we could look out upon the sea more thoughtfully.
The government’s gradual elimination of smoking by date of birth sets an interesting precedent. How about setting a ‘best before’ date for lots of our freedoms this way, thus consoling the old while protecting the young from being triggered by the threat of liberty? As a journalist born in the 1950s, I, for instance, could be allowed to eke out my twilight years attacking, say, mass immigration or gender-neutral lavatories, but those starting out in media would be banned from taking such incorrect positions. Come to think of it, that is pretty much what is happening already.
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