Politics

This being the first anniversary of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, I feel that prudence requires anyone writing a Diary in The Spectator – which has become the principal launching-pad for Mark Steyn’s state-of-the-art verbal missiles – to use the main part of his diary to commemorate this event. So let me start uncontroversially with the statutory reminiscence about where I was when the news broke. I was lunching in my club enjoying a post-prandial digestive with Betty Boothroyd, when another member rushed in to summon us urgently to the television room upstairs. So far, so usual. But something else also sticks in my memory. Throughout the hour or so that we were all glued to the box, two elderly members, who had obviously dropped off while watching the cricket coverage before it was interrupted by the Twin Towers news, remained contentedly snoring, until eventually, when the set was turned off, one of them woke up to inquire about the score. I have to confess, however, that far from being shocked by this dear old buffer having slept through an event ‘after which the world will never be the same again’, I remember taking his somnolent figure as a symbolic reassurance that at least on this side of the Atlantic – where terrorist attacks have long been commonplace – there might be some chance of a proportional reaction. Not for a moment on that day did I worry that the Americans might underreact; overreaction, on the other hand, seemed to me the clear and present danger. A year later I feel the same, only more so.

I have three other relevant reminiscences: firstly of Bertrand Russell giving a broadcast lecture a year or two before the Soviet Union developed its own atomic bomb, advocating a pre-emptive nuclear assault to prevent those evil plans ever materialising.