The current ‘Britain is on a knife edge’ mood is understandable. Our discontents are great and Sir Keir Starmer’s government is even more incompetent and divided than we critics expected. But do not forget how the British system works. We are not like France, paralysed because its executive president can, constitutionally, hold out until 2027, even though his governments last only for months. The tired phrase ‘overwhelming majority’ has meaning. Labour can overwhelm all parliamentary opposition. It may find it harder to overwhelm internal opposition, but an early general election remains most unlikely, since MPs do not demand an election if they think they will lose their seats. Labour can cling on easily, even if (or, perhaps, because) Sir Keir and Rachel Reeves are forced to resign. So Reform’s success, persistent though it now seems, has plenty of time to evaporate or – more likely – stall. In 1981, the Liberal-SDP Alliance peaked at 52 per cent in the opinion polls, but in 1983, it won only 23 seats, despite clocking up 7,780,949 votes. Reform is now at 30 per cent in the polls. To project from today that Nigel Farage will be the next prime minister is as silly as to say that, in 2029, the stock market will stand at its current level. We just do not know; we do know Labour has four years and a huge majority.
Sir Laurie Magnus’s report found against Angela Rayner because she underpaid the stamp-duty land tax due on her flat in Hove. She resigned. But the bit that still puzzles many people is not the stamp duty, but her role as a trustee, with her ex-husband and a third person, a lawyer involved with the court of protection, for her disabled son. Mrs Rayner has spoken of the payment of more than £162,000 to her from this trust as a way of helping her son secure his place in the family home in Ashton-under-Lyne. But surely, since his father lives there and both his parents are his trustees and must therefore put his best interests first, he was secure there anyway. How was it advantageous for him that money was surrendered from his trust to buy out his mother’s interest in the house he lives in?
Our old friend Betty Perks has Candida, a 38-year-old daughter profoundly disabled at birth, blind and gastrostomy-fed. Candida could not be directly affected by the assisted suicide bill, because she lacks mental capacity, but Betty has written to her MP about ‘a shift in thinking’ which she thinks the bill signals. ‘So much is weighted towards people thinking she has a poor quality of life… yet she is profoundly loved and radiates love herself.’ Until now, Britain ‘accommodates vulnerable people like my daughter’ but ‘we should never take this situation for granted’. She notices that doctors’ attitudes to her ‘are probably a bit less committed than in the past, as the NHS struggles to function for all’. Assisted dying, Betty says, will weaken ‘the very delicate trust that doctors are always going to affirm life’. She can see the slippery slope more clearly than most because she sits on its edge: she should be heard.
Modern obituaries are often painfully frank, but those of the Duchess of Kent, who died last week, were understated. She was an odder person, more conflicted. Although it was true that she disliked royal grandeur, she was, in fact, rather grand and expected people to do things for her while reserving the right to change her mind at the last minute. This was difficult for those close to her. Perhaps she suffered from ‘imposter syndrome’, while being very good at the imposture that royal life imposes. She could perform with great grace and sweetness in public despite turmoil and rebellion within. Privately, she was impulsive. ‘I’ve been terribly naughty today,’ she announced to a friend of mine. ‘I’ve just bought a flat’, without having secured the money. ‘Will you come with me to the Holy Land?’ she asked me urgently at lunch (always her table at the Caprice), when we were discussing our shared Catholicism. I felt cowardly for deflecting her, but I feared her genuine desire for pilgrim simplicity would turn out to be highly complicated.
The contradictions in Katharine Kent’s character made her real goodness the more impressive. I saw this in two ways. One was her courage if her sympathies were engaged. She was Patron of the Royal Ulster Constabulary Benevolent Fund. When the Blair government moved to abolish the force, I was editing the Telegraph and concerned for the RUC’s plight. She was uninterested in the politics, but touchingly concerned for the wives and families of the 312 police officers murdered (chiefly) by the IRA and the thousands more who had been targeted. She went over to the province with us, meeting and listening to such families – as if to say ‘Lest we forget’. The other quality was her rapport with children. The engagement she faithfully kept was her day each week teaching music to children in a very poor area of Hull. (Only once did a pupil out her: ‘Are you royal, Miss? Your jumper smells of Buckingham Palace.’) When she came to stay with us, our daughter, Kate, aged nine or so, proudly introduced her to her dolls’ house and the imaginary Hobhouse family who inhabited it. Katharine started an ingenious correspondence with Kate, writing microscopic letters from her own dolls’ house family to the Hobhouses. This was playful, and very kind.
When I got my first job in 1979 – on the Peterborough column of the Daily Telegraph – the glamorous, humorous biker sitting opposite me was called Sebastian Faulks. The great novelist’s new memoirs, Fires Which Burned Brightly, vividly describe those last, drunken days when ‘Fleet Street’ actually was in Fleet Street. The most original bit of the book, though, is Sebastian’s decision to direct his full attention to his parents in his last chapter rather than his first. This is generous. Instead of saying ‘Well, I’ve risen above all that’, his narrative arc is saying: ‘In my beginning is my end.’
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