When the editor of this magazine called to congratulate me on being given a peerage, he said: ‘It’s QPR’s first win this season.’ Not quite right – we’ve actually won four games this season – but not far off. He touched a nerve because I’ve been thinking about what to call myself to maximise my chances of being appointed to QPR’s board. Would Lord Young of Loftus Road be too obvious?
The other joke Michael made is that it shows Keir Starmer isn’t completely opposed to hereditary peers, given that my father was also a life peer. I hoped to be the first son of a life peer to be made a life peer and toyed with the idea of writing a piece about the hereditary meritocracy (my father invented the word ‘meritocracy’). But in fact there is one other. Baron Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, now deceased, was a former Conservative Cabinet minister who was made a peer in 2001 and both of his parents were also life peers, a record which will surely never be beaten. What a family!
When I told my three sons last night I said the pressure was now on for one of them to be made a peer – as it will be on my daughter, too – but they didn’t seem unduly burdened by this. Maybe they will in time. For years I didn’t feel remotely obliged to follow in the footsteps of my father, a pillar of the left-wing establishment who set up about 50 charitable organisations, and ran as fast as I could in the opposite direction. But when I got married and had children I felt the tug of public duty and helped set up a bunch of schools, followed by the Free Speech Union. I realised that when I’d been running away from my father’s legacy I was actually on a long piece of elastic and he was now reeling me back in.
This was brought home to me when I watched the 2009 Star Trek reboot. There’s a scene towards the beginning when Captain Pike stumbles across a young, dissolute James T Kirk in bar, who is throwing his life away drinking too much and getting into fights. Pike tells him to enlist in Star Fleet: ‘If you’re half the man your father was, Jim, Star Fleet could use you.’ Kirk laughs in his face – ‘You must be way down on your recruiting quota this month’ – but Pike rises to his full height and delivers a short lecture that brings the scallywag to his senses: ‘Your father was the captain of a starship for 12 minutes. He saved 800 lives, including your mother’s and yours. I dare you to do better.’
I found this incredibly affecting and still do whenever I watch the film again, which is often. What little I’ve done with my life pales in comparison to my dad’s, so the gauntlet thrown down by Captain Pike is still there, lying at my feet. My indefatigable father went on to set up at least a dozen more organisations when he became a life peer at the age of 63 and continued working his standard 12 hours a day, seven days a week, until the day he died, 23 years later. If I can achieve half as much for the causes I care about – free speech, classical liberal education, limited government – I’ll be thrilled.
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