‘Moderate Taleban’ are being talked of. It is a very strange, almost oxymoronic concept, like ‘moderate fanatics’; but the conventions of Western political discourse are such that the Foreign Office and the BBC have to deploy the word ‘moderate’ to legitimise whatever our diplomats might be up to. Hunting the moderate is a favourite sport of ‘that old fox, Britain’, as the Iranian regime likes to call us. It conceals the less palatable point that sometimes Western democracies feel the need to make deals with people who are thoroughly vile, but capable of delivering results. The old fox may even be right. But I wonder why the idea of talking to ‘moderate’ Taleban has come up just now, as our troops are fighting in Helmand to ensure that people there can vote freely in the forthcoming presidential elections. Is it because Britain has lost all faith in the President, Hamid Karzai, but is hamstrung by the fact that the new Obama administration, not very sure of itself at first, decided to stick with Karzai for the time being? We would appear to be insuring against, but perhaps also inviting, a result in which Afghanistan becomes even more ungovernable.
Much has been written about how little the British military think of our present government, especially of Gordon Brown himself. It is true. Less has been said about the decidedly cool relations between our soldiers and the Conservatives. There are grumbles that David Cameron, on his visits to Afghanistan, was ‘rude and arrogant’, and did not strike up the expected rapport. If this is so, it may have been part of the coldness required in leadership, at which Mr Cameron excels. He knows that if he becomes Prime Minister, everyone will be trying to prise more money out of him, so he must become nobody’s buddy in advance. But what is also true is that no government can conduct a war successfully unless the Prime Minister himself leads on it all the time. One gets the feeling with Mr Brown that his attitude to our Afghan struggle is ‘It’s nothing to do with me’, which makes it politically unwinnable. Prime Minister Cameron could fall into the same trap.
It would be going too far to say, ‘It’s hunting what won it’, but last week’s Tory victory in Norwich North was in part delivered by the organisation called Vote OK. The Labour party in the city put up posters saying ‘Vote Labour, or the fox gets it’, but these seem to have irritated electors. Vote OK, on the other hand, does not go round propagandising for hunting. Rather, it deploys hunting people to help those candidates — mainly Conservative — who say they will repeal the ban on hunting if elected. In Norwich, it bussed in about 150 workers. They are the most motivated of all Tory supporters. Vote OK is as important as the public argument for hunting because it will create an obligation which a new Conservative government will be under huge pressure to discharge. If Mr Cameron wins, one of the handful of people he will need to call and thank on election night should be Charles Mann, the boss of Vote OK. If that does not happen, the omens for repeal will be bad.
Charlotte Gainsbourg, the star who attacks her own genitals with rusty scissors in the latest attention-grabbing revolting film, Antichrist, is the daughter of Jane Birkin. Jane Birkin, most famous for the rude song ‘Je t’aime …moi non plus’, is the daughter of Judy Campbell. Judy Campbell, who first made herself famous by her rendering of ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ during the war, was the daughter of J.A. and Mary Campbell. Mr and Mrs Campbell ran the Picture House in Grantham, and were so respectable that they persuaded the stern, unbending Alderman Alfred Roberts to let his daughter Margaret (later better known as Margaret Thatcher) go to their cinema. This genealogy is an eloquent microcosm of cultural change.
Parked beside a large metal container used to stow workmen’s tools at a station the other day, I spotted a notice posted on it by the leasing company which announced itself as ‘Caring, Clean, Considerate, Cooperative’. This column occasionally moans about ‘bad’ language, but I could not help being pleased to see that a member of the public, irritated by the poster’s sanctimony, had added another word beginning with C just below.
The Spectator’s recent correspondence about direct family relations stretching over centuries is one of those subjects that can go on forever, so I shall contribute my bit. My French great-aunt, who died in the year of my birth, knew an old man in Paris when she was a girl who had served with Napoleon at the Battle of the Pyramids. He was present when Napoleon spoke to the troops saying, ‘Forty centuries look down upon you.’ ‘But we looked up,’ the old man recalled, ‘and we couldn’t see them.’
It was my sad task to collect the ashes of our old dog, Jip, from the vet. I looked at the bill to see how his cremation was itemised: ‘Final attention’, it said. I wonder what euphemism they employ when charging for the last rites of the Dignitas clinic.
When I suggested three weeks ago that someone with a record of genuine public service might consider refusing the customary clear run to Mr New Speaker Bercow in his Buckingham seat at the next election, I did not know that a candidate had just stepped forward. He is Patrick Phillips, a former High Sheriff and President of Bucks Vision (the Buckinghamshire Association for the Blind and Partially Sighted). Mr Phillips lives in the constituency. He shares the widespread irritation there that someone who got a safe seat by expressing conservative views quickly abandoned them, and became ‘the First Commoner in the land’ as a result. He tells me that Tories keep coming up to him and saying that they cannot support him openly ‘because I’ll be expelled from the party if I do’, but that they will be voting for him. Are they right about being expelled? The word ‘Conservative’ will not appear on the ballot paper so long as Mr Bercow is Speaker. That being so, is any Conservative member bound by any party rule to support him? An additional reason for voting for Mr Phillips, by the way, is his age. He is 74. We are all heartily sick of ambitious young people making a mess of politics.
This is the first time I can remember when our garden has been so far advanced as to produce enough fruit to make blackberry and apple pie in July.
Comments