If you are not part of the ‘selectorate’, you feel annoyed at the suggestion that Gordon Brown can become prime minister by acclamation and without a general election. It is not so much that another candidate might be better — though I rather like the look of Alan Johnson, the Trade and Industry Secretary — it is just that a party’s choice of leader is a very different thing from running the country. The country should decide on the latter. Of party leaders since the war chosen while in government only Harold Macmillan could be accounted any sort of success. The others were Anthony Eden, Alec Douglas-Home, Jim Callaghan and John Major. The ones who kept winning elections — Wilson, Thatcher and Blair — were all chosen in opposition. It is Eden that Brown most resembles, in that he has been the impatient yet almost unchallenged heir for years and years. Eden’s particular area of expertise was foreign policy, but he gave us Suez. Brown’s acclaimed skill is economic management, but he is at last admitting that his own predictions of growth cannot be sustained. His omens are not good.
Against all evidence, however, including Mr Brown’s brimming confidence, this column clings to the idea that Tony Blair will not, in fact, step down before the next election. This view is based on the simple belief that when Mr Blair absolutely, categorically promises something, he does the opposite (‘at our best when at our boldest’). My thesis will be proved wrong, though, if the desire for money overcomes the love of power. After a few years, prime ministers always develop the view that they are poor, and indeed they are, compared with the money they could make if they left office. Mr and Mrs Blair have a notable fondness for the company, houses and holidays of the rich, and if they calculate that all these could be theirs if only they could become Bill and Hillary Clinton-style celebrities on the world stage, I expect they are right. It is hard to see how the Blairs could afford their mortgage on their house in Connaught Square unless they felt confident of a memoir deal (or two memoir deals?). This cue from the top may explain why it has become ever harder to prevent ex-advisers, etc., from publishing their diaries and memoirs so soon after they leave government. The diaries of Lance Price, which are being serialised in the Mail on Sunday, are a good example. They are highly enjoyable, completely indefensible breaches of trust by a former Downing Street adviser. You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh as Shaun Woodward tells Tony Blair that if he is to defect to the Labour party he must be given a ministerial job to placate his wife, Camilla. Mr Blair and Price arrange for a fictitious telephone call from the Irish Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern, to break up Shaun’s tearful monologue. As we are solemnly assured this week that the IRA have got rid of all weapons, I wonder if the peace process itself shouldn’t be entered for the Booker Prize. Shaun Woodward, by the way, is now a minister in the Northern Ireland Office.
In almost all church services there are ‘intercessions’, informal prayers, often led by a member of the congregation, for the world and its people. There are always prayers for the sick of the parish, many of whom are named. Now, I gather, the instruction has gone out to Catholic churches that this last practice must cease. It may, apparently, be an offence under the Data Protection Act to pray for a living person by name unless you have his or her consent. So we live in a world where a Downing Street adviser can be paid, unpunished, for breaking the confidences of his post, but if you want to ask God to help Elsie next door recover from cancer, you face the wrath of the law.
There is a passage in P.G. Wodehouse, which I cannot trace, in which Bertie Wooster speaks of jute. He has no idea what jute is, he says, ‘but a lot of fellows seem to have taken a shine to the stuff because my uncle Archy made a packet out of it’. The modern equivalents are hedge funds. Not many people have the gift of expounding with crystal clarity what these things actually do, but there can be no doubt that they make their owners and, more rarely, their customers rich. It is quite possible that hedge funds now run the world. I feel that rural conservationists should take advantage of the phenomenon. They should set up a charity called The Hedge Fund, whose purpose is disclosed by its name, and persecute the Man Group, Marshall Wace and all the rest of them for massive contributions.
Last week I was interviewed on the Islam Channel, an outfit put out via Sky but owned, I was told, by a Tunisian Salafist (Salafism is a form of puritanical Wahabism) and backed with Saudi money. I was cross-questioned by two representatives of the Muslim Council of Britain for an hour minus the Muslim equivalent of the commercial break — a seven-minute pause for the call to prayer. As the programme continued, people started to call in. Most were intelligent and articulate, a few were abusive. What depressed me was that none spoke as if he (all the callers were male, I think) considered himself British. One referred angrily to Tony Blair as ‘your leader’. I said that I didn’t vote for him either, but he was the caller’s leader, as well as mine, because he led our country. Every caller seemed to think that Muslims had a common political interest which was more important than any other political consideration and which could be justified in religious terms. Thus, in a war in which one side was Muslim and the other mostly Christian, right must be on the Muslim side, even when religion was not the issue. Christians don’t believe the same thing the other way round (e.g., most Western Christians supported the Muslim ‘side’ in the Bosnian conflict). If that is what Muslims here believe, it follows that they will always reject British foreign policy unless it follows what they take to be the Muslim line. It follows, too, that violent resistance to that policy will always be legitimate in their eyes, since armed resistance to what are seen as attacks on Muslim lands or on Islam itself is religiously justified. Most of my callers were pleasant people, but not moderates.
Before his Channel 4 News, Jon Snow puts out a daily trailer called Snowmail. Here is Jon on Friday last: ‘I’m afraid the prognosis is absolutely dreadful. You see, it’s beginning to look as if New Orleans may become unsustainable, and that could affect the whole of the Mississippi river …and the whole of the core of America is dependent on the river for its life.’ Am I unfair to detect some relish in the tone? Subsequent reports suggest that the ‘core of America’ has survived.
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