No opposition leader’s party conference speech is complete without a ‘This is who I am’ passage. On Tuesday, Ed Miliband said that, because of his family’s background as refugees from Hitler, he had ‘the heritage of the outsider’, but because of his own career, he had ‘the vantage point of the insider’. I wonder if this attempt to provide an autobiographical ‘narrative’ helps as much as people think. The truth about modern politics is that almost all its main practitioners have attained their positions only by devoting their entire adult lives to it. No war or hardship or business success, no experience of a profession or a farm or a factory has touched them. When they tell their ‘story’, they only expose how little of it there really is. They talk about the virtues and values (that word endlessly repeated) of ‘the British people’ with the enthusiasm and ignorance of tourists. So when Mr Miliband spoke, it was not that he failed to convince me that his views were right, but simply that he gave me no reason why I should think him suitable to lead my country. The politicians’ preoccupation with ‘narrative’ today derives from guilt at the fact that there isn’t one.
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The Catholic Church in the English-speaking world has just introduced a new version of the liturgy. This presents conservatives with a conundrum. Should we welcome the changes on the grounds that they are intended more faithfully to represent the original Latin (which has not altered)? Or should we disapprove of them on the grounds that all change should be resisted? Liberals suffer from the same problem the other way round: they are supposed to love liturgical change, but they dislike these reforms because of their sacral and anti-populist spirit. There are said to be calls for a Society of Paul VI to adhere fanatically to the groovy language of the 1960s just as Lefebvrists stick by the Tridentine Mass. In the pew, the new words, I notice, make people stumble. You have to be almost over 50 to remember anything different. Occasionally, the obsession with a highly religious tone hits the wrong register. It is surely not an improvement, for example, to stop referring to the ‘cup’ — which, after all, is what it was at the Last Supper — and call it the ‘chalice’ in the prayers of consecration. But there are at least two clear benefits of change. One is the recovery of repetition — ‘through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault’ — which always impresses words upon the heart. The other is a greater precision with holy words — ‘And with your spirit’ means more than ‘And also with you’. And it is good to have the centurion fully reinstated, ‘Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.’ He stands for all of us who are Gentile participants in a drama first played out among the Jews.
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It was a propaganda coup for Saudi Arabia to announce votes for women. The excitement was such that no one stopped to ask what the vote in Saudi Arabia actually achieves. Can anyone cite an example of the previously all-male Saudi franchise making any difference to anything?
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Guilty Men, the new pamphlet by Peter Oborne and Frances Weaver (see last week’s cover piece), brilliantly exposes the words of great and sometimes late sages of Europhilia like Peter Jenkins, Hugo Young and Philip Stephens, and contemplates them in the light of current events. But it still does not explain why such intelligent people believed so strongly in ‘ever-closer union’ that they suspended all normal care about what might actually happen. I suspect that left-liberals of this sort are driven by a factor which, in the context of racism, they would excoriate — the fear of ‘the other’. They so hate anything that could conceivably seem right-wing that they pay no attention to any argument from that quarter. More than any other issue I can think of, pro-Europeanism in Britain has for 40 years been a form of character assassination rather than a debate. So at last it is failing.
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Private Eye, like Songs of Praise, is 50 years old. When I was at boarding school, the magazine was considered so subversive that we boys (who all read it avidly but were most reluctant to pay for it) debated which of our fathers was sufficiently tolerant for us to dare to put it on his bill. Now it is almost like Punch was then in its comfortable, uncontroversial place in English life. If the analogy holds, it will become unreadable in about ten years’ time, then be bought by Mohammed Fayed, and then close. At present, I still buy it, and I still laugh, particularly at Craig Brown’s parodies. But it doesn’t matter as once it did. This is because it has ceased to be nasty. I do not know Ian Hislop, the editor, very well, but he strikes me as genuinely decent, moderate and patriotic — qualities which slightly weaken the publication. He is certainly funny, but not with any darkness. Richard Ingrams, whom I also do not know well, was a dark lord, an editor who really enjoyed wielding power. People lived in fear of him, and I think he liked that. And I think readers, laughing partly out of nerves, secretly liked it too.
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It is not perfectly clear that the BBC really is, as reported, trying to stamp out use of the letters BC and AD in dating and replace it with BCE and CE, but the change is gradually being officially imposed through state education, though, as with metrication, hardly anyone wants it. My postcode includes the letters AD, and when I have to spell it out over the telephone, I usually say ‘AD — Anno Domini’. I find that only about a third of the people understand what I am saying.
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On a riding safari in Kenya recently a friend lent me a pair of full chaps to prevent my legs from chafing as we rode for six hours or so a day. These useful garments, being leather and crotchless, are said to be very popular with homosexuals. I think fullchaps.com would be the perfect title for a gay equestrian dating website.
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