Although there is a lot more to be said for Tony Blair’s memoirs than you have so far read, I do recommend his account of the hunting ban (p. 304-6) as an epitome of his defects.
Although there is a lot more to be said for Tony Blair’s memoirs than you have so far read, I do recommend his account of the hunting ban (p. 304-6) as an epitome of his defects. First, he confesses to ignorance of the issue. No disgrace in that, but you would have thought that if you were spending 700 parliamentary hours on a subject, you might find out. He still knows very little, as his references to ‘trumpets’ (he means horns) and to ‘the mistress of a hunt’ (he means Master — the mistress of a hunt would be something else again) reveal. Second, he evades describing what actually happened with a would-be charming vagueness. He says he ‘stupidly’ gave the impression on television that the sport would be banned: ‘Of course I had voting form, having voted to ban it or said I wanted to or signed some petition or something.’ But he did not ‘give the impression’: he said outright that it would be banned. And he did not have ‘voting form… or something’. He said that he had voted to ban, but he never had. Third, Mr Blair has persuaded himself that what resulted was ‘a masterly British compromise’: ‘it was banned in such a way that, provided certain steps are taken to avoid cruelty when the fox is killed, it isn’t banned.’ This is not true. Mr Blair allowed a compromise proposal to be overruled by his own party and the Parliament Act to be invoked (six years ago next week) to force through a total ban. The fact that the ban does not, in fact, work, is not in any sense ‘masterly’.
In a way it is disarming that Mr Blair now admits he did not understand hunting: he realised too late that ‘this wasn’t a clique of weirdo inbreds delighting in cruelty, but a tradition, embedded by history and profound community and social liens, that was integral to a way of life’. At least he can admit error. But when you think about it, it is incredibly annoying. He says that his problem was that ‘You have to “feel it” to succeed in politics. That’s where the instinct comes from, the emotional intelligence. By and large, I do feel it, and so, on most issues, I get it. On this one, I had a complete lapse. I didn’t feel it either way… Result? Disaster.’ So good government depends absolutely on the sensibility of the supreme ruler. If he ‘gets it’, all is fine. If not, livelihoods are threatened, police are set impossible tasks and traditions are destroyed. It is to avoid such a terrible form of government that parliament exists. Not just on hunting, but on everything, the country was made shockingly dependent on one man’s ‘emotional intelligence’.
When Mr Blair was writing what he calls his ‘visionary’, post 9/11 speech for the Labour party conference of 2001, he sat in the study at Chequers overlooking the Rose Garden. ‘I remember picking up from my desk a silver-and-gold inkstand that had been a present to Chamberlain in 1937, with a Latin inscription that translates as “To stand on the ancient ways, to see which is the right and good way, and in that way to walk”.’ I wonder if he is aware that Mrs Thatcher also made public reference to this inkstand. In the wonderfully titled Dame Margery Corbett-Ashby Memorial Lecture, just after the Falklands victory in 1982, she invoked its message (not mentioning, by the way, that the inkstand was Chamberlain’s) to indicate how the conflict had revived Britain’s great traditional strengths. By contrast, the message which Mr Blair took from the inkstand is never made clear. All he says is that ‘I wrote easily because I wrote what I thought’. Yet standing on ‘the ancient ways’ is what, all along, Mr Blair taught that one should never, ever do. The one thing always necessary is ‘modernisation’. So what is he talking about?
Like virtually everyone who has written about it, I do not know what William Hague intended when he shared a bedroom with his young special adviser. But the nasty way he has been treated shows how intolerant a culture obsessed with sexual self-expression can become. In the past, it was commonplace for men to share rooms and even beds without ‘meaning’ anything by it. There was also something else. Some senior men, often married, had sentimental attachments to young men. Lord Kitchener was one. Selwyn Lloyd who, like Mr Hague, was Foreign Secretary, was another (I seem to remember he particularly liked Jonathan Aitken). This was generally harmless and generally accepted. It is strange how the end of ‘queer-bashing’ has brought forth other cruelties.
In all the discussion of who, in the public service, earns more than the Prime Minister, no one seems to have noticed that the Prime Minister himself earns much less than before. On coming into office, all ministers agreed to take a pay cut of 5 per cent. But David Cameron has to endure a much bigger drop. His predecessor, Gordon Brown, reduced the salary from £192,414 to £150,000 (so now, with the 5 per cent off, it is £142,500). This self-sacrifice cannot have been very painful to Mr Brown, since it happened only shortly before he left office, but it must bear heavily on father-of-three Mr Cameron. It reminds me of my headmaster, who abolished beating by the headmaster, but only in his last term.
On Monday I attended a dinner at the V&A to celebrate the arrival, in advance of the Pope’s visit, of the Sistine tapestries, copied from the Raphael cartoons of the acts of SS Peter and Paul. Pictures and tapestries have never before been reunited. On the whole, the copies of the cartoons are exact — though, because of the nature of the process, reversed — but in ‘Christ’s Charge to Peter’, the plain white robe which Jesus wears in the cartoon is weaved with gold stars. A professor of Christian art explained to me that this was the result of Byzantine influence — the gold stars indicate a state of grace. At this point, however, the Archbishop of Canterbury hove into view. Knowing that he is an expert on the Byzantine, I asked his opinion. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘putting on gold splodges was just much more fun for the weavers.’
As Michael Hintze, our generous host, pointed out in his speech, the Christian content of so much art is central to understanding it, so I was disappointed to learn that the V&A has recently turned down a plan for an exhibition called ‘Catholics!’ (why the exclamation mark, I do not know). The idea is to show the artistic heritage of Catholics in Britain since the Reformation. But I gather the authorities considered anything celebrating Catholics too controversial and turned it down. If a museum director took that view of an exhibition celebrating Islam, his career would not survive.
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