The Spectator’s Notes | 12 June 2010

We are all being asked by the government what should be cut. I bet the British people will take part happily. Contrary to what you read in the papers, cutting is great fun. One serious contribution is already being offered by Paul Goodman, the excellent former MP for Wycombe, who stood down at the last election. Mr Goodman’s argument, in a new paper for Policy Exchange called ‘What do we want MPs to be?’, is the counterintuitive but correct one that the new restrictions on MPs’ earnings are against the public good. Once they depend on payment from the state, and are forced to account for all their time not spent on the state’s business, they cease to represent the variety of interests in this country and become simply second-rate civil servants. Freeze their pay, stop their pensions, says Mr Goodman, and let them fend for themselves instead. If they do so, they will represent those who elect them more faithfully. They will be part of the Big Society, not of big government.

Mikhail Gorbachev was in London last week, and I went to a dinner for him. It was held in the Jerusalem Chamber in the Deanery of Westminster Abbey. As I entered, a waiter said, ‘Please go straight through to the reception.’ I suddenly found myself in the Abbey itself, with a glass of champagne in my hand. In a chair beside the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier sat Lady Thatcher, flanked by the hosts, Alexander and Evgeny Lebedev, and looking, even by her high standards, beautifully dressed. She had come to meet Mr Gorbachev, but it turned out that he was too ill to attend. After a bit, she walked gradually out of the Abbey, meeting the other guests as she passed. I watched her greet first a pretty Russian girl, heavily pregnant and looking about 17, who appeared to be wearing nothing but a long white shirt; second, Vanessa Redgrave (the two exchanged easy courtesies as if no politics had ever existed); and finally, Boris Johnson, who came shambling hastily in, just as Lady Thatcher moved, slow and stately, out.