In common with, I suspect, many of those writing most censoriously about it all, I have no idea whether the Duke of York has done anything wrong. So far, the charges against him are that he is friendly with a convicted sex offender, and that he has met Saif Gaddafi and given lunch to the son-in-law of the then president of Tunisia. The first accusation proves nothing against him, but the newspapers are trying to hint, without stating evidence, that the Prince himself may have committed sexual offences. The other accusations prove even less: the Duke is this country’s informal trade ambassador, and he met people with whom the British government happily did business, so he was performing his official role. These people may well have been disgusting, but that is a question above Prince Andrew’s pay-grade — an unfair phrase, actually, since, in this role, he is unpaid. His mother, in her time, has had to confer an honour upon Ceaucescu of Romania and be nice to the mass-murderer Robert Mugabe. No one has been so stupid as to suggest that these were personal errors on her part: they were acts of state policy, and the Queen was merely doing her constitutional duty. The only disgusting behaviour so far in the Prince Andrew case has been that of ‘government sources’ briefing the press on Sunday. They said that Downing Street ‘would shed no tears’ if the Duke chose to leave his post: ‘We won’t be giving a full-throated defence of him.’ Whoever said these things should be sacked. The government does not seem to understand the rule that members of the royal family, in their official capacities, act only on the advice of ministers. The government must therefore always defend them full-throatedly, as it should all who do government work and cannot answer back. It is nonsense to say, as Vince Cable does, that it is for the Prince himself to ‘judge the position he is in’: it is a matter for the government. If Downing Street thinks the Prince is unsuitable for his role, it must find the most tactful way to move him. But until that is accomplished, it must defend him absolutely. By behaving otherwise, the government machine is being cowardly, weak and cruel. It is also, in effect, attacking itself. David Cameron seems belatedly to have realised this, rushing on Monday to make up the damage his own people had just done. In the last few days, the government has had to handle matters in relation to two headline words which always set a severe test of good judgment — ‘royal’ and ‘sas’. It has failed dismally over both.
One begins to have a sneaking admiration for Colonel Gaddafi. People who have met him say he is mad. He certainly does behave in public like the Michael Jackson of politics. But you do not stay in power in an Arab country for 40 years without possessing some skills. One of Gaddafi’s is his capacity to act as a distorted mirror of the follies of his own culture — desert romanticism, the bogus deployment of religion, the myth of the Arab strongman — and of our own. It was a good joke on his part, for example, to get his country made chairman of UN Human Rights Council, to endow the LSE for research on the same subject, to declare Tony Blair his ‘friend’, to persuade our authorities to pretend that the Lockerbie bomber was dying, and to let his son Saif risk his reputation by falling in with unsavoury types like Peter Mandelson. He understands all too well how western elites behave. Recently, he has been mocked for handing out $400 in cash to every Libyan citizen who asks for it. But it looks quite amusing and clever to me — a burlesque of our own policy of ‘quantitative easing’, and one which may help him survive.
As the Budget approaches, so does the 30th anniversary of the famous letter from 364 economists to The Times. This declared that there was ‘no basis in economic theory’ for the Thatcher government’s policies. With perfect timing, the letter was published just as the economy began to look up. One of the 364 signatories was Mervyn King, then an academic economist and now the Governor of the Bank of England. When I interviewed Mr King last week for the Daily Telegraph, he admitted that the letter had been a mistake: ‘I didn’t understand nearly enough about monetary economics at the time.’ What was missing from the letter, he told me, was a recognition that although there had been a sharp tightening of fiscal policy, there was also ‘a sharp easing of monetary policy’. Thirty years on, the position is not so different except that, with a bit of luck, the right action has been taken earlier.
In his interview, Mr King was eloquent against the folly of permitting banks to be ‘too big to fail’. By coincidence, Bob Diamond, the chief executive of Barclays, popped up shortly afterwards being photographed taking part in a tribal dance in Kenya. Perhaps it was less accidental that his massive bonuses were declared the following day. Flying to Africa has become like endowing chantries in the Middle Ages — one of those things important people do when they wish to correct a widespread public impression that they are too rich/powerful/selfish. Since these great men are terribly busy, wouldn’t it save time if there could be one place near an airport with the word ‘africa’ on the hillside, like the word ‘hollywood’ in California? Tribal dancers, black babies, rondavels and Potemkin microfinance projects would be permanently on call. Stars like Mr Diamond could fly in for breakfast, get photographed, and get back to London for dinner.
The Annual General Meeting of the Rectory Society, which I chair, takes place this year on Thursday 24 March at 6.30 p.m. at the Savoy Chapel in London. Last year, P.D. James wowed the large audience. This year, our guest speaker is the other great nonagenarian of our times, our Patron, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, who inhabits one of the few semi-detached old vicarages in the country. Tickets, which cost £25 to non-members, can be obtained from Alison Everington (ali@everington.net).
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