Because everyone can see that the government can no longer do anything worth doing, there is a widespread assumption that its days are numbered. But this is a non sequitur. In the past, Labour governments could do things only in the short gap between their election victory and their sterling crisis. Conservative governments had a slightly longer effective life, but the Heath administration was pretty much disabled after the failure of its industrial relations legislation in 1972. The period between 1979 and, roughly, 1989 was quite exceptional in having a government that had ideas about what it wanted to do and the political ability to do them. Implosion does not necessarily produce defeat. One might dispute the precise date — it might be Nigel Lawson’s resignation in 1989, for instance — but it would be hard to disagree that Conservative governments achieved very little from 1989 onwards, yet they remained in office for eight more years, winning one election on the way. This could easily happen with Labour, especially under a new leader. Nothing changes the electoral arithmetic that the Tories need an almost unprecedentedly enormous swing to form a government next time, and no law states that boredom and disgust with Labour must translate into Tory victory. It may even be that a prolonged period in which governments can achieve very little is good for the country. Towards the end of her time Mrs Thatcher spoke about there being ‘new dragons still to slay’, and there was a widespread public feeling that the field was already clogged with quite enough dead dragons. Tony Blair says that he needs to stay in office in order to implement more radical reforms. Labour is at its best when at its boldest, he says. Having seen what its boldest is, the country might well benefit from a period of timidity, not to say cowardice.
Governments come and go, but there still is such a thing as the British official mind. From our colonial days comes a Foreign Office belief that in any tricky situation, especially one involving religion and politics, one must make friends with the extremists and find, like needles in a haystack, the ‘moderates’ in their midst. This was the strategy that led us to encourage the Arab Higher Committee in pre-war Palestine, under the Mufti of Jerusalem, the Nazi-supporting Haj Amin al-Husseini, to ‘deliver’ Muslim opinion. The concept achieved apotheosis in the approach towards terrorism in Northern Ireland, which systematically broke all the genuine moderates — Terence O’Neill, Brian Faulkner, David Trimble and the SDLP — and advanced Sinn Fein on the grounds that it held ‘the key to peace’. Now the two biggest parties in Northern Ireland are Sinn Fein and the Paisleyites, so extremism is seen to pay off and the Province’s sectarian divisions are as a great as they have ever been. Sorry to praise the New Statesman in these pages, but its political editor, Martin Bright, has just produced an excellent pamphlet for Policy Exchange, the think-tank of which I am chairman, called ‘When progressives treat with reactionaries’. It is about how the British government has sought to deal with Muslims in this country (and abroad) by flirting with Islamists rather than helping empower the unfanatical. The pamphlet reprints a dozen leaked official documents which promote the oxymoron, expressed in one of them, of ‘moderate Islamist tendencies’. The Foreign Office has as its adviser a young man called Mockbul Ali, who wrote, after September 11, about how the ‘non-white world has been terrorised in the name of freedom’. He is revealed advising the Foreign Office to support the admission into this country of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the religious leader who supports Taleban ‘jihad’ against British troops, the execution of homosexuals and female genital mutilation. He also wanted Hossain Sayeedi, a Bangladeshi MP, let in. Sayeedi thinks our troops deserve to die for opposing the Taleban and has compared Hindus in his own country to excrement.
My thanks to the editor of the Observer, following my question last week about why people say ‘across the piece’. Roger Alton thinks that what they ought to be saying is ‘across the piste’. Is it all just Chinese whispers? I wanted to discuss all this with Mr Alton at The Spectator’s summer party, but it was impossible, trying to talk across the pissed.
The political blogs of Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes boast this week that each now receives more hits than the official websites of either the Labour or the Conservative parties. This breakthrough seems to have been accomplished by their reports of John Prescott’s love life. Although politicians have much to worry about from these sites, I suspect that lobby journalists have even more. As Guido (real name, Paul Staines) himself points out, the parliamentary lobby has, by its nature, a tendency to conspire with politicians to produce a ‘line’. It controls the flow of information and is bound to collude with the suppliers of that information, the politicians themselves. For years, attempts have been made to break up the lobby but these have never worked because there has been no workable alternative conduit. Now there is, or soon will be. The lobby takes its name from the physical place where the journalists stood to meet MPs. Today the web is usurping that gothic hall, creating an infinitely bigger and much less safe place.
A businessman friend observes, of the British army’s attempt to interdict the heroin trade in Afghanistan, ‘It will be as successful as if 500 Afghan policemen arrived in the City of London and tried to close down the stock market.’
This column complains from time to time, to a chorus of displeasure from readers, about the enthusiasm with which the planning system prevents new building in rural areas. So few of you will probably share my depression on hearing that when you visit the planning officer in an ‘area of outstanding natural beauty’ in the North, the first thing he says as you enter the room is, ‘Whatever you want, the answer is no.’
I feel instantly sympathetic with David Cameron’s call to love hoodies because I so much like the longest-standing hoodies in the West — Benedictine monks. Perhaps because of the poor reputation of hoods these days, or perhaps because of general barbarism and ignorance, it has become much more common for monks in their habits to be insulted on public transport. The next time you see a monk, give him a hug.
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