Charles Moore’s reflections on the week
Watching the BBC’s excellent dramatisation of Anne Frank’s diary last week, I was struck by the family relationships depicted. They reminded me strongly of another family. Otto Frank, Anne’s father, was the dominant and admired figure in the household. He ran a small business supplying pectin for jam-making, but his intelligence fitted him for greater things which circumstances prevented. He had two daughters, and no sons, and was very ambitious for his younger, livelier daughter, Anne. His wife, Edith, was much more withdrawn, and Anne felt that her mother did not understand her. Anne, though she loved her family, had the self-absorption of the clever teenager. She longed for a different, wider sphere of life, and dreamed of fame as a writer. At much the same time as the Frank girls were growing up in Amsterdam, the Roberts girls in Grantham were doing the same. Alfred Roberts was a small grocer, who had had to leave school at 14, but was highly self-educated. He had no sons, and he poured his intellectual and political ambition into his younger daughter, Margaret. His wife, Beatrice, was a rather disregarded figure in young Margaret’s life, and the two were not close. Though feeling natural piety towards her family, Margaret was determined to look beyond the life of the grocer’s shop, and dreamed of political success in the wider world. The difference in the two stories consisted in the outcome. Margaret Thatcher became the first woman prime minister of Britain. Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Why that difference? Surely it boils down to the difference between a good and a bad political order. If Anne Frank, who was Jewish, had been born in Golders Green, she might now be a distinguished elderly novelist. Perhaps, to coincide with her 80th birthday this year, she would be made Dame Anne Frank by the Queen, whose picture, as a young Princess, Anne pinned on the wall of her hidden attic.
Obviously the juxtaposition of the Anne Frank programme with the Israeli attacks on Gaza made one ‘read across’. Unlike most British journalists, I feel more pro-Israel because of these events. It relates to the point above about good and bad political orders. Israel is a country with a rule of law and parliamentary democracy and a free press. It withdrew from Gaza in 2005 because it knew its presence there was, in anything but the short term, illegitimate and unsustainable. The Hamas regime which then arose in Gaza is a bad political order — a fanatical entity which shows no concern for the welfare of its own people. Indeed, it actively advocates that they kill themselves. Under the guise of divine inspiration, it claims the right to destroy Israel (and, by the same token, persecutes Christians and those Muslims who do not agree with it). It makes hate-filled and conspiratorial claims against Jews which, if spoken by white men, the pro-Hamas BBC or Guardian would execrate. I am not, in the exact sense, a Zionist: I do not think that any people have a God-given or historic right to a homeland previously inhabited mainly by others. But a good political order has grown up in Israel over 60 years, and those who wish to destroy it have the same motives as those who took the Frank family away to their deaths. Next year, Iran, which leads the Islamist death-cult of which Hamas is a part, may get the Bomb. Israel has present, aggressive enemies. Of course it must defeat them.
If you Google Otto Frank, and then pick up the entry on him from the Encyclopedia Britannica, and its cross-ref to ‘Anne Frank’s Attic’, you suddenly find yourself in a pile of advertisements for ‘Heritage Loft Conversions’. The tasteless resourcefulness of commerce is truly an amazing thing.
Roughly once every two years, there is a clamour for a Tory reshuffle to make life harder for Labour. Then we simple toilers in the workshops of the Eurosceptic press have to dust down our ‘Why Ken Clarke is not the answer’ articles. But although it remains the case that Mr Clarke’s views on Europe are unreformed and could still split his party, that is not the main current reason why he should not be brought back. One of the best achievements of the Cameron/Osborne era has been to bully Tories into not taking themselves at their own absurdly high estimation. It has been to show that the ‘brand’ is bad, and that virtually all trust has to be regained. If answered, the call for a return of the Tories’ favourite ‘big beasts’ would represent a great unlearning of this lesson. Mr Clarke, for all his undoubted blokey charm, courage and experience, has never accepted the basic fact from which Conservative recovery must start — that they ended up making a mess of things. Instead, he believes in his ‘golden legacy’, and rejects media co-ordination and policy discipline as contemptible Blairite ‘spin’. Yes, Ken Clarke is a marvellous independent-minded free spirit — so he should stay in the place designed for such people: the back benches.
The death of the war hero David Smiley, who contributed occasionally to these pages, is a reminder of the astonishing opportunities open to brave Englishmen of his generation. He fought as an ‘irregular regular’ in Iraq, Iran, Abyssinia, the Western desert, Thailand, Laos, Albania, Yemen and Oman. Nowadays, such men’s equivalents do it mostly for money. Not Smiley. Having defeated the insurgents in Oman in 1961, he received a present from the Sultan. As Smiley put it: ‘I won him the war, and all I got was a coffee-pot from Asprey’s.’
This column’s campaign against those who wish to reform the Women’s Institute opens a new front this week because of the creation of WIGs (the Women’s Institute Girls), a youth movement devoted, as all WI reform seems to be, to overturning the image of the organisation as being ‘just jam and Jerusalem’. They want to have ‘clothes-swapping parties’ instead. Yawn. Jam is delicious and ‘Jerusalem’ is one of the greatest visionary poems in our language. ‘Woman’, as Trollope’s Mr Crawley cries out, ‘…to thy distaff.’
The same rebranding problem afflicts morris dancing. New claims that it makes you more attractive to the opposite sex etc will do no good. It is intrinsically comic, and should be promoted on those grounds. Jo Grimond, the leader of the Liberal party in the 1960s, once had a cousin who was run over and killed while morris dancing. Jo found this so funny that he dared not go to the funeral lest he burst out laughing. I once told this story at a dinner party. ‘Yes,’ said my hostess gravely, ‘that was my uncle Walter.’
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