The current row about how Oxford University should be governed illustrates two problems of our culture. The first is about how institutions work. The modernisers want organisations to work more purposefully, and they are right. But the traditionalists are suspicious of reforms which separate the people who know about the content of their institution from those who run it, and they are right too. Thus, it may well be true that hospitals should be more efficient, but they have not become more so now that doctors can be ordered around by non-medical managers. In the case of universities, their oligarchic and diffused form of authority (not to mention endemic pettiness — think of the Oxford fools who denied Mrs Thatcher her honorary degree) can be a terrible block on financial improvements. On the other hand, a board of control dominated by people who do not themselves share Oxford’s academic life will surely not be respected by those they seek to govern. My second point is that these troubles seem to beset Oxford more than any other university. It has the misfortune to be a ‘brand’ too famous for its own good. While poor John Hood struggles to impose his will on Oxford, Alison Richard has quietly got her way at Cambridge.
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Tom Bower’s new book about Lord Black, the former owner of this paper (Conrad and Lady Black, HarperCollins, £20), is the case for the prosecution. This is a pity, since that case will be made by lawyers in a Chicago court next year. A biography should surely try to stand on both sides of the courtroom. I think Bower misunderstands Conrad’s dealings with journalists. It is true that he delivered many insulting remarks about our trade, and is paying for these now that he is in disgrace. But he did not, in practice, despise all journalism. He loved news, public affairs, history, arguments, trouble and gossip. He wanted lots of information, and a ‘take’ on that information. He therefore loved quality newspapers and magazines. If you think of the editors he appointed — notably Peregrine Worsthorne, Max Hastings, Boris Johnson, Frank Johnson, Dominic Lawson — you can see that he was not looking for apparatchiks. However badly things went wrong in the end, he rescued two great British newspapers and improved them, and he brought to The Spectator a security which it had always previously lacked. As editor at one time or another of all his three British titles, I can certainly think of things I found difficult about his proprietorial style (one was the fact he likes going to bed at five in the morning while I am asleep by ten at night), but the good things much outweighed these. He was intelligent, well-informed, well-read, and he always had enough time to talk seriously. He never allowed conventional business considerations to drown out the editorial voice; and his political opinions, though noisily expressed, were seldom, in fact, imposed. He read the paper avidly, and so even his criticisms were a form of compliment to the whole enterprise. Shareholders will not feel gratitude to him, but readers of The Spectator should.
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A neighbour who organises charity tea parties for lonely old people asked us if we would give one in our house. We said yes. The charity then sent us a 14-page document about our task. There is stuff about Equal Opportunities, Health and Safety, insurance, wills (we mustn’t help prepare wills for our elderly guests), smoking, and the need for a ‘big teapot’. Appendix 111 gives us some hints on ‘Safe Catering Practices’. We must not, for example, wear an apron ‘when emptying the bin or going to the toilet’; and we should offer commercially produced mayonnaise, not home-made. We must put waterproof dressings on our cuts and wounds. Before we can embark on our tea party, we must give details of two people for references. The charity will then carry out Criminal Records Bureau checks on us. I assume that this point about CRB checks and references is, as so often nowadays, one of those things you have to say in formal documents and can then ignore. If not, I’m afraid we shall just find it too insulting to go ahead with the tea party.
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Although we are all trained to hail the new Ireland where everyone is rich and irreligious and without historical memory, for me the most magical thing about the place is the bogs. I have just spent a few days in Northern Ireland, two of them shooting snipe. It is as romantic as shooting ptarmigan, and even more difficult. The tiny, elegant birds get up without noise from the red bog on which they settle after the full moon, and zigzag away at astonishing speed. They climb high very fast and have the capacity, equalled only by some birds of prey, of losing height even more suddenly than they gain it. The way they kink downwards makes you think that you have shot them, but you almost never have. Shooting pheasants, you expect to hit a bird roughly one shot in three; with snipe, it is more like one in 12. The bogs have subtle variations in colour — red, yellow, sometimes green — and equally subtle holes into which you can disappear without warning. It was eerily beautiful to see the two beaters work their way with their flags across the drear expanses, and hear their cries and the occasional piping of the snipe. Technology, though, now allows builders to erect hacienda-style bungalows on stilts over the bog itself, and this is happening everywhere. There is a system of planning permission, but you would not know it. Yes, it must be marvellous to be free at last from the slavery of poverty, but now there is the slavery of ugliness.
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The peace process in the North is an analogous structure. It exists on stilts above the bog, and nobody yet knows whether the engineering will work. I found most people I spoke to said the same thing: they wanted Paisley’s DUP and Sinn Fein to meet this month’s deadline and go forward with an assembly. But they also said that the ill-feeling between unionist and nationalist had not really altered at all. Would government shared between Ian and Gerry be miracle or morass?
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Michael Barclay, a Norfolk landowner, is currently serving four months in an East Anglian prison for having illegally bought stuffed specimens of various birds which are classified as endangered species. I gather from a friend who knows him that his arrest was effected by 28 policemen. I also heard of a recent raid on an estate in Lanarkshire, under suspicion for shooting raptors, which involved police helicopters, loudhailers and searchlights trained on a gamekeeper’s cottage whose only occupant was a woman in her sixties. It was in the small hours, and for some time the woman was too frightened to open the door because she thought she was surrounded by terrorists. There is an offence called ‘wasting police time’: can policemen themselves be guilty of it?
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