Last week I discovered that I have to have two separate checks made on me by the Criminal Records Bureau. One is because I am a trustee of a charity which works with children. The other is because I sometimes serve at the altar at Mass and therefore come into contact with children who do the same. In both cases, I have to produce documentary evidence of who I am and where I live to people who know these facts already, and I have to fill in forms in black ink with my National Insurance number and my unspent criminal convictions (none) on them. I have to do two forms for the same check because the Criminal Records Bureau ‘does not endorse portability’. The people in the charity and the church then have to process the forms. In the case of the charity, it has to operate via the local council which uses its services, rather than directly to the Criminal Records Bureau, and this means that delay can be considerable, which is a real problem when it is trying to get a volunteer worker started and has to wait months for clearance.
Are these rules wrong? It matters, after all, that sex criminals do not work with children. I think they are wrong. The minor reason is the time-wasting. As a trustee of a charity, I have almost no direct contact with children, so the threat I might pose is very small. As an altar-server, I am in full view of the congregation most of the time, and if I am in the vestry with a child, there are always other people about: my duties never involve seeing the children anywhere else. Both the church and the charity are small concerns; they have better things to do with their overcrowded time than deal with forms about me. Such demands erode goodwill, particularly of volunteers. The major objection is to do with trust. As the word implies, a trustee has trust reposed in him by the other trustees. It is a matter for their judgment. This is true of the people who run matters in a church as well. If the law forces some of that judgment to be delegated to others, the mental emphasis among the other trustees changes. Instead of making their own decisions, they start to look at all these matters as part of the boredom of ‘compliance’ and become less vigilant. Surely it should be up to each organisation to work out what checks it thinks appropriate, drawing on the CRB if it wants. If it is not concerned about such matters, nothing will go right, regardless of what formal procedures are followed. If it is concerned, it should not be ordered about. These rules have little to do with caring for children, lots to do with back-covering.
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It is an interesting fact that T.S. Eliot taught John Betjeman (born 100 years ago this week) at Highgate Junior School. In ‘Summoned by Bells’, Betjeman calls Eliot ‘That dear good man’, and says that he never was able to find out what Eliot thought of his poems. But the influence of Eliot on Betjeman perhaps helps to explain the fact that, for all his nostalgia and ‘accessibility’, Betjeman is a modern poet. You can see their difference, and their similarity, in the way they describe the same phenomenon. Here is Eliot, in ‘East Coker’, the second of Four Quartets:
‘Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about.’
Here is Betjeman, in ‘Summoned by Bells’:
‘When, in a pause between the stations, quiet
Descended on the carriage we would talk
Loud gibberish in angry argument,
Pretending to be foreign.’
When Betjeman wrote the above, he would certainly have read ‘East Coker’.
No point in pretending that Sir Alfred Sherman, who has just died, was a popular man. The late, saintly Colin Welch, who employed Alfred on the Daily Telegraph, said that anyone who disliked him was anti-Semitic, but Victor Rothschild spoke for a larger faction when he said that Alfred was the sort of Jew who makes even Jews anti-Semitic. Alfred Sherman was rude, paranoid, dogmatic in the way that ex-communists sometimes are, and difficult about money. But despite or perhaps because of all this he deserves an honoured place in the history of the Thatcher era. It was Alfred who persuaded the sweet and gentlemanly Keith Joseph that he had been wrong about everything up till 1974. And it was Joseph, Alfred-inspired, who persuaded Mrs Thatcher that the Tories had to break with the postwar economic consensus in order to save the nation. The Centre for Policy Studies, which Alfred dominated though he did not actually run it, did much of the necessary rethinking. As Alfred once, characteristically, put it to me, ‘Early Thatcherism was pure Keith, which meant pure Sherman. She lacked coherence.’ Sherman proved that ideas have to have an element of madness (‘thinking the unthinkable’) to take off. What he said was never prudent or judicious, and some of it was wildly wrong, but it was fresh, clear and incendiary. It burnt through the jungle of Heathite verbiage and allowed something new to grow. It was Alfred, too, who persuaded Joseph to make his ill-fated speech at Edgbaston which appeared to tell the underclass not to breed. This did a great favour to the Tory party because it put Joseph out of the running for the leadership, for which he was honourably ineligible, and left the way open for Mrs Thatcher.
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There is much anxiety at present at the ‘epidemic’ (a word that now means almost nothing) of obesity. It is attributed to junk food, etc. One cause of fatness not mentioned by health promoters is the decline of smoking. It is well known that people who stop smoking almost always get fatter, and since roughly half as many people smoke as did so 30 years ago, the connection is obvious.
This would also explain, by the way, why David Cameron looked a bit tubby on the beach this summer. He gave up smoking after Christmas. In my view, it would be a mistake for him to get much thinner, though. Vicki Woods has pointed out that he has an 18th-century face, and it is true. Put a perruque and breeches on him and he would look very like someone in a painting by Arthur Devis or Zoffany. He has those rather featureless, expressionless, English good looks that speak of benevolent prosperity, frequent but moderate amounts of fresh air, and a dislike of what was then called ‘enthusiasm’. He is the Whig Interpretation of History made flesh, and if there were less flesh, he would be diminished.
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