People are quite often pilloried for saying the opposite of what they actually said. I have read Hilary Mantel’s London Review of Books lecture, and she is quite clearly not attacking the Duchess of Cambridge, but criticising what it is that people try to turn royal women into. When she speaks of the Duchess as ‘a jointed doll on which certain rags were hung’, or ‘the spindles of her limbs’ being ‘hand-turned and gloss-varnished’, she is talking about what the media and public opinion want of her. She discusses appearance, and offers no opinion about the young woman’s reality. She is sympathising with a female predicament, and she does the same about Diana, Princess of Wales, the present Queen, Anne Boleyn and Marie Antoinette. Indeed she makes an appeal: ‘I’m asking us to back off and not be brutes.’ So are the Prime Minister, Ed Miliband and the Daily Mail plumb-wrong in attacking our great novelist? Oddly enough, not quite. The misinterpretation of Mantel reminds me of the case of David Jenkins, the left-wing Bishop of Durham in the 1980s. Doubting the physical fact of the Empty Tomb, he said that the Resurrection was ‘not just a conjuring trick with bones’. His critics yelled that he had described the Resurrection as ‘just a conjuring trick with bones’, though he had said the exact reverse. Yet they were on to something. They were on to a contempt for his subject which lurked in his striking phrase. I fear that Hilary Mantel may be guilty of something similar. Her lecture, for all its interest — everything she writes is interesting — does what she herself deplores. It hangs clever thoughts upon the body of a woman whom, one cannot help suspecting, she regards as her intellectual inferior. This is unpleasing.
If you seek a lighter take on the cultural impact of the Duchess and her family, I warmly recommend a two and half minute clip now visible on YouTube. Called The Middle Middleton, it concerns the career of Doris, the unknown Middleton sister. This has been conceived and produced, I should declare, by our son and his friends. Poor Doris, too, has to deal with the expectations of others…
Probably there are sensible reforms that could be made to America’s gun laws, but why do we British casually assume that if guns were more heavily controlled, US gun crime would automatically fall? At present, there are thought to be about 200 million guns in private hands in the United States. If they — or a substantial percentage of them — were banned, who would give them up? Obviously, only those who obey the law. Who would keep them? Obviously, the criminals. Then would begin the gun equivalent of the Prohibition era. The gun trade would be controlled by gangsters. The police would have to devote huge resources to fighting them and many would be murdered or corrupted. The citizen, meanwhile, would be disempowered. Given the likely alternative, you can understand why many peace-loving Americans believe that it is fun to have a gun.
Studying the current crisis of confidence in the civil service, I read the famous Northcote-Trevelyan Report which appeared in 1854. It opposed appointment by patronage and favouritism and recommended admission on merit, judged by a competitive exam. This eventually became the basis of our permanent, non-political civil service. The report is a mere 28 pages long. What strikes the modern reader is the rigour of education which it prescribes — ‘proficiency in history, jurisprudence, political economy, modern languages, political and physical geography … besides the staple of classics and mathematics.’ It points out that if these were demanded for the civil service, the standards of universities would rise to meet the challenge. It would be unintelligible to Northcote and Trevelyan that, 150 years later, such knowledge and such universities are disparaged as ‘elitist’. The doctrine of ‘diversity’ has reintroduced in 21st-century guise the low standards which they fought to overcome.
Mark Carney, the soon-to-be Governor of the Bank of England, wants to get rid of our banknotes. As Governor in Canada, he has introduced polymer (plastic) notes, and he says he is thinking of doing the same here. The Bank of England’s £1 billion banknote contract is up for tender. All existing British note production (paper made from cotton fibre and linen rag) is stitched up, literally and metaphorically, by De La Rue, in Essex. But before people complain that the Canadian is trying to bring in nasty foreign ideas, they should know that plastic banknotes are a British invention. They are made by a firm called Securency in Wigton in the Lake District, and have been so successful that they now provide the currency — printed locally — for Australia, New Zealand, Romania and various oriental countries. (Indeed, a row is in progress about alleged corruption in getting the notes launched in Vietnam.) The technique creates a complicated, multiple version of clingfilm. Lord Blencathra, in whose former constituency Securency lives, tells me that this is produced via something which looks like a giant condom. The advantages are that polymer lasts ten times longer than paper, does not harbour disease (apparently, in many developing countries, typhoid is often passed by dirty banknotes), and is forgery-proof because the notes contain a little clear window which prevent their reproduction by sophisticated colour copiers. The only known disadvantage is that the notes do not fold as well or feel the same as paper. Expect a fierce fight for that proverbially wonderful business — the licence to print money.
People, including me, keep saying that the government should do more to improve the supply side of the economy. I am sure that one reason we have difficulty getting our case across is that most people do not know what the phrase ‘supply side’ means. There should be a prize for the person to come up with a crisp and comprehensible alternative. Could one reclaim ‘the right to work’?
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