Last week at Policy Exchange, the think tank of which I am chairman, General David Petraeus gave a fascinating lecture about what we are now not allowed to call the War on Terror. He spoke tactfully, but between the lines I thought I read a feeling that the fight in Afghanistan is in the balance. This made him emphatic in his praise of British troops: he can see the political dangers if we withdraw, he needs more of our men, and he wants this to be clear to a new Tory government. Now the Washington Post has leaked the views of the general on the spot, Stanley McChrystal. He sounds almost desperate for a greater US effort. The fact is that the Obama administration, having tried to reassure those anxious about withdrawal from Iraq by saying how important Afghanistan is, has not really followed up. It backed the re-election of Karzai despite British anxieties about his uselessness, and now appears not to have the will for what is needed next. Many welcome the retreat of American power after the Bush era, but what is actually happening is that small countries that want to be free are suffering, and big nasty ones — China, Iran, Russia — breathe sighs of relief. It is beginning to feel too much like the Carter era repeated.
The oddest thing about the case of Lady Scotland and her Tongan housekeeper is the speed with which it was ‘settled’ by the Borders Agency. A quasi-judicial process was all sorted out in a couple of days. Would anyone who is not a government minister get that sort of service?
In the new biography of Alan Clark by Ion Trewin (Alan Clark, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £25), there is mention of a correspondence about how to write between Alan and his father, Kenneth (of Civilisation). ‘I find,’ Alan tells K, ‘that once I start to think of grammar I become so nervous that I can no longer put pen to paper. It is like thinking about your feet when running down stairs, or the phonetic oddness of words generally, when making a speech.’ This is neatly put, and true, but some people might use it to bolster the idea that grammar should not be taught. Surely it points the opposite way. One is self-conscious on the subject because one’s knowledge is not quite good enough. Only when you have been taught something really well can you afford not to think about it.
John le Carré is the only person quoted in the Clark biography to have noticed that he ‘had a homo-erotic quality. He exuded that. Much more a man’s man than a woman’s man. Women were the enemy.’ This chimes with my observation of Alan Clark. I must have met him at dozens of parties. I never saw him engage a woman in conversation, or speak to one if there was a man to talk to. Most women I know who knew him say they did not enjoy talking to him. Other evidence — obviously — suggests that he spent a good deal of time with women, but perhaps his interest was never conversational. It is fascinating that he made an exception of his wife, Jane. They always seemed to be chatting away about everything.
My battle against the BBC gets more confusing. Having refused to renew my television licence since July, I have now received a letter from TV Licensing informing me that ‘your details are being passed to our enforcement officers’. This I was expecting. But at much the same time arrives a letter from TV Licensing enclosing a cheque for £2.50 ‘in respect of a refund against payment for a television licence’. I have made no such payment, and so am owed nothing, not even £2.50, which is less than a week’s worth of television. Let me take this chance to tell TV Licensing that my protest, which is provoked by the continued employment of Jonathan Ross, is a matter of principle. It will remain so, unless the BBC start offering the sort of money which Ross gets. As a bribe, £2.50 is insulting.
Brooding on the Liverpool Care Pathway (see last week’s Notes) along which the National Health Service now sends people to their death, I wonder if it has any relevance to the cases of Abdelbaset Al Megrahi and Ronnie Biggs. It is argued that life-prisoners should be released from gaol when they are about to die, on humane grounds. But now the administrative enthusiasm for deciding that people are dying — because this frees up beds — is so great that people get put on death row indiscriminately. This, combined in Al Megrahi’s case with politics, may mean that criminals get let out who are dying only a little bit more quickly than the rest of us.
William Shawcross has been attacked for sycophancy in his new official biography of the Queen Mother. I am a friend of Shawcross, and therefore biased, but I think some of his critics, for example Jenni Murray of the BBC, have an odd idea of biographical integrity. They assume that a biography that is not fierce is somehow untruthful. It is not necessarily so. The doctrine of ‘warts and all’ can easily deteriorate into the belief that only the warts are worth looking at. Shawcross is surely right that Queen Elizabeth’s attitude to the divorce of Diana, Princess of Wales, does not need a great deal of space. She was over 90 at the time, and had no decisions to make on the subject. Her saving of the British monarchy, which people like Murray ignore, mattered rather more. Here is George Orwell, writing in 1941, when Queen Elizabeth was making quite a difference: ‘It is a strange fact, but undeniably true, that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during “God Save the King” than of stealing from a poor box.’ As for the idea that the present Queen ordered the suppression of anything, I gather that the only changes she suggested were to correct the names of two racehorses.
One understands the polite intention behind the request on so many invitations nowadays to state any ‘special dietary requirements’. There is vegetarianism to think of, and other religions too. But surely respondents should confine their answers to simple points like ‘no meat’ or ‘allergic to nuts’, or just avoid eating what they don’t want. A friend recently invited a senior executive to a dinner he was organising, and received the following reply from her secretary: ‘X’s dietary requirements tend to be steered towards high protein, iron and b & c vitamins i.e. in fish, lots of vegetables and salads (Caprese salad), few carbs, little red meat, and she avoids pork.’ Luckily, perhaps, this picky top person, having accepted the invitation, then failed to turn up.
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