Jane Austen is a ‘contingency character’, we have just learnt. In his last appearance as Governor of the Bank of England before the Treasury Select Committee of the House of Commons, Sir Mervyn King explained that the great novelist rather slightingly so described stands in reserve to feature on any of our bank notes if too many people succeed in counterfeiting the current occupants. She is also in the running for the ten-pound note when Charles Darwin relinquishes it. This is a hot issue, because the notes do not feature enough women, we are told — despite the fact that since 1952, 100 per cent of them have featured a woman (the Queen). In subsequent debate about which women should feature, it has been comically predictable that all the eager suggestions ignored the great She-Elephant in the room. Someone on the Today programme put forward Margaret Bondfield, the first woman Cabinet minister. I can think of another woman politician who may have been more important than that. Actually, the whole thing is unnecessary. Until the 1960s, Britain was unusual, possibly unique, in the world in featuring no non-mythological human being apart from the sovereign. It should revert to this elegant austerity before Mark Carney starts putting Canadians on the notes.
Although virtually everyone, including me, is against the dreadful people who ran the Care Quality Commission, I do notice that something ridiculous has crept into all reporting of such rows. This is the unquestioned assumption that the ‘whistleblower’ is in the right. Other recent examples include the mysterious anti-CIA and anti-GCHQ man, Edward Snowden, the police who appear to have invented what Andrew Mitchell told them at the Downing Street gates, and anyone who ever accuses anyone in any position of authority of having performed acts of paedophilia. We know that many people in big organisations have base motives for covering things up, and we excoriate them for doing so. But we seem not to understand that others may have base motives — revenge, disappointment, a craving for celebrity or money — which encourage them to betray confidences in their work. If you think of real workplace situations in which people try to reveal bad things to the outside world, you will recognise that the disinterested pursuit of justice is not usually what is at stake. Hence the importance of payoffs in our culture. A great many potential blowers shut up when the bosses stuff their whistles with silver. We do need to understand that if everyone feels entitled to blow the whistle on a colleague every time he does something he considers wrong, no one will ever want to work in any organisation ever again.
According to the Sunday Times, nine state school pupils have turned down places at Oxford and Cambridge ‘mostly’ to attend Ivy League universities in America. ‘It is the first time,’ alleges the paper, ‘that a group of state-educated pupils has spurned Britain’s top two universities.’ It is not really made clear in what sense these pupils constitute ‘a group’, and nine does not seem all that many, but let us take the story at face value. Ian Barr, from Stockport, rejected an offer to read law at Oxford in favour of Yale. His stated reason was that one of his friends had been told, when going for an Oxford interview, ‘Don’t walk on the grass or you’ll have a £50 fine.’ Harry Edwards, from Huddersfield, snubbed a Cambridge maths offer in favour of Harvard. ‘In Harvard,’ he said, ‘it felt more like they wanted you there rather than the other way round.’ These young people may well be making the right decision: Yale and Harvard are outstanding universities. But doesn’t it strike you that their reasons for choosing show how untrue it is to see such people as ‘underprivileged’? So great is their sense of entitlement that they decide their future on whether their friends are allowed on the grass or whether the dons sucked up to them enough. Isn’t it good to want a university more than it wants you? No doubt cocky Harry is a brilliant young man, but mightn’t Cambridge have a bit more to give him than the other way round? Or is that an elitist thing to say?
It has already been announced that there will be no provision for adultery as grounds for single-sex divorce, for the obvious reason (though it was only belatedly obvious to the legislators) that same-sex intercourse, having no procreative purpose, cannot have any definition of consummation, and therefore cannot be adulterated. Now it turns out, however, that if someone in a single-sex marriage has intercourse with a member of the opposite sex, this will be grounds for divorce. Since such intercourse will presumably be unwelcome to most homosexuals, and yet useful in divorce proceedings, one can foresee a return to the pre-war system, satirised by A.P. Herbert in Holy Deadlock. A husband seeking divorce on grounds of adultery would take a hotel room in Brighton, enter it with a woman paid for the task and make sure he was observed by a chambermaid having breakfast in bed with her. This was all that the law required: he did not actually have to sleep with her.
At Ascot last week, the bookies were taking bets on what colour the Queen would wear for the day of the Gold Cup. According to my wife, who studies racing closely, there is a good sporting chance of getting it right. The Queen’s colours are a purple body with scarlet sleeves (plus some gold braid). She has sartorial form. When she has an outstanding horse running, she often wears an approximation to one of her own colours, just as the late Duke of Devonshire — whose racing colour was ‘straw’ — always wore yellow socks when Park Top was running. Since it would not be appropriate for the monarch to be a scarlet woman, that leaves only purple. Sure enough, she wore purple last year when Estimate won the Queen’s Vase at Ascot, and again, this year, when she triumphed in the Gold Cup. There should be a film about her successes called The Colour Purple, but the title is taken.
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