As the conflict deepens in the Lebanon, the word on many lips is ‘proportionality’. Israel keeps being told that her actions are ‘disproportionate’. Proportionality is, indeed, a key moral concept in wars, but how is it to be calculated? The question becomes more complicated in an age in which opponents often prefer terrorism to formal military engagement. The regular army fighting the irregulars can almost always be made to look like a sledgehammer taken to crack a nut. In this case, it is probably right to argue that Hezbollah does not, as a fighting machine, pose a threat to the territorial integrity of Israel. But it can and does train lethal rockets on a great many Israelis. It is impossible to imagine any democratically elected government allowing this to happen and staying in office, so Mr Olmert had to act. In a wider sense, the disproportion may lie the other way. Although Hezbollah may well have genuine local support in southern Lebanon, it is able to operate on a large scale only because of Syria and Iran. Both those countries undermine legitimate government in Lebanon, try to prevent the establishment of legitimate government in Iraq and back Hezbollah’s commitment to the destruction of Israel. In the case of Iran, it has announced that it wishes to bring about that destruction by acquiring an atom bomb. Seen in this light, the decision of Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon in 2000 looks disproportionately weak, since it allowed her enemies to creep back. You could argue that Israel is not serious enough about pursuing the true targets: why can Hezbollah leaders operate in Damascus safe from attack, for example? It may well be that Israel will have the worst of both worlds — getting huge international condemnation for hitting civilians but actually only scotching the snake, not killing it. The lesson of history — the Six-Day War, the attack on the Osirak reactor in Iraq — is that Israel only really gets what she needs if she can hit so fast and so hard that the world does not have time to draw breath.
Early wire reports of the accident in Chester-le-Street, in which two people died on Sunday, said that the culprit was a bouncy castle. It soon emerged, however, that this was a slur on traditional styles of architecture: the fatal contraption had been ‘a giant inflatable walk-in artwork’. The structure, which was 16 feet high and 165 feet square at the base, was called Dreamscape. It broke from its moorings and lifted 30 feet into the air. As so often with modern art, the victims involved were puzzled about what it was ‘supposed to be’. One man said that he ‘initially thought it was part of the experience’ as the thing lifted him into the sky and wrapped itself round a CCTV post. It was only when it hit the ground that he realised ‘this isn’t right’. I am surprised that supporters of the orthodoxy that the ‘purpose of art is to disturb’ have not had the courage of their convictions and come forward to defend the deaths as necessary, even beneficial sacrifices in the cause. Sir Nicholas Serota at the Tate has forced taxpayers to produce hundreds of thousands of pounds for artefacts made of excrement. Why stop there? Why not arrange for the famous wobbly bridge taking visitors across the river to Tate Modern to collapse under their weight and plunge them into the Thames? That would be a statement about the place of modern art in bourgeois society.
In a recent column in the Daily Telegraph, I reported on how behavioural courses in prisons are now forbidden to have any explicitly Christian content under the government’s ‘What Works’ criteria for prisons. A further example of what this means reaches me from a prison which had just such a Christian course when the rules changed. The organisers were told that they had to stop teaching the Ten Commandments and must cut down to six. It was the first four that had to go — the singularity of God, no graven images, no taking the name of the Lord in vain, keeping the Sabbath. They were still allowed to discourage murder, adultery, theft, bearing false witness, and coveting thy neighbour’s house, and to encourage honouring thy father and thy mother. History suggests that if you remove the first four, the other six become even harder to obey. It seems very tough on prisoners that, under government rules, their maximum score is six out of ten.
Everyone who lives in the country unites in wanting to save rural post offices. They are, we all agree, a hub. But there is something about the rigidity with which the shops are controlled from the centre which makes their gradual disappearance almost inevitable. They are now the only shops that stick to the short hours of the past — closing for lunch, and at 5.30, and from 12.30 on Saturdays until Monday mornings. There are rural things which they do not have — a game licence form, for instance — for which you have to struggle to a main post office. They are all surrounded by a prescribed system of fortifications which is highly unfriendly and presumably expensive. Why could not sub-postmasters choose their hours, services and means of security more freely? Why could not several in small villages club together to move some of their cash or computer services round at regular intervals so that each village gets a bit of them?
John Prescott says that the cowboy outfit presented to him by the casino billionaire Philip Anschutz on his ranch in Colorado was accepted in his capacity as a Minister. The stetson, worth £97, boots (£120), belt and buckle (£207), and the spurs (£185), are now ‘retained by his Whitehall department’. Since they are public property, please may the public see them? And since Mr Prescott tells us that he wore the gift while acting ministerially, please may we see a photograph of this event or, if none exists, could he put the items on in public, so that we could all admire the old cowpoke and the work he does on our behalf?
There are few pleasures of this extreme heat, but one is swimming, so we were delighted, when staying with friends in Worcestershire at the weekend, to have the chance to bathe in the Avon. Hearts sank a little as, for the first time in weeks, dark clouds loomed an hour before our planned trip, and it began, at last, to rain. We swum all the same, though, and it turned out to be a sensuous delight. Raindrops in the river looked enormous and filmic as they plopped beside our heads, the water was warmer than the air above it and one felt delightfully out of one’s natural element as sky and stream almost merged. Thunder grumbled distantly. This is not what is meant by the phrase ‘perfect storm’, but for us, it was.
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