Last Thursday, I got a rush-hour train out of London and sat down in a second-class carriage. Soon I found myself sitting opposite a minister in the new coalition. I was surprised by how much pleasure it gave me that, following the new guidance, he was not travelling first-class, or by official car. I let him doze, and when he woke up, I asked him a few questions in pursuit, as we like to say, of journalistic inquiries. Having drivers on hand at all times is, of course, a huge convenience for ministers, but that is why it is also a bad thing. They quickly forget that one of the main features of life for most people who pay their salaries is its sheer inconvenience. Their limousines feed their illusion that the more time they can spend rushing round on government business, the more good they will do. By the same token, although I am opposed to an independent body deciding what money MPs should or shouldn’t spend (since this removes the authority to decide, which is the main point of having elected representatives), I am pleased to hear them squealing about how they can no longer afford so many assistants. They do not need them. Nowadays, it is commonplace for the most obscure MPs to have someone, paid by the public purse, who is called their ‘chief of staff’. The idea that they should have a staff which needs to have a chief is itself a conspiracy against the public interest.
This business of cutting out the cars, however, is not as simple as it seems. This week, I bumped into a minister walking down the street (a good sign), trying to remember where his new office was. The problem, he told me, is that ministers can go by foot or bike, but their papers, for the most part, cannot. So they travel with the common man, but the red boxes with which they go to bed travel to their homes by official car. His solution, so far, is to take deliveries of red boxes in lumps every two or three days. But unless something clever is devised, it cannot be long before the ministers, seeing their boxes going home in the car, start to climb in with them.
One of the subjects on which I tackled the comatose minister in second-class was David Cameron’s extraordinary attempt the previous day to take over the 1922 Committee. The Prime Minister wanted to ensure that, in future, government ministers could vote for the officers of the committee, thereby abolishing the essential point of the ’22 in periods of Tory government — that it represents backbenchers to (and, where necessary, against) the government. There was a lot of public protest. But one marked characteristic of Mr Cameron — look at the speed with which he plunged into coalition-making — is his ability to change tack fast. On Monday, he sensibly abandoned his bad ideas of the week before, and peace was restored. What had been behind all this? In his Sunday Telegraph column this week, Matthew d’Ancona defended Mr Cameron’s then plan, and wrote that ‘in the final analysis, modern political parties are organisations for the disciplined achievement and retention of power to realise specific goals’. That is certainly the way groups at the top tend to think, but it is surely only partially right. It is usually not that important to ‘realise specific goals’, though it matters very much in a crisis. Political parties represent interests, traditions, occupations, classes, attitudes, helping to mobilise large swaths of voters. It is this point about representation which is essential to democracy and which modern leaders, for all their talk about electoral reform, do not think much about. It was the neglect of this point which eventually made Mr Blair and then Mr Brown so disliked. They saw government as a sort of coup pulled off by grabbing control of one’s party. One hopes Mr Cameron’s early brush with the problem will make him avoid the same mistake.
The office of deputy prime minister is not known to the constitution (as indeed, was true of the office of prime minister until well into the 20th century), so Nick Clegg sits in the Cabinet as Lord President of the Council. In this role, he is supposed to walk, formally dressed, in the Queen’s procession for her speech from the robing room to the chamber of the House of Lords. Instead, for the state opening on Tuesday, he put on his orange tie, and walked with David Cameron. One can see why he wanted to point out that he was there, present and incorrect, displaying his new power, but a state occasion is different from one which expresses power. It is a brief moment when certain pieties take precedence over politics. Deference to these pieties is a form of humility, not servility. I know Mr Clegg is one of the very few declared atheists to have held high office, but it would have been better if he had decided, just for the day, to bend the knee.
Angela Merkel says that ‘if the euro fails, Europe fails’. It is a half-horrifying, half-enticing prospect. But is she right? ‘Europe’ long predated the euro, and presumably could outlast it. The trouble is that the ‘ever-closer union’ model has only one direction. Time for a Plan B.
In church last Sunday, we were asked to pray for Catholics in the media. The priest pointed out that one article written in a national newspaper would reach more people than the entire audience reached by Jesus in his two and half years of ministry. This alarming thought made me wonder what would have happened if Jesus had been a newspaper columnist or a television star, feeding not the Five Thousand, but millions. Would the 40 days in the wilderness have been rendered as Jesus giving interviews about ‘battling his demons’? Would he have received a prestigious lifetime achievement press award one week and have been ‘crucified’ in the media the next? Would he then have made an astonishing comeback? It doesn’t bear imagining. What is certain is the inverse relation between the speed of any popular message and its ultimate value — the difference between mass communication and Mass communication.
It already feels almost too late to try to stop it, but why should England bid to play host to the World Cup in 2018? Now that football is much more clearly seen on television than in a stadium, what advantage to football-lovers is it to hold it here? Those of us who do not love the game are almost voiceless, yet we must comprise about half of men and 80 per cent of women. We, the silent majority, dread the vulgarity, greed, boredom and waste of money involved. It would be truly modern, compassionate, deficit-busting and vote-winning for the government to let the Cup pass from us.
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