Ed Miliband, in Manchester, invoked a speech by Disraeli 140 years ago, in the same city. Prudently, he did not quote it: you won’t find much ‘One Nation’ stuff there. In it, Disraeli devoted his energies to attacking the radical forces which ‘were determined to destroy the Church and the House of Lords’ and were threatening even the Crown. No matter, what Mr Miliband is doing is, to employ another Disraeli phrase, ‘stealing the Whigs’ clothes while they were bathing’. (For this purpose, and possibly for others, we can call the coalition Whigs.) He has noticed that David Cameron’s great selling-point — ‘We are all in this together’ — has weakened in office, and so he has mounted an audacious raid and grabbed it. ‘Who can make us One Nation?’ Mr Miliband asked. It is the right question. Mr Cameron will now be forced to answer it properly next week.
The most comical political photograph of the summer was that of the post-reshuffle coalition seated round the Cabinet table. There were so many people that they were virtually sitting on one another’s laps. The picture gave visual proof that ministerial office now has very little to do with who actually runs the country, and is simply a sort of reward, or consolation prize. The numbers have grown because, although the size of the Cabinet is capped by law at 22, David Cameron has greatly extended the number of ministers given the right to attend Cabinet without being a member of it. A note recently published on the official Parliament website computes the growth in the ‘payroll vote’. This includes parliamentary private secretaries (PPSs), who, though unpaid, are bound to vote with the government, and also those ministers who are unpaid in order to get round the cap on numbers. In 1983, the first year in which the full ‘payroll’ count was made, there were 122 MPs on it. In 2010, there were 140. Today, there are more still, but no figure is given because ‘Appointments have been changed frequently and without public notice.’ When you consider that devolution should theoretically have removed all but a vestigial ministerial representation for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, you can see that there has been a growth of executive numbers of roughly 20 per cent in 30 years. At this rate, most MPs of the governing party will, within half a century, be ministers or ministerial bag-carriers.
This week I had lunch with Lord Carrington, who is now 93 years old. He must be the last person alive to have been appointed a minister in the reign of King George VI. He told me how it happened. He was shooting partridge, and a man arrived on a bicycle and said, ‘The Prime Minister wants you to telephone him.’ The young Carrington did not believe him, but the man absolutely insisted, so he went off and rang Downing Street. ‘I gather you are shooting partridge,’ said Winston Churchill. ‘I want you to join my shoot.’ Peter Carrington duly agreed to be parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. I checked with recently appointed junior ministers to see how it happens now and was impressed to find that Mr Cameron appointed them all in person, and actually spoke to them in some detail about what the job might entail. His problem now is finding equivalent time for the few remaining Conservative MPs who are not ministers. ‘He has been my leader for seven years,’ one of them told me this week, ‘and in that time, he has spoken to me for seven minutes.’
William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, recently announced a plan for Britain and Canada to share embassies and consular facilities in countries where one of the nations does not have an embassy. The joint venture is a small piece of evidence of a level of trust between independent states which is extremely rare. It is grown-up of Stephen Harper’s government in Canada to do this deal instead of standing on its post-colonial dignity. It indicates self-confidence. Something similar has happened in relation to Canada and the monarchy. I have just read a new book called The Secret of the Crown, by my friend, Canada’s leading conservative thinker, John Fraser. He points out how the monarchy, after having been almost written out of Canadian public life from 1967 until the early 21st century, is now back. The Queen’s celebration of Canada Day in 2010 and the visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge last year seem to have reminded Canadians that they like their monarchy very well, and have no idea what could successfully replace it. Fraser makes an ingenious argument, too, about the difference between Canada and the United States. The US, he says, simply transferred to the President the powers of King George III, and thus created a legislature permanently curtailed by the Sovereign. It was Canada, with its constitutional monarchy, which allowed strong parliamentary government to arise.
In this great sporting year, there is similar confirmation of our enduring cultural legacy. If you look at the Olympic medals table, you will find that the winner, if you aggregate the different elements, is the former British Empire, even if you do not include the United States in that category. By my calculation, the Empire, including the United Kingdom of course, has 53 gold medals. If you add America, it has 99. China comes next, with 38.
When I was a teenager, I had a fairly typical male nerdish interest in lists. I prided myself on knowing the name and face of every boy in my year at school. There were nearly 250 such boys, so the knowledge required effort. By about my fourth year in the school, I had managed it with every single boy except one. I knew his name and his house, but I could not recognise his face and I knew no one who knew him. He was called Welby, and it seems that he may shortly become the Archbishop of Canterbury. Far from being a disqualification, this invisibility suggests he is humble enough for Christian leadership.
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