As one who has had the pleasure of meeting Peter Cruddas, without being an undercover reporter, I see the latest scandal about party funding rather differently from most. Mr Cruddas has the curious, attractive unworldliness which often goes with being a very successful self-made businessman. He is the son of an alcoholic taxi-driver from Hackney, and he left school with no qualifications. He took a menial job in a bank and found that he was clever with the tickertape machines of that time (the 1970s). This was the germ of something big. In the internet era, he worked out how to capture, convey and help people bet on market information. When he had made a really enormous sum of money — a value of about £1.2 billion at the height — he felt grateful to Britain, Mrs Thatcher, the Queen etc. So he started to give lots of money to charity, especially royal charity, and to the Conservatives. When I met him, we started chatting about politics and I asked him if he knew someone or other in that world. ‘Charles,’ he touchingly replied, ‘I don’t know no one.’ Quite possibly one of his motives in giving money was to meet people he admired, perhaps even to get an honour. What is wrong with that? Why shouldn’t he rise in the country which he loves and whose prosperity he has assisted? The feeling against people like Mr Cruddas is essentially snobbish. Now Tories are privately briefing that Mr Cruddas is a ‘barrow boy’ who is not much use at fund-raising. What bastards they can be.
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Obviously it was unwise of Mr Cruddas to say what he said to the spies from the Sunday Times but, if you think about it, why shouldn’t donors ‘buy access’ to the leaders of the party to which they donate? It is to the public good to support a political party as it is to support a charity, even if one does so with mixed motives. If I gave £1 million to Help the Aged (or whatever), I would certainly expect to meet their officers and bigwigs and be presented to a royal patron. Turn the argument the other way round: is it seriously suggested that you have only to give a large sum of money to a party for you not to be allowed to meet the leader? Mr Cameron has a moral and prudential duty to meet and thank the people who help keep his party on the road. They should not be able to buy policy change, but there is nothing wrong with them telling him what they think. Their voices are different, thank goodness, from those of all-encompassing officialdom, and ministers need to hear them. The great corruption would be if politicians were to be spared the humiliating business of raising money from the freewill offering of citizens and grab it all, by law, from taxpayers.
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Lord Ridley, who has just died, was, as his obituaries have said, a fine example of the aristocrat who does good in the world, and especially his own bit of the world — in Matthew Ridley’s case, the north-east. Like all the best such people, he emanated enjoyment. He told me once that he was in Cardiff, assisting at an investiture by the Prince of Wales, and realised that he had forgotten the coat, though not the trousers, of his morning suit. He hurried to a shop to hire one. The assistant asked him in a friendly way why he needed it. Suddenly embarrassed by the royal connection, Matthew pretended that it was because he was getting married (he was about 70 at the time). ‘Oh,’ said the assistant, ‘won’t you be needing the trousers too?’ As he started to edge to the door with the coat, Matthew Ridley heard himself saying, ‘Oh no, I never wear trousers when I’m getting married.’
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In a letter to The Spectator last week, Mr George Pownall accused me of being ‘ungallant’ and ‘boring’ in my criticisms of Radio 3 presenters. I do sort of know what he means. It is a well-known difficulty about journalistic campaigns that they only begin to be noticed at roughly the same time as readers start to get fed up with them. So in this, the octave in which Radio 3 is devoting itself exclusively to Schubert (‘who wrote melodies to break your heart or make you smile’), I shall draw my Radio Twee campaign to a close, with warm thanks to the many readers who supported it and contributed examples. But in the course of defending the announcers, Mr Pownall was actually, perhaps without realising it, supporting the campaign. ‘They have been told by their producer,’ he wrote, ‘to conceal the erudition they display later in the day in order to seem “approachable” to the commuting and school-running audience.’ Exactly. I have nothing against the individual announcers. I am attacking the policy. It is based on the untrue idea that what is informative and intelligent cannot be popular. It is also part of the heresy that ‘access’ matters more than the thing ‘accessed’. People become so obsessed with the idea that more, or more ‘diverse’ people should get into good universities, visit stately homes and art galleries or listen to classical music that they forget their original duty — to uphold learning, preserve great art or architecture, encourage the best possible performance of music etc. I must re-emphasise that I write as a musical ignoramus. It is precisely because I don’t know much that I so resent Radio Twee and so love it when Radio 3 tells me things well. Last Saturday, it broadcast Alfred Brendel speaking about Schubert’s last three piano sonatas. He spoke with the eloquence that comes from a lifetime’s knowledge, practice and love. He never raved about how the music ‘blew him away’: he spoke resolutely about the music itself.
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A letter arrives from the Procurator-Fiscal about a speeding offence I may conceivably have committed in Scotland. It starts with a series of questions purporting to assist the recipient. ‘WHAT IF I AM CHARGED WITH A SEXUAL OFFENCE?’ shouts question 3. Help! What is the definition of a sexual offence in Alex Salmond’s Braveheart Scotland? Does being an Englishman and driving at 36 mph count?
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