On Sunday night, I went to Wellington College to defend God. The Almighty does not need human help, of course, but I was asked to oppose Professors Richard Dawkins and A.C. Grayling, and — with Lord Harries, the former Bishop of Oxford — propose the motion that ‘Atheism is the new fundamentalism’. I had hoped that the audience would consist largely of the stalwart pupils and parents of Wellington, which would have had our side in with a chance. But in fact the event was run by the brilliant, Notting-Hilly debating organisation Intelligence Squared. This meant that 1,500 people turned up, cramming the vast sports hall. It also meant that the Wellington clientele was swamped by a very different crowd. I could see at a glance that the atheist fundamentalists were present in force. The side of the angels got a paltry 363 votes and that of the apes got 1,070. It was good-humoured and well-chaired, so I have no complaints. But more than I had realised, it is indeed the case that there is a movement of militant, fundamentalist atheists — well-organised, self-righteous and derisive, rather like Gay Pride marchers. Indeed, just as homosexual activists co-opted the word ‘gay’ for their cause 40 years ago, so the grooviest atheist gang call themselves, self-regardingly, Brights. They campaign for, among other things, ‘full and equitable civic participation’ for those with their ‘naturalistic world-view’. My impression is that they have got a lot further than most people realise. For example, they are now making it very hard for faith schools to teach faith, or select the children of the faithful or, ultimately, to exist at all. They want religion to be tolerated only as what they call a ‘private’ opinion, by which they mean that it should have no space in the public sphere, rather like Roman Catholicism in 18th-century Britain, or Judaism in most Arab countries today. I think a big battle is beginning and, at the moment, religion is losing.
Professors Dawkins and Grayling seem to be the Moody and Sankey of this movement. They play, as it were, the favourite hymns, and they do it very well. Professor Dawkins, in particular, has rock-star status. Fans hail his sallies rather as black congregations in the Deep South shout ‘Ay-men!’ when they like what the preacher is saying. But, with his mellifluous voice, distinguished grey hair, slightly old-fashioned forms of expression and high opinion of his own abilities, Professor Dawkins reminds me of nothing so much as an old-school Anglican bishop. Winding up, he gave a little picture of himself lying down, staring at the Milky Way, and feeling a sense of ‘gratitude’ for the great mystery of the universe. It was very stirring, but to whom, in the absence of a God, was he grateful?
In my lead item last week about how Lord Mandelson had been present at Lord Rothschild’s house during a shooting party attended by Saif Gaddafi, son of the Libyan dictator, I mentioned that Cherie Blair had also been at Waddesdon that weekend. Now The Spectator has received a strange letter from Mrs Blair’s lawyers. It says that I said she was ‘rubbing shoulders’ with Mr Gaddafi. In fact, says the letter, ‘our client was not present at the shooting party and was not at Lord Rothschild’s house at any time whilst Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was in attendance. Indeed, our client has never attended a shooting party in any location…’ When she went to Waddesdon that weekend, ‘she had only dined with members of the Rothschild family’. Actually, I never said that Mrs Blair rubbed shoulders with Mr Gaddafi, or even met him: I said that Lord Mandelson had done so. I also pointed out, because I knew that, in Mrs Blair’s eyes, there could be no greater sin than shooting pheasants (unless it be hunting foxes), that she had not picked up a gun. The letter went on to say: ‘In the light of our client’s well known position as a leading human rights lawyer and also being married to the UN’s special envoy to the Middle East, the suggestion and direct inference you make is clearly very damaging to her professional and personal reputation.’ But this UN special envoy to the Middle East is better known as the former Prime Minister of Great Britain. When he held that post, Tony Blair made the deal which brought Col Gaddafi in from the cold with the West and turned his son Saif into Peter Mandelson’s fast friend. So why does Mr Blair’s wife think she can’t be seen (not that I am saying she was) with this prominent trophy of her husband’s foreign policy? Why does she repudiate with horror an association which Lord Mandelson stoutly defends? Is there a Cherie/Mandy split here? I gather that Lord Mandelson is very anxious to point out that, though he did meet Mr Gaddafi on this weekend, he did not meet Mrs Blair.
Whenever people have to deal with public authorities, they always complain about problems arising from meetings. If you seek a social or health service for yourself or your children, if you are involved in a legal or planning dispute, if you are the victim of a health and safety infraction or of a crime, you are almost certain to have meetings with officials which are postponed, confused, distorted afterwards, or otherwise unsatisfactory. For people under great strain — such as the parents of handicapped children recently so well highlighted on television by Rosa Monckton — these meetings are a major source of anxiety, actively contributing to the stress they are in theory supposed to relieve. There is a gap in the market for a charity whose sole purpose would be to furnish trained volunteers who would help people prepare for these meetings and accompany them to them. The presence of a third party, giving support and taking notes, would improve the morale of the petitioner against the bureaucracy without the expense and confrontation caused by lawyers. These volunteers could not, of course, be experts in the particular subject covered, but they would understand about process, records, and how systems of authority work. They would also be witnesses, so that when, as so often happens, the public service misrepresented what happened in a meeting, an independent record would exist to correct it. The charity could be called Meeting People.
Mervyn King’s revelation that the Bank of England secretly supported the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS last year with loans of £62 billion casts an interesting light on earlier history. In 2007, Mr King said that he had wanted to mount a covert operation to save Northern Rock late that summer but ‘the legal advice among the tripartite authorities was that it could not be done’. So that legal advice (some of it about European law) was wrong. As a result, we suffered the first run on a British bank for 150 years.
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