Last week, I was airing to a sceptical Cabinet minister this column’s moan (see Notes, 4 December) that the BBC is so obsessed with the Israel/Palestine question that it ignores what is happening in the rest of the Muslim world.
Last week, I was airing to a sceptical Cabinet minister this column’s moan (see Notes, 4 December) that the BBC is so obsessed with the Israel/Palestine question that it ignores what is happening in the rest of the Muslim world. ‘Why,’ I complained, ‘does it tell us so little about the state of Egypt?’ I was more to the point than I knew. On leaving the meeting, I heard that trouble had started in Cairo. Since then, we have had a week of demonstrations, violence and political crisis, but I still have heard nothing from the correspondents of the BBC that would suggest they know very much. Camera shots (the same ones often repeated) show large protests, and reporters speculate, but I have yet to hear a sustained analysis of the political parties, the power of the army, the strength of the religious leadership, or the price of food. On the Today programme on Friday, the Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, was asked about the Muslim Brotherhood. They ‘are a fairly moderate force here’, he opined. ‘They don’t want to rock the boat too much.’ I like to imagine Mr Bowen covering the first of the two Russian revolutions in 1917: ‘Jeremy, we hear that the Bolsheviks may be players. What’s your take on them?’ ‘Well, Sarah, they are, as their name suggests, the party of the majority, and they’re a force for moderation. They’ll be content to have a watching role.’ If there is a revolution in Egypt, you can bet that the BBC will soon be complaining that western governments are refusing to ‘engage’ with the Brotherhood. By the way, Hasan al-Banna, its founder, begins his book On Jihad by saying that the Koran and the Sunnah of Mohammed ‘summon people… to jihad, to warfare, to the armed forces and to all forms of land and sea fighting.’
In The Cairo Trilogy, one of the great novels of the 20th century, Naguib Mahfouz depicts the scene when the 19-year-old Fahmy, son of the book’s leading character, takes part in an anti-British demonstration in Ramses Square during the agitation after the first world war: ‘The sight of thousands of people concentrated together filled him with such limitless power and assurance it was like armour protecting him, clinging tightly so that bullets could not penetrate.’ In the last few days, one has seen thousands of Fahmys filmed in the very same places. The television coverage invites us to share the enthusiasm, and it is hard not to. But on the day of Fahmy’s elation, guns are turned on the crowd, and he is killed. His death still hurts his family decades later. How well Mahfouz would have understood today’s situation — its excitement, its poignancy, its perils.
The row about the privatisation of the Forestry Commission makes one despair of the goofiness of the British middle classes. Suddenly, the Commission has taken its place with trial by jury and constitutional monarchy as a gem of our heritage. The Forestry Commission! In my lifetime, it has been the second biggest despoiler of landscape in this country (the first being pylons). It is true that it has now gone back on its previous love of monotonous conifers, but there is no reason to suppose that a nationalised body which controls 70 per cent of the timber market is more imaginative about access and the environment than a ‘Big Society’ combination of smaller commercial interests, local wood-lovers and large charitable bodies such as the National Trust. We hear protest at the idea that woods should make profits. The best future for timber is that people want to use it, and therefore renew it. A particularly stupid article by Ed Miliband seemed to suggest that cutting down a tree was an offence against forestry: you might as well protest about the harm done to grass by mowing the lawn. Yet it is the government’s own silly fault. It has been passive in the face of this onslaught. It is suffering — see last week’s Notes — from its lack of spin. In government, every speech and broadcast is an argument to be won, and if it is not won, it is lost.
Matt’s cartoon on Tuesday depicted Winnie the Pooh and Piglet confronted by a high fence and a notice saying ‘Hundred Acre Wood: Privatised Property’. It had all his customary wit, but it is worth remembering that when Milne wrote the story, Ashdown Forest was privately owned, by the Sackville family.
This Sunday, the Sunday Telegraph will be 50 years old, precisely half the age of Ronald Reagan. People are surprised to hear that the paper is so young, because, from the first, it has projected a character that feels familiar. It is still the only successful broadsheet newspaper to have been created since the war. In fact, though borrowing respectability from its big sister, the Sunday Telegraph has generally been more subversive. The single biggest factor in this was Peregrine Worsthorne, who was there from the beginning, and still thrives, aged 87. Once an enthusiastic reader told Perry that she agreed with everything he wrote. This is impossible, and certainly not something Perry has ever tried himself. Now, in old age, he claims to have forgotten why he ever held any of the strong views he once advanced. This is a curiously good position for a journalist to be in. I hope one day to attain it.
Our friends Sally and Andrew Gimson run a famously ecumenical household. She was a Labour candidate at the last election. He is a former deputy editor of this paper, and one of the most truly conservative (and therefore not invariably Conservative) people I know. They gave a drinks party at their house in Oak Village last Saturday. Despite its name, Oak Village is in north London. One friend, declining, said to Andrew: ‘It is very left-wing to give a party in London on a Saturday night.’ I hadn’t thought of this before, but it is surely true. Indeed, we couldn’t go to the Gimsons because we were at a dinner party in the country: presumably, by the same token in reverse, that is a right-wing event. What sort of party could make everyone feel that ‘We’re all in this together’?
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