The Spectator’s Notes | 5 September 2013

David Cameron says that he will not come back to the House of Commons again about the question of Syria because Parliament has spoken. Obviously, having sought its opinion, he cannot now try to override it. But no one can know how the issue will now play out, and it may well be that new circumstances (major foreign interventions, for example) will change everything. Parliament cannot make foreign policy decisions in advance of facts, and therefore should not try. Foreign policy is not like legislation: it is protean. The House of Commons should support the government when it gets it right and arraign it when it gets it wrong. It should not pre-empt it. What actually happened last week was that no motion about Syria passed. There is therefore a policy vacuum. Mr Cameron has no duty to perpetuate this emptiness.

A Labour ministerial aide famously emailed that 11 September 2001 was ‘a good day to bury bad news’. The government’s defeat over Syria was a good day to bury badgers. The wandering searchlight of media attention switched from the darkling woods of Somerset and Gloucestershire to Westminster and left a handful of fanatical antis blundering around with torches in the 200 square miles affected. The cull proceeded in an orderly manner, virtually unobserved.

Many articles say what a nice man Seamus Heaney was. I believe it, and it is nice to be nice. But niceness is not necessarily the same as goodness, let alone courage. It has also been truly said that Heaney was a fine poet of place. His place was Catholic, rural Northern Ireland. In that place, there was an opportunity for courage — to condemn without equivocation, from within the same tribe, the thuggery, murder and bigotry of the Provisional IRA.