The Spectator’s Notes | 9 December 2006

It is strange to find myself at odds with several fellow Thatcherites, but it seems to me obvious that David Cameron’s first year as Tory leader, which falls this week, has been a success. What his critics cannot get into their heads is that opposition is completely different from government. You can’t do: you must just be. So the first thing you have to be, particularly when people have long disliked your party, is nice. I read that focus groups say that Cameron has a ‘kind face’. Serious-minded people scoff at such things, but if voters thought he had an unkind face, the Tories would get nowhere. As for the reaction to his injunction about the need to show love for young criminals (misrepresented as ‘hug-a-hoodie’), some of it was slightly shocking. To say that criminals need to be loved does not imply that they should not be severely punished or that their victims should be ignored. It is simply a statement of basic Christianity and, in a way, of fact. If boys are consistently loved, preferably by two parents, they are much less likely to commit crimes. A fairer criticism of Cameron would be that he has not been very bold. He seems to shy off clear and new analyses of things. For example, though he is right about why identity cards would be a disaster, he has not really developed a tough-minded approach to the whole subject of security. Labour knows this very well, and will continue to devise more and more anti-terrorist legislation to show up Tory confusion on the subject. The defence of freedom, which Cameron rightly wants to make, will not cohere unless it involves the full identification of freedom’s enemies.

People are furious that MPs want bigger salaries. But what is so annoying is not any particular figure — £100,000 a year is said to be the latest sum sought — but the means by which MPs have turned themselves into a trade union. They have delegated the setting of their pay to the Senior Salaries Review Body, and so they write to this body to explain why they should get more. They invoke comparability with doctors or civil servants. This is an evasion of their own unique responsibility. All ‘supply’, i.e., the spending of public money, is voted by the House of Commons alone, so MPs are in a completely different position from civil servants. As our elected representatives, they should debate and vote on their own salaries in public, just as they debate and vote on everything else. This used to happen at the beginning of each Parliament, and an instructive and shaming spectacle it was, with only a handful, led by Enoch Powell, ever arguing that their money should not go up and up. Naturally MPs found it embarrassing, so they arranged to hide it away. But the embarrassment was a good thing — part of the price of representative democracy.

It is argued that if one is pro-Turkey, one must want it to become part of the European Union. It would be hard to think of a more blatant non sequitur.

Too late to tip off obituary writers, I hear of the death earlier this year of Jane Parsons. She ended up being head of the ‘Garden Room girls’ in No. 10 Downing Street. The Garden Room was really the typing pool, but the phrase does nothing like justice to its central importance in what used to be a small household. Jane joined No. 10 in 1946 and left in 1981, so she worked closely with every prime minister from Attlee to Mrs Thatcher. She told me her likes and dislikes. She liked Attlee (though Mrs Attlee accused the Garden Room girls of stealing her knitting), Macmillan, Home, Callaghan and Mrs Thatcher. She disliked Churchill, Eden, Wilson and Heath. Attlee she admired for his modest efficiency. The Macmillans, Homes, Thatchers and, to a lesser degree, the Callaghans made her and her girls feel part of a family. In all those cases, the spouse supported the prime minister very closely, which made it much more fun. Eden was too neurotic. Wilson allowed Marcia Falkender to start treating the Garden Room politically, and she began a persecution of what she called the ‘Tory debs’; Heath was completely cold, and never knew anyone’s name. Churchill, honour though it was to work for him, was the worst. He loved dictating in all hours and places, with a perfect lack of consideration. Jane remembered sitting in Churchill’s car, facing backwards, trying to take down a message to Stalin. Also in the car were Churchill’s pug, Churchill’s overwhelming cigar and Churchill’s budgie, which flew round pooing on her. She felt dreadfully sick, but also much too junior to object. This distinguished public servant died under the care of our wonderful National Health Service, by the way, killed by hospital MRSA after a minor operation.

It was fascinating to listen to Professor Stephen Hawking on the Today programme predicting mankind’s travel to other galaxies etc., but I was distracted by the voice of the machine that does his speaking for him. Why does it have an accent like Borat?

If you still have not seen Borat, don’t. A few bits are extremely funny, but there are longueurs. I went with our son, who was strangely anxious that we should go unaccompanied by any women. Afterwards, I understood why. It is partly that lots of the scenes are scatological and therefore embarrassing for a teenage boy to see with his mother (actually, I have a very ‘female’ sensibility about such things myself, and shut my eyes for most of them). But it was also, I suspect, because Baron Cohen’s humour, though justified with talk about how it reveals the latent racism in us all, is really the traditional young man’s staple comic fare of smut and humiliation. My suspicion was confirmed when I sat next to a shaven-headed youth on a train a few days later. He opened a lad mag and, after a quick glance at the naked women on display, settled down to an article about Borat which soon had him guffawing.

When I wrote about the Wynnstay Hunt last week, I forgot to mention an interesting change they have made since the hunting ban. They have got rid of the red coats, traditional for the huntsman, whips and hunt members, and replaced them with their own tweed, cut like a coat rather than a jacket and bearing the gold buttons of the hunt. The effect, I was told, was instantaneous. The former wearers of the red coat ceased to get any of the V-signs and shouted abuse from motorists that had been quite common before. The red obviously brought out something atavistic. A clear disadvantage of the change is that it is much harder to see the huntsman a long way off. But no one, looking at the Wynnstay tweed, could say that there has been a loss of elegance.