Fox-hunting, as Lord Burns famously put it, ‘seriously compromises the welfare of the fox’. Everyone agrees that the welfare of Dr Fox, the Defence Secretary, has been seriously compromised, so I suppose everyone is right. But amid all the aerating about standards in public life and ministerial codes, no one seems to worry who now exercises power in these situations. The answer is civil servants, and people should be worried by this. It was the permanent secretary of the MoD who was asked to look into Dr Fox’s case, and the Cabinet Secretary who took charge. Why is this considered appropriate? Civil servants are, as their name suggests, supposed to serve ministers, not discipline them. If they invigilate ministers’ conduct, it is only natural that they will tend to apply to them the standards which they would use for their own kind. They always detest the idea that ministers should be advised by anyone but themselves, so they will use petty scandals like this one to circumscribe them still further. Yet ministers are different, being directly answerable to the public who elected them to office. They have even heavier moral duties than civil servants, but they should also be freer, and should be able to insert various irregulars into the system. It doesn’t look as if Dr Fox did so very sensibly in this case, but he was entitled to try, and he should be judged on this by his political colleagues and public opinion, not by bureaucratic process. Prigs like Sir Alistair Graham say how disgraceful it is that the last word in handling this still rests with the Prime Minister. Actually, Mr Cameron has farmed out too much of his responsibility.
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Public schools are being urged to set up academy schools, as Wellington College has done. David Cameron called for it in his party conference speech last week, rather in the tone of a housemaster complaining that his boys are not doing enough social service. There is much to be said for the idea, but one needs to understand why independent schools might hesitate. The first reason is that they do not all believe that they have the right skills. The best know how to teach the brightest: they are not necessarily expert in dealing with the problems of the below-average. Many prefer to farm out their skills — the teaching of particular subjects like maths or sport, for example — to a number of state schools, rather than concentrating on building one. The second reason is that they exist primarily to educate the children of the parents who pay their fees. The different interpretation of ‘public benefit’ which came in under the last government sought to undermine this, but the point is crucial. No conscientious board of governors could agree to compromise the basic purpose of educating the school’s own pupils as well as possible. Setting up an academy could be too time-consuming for some schools, or bureaucratic, or simply beyond the schools’ capacities. I detect in current government attitudes an attempt to bully the public schools about this, and I know this is already causing resentment. Independent schools naturally wish to remain independent. There is danger that the government’s love of ‘nudge’ may come to shove. If it does, it won’t work.
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The government is very proud of its commitment to localism, and has fought hard to get its controversial Localism Bill despite numerous objections in the House of Lords. Yet at the same time, it orders another annual freeze of council tax and everyone applauds. If localism is not locally paid for, it is only a game. It reminds one of people who love the ‘self-sufficiency’ of living in tents and foraging for food, but retreat to their comfortable house whenever it rains.
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In his new book, Boomerang, Michael Lewis writes that ‘On Planet Money … English is the universal language’. This is true, and it is one of the main factors that have lulled the English-speaking peoples into not bothering to learn other tongues. But if, as one keeps expecting to happen any day, the Chinese decide to make blatant their struggle for world domination, surely an obvious tactic would be to try to make life harder for English. The French have failed in this, but they lack the numbers. Drawing on their hundreds of millions and their growing strength in trade, the Chinese could edge the world away from English. If they did so, they would disable most of their western competitors. Anglophone monoglotism — even more extreme in the United States than in Britain — is a symptom of the laziness of the top dog, so surely it cannot last much longer.
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As a regular Radio 4 listener, I find there is no more discouraging phrase currently in use than ‘John Bell of the Iona Community’.
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The Foreign Office is a strange institution. By common consent of everyone in government, one of its very best officials is Hugh Powell, son of Charles, nephew of Jonathan, and formerly our man in Helmand. He is frequently called in to Downing Street to help with great international problems such as Libya. The Foreign Office keeps him on its books but steadfastly fails to give him an actual job, and now, I gather (though not from him), he is so frustrated that he may leave.
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Being one of those educated people who feel smug about not following popular culture, I have never actually watched any programme with Simon Cowell in it. But I have always been struck by his photographs in newspapers. He has the look of implacable cruelty that sometimes goes with being young and successful. The other day, when reading the birthdays in the Daily Telegraph (on the day when Sir Hereward Wake was 95), I found that Cowell was 52 — almost as old as me. I also read an interview with him in which he complained how exhausting ‘maintenance’ was. These bits of evidence forced me to revise my opinion. What I took for the tyrant’s powerful gaze is actually the frozen stare of someone who dare not move his face for fear of disclosing his wrinkles.
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