W e are in a financial crisis which has been going
on for more than a year. It is remarkable that, in all that time, no political leader has had anything much to say about it. In the United States, neither John McCain nor Barack Obama appears to have any understanding of what is going on. Over here, Gordon Brown’s supposed gift for economic analysis seems to have deserted him. One hears phrases like ‘the fundamentals are sound’, and trembles. David Cameron, pursuing the favourite strategy of keeping his party away from bad news, acknowledges the gravity of the situation without proposing remedies. It may be the right tactic, when in a hurricane, to lie as low as possible and wait for it to pass, but big political rewards do come to those who, people believe, have successfully diagnosed and treated economic malaise. That is why people have heard of FDR and Margaret Thatcher, and tend not to remember Warren Harding or John Major. At present, the only British politician with a reputation for economic thinking is Vince Cable, which makes one feel there is a gap in the market.
Under its leader from Kirkcaldy, the Labour party has become a thing of ill omen. Just as Macbeth is superstitiously known as ‘the Scottish play’, I feel it would be safer to refer to Labour from now on as ‘the Scottish party’.
On BBC One’s magazine programme The One Show last week, I happened to watch an item celebrating ‘the Taggart of the wildlife world’. He is DC Dave Mackinnon, and from his police station in Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, he scours the Scottish landscape for ‘wildlife crime’. On the day The One Show visited, DC Dave was pursuing reports of a dead buzzard. Buzzards are a very common species of hawk, so you would think that not a day passes without a dead one being found somewhere in the Grampians, but off sped the detective, the television cameras and another police car with a second officer to assist. As the presenter said, they were ‘treating this like any other crime scene’. A GPS reading found the bird which was, indeed, dead. On one wing, DC Dave discerned a small hole which he said could have been made either by a shotgun or a rifle (as if the impact of the one were indistinguishable from that of the other) or, he thought, possibly not. The bird was X-rayed, and then put in a bag and taken off to Edinburgh for a post-mortem. When this process was complete, it was decided that the buzzard had died of natural causes. In the eyes of the unquestioning BBC (‘Most of us find it hard to get our heads around the idea that people make it their business to harm animals and birds’), Mr Mackinnon was a hero in a war against game-keepers — indeed, I have heard them promoting him on another programme on Radio 4. But it struck me that he should himself be arrested for the serious offence of wasting police time.
The Rectory Society, of which I am chairman, paid its first visit north last week. We visited the Old Rectory at Longford in Derbyshire and the Old Vicarage in Edensor. The latter is unusual in being a semi, one part of it occupied by Andrew and Bridget Flemming and the other by our patron, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, who moved into it from Chatsworth after the death of her husband. Both bits kindly let us in, so we were able literally to see how the other half lives. Debo Devonshire had predicted that we, like most visitors to other people’s houses, would want to see everything, and so it proved. Mats were laid down to prevent feet from the wet lawn staining the carpets, and we submitted her bedroom, bathroom, larder, etc., to minute inspection. At lunch in a marquee in the garden, we heard a touching speech from a very old, very small, very clear lady called Irla Simmonds, the widow of the last vicar to live in the entire house, which had 22 rooms. She remembered, affectionately, the perpetual cold, the kitchen range with the instructions ‘rake the ashes at six a.m. every morning’, the dado rail, the universal application of a colour called ‘Chatsworth brown’. It reminded me what a new thing it is that people expect their houses to be comfortable — it has happened over the last 40 years, and until then was unusual, even among the rich. I am not pretending that I do not, in general, prefer comfort, but I remembered, hearing Mrs Simmonds, that you love your house the more if you have had to live in it through thick and thin. That sense of an almost welcome ordeal shared between building and resident is being lost.
It was particularly nice of Debo Devonshire to have us because she had only just launched her new book In Tearing Haste (John Murray), an edition of letters between her and Patrick Leigh Fermor, exchanged over more than half a century; besides which, she is 88, and having trouble with her sight. Her energy and interest in life are astonishing. One reason that the letters are so good is that the reader can imagine the pleasure of receiving them. If I were Debo, I should have been particularly delighted by a short one from Paddy about imitating owls. He says that his wife Joan is brilliant at it, and that he cannot do it at all. He cannot whistle either, he says — ‘because of two front teeth being too far apart’ — but Debo, he remembers, can: ‘I wish I could whistle like you, you’re the most skilful whistler I’ve ever met. I think of you at the wheel, driving medium fast, and whistling “There may be trouble ahead, let’s face the music and dance.”’ Very flattering in its attentiveness, its slight flirtatiousness, its recollection of happiness.
Paddy is reported to be annoyed because the publishers refused to allow John Craxton, who had illustrated his earlier books, to do the same for this one. Apparently this is because dust covers now have to be approved by Tesco if they are to sell successfully there, and Tesco is thought to be the most important market. The Tesco-friendly cover of In Tearing Haste is an astonishingly dull and incompetent picture of a man’s hand holding a pen to write a letter. Why this should be thought likely to entice bored shoppers is completely mysterious. But if Tesco can decide the outward appearance, how much longer before it claims the right to what is inside? Will authors soon be treated like British farmers who supply it with milk or meat and be put out of business if they do not do what they are told? Will their books have to include product placement if they are to be stocked at all? Actually, there is one respect in which In Tearing Haste fulfils a Tesco criterion. It offers two (authors) for the price of one.
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