I t is generally agreed that David Cameron, this magazine’s candidate
for the Conservative leadership, did a good job against Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight last week. His skill was to bring out something which is more and more striking about national television political interviewing, particularly on the BBC — its sheer weirdness. I notice this myself when I broadcast for a foreign company — Irish radio, say, or an American channel compared with doing it for the BBC big beasts. The underlying, courteous assumption behind the foreign interviews is that you are relatively truthful and the purpose is to elicit your views clearly on behalf of the listeners/viewers. With the BBC, the assumption is quite different: it is that you are automatically suspect, and that you have been asked on to be exposed or ridiculed. This applies with knobs on to interviews with politicians. Catching them out is seen as the only sport, and since this has become harder to do on policy issues, because they have learnt caution, you have to ambush them with surprising facts or, as Paxman did with Cameron, the semi-obscene names of cocktails. Paxo looked and sounded like an ageing voluptuary, so jaded with the ordinary dishes of the table or the customary habits of the bedroom that he must be supplied with something ever more exotic or kinky. The viewer, on the other hand, wants things straight. Clever of Cameron to play on this. BBC interviews are going to have to change.
Cameron was also clever in his answer to the God question. Paxman asked him, lip curling at the very idea, whether he talked to God. Cameron replied that he believed in God, that he went to church, more often than Christmas and Easter, though ‘perhaps not as much as I should’, but that he didn’t have ‘a direct line’ to the Almighty. It was the perfect Anglican answer, and will have been appreciated as such by the constituency to whom, in these weeks, he is trying to appeal.
Sad to say, no such studied moderation seems to be able to heal the split in the Anglican Communion about homosexual clergy. But the potential schism does contain an amusing historical irony. It is essentially an ethnic and geographical split. White Western bishops tend to be in favour of gay ordination, black African ones to be opposed. The irony lies in the fact that the whites who are trying to push gay ordination are the people who would be most horrified at the idea of acting in an oppressive, colonial manner. Yet that is what, in African eyes, they are doing. Until now, the black Anglican Churches have stayed much more deferential towards white leadership than have their secular, governmental equivalents. As they find what they regard as their determination to stand up for their faith scorned by people who regard them as savages, they are becoming more militant. Strange if this cause turns out to mark a moment of black Christian emancipation.
The more I think about Sir Christopher Meyer’s memoirs, the more wretched does his behaviour seem. As well as the injury done to his diplomatic colleagues and to the British politicians about whom he is unkind, there is the damage to our dealings with American administrations. The value of the ‘special relationship’ is much disputed, but it has meant that the degree of trust, and therefore of information shared between the two governments, has been unique. How much will future Secretaries of State confide in HM’s Ambassador if they can expect a year or two later to read it in the Daily Mail? Sir Christopher also exculpates himself over the conflict with his role as chairman of the Press Complaints Commission by saying that those who appointed him knew about his memoirs in advance. Why does that make it better? It suggests something worse — that his job made it easier for him to get his serialisation deals. Two months ago, this column noted the tendency of media reports of disasters to settle on an over-large, unsubstantiated figure for the number of dead, and then to pass on, leaving it uncorrected. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, the figure touted was 10,000. I have just checked the latest statistics. There are 1,306 recorded dead. There are also 6,644 people unaccounted for, but the National Center for Missing Adults in the USA is confident that a majority of these are alive. It seems a reasonable guess that the final total will be below 3,000, perhaps below 2,000. Bad enough — but ought there not be more attention paid when figures are exaggerated by four or five times?
‘ he frost performs its secret ministry,/ TUnhelped by any wind,’ wrote Coleridge. So has it been this last week in Sussex. Something about such weather, perhaps the clarity and stillness which send the smoke from fires straight upwards in neat plumes, provokes thought which slides unchecked from one subject to another. You see this pleasant meandering in what William Cowper calls the ‘argument’ of the fifth book of his poem The Task, entitled ‘The Winter Morning Walk’. Here is some of it, as printed: ‘A frosty morning — The foddering of cattle — The woodman and his dog The poultry — Whimsical effects of frost at a waterfall — The Empress of Russia’s palace of ice — Amusements of monarchs — War, one of them — Wars, whence — And whence monarchy — The evils of it English and French loyalty contrasted ...’ and so on. One truth about lovely weather is that it can be enjoyed absolutely without prejudice to one’s pleasure in completely different weather. Coleridge captures this, addressing the poem to his infant son, who, he hopes, will benefit from country life:
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness ...
Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them [the ‘eave-drops’] up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
All that quiet shining can be dangerous, though. In the middle of this frost I walked upstairs and smelt burning rubber. I traced it to our daughter’s bedroom. The winter sun was so strong that it had shone through a crystal paperweight on her desk by the window and, thus magnified, set fire to the band of her head-torch that happened to be lying next to it. It would have been odd if the coldest day of the year had burnt us down.
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