T here is a yet another plan to reform the House
of Lords, getting rid of lots of life peers, proposing partial direct election and, as always with these ideas, the fuller representation of ethnic minorities. Commentators and politicians may be tempted to look at these plans ‘on their merits’ and go through them minutely. This is a waste of time. All Lords reform talk is mere displacement activity to avoid facing the far more serious parliamentary problem that the House of Commons does not work any more. No political party will address this, because all, once in office, prefer it that way.
This column recently commented on the boredom and pointlessness of the process by which everyone working in any way with children must now undergo checks by the Criminal Records Bureau. Now a freedomloving organisation called the Manifesto Club has produced a report showing exactly how boring and how pointless. By 2005–06 the number of CRB checks per year had almost doubled from its start in 2002–03 to 2,772,929. As the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill heads to the statute book, the report predicts that a third of the British population will be checked. You have to go through the process if you are a cricket umpire, a plumber who checks school radiators, a secretary in a hospital, a teenager present while his parent is minding a young child, a private tutor or a grandmother who volunteers in schools. This costs money (£250,000 a year for the Scout Association) and often delays the time at which the worker can start. It breeds suspicion of adults by children, and it makes organisations slovenly about scrutinising candidates for posts because they are bogged down in the bureaucracy of compliance. Perhaps worst of all, it gradually cripples voluntary work because the volunteers cannot bear the aggravation and the implied insult. If it is true that ‘There is such a thing as society, but it is not the same as the state’, then the state must not persecute that society with accusation and regulation. The ‘little platoons’ will not survive if they are frogmarched off to boot camp. The logic of the new regulations is inexorable — the only remaining group of people working with children who are not yet vetted are parents. How long before the state vets their criminal records and, when these are found wanting, forbids them to breed, or takes their children into care?
Two severe blows have recently been struck at Annabel’s, the nightclub in Berkeley Square. The first is in David Blunkett’s newly published diaries (The Blunkett Tapes). Mr Blunkett went to dinner there and met a girl called Sally Anderson, who later got him into some trouble, falsely alleging that she had had an affair with him and had miscarried his baby. Mr Blunkett describes Annabel’s as ‘a trendy nightspot which had been the favourite haunt of John Selwyn Gummer, Virginia Bottomley and many other Cabinet ministers years before’. Mr Blunkett is obviously trying, rather desperately, to hint that Tories, too, do silly things in nightclubs, but the collateral damage to Annabel’s is grave. Obviously, it cannot be ‘trendy’, or otherwise alluring, if haunted by John Selwyn Gummer and Virginia Bottomley. I am not a member of Annabel’s, but on the occasions when I have been there it has always seemed to me to be extraordinarily well run and completely free of John Selwyn Gummer, Virginia Bottomley and David Blunkett. This leads me to the second blow. It has recently emerged that Mark Birley, the founder of Annabel’s, has fallen out with his son Robin, who was running the club (and the other clubs, Harry’s Bar, George and Mark’s) and disinherited him. This is a disaster. These clubs are almost the only English-owned ones in London, and Robin has looked after them brilliantly. Mark Birley is too old to run them himself. If they pass out of the family they will become just another business, and the élan which Mark created and Robin continued will disappear.
Not long after Alfred Sherman (see The Spectator’s Notes, 2 September), Ralph Harris has died. The two provide an absolute contrast in how ideas can successfully be injected into politics. Where Alfred was relentless, fierce, seeing conspiracy everywhere, Harris was open, amused, genial. He had the rather innocent character often to be found among people who believe in free markets. He understood that his Institute of Economic Affairs which he ran with Arthur Seldon would lose its capacity to think straight if it tried to get involved in hard politics. Instead, it provided a place where people who cherished economic liberty could publish, talk and eat. Almost all reform that eventually happened under Mrs Thatcher small things like getting rid of the opticians’ monopoly; big things like ‘monetarism’ or removing the legal immunities of trade unions — were floated by the IEA when most people thought them mad. With his moustache and his silly hats and pipes and endless jokes, Ralph Harris resembled an Edwardian prankster, but he was perfectly serious. He achieved more in politics than all but about three politicians of the past 40 years.
Anne Ridley, who also died last week, was one of the last generation of educated women (which includes the Queen) who did not go to school, much less university. Other than a fortnight at a convent, she was tutored at home in every usual subject except maths. Partly as a result, she was astonishingly wellread and had the sort of direct intelligence that education so often fuzzes up. She also produced four brilliant children, including Matt, a frequent contributor to these pages, who survived a formal education to write so lucidly on evolution, the genome, etc. As public educational theory gets worse and worse, I feel that Anne’s form of learning is the way of the future.
One story that Anne Ridley told me always stayed with me. In the late 1930s her father, Roger Lumley, the future Lord Scarborough, was governor of Bombay. A local maharajah invited the family out on a hunt for blackbuck, and soon Anne and her sister found themselves with their nanny on the cream leather seats of an open-topped Rolls-Royce bouncing along off-road. Anne was wearing a new coat from Jaeger. In the front seat was a cheetah wearing a muzzle. When they got close enough to the game, the cheetah, unmuzzled, rushed off and killed the blackbuck. His keeper brought him back to the car and returned him to the front seat. At this point, the cheetah suddenly turned round to reveal a face covered in the blood of the blackbuck. Nanny was horrified, because the blood dripped on to the new Jaeger coat. Every single detail of this story belongs to an unimaginably distant age.
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