O ur children recently went to the stage version of Billy
Elliot and, like most, loved it. I am sure it is an inspiring tale about aspiration, disadvantage and dancing. But the politics.... The miners, striking for a year in 1984–85, sing ‘Solidarity solidarity/ Solidarity forever’ while their police antagonists sing: ‘Keep it up till Christmas, lads,/ It means a lot to us/ We send our kids to private school. On a private bus.’ Were there really many rank-and-file policemen at that time who could afford to send their children to private school, even with the overtime? And where was the solidarity in a strike which was imposed on members of the union without a ballot? The careers of people like Elton John, who did the music, Stephen Daldry, who directed, and Lee Hall, who wrote those lyrics, have benefited enormously from the prosperity ushered in by the defeat of Arthur Scargill and other union bosses. The audiences jeer as a 20ft puppet representing Mrs Thatcher flies above the stage while the chorus sings ‘Merry Xmas Maggie Thatcher/ We all celebrate today/ ’Cos it’s one day closer to your death’. Margaret Thatcher will be 80 next month. I know we’ve had 25 years of licensed hatred of her, but the nastiness of it still shocks. The chorus also sings: ‘O my darling, O my darling/ O my darling Heseltine/ You’re a tosser you’re a w—–er/ And you’re just a Tory swine’. Comfort, after all, for the more unforgiving Thatcherites.
The man the BBC called the ‘hugely respected’ Muslim leader Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, hero of Ken Livingstone, has just clarified his position on suicide bombers in Palestine and Iraq. He denies that suicide bombing is ‘a legitimate right’, because ‘a right is something that can be relinquished’. It is much more. ‘It is a duty,’ he told a conference in Egypt. Qaradawi seems to be saying that the only good Muslim is a dead one. Mr Livingstone, meanwhile, suggests that Qaradawi’s cause is like that of Nelson Mandela. Qaradawi’s view on the London bombers, by the way, is that they were ‘misguided’. ‘They have gone astray,’ he explains, ‘so we want to treat them in a way that will set them straight.’ It’s a nice idea, but unfortunately they are dead.
In last week’s Spectator, Simon Heffer drew attention to the threat to shooting from this government. He is right, but he may be wrong to suggest that supporters of shooting should resist all criticism. What was extraordinary about the hunting ban was that it deliberately defied all evidence. Although there is no case for banning shooting, there is a case against some of its practices. The problem is numbers. Unlike hunting, a great deal of shooting is commercial: there is more money to be made if you produce more birds. This tempts the greedy to rear too many in too small a space, making disease and discomfort more likely and turning the woods in which the birds are released into monocultural muddy messes where other wildlife cannot flourish. In hunting, self-regulation worked pretty well because hunts, being mostly collective affairs, could be inspected by hunting’s national authorities and punished. Shoots are far more numerous and individual and therefore hard to police. In general — and I write as someone who enjoys shooting — shoots lack the romantic element which wins so much public support for hunting. The sport is quite vulnerable politically. Hunting lost the legislative battle. To avoid a similar fate (more likely through regulatory strangulation than a total ban) shooting needs to be very determined, but also wily and flexible.
At the last election the Conservatives pledged to allow government time for a government Bill repealing the hunting ban, the only way of ensuring the sport’s restoration. As the new leadership contest approaches, it would be interesting to know if all the candidates remain committed to this. But perhaps it is irrelevant, since members of the Conservative party seem to be the only group in this century facing the removal of their established democratic rights.
Two words to avoid, often used in marketing. ‘Ask’ as a noun (‘It’s a big ask’). ‘Learnings’, as in ‘What are our learnings from this focus group?’ ‘Request’ does for the first and ‘lessons’ for the second.
It has been good to read so many obituaries and columns following the death of Maurice Cowling, the sage of Peterhouse. One of the best services journalism can perform is to tell readers about someone few of them will have heard of and explain why he mattered. But there are one or two things to add. The first is that, because of a slight squint and his astonishingly arched eyebrows, Maurice had an air of amused wickedness which made him immediately attractive. And like Isaiah Berlin, his manner of speaking inspired a whole generation of more or less unconscious imitators. Another is that his famous Machiavellianism was ineffective: it was Maurice who intrigued to get Hugh Trevor-Roper made Master of his college and then spent the rest of his life regretting it. But in his work, Cowling was not the advocate of a cynical pragmatism which most writers have made him out to be. If his sole point had been to show that politics bore no relation to ideas, he would not have devoted so many years and three volumes to Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England. What Maurice disliked was the notion prevalent in liberalism, he thought — that the enlightened mind could rise to a lofty, unprejudiced eminence from which it could impartially survey mankind. He saw prejudice as inevitable and not necessarily bad, and he attacked liberals not for being prejudiced, but for being blind to their prejudices. Inherent metaphysical positions, Maurice believed, could not be escaped. The most important thing to ask of someone was ‘What’s his religion?’ and the question would be just as pertinent, in his view, if it were asked of an atheist as of a believer. Although I was in Whiggish Trinity, not Tory Peterhouse, I wrote a dissertation about Gladstone and the Church for Maurice Cowling, and found him a wonderful teacher. He was often playfully insulting to pupils — ‘You’re a Whig’, ‘You solemn goose!’, ‘Ah, the Devil Incarnate!’ — but he spoke to us like grown-ups, as if our ideas meant something, or at least might come to mean something. As a result, though Maurice never sought disciples, he found them.
Abottle of shampoo I bought says ‘Depleted, mature hair’. The two adjectives represent a failed compromise between euphemism and truth. The line below says ‘Becoming thin’, assuring victory for truth.
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