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But one must not be nostalgic about the great days of former Speakers. There weren’t many. The late George Thomas was widely admired for his mellifluous tones, but in fact was a toady to the executive (led, through most of his time, by Mrs Thatcher, who duly made this old Labour man a viscount). Once, I had tea with him. ‘Where did you go to school, Charles?’ he asked. ‘Eton,’ I said. ‘Eton, eh? Well, a fellow like you probably spends the evening at his club, so it may surprise you to know that I often spend the evening on my knees.’ For a moment, I thought he was describing some unusual private peccadillo, but then I realised he claimed to be praying all through dinner-time. He was one of the last of those unlamented canting Wesleyans (I have nothing against Wesleyans, by the way, only against the canting ones). He prided himself during his time in the Chair on avoiding calling Roman Catholics who wanted to speak. A Speaker who strongly reasserts the rights of Parliament is an unfamiliar figure. But now, perhaps, his hour has come.
If it is true that all in Northern Ireland now agree that the border can be changed only by consent, it follows that the existing, sectarian political parties there are out of date. David Cameron seems to be the only national party leader to have spotted this. Last week he went to Belfast to top off the negotiations conducted by his colleague Owen Paterson with the Ulster Unionist party. The two parties are not merging, but making an electoral pact. At a show called Cameron Direct in which members of the public came to question him, it was striking that all of them raised questions like rates of income tax, rather than obsessing about the Anglo-Irish Agreement or other past wrongs. In other words, they wanted to take part in ordinary United Kingdom politics. Given the famous fissiparousness of Unionism, there will be many slips ’twixt cup and lip, but the younger generation, no longer minding so much whether they are orange or green, see that there might be advantages in being blue. Few would have thought that a revived ‘Conservative and Unionist’ ticket would be part of the modernising agenda, but it is so.
In last week’s issue, a letter was published from Joanna Richards of TV Licensing. She said that its operations ‘strictly comply with the law’. But a friend who is an Oxford don and has been threatened by TV Licensing tells me that in its letters to him, it stated that it might caution him under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. If you look at the Act, it appears to make no mention of television licensing officers. Code C of the Act does include a section on cautions, but this seems to apply only to questioning people in custody, so one cannot see how it helps a TV Licensing man on one’s doorstep. It also requires ‘reasonable objective grounds for suspicion’. How can the lack of a television licence be considered ‘reasonable objective grounds’ for suspecting that he is breaking the law? TV Licensing is on weak legal ground. Apparently, if its men call, you should say that you will film them as they try to search your premises. Then they go away.
As a former editor of this paper who always tried to uphold consistency of house style, I cannot complain at being so edited last week, but I do wish The Spectator — and most other publications — did not talk about Mumbai instead of Bombay. Dhiren Bhagat, the brilliant young Indian writer, who was killed in a car crash more than 20 years ago, wrote a prophetic piece in this paper in 1986. He said that the move for renaming came from Shiv Sena (Shiva’s Army), a militant movement in the state of Maharashtra which took control of Bombay Municipal Corporation in that year. Its founder, Bal Thackeray, proudly claimed to be a terrorist, and told Bhagat, ‘My real hero is Adolf Hitler: one may perhaps disagree with the final solution, but that is merely arguing over details. Personally I would be of the opinion that we put all the Muslims on a boat and ship them out.’ Shiv Sena’s renaming of the city with what it said was the authentic local name was part of this project. Such hostility to Muslims forms part of the backdrop to the terrible events of last month. There would have been less communal strife if Bombay had kept the name which made it famous. The reason that Western media call it Mumbai is their politically correct tendency to defer to local politicians. Would it give these media pause for thought if they were told that their choice of Mumbai was ‘Islamophobic’?
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