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Although, collectively, MPs have deserved the expenses scandal which has engulfed them, I do feel sorry for the better ones. As a leading MP in his late fifties put it to me this week: ‘I am questioning my sense of vocation.’ The effect is not unlike that of paedophile crimes on the Catholic Church. The scandal was great and it was ‘systemic’, in that the authorities did not confront the abuse, and it had to be exposed. But most priests were not paedophiles, and the furore gave power to self-righteous and unscrupulous people who wanted to denigrate the entire institution. Good priests as well as bad ones felt threatened. So it is with MPs. It is a dreadful thing, particularly as you get older, to start wondering if a career which you thought was honourable is in fact a waste of time. Many of those departing from the House of Commons will be unmourned, but I feel sad about one which has passed almost unnoticed. My friend and former colleague at the Daily Telegraph Paul Goodman is stepping down from his seat at Wycombe. He is not implicated in the expenses scandal in any way, but he feels that public disapproval is so great that MPs will now be turned into slaves of petty rules, and so the whole point of representing the people in parliament will vanish. Paul has already had an excellent influence as one of the very few Tory MPs who understands the problem of Islamism in Britain, and he would have had more scope in the Tory government which is probably coming, so I think he is making a mistake. But the fact that he thinks as he does suggests that things will get worse before they get better.
There is a great deal of ‘yielding to no one’ in one’s detestation of the BNP after the party’s success in the European elections, but actually the Labour party has been extremely indulgent to Islamist groups whose racism is equal to that of the BNP and whose support for violence is much greater. This is about to get worse. The resignation of the Communities Secretary, Hazel Blears, means that the government has lost one of the most robust critics of engagement with extremists who support suicide-bombing in the Middle East, anti-semitism, the killing of homosexuals, and so on. She has been replaced by John Denham, who is much more placatory towards the extremists, and Mr Denham has now been joined by Shahid Malik. Three weeks ago, Mr Malik was out of office because of Daily Telegraph reporting of his housing arrangements. Now he has been cleared of any breach of the ministerial code, though Mr Brown is preventing us from seeing the official report on the subject. Will Mr Denham and he maintain Hazel Blears’s refusal to treat with the Muslim Council of Britain unless it distances itself absolutely from extremism? Or is their joint appointment an effort to grab the Muslim vote at any price?
A correspondent, Richard Munday, tells me what happened, nearly 100 years ago, when MPs first voted to pay themselves a salary which, interesting to note, was presented as an ‘allowance’. It was tacked on to the Parliament Bill of 1911 which gave the Commons untrammelled power over public finance. One opponent, called Sandys, put it thus: ‘Look at the man who is entirely dependent upon his £400 a year… Is a man like that going to risk his seat and his salary by giving an unpopular vote?… not only will this tend to increase the despotic power of party organisation, but in the end it must… tend to lower the standard of public life in this country.’ Can anyone say that he was wrong?
Last week, I attended a memorial meeting for Sir Nicholas Henderson. Nicko was not religious. For such people, meetings are much better than memorial services and this one, held in the auction room at Sotheby’s, was just right. Lord Carrington spoke charmingly and vigorously, despite being 90 later in the week. So did Tom Stoppard. He made much of Nicko’s physical presence — the large collar that strayed over the lapel of the suit, the unruly white hair, the elegant angle at which he stood. This was right. One’s friends are not disembodied. Their physical presence is a great part of what stays in the memory, and their physical absence is one of the saddest things about death.
My wife, who has a moth-trap which releases moths after inspection (no animals were injured or killed in the making of this column), was recently the first person in Sussex to record the presence of the rare Rannoch Looper in our county. It almost certainly came from the Continent, but before anyone shouts ‘climate change’, the Rannoch Looper, as its name suggests, is happy with the chill of the Scottish Highlands, where it likes to feed on bilberries, so we do not know what meteorological vagary brought it to us. No sooner did Caroline report it than sightings by local moth-eaten enthusiasts followed. So far, it is only a transitory migrant, but our Looper has laid eggs near our blueberry plant, and so, defying the BNP, we hope to create an ‘alien wedge’ in our English garden.
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