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On Tuesday night, Daniel Hannan MEP was expelled from the federalist European People’s Party — which includes the Tories as uneasy bedfellows — accused of wanting a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and of calling the Speaker of the European Parliament a Nazi. What Hannan actually said was that the Speaker was ‘a decent and democratic man’, but that his decision to ignore the Parliament’s own rules to prevent further protest against the failure to hold a referendum called to mind the Enabling Act in the Reichstag in 1933. Funnily enough, before Hannan had delivered his wicked remark, two group leaders made speeches comparing the pro-referendum protestors’ interventions to the tactics of Adolf Hitler and/or Nazi members of the Reichstag. Neither was disciplined, of course. Anyway, Hannan is now a happy man, since he has fulfilled his party’s promise to break with the EPP. That promise was made by David Cameron, and there are signs that he is belatedly moving towards fulfilling it. Within 18 months, one suspects, Hannan will not be sitting alone.
One of the melancholy things about being a journalist is the awareness that everything one does is forgotten. But there are one or two of our trade who are so distinctive that they are exempt from the rule. Auberon Waugh is top of this small class. Whenever something grotesque or horrible or pharisaical happens — i.e. every single day — I find myself wishing that Bron were here to comment on it. What would he have said, for example, about the latest shootings of fellow students in the United States (on this occasion, at Northern Illinois University)? Most of us (see previous Notes) drone on about ‘America’s love affair with the gun’. Bron, I feel, would have preferred to ask what it is about American higher education which drives people to homicide.
Not that the British version is better. When I was a student, one used to bump into American contemporaries who would say things like, ‘Oh yes, we have done Thomas Hardy [or whoever]’. This would turn out to mean that they had read short set passages from one or two of Hardy’s novels and then answered a few ‘multiple choice’ questions about them. They had never read the whole book. At the time, we looked down our noses at this form of study, but today it seems commonplace in Britain (except that Hardy is probably too long dead and too indisputably white and male even to merit extracts). The latest news is that oral examinations in foreign languages are to be dropped from GCSE because they are ‘too stressful’. Why is it that a society which fills its public rhetoric with the importance of education has developed such a hatred of actually learning anything? No — as Bron Waugh might have said — I am not suggesting we should shoot all those involved, but the thought is somehow consoling.
T.E. Utley is another journalist whose influence extends far beyond his life. Because of the second-to-last-ditch reluctance of Lord Hartwell’s Daily Telegraph to give anyone a column, Peter (as he was always called) was not as well known to the public as Auberon Waugh, but he had a huge effect through his Telegraph leading articles, and through his conversation and friendship with the young. Peter Utley was blind and liked sitting in the pub, and his was the special sort of wisdom which immobility and not being in a hurry can bring. He had a Dr Johnson Toryism — Anglican, funny, wholly English, independent — but without any of Johnson’s awkwardness. His company was an education — the more so because it never presented itself as such. When Peter died 20 years ago, a fund was set up in his memory, and this year it offers a prize of £5,000, open to undergraduates at any British university who submit an essay of not more than 5,000 words on ‘Will the United Kingdom still be united in ten years’ time? And should it?’ The judges include Michael Gove MP, Tom Utley of the Daily Mail (yes, son of T.E.), Andrew Gimson of the Daily Telegraph and myself. Entries should be sent to the T.E. Utley Memorial Fund, 111 Sugden Road, London SW11 5ED, or emailed to ginda.utley@btinternet.com by Friday 16 May.
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