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Tony Blair recently let it be known that when he leaves office he does not want to become a member of the House of Lords. ‘It’s not my style,’ he said. This was an interesting reflection on the cynicism of the man who has created more peers than any other prime minister — a case of ‘Le patron ne mange pas ici.’ But a further point occurs. Under the goody-goody rules which Mr Blair’s own government has invented, peers now have to register their interests in the same detail as MPs. If, as this column keeps arguing, Mr Blair’s main preoccupation after his resignation will be to pay off his nearly £4 million mortgages, he will not want to be made to publish the source of his earnings.
We must all be nice about Norman Kember, the ‘peace activist’ rescued from captivity in Iraq by the SAS. He has had a terrible ordeal in his months of imprisonment by the Sword of Righteousness Brigade. Any feelings of anger one might have about his adventure should therefore, I feel, be transferred to the minister of Mr Kember’s Baptist Church in Harrow, the Revd Bob Gardiner. When the newly released Mr Kember attended a service there last Sunday, Mr Gardiner sought to justify the Kember mission to Iraq, saying, ‘The Gospel makes us all take absolutely irresponsible risks for the Kingdom.’ I suppose this is the smug, low-church equivalent of the famous line in the Beyond the Fringe sketch about the Battle of Britain: ‘We need a futile gesture at this stage.’ Mr Gardiner is a leader of the Sword of Self-Righteousness Brigade. Would it be an ‘absolutely irresponsible risk for the Kingdom’ to go and punch him lightly on the nose?
It has been reported that the gang who held Mr Kember and his colleagues hostage (and murdered one of their number) were not religiously motivated but wanted money. The two can go together. From the beginnings of Muslim history, ransoming prisoners was a religiously approved way of bargaining. For example, the respected jurist al-Mawardi (974–1058), in his Ordinances of Government, has a section on ‘Dividing the war spoils’, which authorises ransom, along with enslavement, as things that can be done to infidel prisoners, citing Koranic verses in support of his argument. So Mr Kember’s kidnappers may well have been pious as well as greedy.
Last week I was talking to a country neighbour who lived in London until about ten years ago but now goes there infrequently. What she notices when she does is that ‘everyone wears black’. This is not, chiefly, the dark suits of traditional office workers, or even the larger number of women wearing varieties of Muslim garb. It is a sort of casual uniform of black trousers for both sexes, often a black jacket of different material and sometimes even a black shirt. The overall effect is depressing. Wearing colour seems to mark you out as unserious, unwaged or from out of town.
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