Charles Moore
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The morning after Greece’s debt was given junk status, I rang an English friend who is doing up a house in Corfu. The night before, he told me, he had gone round with his Greek agent to the local ironmonger to inspect a metal table there. The ironmonger’s elderly assistant showed him the table, which he decided he did not want, and then fell into discussion with the agent about something else. My friend’s attention wandered. Suddenly he noticed that the assistant was waving a spanner menacingly under his nose, and shouting ‘Twenty-nine years at sea! I was 29 years at sea!’ So my friend turned to his agent, who was laughing, and said, ‘What on earth did you tell him about me?’ ‘I told him,’ said the agent, ‘that you were Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF, and that you had come to take away his pension.’ Many more Greeks will be waving their spanners soon.
It is said that four out of ten people who will actually vote in this election are over the age of 55. It illustrates how strange the subject matter of modern politics has become that they have hardly been mentioned. Is it too late for a party to notice them?
I once asked a duke how his family had managed to survive the very large death duties they incurred after the war. ‘Well, you know,’ he said, ‘we were very lucky.’ ‘Lucky’ is the word invariably used by grand people when referring to their own wealth. I heard Nick Clegg telling Andrew Marr last Sunday that he was very ‘lucky’ in his upbringing. Thus he proved just how posh and rich he is.
A couple of years ago, Rowan Laxton, the head of the South Asia desk at the Foreign Office, was reported for screaming insults about the Israelis while exercising in the gym of the London Business School. He was suspended from the Foreign Office, but not sacked. (His appeal against a criminal conviction for his words was recently successful.) This week, it was revealed that Steven Mulvain, a member of the four-man Papal Visit team at the Foreign Office, had produced a memo suggesting that the Pope, when he comes to Britain in September, should launch a range of ‘Benedict condoms’, and open an abortion clinic. Mr Mulvain has not been sacked, nor has the more senior official who decided to circulate his memo to 10 Downing Street and other departments for serious consideration. At least two questions arise. The first is: why does the Foreign Office employ people who enjoy mocking and insulting foreigners? Despite all the celebration of ‘diversity’ and the deference to Islamist extremism (what would have happened to Mr Mulvain if he had made jokes about burkas and the sex life of Mohammed?), there seems to be an ignorant hostility about people who do not share the beliefs of those in King Charles Street. It is well known in Whitehall that the department has become demoralised by its loss of money and influence, and the draining of its expertise and language skills because of its politically correct recruitment policy. Now professional pride is disappearing. The Pope’s visit, after all, is a state visit. He is only coming because Britain, as a state, asked him. There are perfectly honourable reasons for opposing the Catholic Church, but the Foreign Office is in charge of state visits, and if it cannot manage the first ever such visit by a Pope to this country (John Paul II’s trip in 1982 was pastoral not state), the entire organisation should be ‘transferred to other duties’. In a way, I suppose, this is what has already happened.
The second question is: does the Foreign Office (or the government) understand what the papal visit means? It probably seems to people like Mr Mulvain and his seniors that the Pope is an establishment figure whom any self-respecting modern person will wish to denigrate. But the history of Catholicism in this country is that, for many hundreds of years, its adherents have been persecuted and, to use the present vogue word, marginalised. Even today, Roman Catholicism is the only religion which our head of state is not permitted to espouse. And now the imposition of human rights law is being used to push Catholics out of education. To people in Liverpool or Glasgow or Birmingham, Mr Mulvain’s memo will not seem like refreshing iconoclasm, but a modern version of the old establishment prejudice against them.
This spring has been the most perfect I can remember — the more exquisite for being late, and for its contrast with politics. Last Saturday, I went for quite a long evening walk, and got everything at once — bluebells, king-cups, my first cuckoo of the season (a special pleasure now that the bird is rarer), and the blackthorn in flower. Looking down on a farmhouse below me, I benefited from a trick of perspective. The hedge of the field above the house appeared to touch its chimney, and the bit which touched it was white with the blackthorn blossom. In the utter stillness, the blossom looked like the smoke of the chimney, painted rather stiffly onto it, as if by a child.
A dear cousin writes to wish me well for my confrontation with the BBC at Hastings Magistrates’ Court on 10 May. Then she turns to the general election: ‘It’s all very depressing,’ she writes, but cheers up: ‘I’ve been doing my bit, blue flowers in church — sometimes it works, once I did a vase of purple lilac, crimson peonies and laburnum in a black bowl, and the Queen won the Oaks!’ I respect her family’s uncommon common sense. Many years ago, her father was patron of the living in his parish. ‘We needed a new parson,’ he said, ‘so we advertised in the Church Times. Couldn’t find anyone. So we advertised in Horse and Hound and got the right man immediately.’
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