Charles Moore
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A man who believed Tony Blair and who, as a result, is out of a job, is David Trimble, Nobel Prize winner and former first minister of Northern Ireland. He deserves to get some pretty good compensation. There is talk of a grand international post dealing with the rights of minorities. No doubt this would suit his talents and expertise, but I still hanker after the idea that Mr Trimble should return to Parliament, this time as a mainland Conservative. Why can’t one of those Tory bed-blockers do a public service and step down to make room for him?
Good news that two men have now been charged in connection with the murder of Robert McCartney. But what about the 14 or so others who played a part in what happened and covered it up? Sinn Fein has offered up only two: it could easily produce all the rest tomorrow if it wanted to.
One reason, we were told, why the Dutch voted ‘No’ last week was their attachment to their own ‘liberal’ customs. These include the right of homosexuals to marry and of people to kill their elderly parents. These causes are presented as enlightened. Try transposing them — the right of people to kill homosexuals and to marry their elderly parents. Would that be more or less enlightened?
Last week the Guardian books section ended the run of a fascinating series called ‘Common ground’, by the young writer and mountaineer Robert Macfarlane. He has been discussing landscape and literature. His tone is excellent — attentive, literary but not over-literary, exact. I hope a book results from his columns. But even Macfarlane illustrates the problem that besets environmentalists — a belief that what is ‘commercial’ in our encounter with nature must be bad. Much of his last column was devoted to an attack on 4 x 4 vehicles (‘the gargoyle of a rampant and acrid form of individualism’). I share the dislike of these machines swooshing pointlessly round cities and suburbs, and of course it is true that they are sometimes abused off-road. But isn’t the Land-Rover, in essence, an impressive example of man’s relationship with the natural world? Farmers, sportsmen, aid workers, quarrymen, Third World doctors, explorers need these strong, adaptable vehicles. If we come to believe that anything technological man does with nature is a violation, bad things will happen. Rural communities will die, so will human knowledge of nature, and so will most of the landscape which we love. The gash cut by the plough — or even by a 4 x 4 — is not necessarily a wound in the earth: it can be the source of its renewal. The ecowarriors’ belief seems to be that no human being should be allowed near the wonders of nature — except, funnily enough, themselves. Yet the reason we have a love of nature inside us is because, from our earliest origins, we have made our living out of it: it is modern anti-commercialism that marks our true alienation from the landscape.
I am looking at a Conservative party membership card. It sets out ‘The benefits of membership’. Top of the list is ‘One member, one vote in the election of the Leader of the party’. Now it looks like the old joke about newly independent African colonies: ‘One man, one vote, once.’
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