Charles Moore
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Why, by the way, is the clearly disreputable Mr Salmond so effective? It must have something to do with the fact that he looks and even sounds like Shrek, the computer-animated film hero — funny, cunning, grotesque, lovable.
***
As I strolled through Westminster last Thursday on my way to watch Tony Blair’s latest farewell broadcast and comment on it on Channel 4 News, I heard someone calling my name. It was the Environment Secretary, David Miliband. He was just off to speak to the Country Land and Business Association, he said, and his speech would be conciliatory. He had even managed to find these words by Aneurin Bevan, of all people: ‘Where the countryside is neglected, it always takes its revenge. Unless town and country march together in reciprocal activity, civilisation will limp on one foot.’ The fact that Mr Miliband had chosen to make that speech to that audience at that moment finally convinced me that he really is not a candidate for the leadership this time.
***
Up in Sedgefield, in the Trimdon Labour Club from which Mr Blair said goodbye, various tunes were playing as they awaited the departing hero, including ‘Things Can only Get Better’. But whenever Sedgefield is mentioned, I always think of the song that Pigg sings to Jorrocks in Handley Cross. Trying while drunk to ascertain the weather outside, he sticks his head into a cupboard, under the impression it is the window, and reports that it is ‘hellish dark and smells of cheese’. Then he strikes up a song about the prowess of the Lambton family hounds:
Let Uckerby boast of the feats of the Raby,
And Ravenscar tell what the Hurworth have done,
But the wide-spreading pastures of Sadberge can swear to
The brushes our fleet pack of foxhounds have won:
Then that Sedgefield, our country, all countries outvies, sir,
The highest top-sparkling bumper decides,
That we’ve foxes can fly, sir, or sinking must die, sir,
When pressed by the hounds o’er which Lambton presides.
As Mr Blair, speaking like some American preacher, told us that Britain was ‘very blessed’, I had a vision of what the song calls ‘the brave Sedgefield fellows’ once more beside ‘the green waving whins of our coverts’, free at last.
Poor Gordon Brown. The grim seriousness of his ambition for No. 10 is proved by the fact that he is smiling so much. The procedure is clearly painful for him, and he has not yet learned to coordinate the action with his words. But the public demand that our leaders grin is now absolute. Why should this be so? The future Queen Mother, when first engaged to the future King George VI, was rebuked by Queen Mary for smiling at the public. The theory was that to smile was to pretend to acquaintance. I suppose that is still the theory, but now such pretence is admired. But why should leaders smile in public? Did Jesus? We are told only that he wept. Did Mr Gladstone, or General De Gaulle? Smiling in politics only took off with the totalitarian age. Think of the most embarrassing book dedication in history, Henry (Tarka the Otter) Williamson’s ‘To that man across the Rhine, whose symbol is a smiling child’.
***
‘Jack’ Weatherill, the former Speaker of the House of Commons, who died recently, was proved right in his prediction that the televising of Parliament would reduce the rudeness and yobbery of the debates. I am not so sure, though, that this was a good thing. Rudeness and yobbery were by-products of the fact that people felt that the debates in Parliament mattered. In the days before broadcasting, a politician could not make a reputation without impressing his parliamentary colleagues in debate. He did this, in part, by showing he could survive attacks, and attack back. When television came along, the public were disgusted by the bad behaviour, and so the manners improved. But it did not mean that the debates became more thoughtful and constructive. Instead, they ceased to matter, and the real political game started to be played elsewhere. The television cameras have ‘stolen hence the life of the building’.
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