Charles Moore
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The first and only time I met Adrian Hilton was in late February, when he had just been selected by Slough Conservatives as their candidate. Since then he has been described as a bigot by the Catholic Herald because he supported the Protestant Succession and criticised Catholic power in the EU in this paper two years ago. Because of this he was dismissed as a candidate by Conservative HQ, against Slough’s wishes. Now he has lost a court case when he protested about his treatment. He is therefore no longer a candidate, has had his reputation unjustly trashed, and is £15,000 poorer, all in the space of less than two months. Why does any sane person nowadays want to stand for Parliament?
As a father, I have whatever is the opposite of fellow feeling when politicians start talking about their lovely little babies. There is something arrogant in their implication that they are the first people in human history to have produced a child, showing off in their trumpeting of their tiredness, and hypocritical because, if their children really came first, they would vanish from the public scene. If I believed that I would have to end up paying Charles Kennedy’s local income tax, I should be furious that he was too dozy, following the birth of little Donald, to know what it would cost me. As it is, I simply feel confirmed in my belief that he is a loser. Why do people want a top politician to be ‘a fully paid-up human being’? Any study of the front rank of politics shows that it is not possible — a political leader has to concentrate and work and fight in a way that normal people never would, and must therefore, among other things, neglect his or her children. This doesn’t mean that our leaders should be inhuman or subhuman — they should certainly defer to the importance of human normality and try to do their best for their children — but they should not invite us to admire them for what is, history so often shows, their weakest point. I admired Michael Howard for emphasising that he was not going to spend more time with his grandchildren.
Two things which, if they appear in an article, disincline you to read on: 1) the words ‘I kid you not’; 2) the setting of a (usually unpleasant) scene followed by the phrase ‘Welcome to …’ (insert ‘Tony Blair’s Britain’, ‘free Iraq’, ‘an inner-London comprehensive’, or whatever it is that is upsetting the author). Both devices appeared on the same page of the Times this week.
Because of the election, various Bills were dropped in the parliamentary ‘wash-up’. One that made it to the statute book was the Mental Incapacity Bill, which provides for certain types of euthanasia. I had dinner that night with an MP who had just voted against it. ‘We’ve just voted tonight to be free to starve old ladies to death,’ he said. ‘If any of us did that to a dog, we’d be thrown out of the House of Commons.’ Indeed, but dogs don’t own houses worth hundreds of thousands a year which will pass to their heirs on their death. I have a growing theory that high property prices are the cause of every moral ill in this country.
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