Poor Nick Clegg keeps trying to change the constitution and keeps being balked (the Alternative Vote, Lords reform). At last, he believes, he will be able to fulfil his ambition to force the first-born child, of either sex, to ascend to the throne, and to be able to marry a Roman Catholic (though not, oddly, to be a Roman Catholic if she/he does actually become queen/king). Perhaps he is carried away by being married to the lovely, fascinating, Catholic Miriam, and is horrified that members of the royal family are deprived of such joys. This speaks well for his ardour. But surely the best constitutional changes of the past 350 years have been those which increased the power of Parliament at the expense of the executive. Mr Clegg wants his Bill, which involves amending eight separate Acts of Parliament, to be rushed through in a single day. Hot-headed with love for Miriam, like Henry VIII for Anne Boleyn, he is careless of our liberties.
Lord Strathclyde has resigned as Leader of the Lords. He is only 52, still 18 years younger than the average age of his party in his House, but is the longest-serving member of the entire Conservative front bench, having sat on it since 1988. He would not boast about it — or even admit it — but it is probably thanks to him that Mr Clegg’s dreams of Lords reform withered. He should be thanked, rather as John Howard, in Australia, should be thanked for stalling the move to make his country a republic. It is not that the existing system is so wonderful, but that supporters of reform are so self-righteous that they never bother to think through plans that could command consent. When history is studied, it will also show Strathclyde counselled David Cameron against forming a coalition in 2010. Form a minority government, he said, and call another election in six months. It was not popular advice at the time — I was one of many who argued for coalition — but Strathclyde is used to taking a long view. There is a good case that he was right.
There will be a big ‘March for All’ rally in Paris on Sunday. It is a challenge to the French government’s slogan which describes its proposals for gay marriage as ‘Marriage for All’. The marchers want marriage to remain between one man and one woman only. The issue has been inflamed by the education minister, Vincent Peillon, who has told education officials to report any ‘anti-gay’ views in state schools and ordered Catholic schools to stay neutral on the issue. The French republic’s long-standing ‘laicité’ is being interpreted to mean that support for traditional marriage is unconstitutional if expressed in public institutions. Could the same thing happen here? In formal terms, no: our constitution is different. But in practice, yes. The doctrine of ‘equality’ will carry all before it. By the way, supporters of gay marriage in France are also dissatisfied with the new legislation. They protest that there will be no provision for artificial insemination of married lesbians by sperm donor at the expense of the state, and so equality will not have been achieved. A belief in imposing equality in human affairs leads, unchecked, to totalitarian madness. You would think they would remember that, in France.
In November, this column mentioned the poignant lives of Tony Blair’s real grandparents, Jimmy Lynton and Celia Ridgeway, actors who gave up their son for fostering, and so never met their eventually famous grandson. Thanks to a kind reader, Roger Mills, I have now seen one of Jimmy Lynton’s chatty columns for World’s Fair, the magazine of the amusements industry. It was called ‘Portables and Fit-ups’, and chiefly concerned memories of music hall and other ‘artistes who were on the stage years ago’. Mr Mills also sent me Lynton’s obituary in World’s Fair, from 1970. He began his career on the stage, it states, with Professor O’Dell’s Royal Juvenile Pierrots, aged five, and afterwards joined another troupe called Parke’s Eton Boys. Later he ‘played Dame in pantomime’ and ‘ran his own Royal Repertory Players, appearing before Royalty’. He ‘presented escapology and mind-reading’. Then he toured with a fit-up cinema, where he met Celia; and during the war, he was manager of five London cinemas, all of which were destroyed by enemy action. He went off to run the Palace Cinema, Swindon. One feels that his whole career descended lineally from the Crummles troupe in Nicholas Nickleby, and that he would have been proud of his grandson for keeping this thespian tradition alive.
The Met Office has been forced to revise its forecast of global warming up to 2017 downwards, to the point where it does not really think there will be any (though it does not put it like that). This reminds me of forecasts about a return to growth by the Office for Budget Responsibility, or, actually, almost any forecasts. They rarely give up on the trend which their authors wish to believe in: they merely postpone it. This suggests that forecasts are of more interest to historians than to futurologists. They tell you the state of institutional anxieties at the time they were uttered, not what will eventuate.
Recently, I realised that I know at least nine women, all in their fifties, who have cancer, most of them breast cancer. I know only two men in their fifties who currently have cancer. I do not remember anything like the same frequency among my parents’ generation of women friends in their fifties. Was diagnosis worse, were people were more reticent about the illness, or is it mere chance? When I was a teenager, it was heart disease which attacked people in their fifties, mainly men who ate, smoked and drank too much. I have not heard that any ‘lifestyle choice’ is causing women to get the illness, and I am reluctant to believe the self-flagellating idea that worrying about cancer gives you cancer. Are there any modern factors which could cause more women to get cancer than in the past? One popular theory is that it all comes from plastic shopping bags. If true, this proves that men still do not do their share of domestic chores.
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