The Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill, currently before Parliament, is often discussed in terms of absolute morality. It can never be right to take a life, says one side. The right to choose extends to the right to choose to die, says the other. I wish more attention focused on a prudential argument about an underlying tendency of human nature. People have a very strong desire for the old to hurry up and die. Sometimes this is straightforward greed for their money and possessions; sometimes the Darwinian impatience of the young to get more power and destroy what is unproductive; sometimes our selfish, though natural, dislike of caring for the decrepit. To guard against these tendencies, civilisations have built up strong taboos which accord old people respect and make children and grandchildren feel that they should look after those who once looked after them: their life is valued precisely because it is fragile. If old people are given the ‘choice’ of assisted death, those taboos will go. Many families will start applying pressure on them to make that choice, just as today they sometimes drive the old into care homes before it is necessary. Oldies who hold out will begin to find themselves considered selfish. The National Health Service will start (actually, it has started already) to regard the old as mere bed-blockers. Choosing to die will become like caesarian childbirth — at first, a procedure used only in extremis, then, the usual course if anything at all threatens to go wrong, finally, the neat and tidy method that bourgeois society feels happiest with. Then assisted death will be viewed as the social duty of the old. The cant term for voluntary euthanasia and assisted death now is ‘dying with dignity’. Behind the concept is an implied threat — you’d better choose to die, because if you don’t, society will make sure that the life you have chosen to prolong has no dignity at all.
Last weekend Venice was filled with carrying voices and tiaras (in one or two cases supervised by representatives of insurance companies) as hordes of mostly English, mostly posh guests descended for a stupendous ball given by Greville and Corty Howard. Greville is a life peer, but in manner and magnificence he is more like something hereditary and 18th-century. A palazzo on the Grand Canal had been taken, a New Orleans jazz band hired, and a seating plan for nearly 500 arranged. Champagne and a delicious drink with a Brazilian name flowed. There was a traffic jam of water taxis dropping the revellers off. Last week these Notes remarked on the fact that, despite being the candidate of the Conservative modernisers, David Cameron is, by background, a completely traditional Tory. I can’t say that the gathering in Venice showed much sign of following the Cameronian dictum of ‘loving this modern country as it is’, but it was certainly dominated by supporters of ‘Dave’. There was the lovely Lady Astor, his mother-in-law, her husband, Lord Astor, a Tory spokesman in the Lords, and Mr Cameron’s delightful father-in-law, Sir Reginald Sheffield, Bt, who is the former president of Scunthorpe United Football Club. The mood of the meeting was definitely in favour of the Cameron candidacy and the atmosphere was made piquant by the presence of the one man whom the ever-courteous moderniser has attacked, Simon Heffer (see 1 October issue). Simon was involved in fierce altercations on the subject. I gather that he was called a ‘viper’ and that, at one point, Sir Reginald fell over (though this incident may have been unrelated). Poor Heffer. You don’t expect to have to defend your version of Tory politics amid flaming torches and swirling dancers in the early hours of a Venetian morning. I could see from the set of his face that Simon was maintaining his position with characteristic tenacity. It all went to confirm my hunch about why the Cameron candidacy is succeeding. For the first time since Mrs Thatcher left the scene, it is a Conservative phenomenon that people find interesting.
My wife and I left the ball on foot, and soon got slightly lost as we searched for the Accademia bridge. In one cul-de-sac, we found ourselves surrounded by about ten Venetian youths, some of whom were shouting and all of whom smelt strongly of illegal weed. In ‘this modern country’ back home, it would have been a nervous situation — my wife in high heels and a full-length dress with earrings and necklace, I in a dinner jacket, both of us trapped in a dark alley — but there all was friendly. I asked directions in bad Italian, and the teenagers gave us the right ones with a slightly satirical ceremony, doffing their baseball caps as we parted.
One of the problems with the last Tory leadership ballot by MPs was that it never found out their preferences when whittled down to a final two. Instead, it stopped at three, and sent the first and second to the party membership on that basis. This meant that the eventual victor, Iain Duncan Smith, never had more than a third of MPs supporting him, and so couldn’t begin to lead. Wouldn’t it be a good idea if, this time, there were a final, final ballot of MPs when they have only two to choose from? Then the grass-roots would know how the parliamentary numbers really stack up. Apparently, the rules are silent on whether such a ballot can take place. The silence should be taken as assent.
At home, I find a little symptom of why ‘this modern country’ of ours can be hard to love — the funny mixture of officiousness and inefficiency in which we specialise. The final demand for my phone bill arrived before the original bill itself.
Mostly when people think of The Spectator they think of words, but there are many who see the words just as the backdrop unfortunately required to show off the cartoons to best advantage. The man most to thank for this is Michael Heath, who is 70 this week but, like his fellow septuagenarian, Nicholas Garland, has Dorian Gray qualities of youthfulness. When I edited this magazine in the 1980s Punch at last began to collapse, and I thought we should try to acquire the sway over cartooning for which it had once been famous, so I pulled Michael (who had anyway been drawing for us from the year after I was born) from the impending wreckage and made him cartoon editor. Ever since, he has looked after what he calls ‘my brother brushes’. One new talent he spotted was that of a boy called Matt.
For no particular reason, a fashionable occasion eventually ceases to be so. Once upon a time, the Booker Prize felt like the happening thing. This week, excited talk of Man Booker sounded like someone saying, ‘Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé.’
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