On Monday I attended a party at the Carlton Club for a new book about the Conservative Research Department, now 80 years old. Traditionally, this would have been a dusty occasion: the Research Department has almost prided itself on its separation from the vulgar worlds of media and power. But it was all rather glamorous. The fact is that, for the first time ever, its alumni have taken control of the Tory high command. George Osborne and Oliver Letwin began political life there; so did Cameron’s closest assistants, Steve Hilton, Ed Llewellyn and Kate Fall; and so did David Cameron himself. As Andrew Gimson discusses on page 19, Mr Cameron is the first CRD product ever to have led the Tory party. He spoke, revealing that when he worked there in the late Eighties and early Nineties, he conducted espionage on Labour extremism, joining groups like Militant Tendency and Red Wedge under the pseudonym of Robin Norse (or North, I couldn’t quite hear). What does this CRD takeover signify? Not, surely, a return of Heathites and Wets, which is what Mrs Thatcher thought the Research Department represented in her early days as leader. Not, in fact, an ideology at all, more the attitudes which stem from such a background. The bad things include: too much interest in politics, a lack of adventurousness, an absence of visceral feeling. The good things include: knowing policy very well, knowing one another very well, being highly intelligent. In short, the advantages and disadvantages of professionalisation. I do not think professionalisation is the answer to our ills, but it is undoubtedly better than amateurism.
One reason to be uneasy about the habit of governmental apology for past wrongs — the transporting of British orphans and poor children to Australia is the latest — is that the apology is only made when it is considered easy. And it is only considered easy when the politicians making it feel confident that they cannot themselves be blamed for the wrongs for which they apologise. They are not, therefore, truly apologising, but blaming their predecessors from a safe distance. When you say sorry about the Irish potato famine, the slave trade, or whatever, you create a useful gap between yourself and the past. Nothing like that could happen today, you imply: we are much more enlightened. Yet we can be certain that our grandchildren will arraign us for evils we have committed, and will express amazement that we barely noticed them at the time. Abortion is a possible example, so is our desire to kill old people, so is our obsession with farming out our children to crèches at ever-younger ages. But I suspect that the biggest example of all will be something in which we tend to take positive moral pride. When you look at the waiting lists, the squalor of Accident and Emergency, the neglect of basic nursing in favour of pseudo-academic training, the fact that hospital food is not served to elderly patients in a way in which it can be eaten, and the killing of hundreds of patients by diseases incubated in slovenly hospitals, we shall at last come to see that the worst public enterprise over which government in our time presided was known as the National Health Service.
This moral blindness which allows us to look down our noses at the past is what has irritated me so much about Andrew Marr’s BBC series on the history of modern Britain from 1900 to 1945 (still in progress). Reviewing the first part elsewhere, I noted that Edwardians were judged by how well they accorded with Marr’s progressive goals. It has been the same in subsequent parts. Mobs are bad if they beat up suffragettes, but good if they call for the death of Lord Devonport, chairman of the Port of London. Marr bears a grudge against the aristocracy, and feels he can openly express prejudice against them. ‘They were about to get the shock of their titled little lives,’ he gloated, over the row over the ‘People’s Budget’. Imagine the fuss if he similarly mocked, say, homosexuals (‘They were about to break into a queeny hissy-fit’). Marr says that the rejection of the Budget was ‘an act of suicidal stupidity’. It is an article of faith with people like Marr that conservatives are stupid, but the arguments against the Budget were not. Lord Curzon quoted Gibbon to show how the appetite for taxing the people was whetted by the moderate imposts of Augustus, and grew into the rapacity of Caracalla, who ‘crushed alike every part of the Empire under the weight of his iron sceptre’. Lord Lansdowne reminded his fellow peers that Cromwell had warned of anything which would create ‘an omnipotent House of Commons — the horridest arbitrariness of anything that ever existed in the world’. As we look at the state of our constitution and our public finances 100 years later, can we be sure they were completely wrong? How about a collective apology to the hereditary peerage?
In his recent memoir, Nicky Haslam records travelling from the United States to Mexico, and says: ‘I wondered why it is that the south of countries is invariably warmer than the north of the ones directly below them.’ He is right (only in the northern hemisphere, obviously). What is the answer to this mystery?
It is hard to fight the war in Afghanistan because the bodies come home. Throughout Britain’s history as a global power, this was not the case. Corners of hundreds of foreign fields became ‘forever England’. The Falklands war was the first in which it became technically feasible to repatriate our dead, and even then some families, notably that of Colonel H. Jones VC, opted to leave them in the graves near where they fell. Now, I believe, all the bodies come home. This creates an ‘optic’ which, as the Americans first experienced in Vietnam on a far greater scale, can damage morale. It is understandable that most families want their dead to come and lie near them. But there is something brave about those uniform British graves all over the world — so well kept, so eloquent.
We spent last week in South Uist, engaged in various forms of field sport, outdoors for more than the hours of daylight. Although we had a couple of days of weird and beautiful stillness, the Hebrides, particularly in November, are more notable for wind and rain, sweeping unbroken from the vast Atlantic. Duck-flighting as darkness fell, one felt as if the elements of earth, air and water had all merged. After getting home, I went hunting across the flat expanse of Romney Marsh on the day of the big storm. Our Master fell from his horse, blown off, he claimed, by the wind. The horses leapt about as rain almost as painful as needles lanced us horizontally. It was all wonderful. The way to deal with ‘bad’ weather is to be out in it.
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