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In praise of those on whom reality has too weak a grasp
There are lies, damn lies and then there are those people who simply have a weak grasp on reality. Lies and bare-faced liars are interesting, of course, and it is quite thrilling, in a prurient way, to watch someone tell shameless lies, as Bill Clinton did.
But there is something even more intriguing, in the human bestiary, about that large group of people who appear to have a weak sense of reality. For them, the boundary between lies and truth, between fact and fantasy, seems to be blurred by the blinding power of their own wishes.
Yet they don't seem irrational, or obviously dotty, or stupid. They always have explanations, often very clever ones. Quite often it is clear that they know they were lying. But what's odd about them is that it seems as though they really believe, some or most of the time, what suits them - they have a weak grasp on reality, or perhaps it is that reality has a weak grasp on them.
There are enormous numbers of people who fall into this group. Included without a doubt must be all unreconstructed socialists, whose lack of understanding of reality is tragic, and several members of the present Cabinet, in whose case it is more often comical.
The same could be said for much of the Conservative Party: this is an affliction to which politicians are particularly prone. But I am trying hard not to think about politics, to avoid weakening my own rather intermittent grasp on reality, and I am now trying to stop thinking about Lord Archer, who inspired these thoughts.
It was a tremendous shock to me, as a child, that there were people who actually believed their own lies. It was an even worse shock to me, as a teenager, to find that I was one of them.
Once, as a student, I borrowed a bicycle from a girl in my college, and promptly forgot where I had left it. A few hours of anxiety were followed by several days of refusing to think about the problem; and, by the time the bicycle must certainly have been stolen, the girl demanded it back.
I had to admit that I hadn't got it, but that I had left it - and then I made up an inexcusable lie - I had left it on King's Parade. Bad enough. Worse still was to find myself soon afterwards on King's Parade, by myself, actually looking for it. As if it ought to have been there. And, for a moment, I was genuinely surprised at not being able to find it.
It is true that, at the time, a lot of students had their fix on reality regularly skewed by drugs, but I had no such excuse in this case. It is also true that the period of late adolescence, like childhood, is often very oddly dreamlike and unreal.
But the truth - the reality - is that there are people who believe what they prefer to believe, and I had just realised that I was one of them, if only briefly and in a moment of madness, to use Ron Davies's deathless cliche. This was a very instructive lesson in the stone-throwing category - I have been amazed and astonished by the great fantasists ever since, like everyone else, but I have never been able to feel very censorious.
My favourite famous fantasist is Sir Edmund Backhouse, the remittance man and so-called Hermit of Peking, who died in Shanghai in 1944 and who was very elegantly exposed by Hugh Trevor Roper in almost my favourite historical biography.
Backhouse spent a great deal of his disreputable and largely imaginary life in China; his best memorials (to my mind) are large tracts of pure make-believe about the Imperial Court in the Times reports from Beijing in the early part of the 20th century, which he fed to hapless and awestruck correspondents, and huge amounts of ancient Chinese calligraphy in the Bodleian, much of it probably fake. He must have had such fun, making it all up and bamboozling all those self-important people who ought to have known better.
I suppose fantasists did have a lot more fun in the days before advanced telecommunications; no one could check anything for months. Today, the great fabulists have to rely on other people's idleness and gullibility, or the corruption of friendship and charm.
Still, that seems to work pretty well, too, if not for quite so long. I find my mind unaccountably drifting to memories of the Prime Minister in his performance as St Tony of Albion, delivering himself to the nation beneath a cross and a stained-glass window, and a clutch of hymn-singing black schoolgirls. To other fabulists, of lesser ability but like mind, such prodigious people are closet heroes.
That is why I think so many journalists - fabulists manques - had a soft spot for Archer and Aitken and indeed Blair; journalists, too, feel reality would be so much better if one could only construct it oneself, if one could edit out those awkward and unaesthetic details that do nothing but spoil the charm of the story.
What journalist has not occasionally felt that facts are nothing but an annoyance? What documentary director has not set and directed a supposedly real-life scene, giving people pretend parts in the drama of their own lives, in the interests of presenting the story as he thinks it ought to appear?
There ought to be a word for this tendency - not Archer, but Sagittarian perhaps, after the desire to aim so singlemindedly at the stars that one is blinded to reality not only by ambition and greed, but also by stardust.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, July 28, 2001 | Comments (0)
If you want to keep the traffic moving, ban buses (and bicycles)
The Mayor of London, in announcing his grand new traffic congestion scheme, claims that he has finished his long consultation with Londoners. Not so. No one has consulted me, despite the fact that I have been driving around central and greater London and using public transport almost all my adult life, and could be said to know something about it. I am even beginning to find that I know parts of London better than some black-cab drivers.
So, I propose to offer Red Ken the benefit of my experience of London traffic, at this 11th hour. It is not too late, even though he has already issued his ambitious plan, because it is almost entirely unworkable, and he will have to change it. I apologise to readers who, like most people, don't live in London. It must be very irritating when metropolitans carry on as if there were nowhere else on British earth, but, all the same, what happens in London affects most people, directly or indirectly. When London sneezes from congestion, the whole country will catch cold.
By far the major cause of congestion, pollution and road rage on the streets of London is not the cars, as Ken seems to think, but the buses. Belching out diesel, buses sit for unaccountably long periods, idling extravagantly and holding up the traffic.
It is daft that huge vehicles should be allowed to obstruct large parts of the public thoroughfare at regular intervals, while people must individually pay the driver before they can get on. At every stop, the entire nation is held up while people struggle for the right coins or the right exemption card, or while the occasional ignorant toff, suddenly reduced to public transport, produces - to hisses of derision from the entire queue - a pounds 20 note.
Without the nonsense of buses, London traffic would bowl along quite nicely; anyone vaguely inclined to accept the idea that we must put up with the obvious obstruction of buses for the greater public good will soon be disabused.
Buses are quite useless to anyone who is obliged to stick to a timetable. Two weeks ago at Russell Square, I found three parked together, at the same stop with the same number, any of which could have taken me close to my destination. All three were quite unmanned.
In one meekly sat a couple of broken-spirited public transport users, apparently unaware that they were alone and that there was no one to drive the bus. For 20 minutes they sat there humbly, and when I unhumbly hailed a taxi, they were sitting there still. Waiting for Ken?
Meanwhile these useless buses were obstructing a large square footage of public highway. Perhaps it is a sophisticated form of covert traffic calming, like the mysterious road works everywhere, which are quite clearly unnecessary. I say nothing of the folly of the bus lane, a constant nightmare for cars and cyclists as they have to swerve suicidally in and out of them, if ever they are to turn left.
It is not, however, simply that buses are hopelessly, inexcusably unreliable and obstructive. They also seem to be getting more and more dangerous. I don't know how bus drivers are trained or recruited these days, but to see them lurch in and out of the bus lane without proper signalling, or heave vertiginously round narrow intersections of ancient streets, swinging up on to pavements and biffing bollards as they go, is to despair and to hold your children close.
Buses are too big for these streets, and these drivers, and these days. The same applies to the ghastly tourist coaches, which grow bigger and bigger every year. In dumping wretched trippers at their hotels, they clog up, for half hour after half hour, entire narrow streets. They, too, are too big to be allowed.
Almost as bad are the delivery lorries and builders' vans. London's booming economy has hugely swelled their size and numbers, too. But London remains, especially in its side streets, an 18th- and 19th-century city, quite unable to take refrigerated pantechnicons or double-parked commercial vans servicing conspicuous consumption.
I sit in gridlocks amazed, as vast, blind Tesco and Marks & Spencer's monsters ease themselves, bleeping, into Dickensian alleys; it is insanity. Quiet two-way streets, just passable for two modest vehicles abreast, are now clogged for hours on end when immense lorries blunder and bully their way through, bringing local - and, yes, "community" - life to a standstill.
We know that modern education means that many millions are unable to use the telephone directory, but it seems that, in the past five years, monster lorry drivers have somehow learnt at last how to consult the London street map, and now imagine they can negotiate tiny side roads and clever local routes. Meanwhile, greedy builders double- and treble-park their vans for hours.
And what is Red Ken's solution to all this? Not to keep out the real culprits, but to exclude the cars. And without a remotely usable public transport system in place instead. It is mad. Cars are not the problem; dependence on cars is a symptom of the problem.
Here is my suggestion. We should dump the red buses and allow much smaller, privately run, Hong Kong-style people-carriers instead. We must pour squillions into the Underground. Until then, the Mayor must not force yet more people on to public transport; if he does, there will be riots and deaths from overcrowding, overheating and public panic.
Meanwhile all large coaches, all outsize lorries and vans, and all day-time deliveries should be excluded from London: small vehicles only. Oh, and no cylists; they are the most irresponsible, lawless and dangerous of the lot. That should do it.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, July 14, 2001 | Comments (1)
The Left has no time for liberty: just ask the Gordonstoun Girl
For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? My sentiments exactly. There have been a great many uncertain sounds buzzing about lately, not least in the Conservative leadership battle, even to the point where people seriously imagine that there is little difference between Conservatism and New Labour. It is hard to prepare to do battle about very little. But there is in fact a very great difference, which needs to be trumpeted about loudly and clearly. It has to do with freedom.
New Labour, like Old Labour, is the party of unfreedom, of intrusion, of excessive legislation, regulation, standardisation, conformity, guidelines, goals and repression generally. The Conservative Party is, or ought to be, the party of freedom. And freedom is under attack in this country.
It is, however, being defended in The Daily Telegraph. This week, the editor sounded the trumpet very certainly for A Free Country, for a major campaign for freedom. He insists this campaign is not partisan; freedom lovers from across the political world can and should unite.
But I find it difficult not to be partisan, because I do not really believe that people of vaguely socialist, social democrat, meliorist or egalitarian tendencies can ever be genuinely interested in freedom, except for themselves personally. The love of freedom, whatever anyone else's rhetoric may be, is a Conservative virtue - one of the greatest - though rather an alarmingly large number of Conservatives don't seem to be all that keen on it.
Be that as it may, at almost exactly the moment that the Telegraph announced its campaign for A Free Country, a perfect example of British unfreedom hit the news. It is the case of the Gordonstoun Girl.
A clever 16-year-old in foster care in Wrexham won a place and a bursary at Gordonstoun, Prince Charles's old school in Scotland. The Prince may have been rather miserable there, but these days it has an excellent reputation. In any case, the girl, her foster parents, her own parents, her grandparents and her teachers all wanted her to go; the grandparents and Gordonstoun were prepared to cover the fees.
But then down came the squelching dead hand of the local council. Wrexham social services refused to let her go. It knew about her offer of a place eight months ago, but only recently told her that she could not take it up.
One could get very excited about its reasons for this extraordinary refusal, but that seems to me to miss the point. A resentment of private schools, or of elitism, or even (quaintly enough) of Telegraph readers, all of which have been mentioned, may lie behind it. But we all have our prejudices. The point is that the council had no right to impose them on this young girl, against her express wishes and against the known wishes of what they would call, in carespeak, her "network of support", anglice her family and friends.
Social services has no right, because it has no statutory duty, to impose any ideology on anyone in its care: its overriding duty here, as Wrexham's director of social services says himself, is to safeguard and promote the safety and welfare of the young person in question.
Going to Gordonstoun (not at council expense) could not conceivably represent any threat whatsoever to her safety and welfare, to put it no more strongly than that; more positively, one could say it offers her a chance of academic excellence, and specialist teaching in her chosen subject, in a safe and respectable environment, which she wouldn't otherwise get.
What was wrong here was the complete absence of a presumption in favour of freedom - the young girl's freedom, and her family's, to do what they legally and reasonably want, regardless of the personal orthodoxies of social workers.
In fact, this is a presumption against freedom, and you see this unthinking, institutionalised disrespect for freedom in social services departments up and down the country.
I apologise to all those social workers who, by contrast, think carefully for themselves, and act wisely; because they think independently, they will know there is a lot of truth in what I am saying. I have met one or two who will admit it. There is a mindset of unfreedom firmly institutionalised in our care services, and the case of the Gordonstoun Girl is a perfect example of it.
The case has a happy ending, up to a point. The council has now backed down. The reason is not edifying, however. The Gordonstoun Girl (or her "support network") was smart enough to contact the new Children's Commissioner, Peter Clark, and make a very effective fuss, whereupon he made a very effective fuss; unpleasant publicity followed, the young girl has spoken very quotably to the press and, lo and behold, social services has bowed to public pressure. But we are left knowing that a less clever girl and a less capable family would have achieved nothing; most people in the clutches of social services do not belong to the fuss-making classes.
I admit that it was the Labour Government that appointed the Children's Commissioner, and he has done a good job here - he is obviously Labour with a small "c". But the sensibility behind this nonsense is of the Left. I can think of other, much more distressing examples, where choice is systematically, routinely denied, and freedom ignored. It is made all the more infuriating by the constant official prattle of choice, inclusion, consultation and diversity: most of that means just the opposite, like much of carespeak. This is where the battle for freedom should begin. I wonder who dares.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, July 07, 2001 | Comments (0)
