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Kiss if you absolutely have to, but please never tell
The news that John Major had a long affair with Edwina Currie does not surprise me at all. His reputation for being grey and boring, not to mention respectable and suburban, exploded years ago in a few bubbles of champagne (as far as I am concerned) the first time that I met him.
It was at a big and starry party given by the journalist Max Hastings. Mr Major had just become prime minister and he looked like a charming little boy whose Christmases had all come at once; he was surrounded by pretty, bosomy women in drop-dead dresses, the most exposed of whom was Jilly Cooper, and he was flirting.
With conviction. And with accomplishment.
So much for the stories of him tucking his shirts into his underpants. The glasses, admittedly, were a bit of an anaphrodisiac, but then power is quite enough to make up for that. And besides, the man clearly likes women.
That is a rare quality in an Englishman, but Mr Major certainly had it. And he is unmistakably sexy. Powerful and successful people are always having affairs; it does not shock me that he did. After all, he was entirely discreet about it. Nobody would have guessed. And he has been loyal to his marriage and his family, if not absolutely always to his wife. That is what matters. That is the bottom line.
What does surprise and shock me is that Mrs Currie should be so base and treacherous as to kiss and tell.
Nobody would ever have known anything at all about the affair if she had not yesterday given a very long interview to The Times, along with extracts of her diaries, telling all - or all that matters - about her affair with Mr Major. What can she possibly hope to gain except money, attention or revenge?
Her crocodile tears and her denials only make her betrayal worse. Money or attention or - worse still - her longing to settle scores in public, are more important to her than the feelings of the man she loved, and of his wife, of her former husband and assorted children.
In subjecting them to unnecessary pain and public humiliation, she has violated the rules of adultery. This is what is so bad about her behaviour - more than the adultery itself.
Without strict rules, adultery is impossible. But, unfortunately, without adultery marriage is very often impossible, too.
If one truly believes in marriage and in family values, one must respect the traditional rules of adultery, as Mr Major did. Otherwise, one is just a selfish, me-generation show-off and an antisocial wrecker.
As La Rochefoucauld famously said, the chains of marriage are so heavy that it often takes more than two to bear them. The adulterer, or adulteress, is that adorable, invigorating person who briefly, and perhaps unknowingly, lightens the load of duty for a while. For many people, that load is too heavy.
Marriage may begin as a passionate romance between two individuals, but it does not continue like that. The early raptures cannot long survive the usual irritations, the mismatch between men and women, the flushings of lavatories and the littleness of life.
Recent scientific research has reported what lovers have long discovered to their sorrow, that the chemistry of sexual desire does not last very long - three years at most. The chemistry literally changes. As my mother-in-law rather chillingly used to say to me, marriage is not a love affair.
Marriage is so much more than that and must somehow survive its loss, if the union is to last. And we very much need marriage to last, in some form; it is the bedrock, so to speak, of society. Yet it is constantly threatened by the contemporary romantic and exclusive view of marriage which - more than anything else - is responsible for today's divorce rates and social breakdown.
That rosy view is dangerously suffused by the contemporary feeling that we somehow have a right to emotional satisfaction and self-fulfilment. This is a mid-20th-century western aberration which is deeply subversive.
Yet at the same time, to go from La Rochefoucauld to Bruce Springsteen, nobody can deny that everybody's got a hungry heart. The response to this unsatisfied hunger, which is our destiny - to romantic disappointment, or sexual disappointment, or simply to boredom - should not be to desert one's family. It should be to take time out.
Well-conducted adultery has been the traditional, time-honoured convention of time out, since the troubadours started singing in Provence. It was always intended to be a prop to marriage.
However, adultery that is not well conducted can be extremely subversive and that is why observing the rules is so important. The first rule is never, ever to tell.
It is easy to give in to mean-spirited promptings of jealousy or spite. It is easy to give in to childish impulses to confess or to boast, or to give in to pride about one's wonderful conquest. That is unforgivable.
For one thing, it is horribly destructive; adultery threatens not only the feelings of the betrayed, but also their security, their children, their status and their postcodes. For another it gives the husband or wife no chance to choose to tolerate it discreetly; it would be too humiliating to have to admit it to the adulterer, or to your friends and family, that you were just feebly putting up with it. Besides, although jealousy is born with love, unfortunately it does not die with it.
For another thing, telling all is counterproductive; one of the great charms of adultery is that it is illicit, or transgressive as people say these days. It's a forbidden escape from the pressures of society and convention and all the more intense for that - which is why the idea of a maitresse au titre is so silly.
That is why adulterers can never claim an accepted place in each other's lives; one cannot expect to get much of a mention in the index of their biographies, as silly Mrs Currie did. Public acceptance is not the point - quite the reverse.
Never, ever believe an angry man or woman who says that all they wanted was to be told the truth. What they really wanted was for it not to be true. Failing that, what they need is ignorance.
It seems quite absurd that one's children's happy home, or granny's twilight in the spare bedroom, or one's shared business or a companionable old age should be threatened by something so transitory as sexual jealousy.
That is the mark of a culture obsessed by sex, a culture which values sexual infatuation more highly than loyalty, affection and common purpose.
Mrs Currie is not stupid. She must know the damage that she is doing. What she may perhaps not realise is that breaking the rules of adultery is not just a personal wrong. It is a social wrong. Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive.
Maybe, but far better to keep re-weaving the social web of commitment and affection and far better to let others do so, too, than to rip it apart senselessly with angry buzzings. That is what is shocking about this shameful story.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 29, 2002 | Comments (0)
Open talk about immigration is a kind of victory over terror
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. On the subject of immigration there has been a deafening silence for many years, ever since Enoch Powell's notorious "rivers of blood" speech in 1968.
I am not sure how this guilty, resentful silence was imposed, or how the majority came to believe that their fears and resentments were so unspeakable; the ideological tyranny of the minority in this country is a mysterious thing. But somehow, until recently, anyone brave enough to break this silence was invariably howled down for playing the race card or the numbers game and, generally speaking, being little better than a Nazi.
Suddenly that has all changed. Whereas William Hague was vilified for the line he took on asylum and immigration in his election campaign, we now have a Labour home secretary talking dirty about it in a way that the daftest Tory xenophobe would scarcely dare dream of. He makes Hague sound like a drippy liberal.
Not long ago David Blunkett dared to suggest, to public outrage, that there ought to be a "discussion" in Britain's ethnic communities about the desirability of arranged marriages with foreigners; he was entirely right, of course, but it was a bit rich coming from a member of a government which abolished the primary purpose rule as soon as it got into power in 1997 - this was the rule designed to stop marriages arranged primarily to get British nationality for a foreigner - and actually vastly increased this kind of immigration.
Then a fortnight ago the home secretary wrote that Asian immigrants should speak English at home to avoid "the schizophrenia that bedevils generational relationships" - rather poor English itself, one might point out. It is hard to decide what prompted him to say anything so astonishingly intrusive. And then, last week, he said that he has no sympathy with young asylum seekers from Kosovo and Afghanistan who come to Britain to find work; the United Kingdom, he explained, has fought to free their countries from war and repression and now they must go home and rebuild them. Strong stuff.
Even more startlingly, Blunkett in effect admitted the previous week to a House of Commons home affairs select committee that the asylum system is hopelessly, shockingly out of control and that the numbers are enormous. He has actually accepted as valid a set of alarming figures from Migrationwatch UK, not least because they are taken directly from Home Office statistics which he himself has succeeded in making more comprehensible.
According to Migrationwatch (and the Home Office's own statistics), in 2001 126,200 decisions were made about asylum seekers' requests to remain here. Of these 41,940 people were granted asylum or exceptional leave to remain and 9,285 were removed or left voluntarily. That leaves 74,975 who were not granted leave to remain. If you allow, conservatively, a figure of 30% for their dependents - in all probability it would be more - you arrive at a figure of 97,500 people who were refused permission to stay, but who are still here, in one year alone.
That is almost the size of the British Army.
One might suggest, as Blunkett and Beverley Hughes, a junior minister at the Home Office, did in their submission to the committee, that some of these people may have since left voluntarily.
One must wonder, then, why they spent so much time and effort getting here and trying to work the system in the first place. But either way we will never know as there is no longer any system of checking people out of the country, so to speak. There used to be, but the Conservatives got rid of it a decade ago in a cost-cutting venture. Other European Union countries count people in and out, but we don't. It is hardly surprising that while asylum seeking is down across Europe overall, it is up in the UK. Britain is a soft touch.
What's more, Blunkett had to confess to the Commons committee that his manifesto target of deporting 30,000 fake asylum seekers a year was hopelessly unrealistic. He now says he will be settling for deporting 1,000 a month; on last year's figures, therefore, that means that if you come to Britain you have nine chances in 10 of being able to stay.
Over the past nine years the number of people who have failed all the asylum tests but have not been removed is about 335,000 - nearly a third of a million. Effectively this country has no border control. Effectively the home secretary admits it. Worse still, the cost of this failure is high. It is difficult to give precise figures - the government has yet to achieve transparency on this - but the Home Office admits to a total cost of Pounds 1.2 billion. It also estimates that the annual legal cost alone is about Pounds 578m.
Whatever the cost, it is all waste. If the long-drawn-out legal process makes no difference to the outcome, it is merely tearing up taxpayers' money to pay the lawyers and the courts. Why bother with a screening process at all?
It is strange that all this is suddenly now in the public domain when it has been unmentionable for so long. It is odd that the Labour government is suddenly bursting out of the closet and admitting, in effect, that it has no policy on asylum and immigration. It's amazing that it is even talking to an organisation such as Migrationwatch UK, let alone making respectful noises.
This could simply be Blunkett talking tough but doing nothing - appealing to the right and appeasing the left all at once, as usual. But this time I think he may be up to something different. Finally the Blairites have woken up to the fact that immigration is a danger to them, to their political future. All across Europe anti-immigration parties are gaining force dramatically; there are votes in all this and new Labour does not want the Conservatives to have them.
Those great new Labour thinkers, Peter Mandelson and Philip Gould, are warning the party faithful even now. "It is not the comfortable middle classes who have most to fear from migration, but those at the cutting edge of vulnerability," Gould wrote last week. Well done, Philip; join the enormous silent majority which has understood this obvious point for years. Well done for understanding, at long last, the appeal of the BNP to the indigenous poor, instead of despising it.
Mandelson's stomach is not so strong as Gould's; he still calls people's fears about mass migration "right-wing populism", but he says progressives must "come to terms" with it. That may well be new Labourspeak for exploiting it themselves.
However unedifying the reason, though, public discourse does suddenly seem to be changing. Things that have troubled people for decades can now be spoken of. A terrible weight of intolerance and sanctimoniousness seems to be lifting; this may, oddly and sadly enough, be an indirect result of the atrocities of September 11. That day forced us to confront all kinds of awkward truths about ourselves and others, and to speak out. That is a small victory against terrorism of every kind. Or maybe not so small.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 22, 2002 | Comments (0)
The Tories will come back aboard the freedom train
This is an awkward time to whip up any interest in the Conservative party. Iain Duncan Smith even chose an awkward day last week, Friday the 13th, to make a big anniversary speech at Toynbee Hall in east London about the future of Conservatism. Anniversary of what, one might ask. Nobody seems to know or care; a few disloyal Tories make damaging or self-loathing remarks from time to time; otherwise the party is, as the opinion polls say, flatlining. The Conservative leader was baited mercilessly on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, also on Friday the 13th, about his lack of profile and lack of policies; he retired hurt.
We desperately need and should have - could have - a strong Conservative opposition and government-in-waiting. The Labour government ought to be a sitting duck for a conviction politician with his or her sights correctly aimed. It all seems terribly simple to me. The problem with the Conservatives emerged clearly in Duncan Smith's Today interview: he is trying to have it both ways. He cannot decide whether his party is libertarian or authoritarian. Until he does decide, the Conservative party will remain rightly condemned to obscurity.
You cannot on the one hand argue, as he did in his interview, for freedom and devolved responsibility for schools, but on the other, when questioned about section 28 (which bans the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities), nervously appear prepared to control centrally the reading matter of individual schools. Equally, you cannot on the one hand say that the Conservatives will stand up for family values and marriage, and on the other say, in the name of vote-catching, that they will support single or homosexual parenthood as well. Conservatives must choose.
In my view there is no contest: Conservatism is most importantly about freedom. It must in government be libertarian; it cannot be authoritarian or paternalistic, because Conservatism is centrally about less government, not more. Conservatives may well believe that marriage is best for children and for society, as I do; even the most right-on of liberal think tanks admits that these days. Conservatives may well believe that divorce and single parenthood breed hardship and social dislocation, as I do; progressive think tanks admit that too. Some Conservatives may believe there is something wrong with homosexual partnerships, although I do not. The point about Conservatism as I understand it, and as I thought I learnt it at Margaret Thatcher's knee, is that government should keep out of our front rooms and our bedrooms as much as possible, however noble its motives.
Conservatism stands above all for personal freedom, for personal responsibility and for the minimum of government intervention - the opposite of the socialists' nationalisation of responsibility and community, as with the extremes of welfare statism. That is something this government doesn't understand or accept. Duncan Smith does understand it, as his speech made clear, but he doesn't seem to understand that this is his unique selling point. Caring and compassion, however genuine, are not. It's true that there are giant social evils stalking Britain, as he said at Toynbee Hall, but that's the wrong emphasis. He should first of all be trying to market an immense social good which the other side isn't offering - freedom.
I cannot understand what Conservatives are doing agonising about whether you are a Portillista or a traditionalist. All that was sorted out long ago by the blessed Margaret. Whatever your own convictions, it is not the business of the state, in the true Conservative view, to intervene in childcare or in auditing the ethnic use of parking meters. Why should the state use tax money to encourage people to marry or to breed - or to discourage them? Why should there be endless social engineering allowances for this and that, however compassionate, with all the perverse incentives and fiddles that follow?
This is the muddle that new Labour is in - not surprisingly, as Labour (undead old or new) is the party of state control. For instance, it has found to its amazement that if you "privilege" poorer working mothers with childcare allowances and tax breaks, you "disadvantage" poorer stay-at-home mothers. So there has to be more fiscal fiddling to put it right; intervention leads to more intervention, more tax, more complexity, more bureaucracy and more waste.
New Labour has painted itself into this old Labour corner; the Conservatives ought to have more sense than to copy it. Tories in government ought to be neutral on all these things - not because they don't care but because they believe that less government leads to more effective caring by the right people. A side effect of this neutrality is that Conservatism can be a truly inclusive big tent - unlike new Labour.
New Labour is doomed to fail, not only because it believes in state intervention, but even more importantly because it depends heavily on voters who believe in state intervention - the great mass of public sector workers, for a start. As a result it cannot control them. Therefore it will fail - it is already failing - to reform public services. They cannot be radically reformed without a rooting out of the state sector mentality which entangles them, and new Labour is unlikely to do much rooting out because it shares that mentality. This mentality means that yet more guidelines, more empty consultation, more quality assurance, more monitoring, more targets and more bureaucracy will become ever more obstructive, expensive and counterproductive.
Earlier this month the Audit Commission warned that public services are facing a recruitment crisis because staff feel overwhelmed by bureaucracy, government targets and the lack of a sense of autonomy. According to this study, public service workers find form-filling for government targets irrelevant and a distraction from their real work. To take another example: the reforms of new Labour's Local Government Act of 2000 appear to have been largely counterproductive, judging from the comments last week of a cross-party committee of MPs. "Councils have become introverted, looking at their constitutions rather than thinking about ways to improve services," it said. Reform has been sidelined by myriad regulations.
Similarly the head of the Local Government Association said last week, at a seminar on improving public services, that government is decentralising and devolving powers to local government only slowly and grudgingly. New Labour's rhetoric may sound good, he argued, but in practice government departments continue to launch their own initiatives, set up central units and produce yet more strategies - almost 30 in the past year - which create confusion at local level.
All this means that later, or more likely sooner, the government will be seen to have failed to keep its promises about public services; schools and hospitals and prisons and crime will still be a national disgrace. The Conservatives should be ready with their government-lite, bureaucracy-lite, waste-free, devolved, respectful, tolerant and irresistible new Conservatism. Power to the people. Freedom. Conservatism really isn't boring.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 15, 2002 | Comments (0)
Bullfighting dwarfs prove one EU size can't fit all
The important news that Jack Straw favours a European Union constitution reached me not long ago in the mountains of southern Spain on a day when I was planning to go to a bullfight. With dwarfs. It gave me pause for thought. I mean, thought about the spectre of a homogenised Europe, although of course the business of tormenting bulls and involving dwarfs in the spectacle does also provide food for rumination.
I do not actually know what Mr Straw's views are on bullfighting, leaving aside his feelings about handicapped people in fancy dress valiantly throwing themselves over the horns of these vast beasts, but I am prepared to bet quite a lot of euros that he would like to stop it. At any rate, one can hardly imagine a European constitution that enshrined the inalienable right of the vertically challenged to fight wild animals in public for fun.
After all, Mr Straw has voted against cruelty in hunting and his party appears to be determined to stop foxhunting, even though its own Burns report found that foxhunting is not cruel, although (in that deliciously memorable phrase) it "compromises the welfare of the fox". Bullfighting compromises the welfare of bulls even more since there is no escape and it is undeniably, if only briefly, cruel.
What we have come to expect from this government is a pathological inability to leave people alone in any of their pursuits or pleasures. What we could expect from the sort of European constitution favoured by the spirit of new Labour would be uniformity, repression and ethnic cleansing, Europe-wide. For what is forbidding the treasured, time-honoured traditions of an ethnic group if not ethnic cleansing? Bullfighting would certainly go. So would matanza, the semi-ceremonial Spanish tradition of pig-slaughtering, which seems to bring so much pleasure to those involved, apart from the pig. Those jolly bull castrating and bull-branding get-togethers in the Camargue would be regulated out of all existence. Intolerance would be institutionalised.
Fortunately, and this was the cheering thought that struck me in an exceptionally beautiful bullring in the mountains near Aracena, it won't work. I do not think Europeans will allow themselves to be bullied, constitutionally, out of their ancient pleasures (however dubious) by lily-livered urban puritans. Worms are turning, all over Europe.
Even the British worm seems to be turning. For years we have been rather docile and law-abiding. But suddenly a spirit of rebellion has appeared; national figures such as Jimmy Hill and the Duchess of Devonshire have publicly announced that they will break any ban against hunting, with Mr Hill taking to a horse in person if necessary, although he is well over 70. If this week's House of Commons inquiry into foxhunting finds against it and a ban does later follow, we will have a very exciting, un-British and really rather European time of civil disobedience.
I shall certainly join in. My first move, as a member of our garden committee, will be to invite any master of hounds who is coming on the Countryside Alliance March for Liberty and Livelihood this month to bring his pack to London and hunt down the foxes in our communal garden. There are masses of them, born after the most horrible mating screams in January, in three dens under the compost heap. One urban fox is romantic, perhaps; 15 are a pest.
While my guest huntsmen are at it, they could ride through all the other communal gardens in the area as well (jumping over the ornamental railings), since they are all overrun with foxes and the council pest control people say there is nothing they can do. I can offer the reassurance that there would be no risk of prosecution: people rush in and out of these gardens all the time, committing all sorts of serious crimes, and the police never have the time to catch them because they are too busy with paperwork - as we know.
I wonder whether Mr Straw knows what Lithuanians, Estonians and Bulgarians feel about blood sports or the Czechs, Poles and Slovenes for that matter. I don't know myself, but I'd be prepared to bet even more euros that many of them have fine old ethnic traditions of hunting, trapping, pigsticking, dogfighting and poaching that they would be entirely unprepared to abandon, even for the sake of EU membership - which they are likely to get by 2004 along with Cypriots, Romanians, Latvians and the Maltese. I am not very keen on the idea of EU enlargement, but it does have the enormous attraction that it will make an EU constitution entirely unworkable - it is quite impossible that so many such different cultures and economies could be squeezed into one politically correct mould of the sort dear to sensitive Islington man and woman.
These were my thoughts as I watched an indescribably beautiful young man lunge forward on an even more beautiful horse to skewer a bull so elegantly with his sword that it sank instantly to its knees and died at once. A roar of passionate applause and the flashing smile of the matador drove Mr Straw briefly from my mind. I have very ambivalent feelings - about bullfighting, not Mr Straw of course. Although I am not squeamish, not even about human nature, I wish that it were not part of our nature to get tremendous excitement from the process of killing animals, from the glamour of death which seems to titillate our own sense of life. What I wish even more, however, is that people were less hypocritical about it and less repressive.
It is one thing to hate cruelty to animals. It is quite another to restrict your disapproval to blood sports that people enjoy, ignoring cruelty that gives no pleasure; that is puritanism at its most dishonest. Amid all the abuse of animals in the world, blood sports amount to almost nothing. Last week, for instance, it was reported that 14,500 Australian sheep on ships bound for the Middle East died of overheating and were tossed overboard; earlier 800 cattle died of excess heat on a similar route; the fate of a bull in the hands of a hopeless novice matador is infinitely preferable. Transporting livestock over huge distances is extremely cruel, and it is a long, drawn-out cruelty which ends in the horrors of a huge slaughterhouse. In this case the sheep were due for Islamic slaughter, which is legally permitted in Europe, even though, like orthodox Jewish slaughter, it is less humane than European methods. None of this gets people nearly so excited as the quick death of a few foxes and bulls; legislators go along with this hypocrisy even when they don't share it.
All the same, what is sauce for the ethnic goose is sauce for the ethnic gander, too. If some people are permitted to treat animals in a way that most others dislike, in the name of ethnic diversity and their right to their ethnic traditions, others should be allowed the same freedom. Otherwise everyone should be stopped equally: no John Peel and no corrida - and no halal meat. It will be very funny watching Europe's urban liberals, like Mr Straw, trying to create a constitution out of that can of turning and wriggling worms.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 08, 2002 | Comments (1)
