May the (Gay) Force be with you

England is turning towards the Dark Side! Details of the 2011 census, published last month, reveal that the number of people who identify themselves as ‘Jedi Knights’ has fallen by more than half since the census of 2001. The Force, sad to say, is weakening, with a mere 176, 632 classifying their religion as Jedi compared to over 330,000 light sabre wielders ten years ago. Master Yoda, noting the trend, said “Concerning, this is. Look for the Sith Lord, we must.”

Yes, indeed, the trend is alarming, though it is encouraging to note that Jedi still tops the “alternative faith” stakes, only behind Christianity, Sikhism, Judaism and Buddhism in popularity. They are well ahead of the true Dark Knights, the Satanists, who managed a mere 1,893 adherents, and the Scientologists, with only 2,418 Thetans. My, my, that's all, despite Tom Cruise.

But the prophet who must be most pleased by the figures is Master Richard Dawkins, the atheist-in-chief, whose religion is clearly the fastest growing, with as many as 14,000,000 people in England and Wales of no faith. On the contrary, dear ones; your faith offers the greatest certainties of all!

Mainstream Christianity is still top of the pops, though the number of people identifying themselves as such has fallen from seventy-two to fifty-nine per cent since 2001, leading to claims that their number could fall below fifty per cent of the population in six years time.

The other downward trend is in marriage. It seems that gays have fallen in love with that venerable institution when everyone else is falling out of love. For the first time since the national census was founded in 1801 married couples are in a minority. Never mind; soon the homosexuals will come and make up the numbers.

Now there is a thing.  We had decade after decade of gay liberation, a mighty struggle that brought forth…a pathetic mouse.  Gay marriage is now a flag ship Tory policy, Prime Minister David Cameron waving his little rainbow flag.  Gay love and gay marriage go together like a horse and carriage.  Oh, but there are dissenters, and they are not all Christian fundamentalists.  There is Rupert Everett, a gay actor or an actor who is gay, who said recently that he loathed heterosexual weddings;

…the wedding cake, the party, the champagne, the inevitable divorce ten years later, is just a waste of time in the heterosexual world.  In the homosexual world I find it, personally, beyond tragic that we want to ape this institution that is so clearly a disaster. 

Not so, says Cameron, who hopes that gay couples, all complacent and middle aged, will soon form the backbone of the modern Tory Party, a new rainbow county set.  Who else, one has to ask, is left?   

Meanwhile, back in the heterosexual world, the Daily Telegraph reports that Sir Paul Coleridge, a High Court judge who started the Marriage Foundation campaign group to promote the institution, said the decline in the number of married couples was a “worrying” trend likely to lead to more family break-ups. He has previously described the scale of family breakdown as a “complete scandal” and warned that people were “recycling” partners instead of trying to fix their marriages.

Oh, well, recycling is the great trend of the age, bed-hopping non-Christians leading the way. This, I have to say, includes Pagan and Wiccans like myself, behind the Jedi, yes, with a professed 68,386 adherents, but making a steady ascent. The beauty of my religion is that it has no rules, other than to take pleasure in pleasure. When we start to follow gays into a parody of Christian marriage I really will know that the game is finally up; that knitting, bring and buy sales, a semi in the suburbs, the rotary club, dogs, slippers and the Tory Party is all that remains. 

May the Force be with you, in whatever shape it comes.

Slumdog Britain

A Red Extravaganza

I didn’t watch the Olympic opening jamboree on Friday; I had more important things to do.  Besides, I can’t stand Danny Boyle, the man who orchestrated the whole thing, that train-spotting slum dog millionaire.  I have now, though; I caught up with it this afternoon on iPlayer. 

Why?  First, because I was bemused by the hysterical onslaught on Aiden Burley, the Conservative Member of Parliament who dared to tweet his disapproval.  Second, because the Sunday Telegraph, which I had always taken to be a conservative and Conservative newspaper, published an article by Dan Hodges, a tiresome Labour Party hack, pouring more dead dogs on the unfortunate Burley.

What, I asked myself; did I buy the hyper-liberal Observer by mistake?  No, sure enough, it was the Telegraph.  I popped over to the Sunday Mail website, hoping for some right-wing sanity, only to be greeted by a copy of a counter-tweet by that fat idiot John Prescott.  This is a man who proved that stupidity and an inability to master the rudiments of proper spoken English is no bar to high political office. Yes, there he was, saying to Burley “That opening ceremony made me proud to be British.  Your tweet made me angry that you are too.” 

I’m getting well ahead of the story here.  What was Burley’s crime; what did he say that caused such an explosion of drivel?  In two chirps simply this: “The most leftie opening ceremony I’ve ever seen – more than Beijing, the capital of a communist state.  Welfare tribute next?  Thank God the athletes have arrived.  Now we can move on from that leftie multi-cultural crap.  Bring back the red arrows, Shakespeare and the Stones.”

And that was the stone around his neck, by which free speech was drowned like a puppy. He has now attempted to backtrack, silly man, saying that he was talking about the way the show was handled, not multiculturalism itself.  Look, Aiden, in the rare chance that you ever read this, never apologise and never, ever give the idiots a second chance to bite.  Multiculturalism is indeed a lot of tosh. Our Prime Minister said as much not so long ago, though using a more mealy-mouthed form of words, as did Nicholas Sarkozy, the former president of France.  

So, as I say, in order to form a more perfect opinion, I watched the whole thing this afternoon.  What did I think?  Why, that it was a soggy porridge of leftie multi-cultural crap.  OK, let me be completely fair, like the curate’s proverbial egg it was good in parts; in other parts it was really rotten.  I liked some of the early routines, which were very well choreographed, and I thought the Industrial Revolution sequence was excellent. But in total, as a depiction of our people and our nation, the whole thing was a sad joke.

My goodness, all those not so subtle and not so subliminal Marxist metaphors, what a scream!  How lovely to see, apropos of nothing at all, Boyle's onstage proletariat forming themselves, North Korean-style, into the badge of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, presumably a celebration of a communist-inspired front that would have left this country defenceless in the face of a serious Soviet threat. At the next moment they were a star. The only thing missing was the hammer and cycle.  

Then there were the dancing nurses and the bouncing patients, a tedious and lengthy tribute to the National Health Service, that ‘much loved’ institution, a sequence that might usefully serve in future as a crazy party political broadcast for Ed Millipede and his gang, a sort of Medicine in Wonderland.  And did you know that twentieth century British history seems to have begun with the arrival of the Empire Windrush from the West Indies, carrying lots of black immigrants?  Well, it did, in the gospel according to Boyle.

I looked in the midst of the universal praise for Boyle, coupled with the demonisation of Burley, for some sanity and, thank goodness, I found it, a blog by Douglas Murray in the Spectator (The Olympic opening satire), an organ clearly still to be overtaken by the onward surge of political madness.   As he says, any foreigner watching this farce must have thought that the NHS was our national religion.  Yes, it really should have been followed by another lengthy montage in praise of welfare, maybe with gyrating dole recipients.  The problem with this is that most of them are too obese to dance.  A shabby socialist hymn, that’s the only way I can describe Boyle’s extravaganza, one in which the Queen herself was induced to take part in a particularly embarrassing James Bond parachute sequence

As we moved towards the finale the whole thing became positively infantile, particularly the music tribute, a cross section of our ‘cultural richness’ put together by a moron in a hurry.  For me Murray really hit the spot with these cogent words;

My main fear is that a young person from elsewhere in the world – better educated, but possibly lacking our sense of humour – might take it all literally. They may have learned of a Britain which was a serious country and produced many of the world’s greatest writers, leaders, thinkers and artists. After watching last night’s ceremony they will realise that Britain is in fact a country which, though once inhabited by hobbits, is only around fifty years old and stuck in a state of permanent adolescence. This will make them doubt their teachers and probably end up becoming anarchists.

Overall the spectacle made me cringe.  Only the likes of Prescott could be proud of this idiotic farrago.  If I thought Boyle had any intelligence at all I might have been impressed by his satirical abilities, his Jonathan Swift-like capacity to make fun of absurdity.  But he has none.  This travesty was for him the literal truth of our country.  It’s shaming that so many seem to have been seduced by his socialist agitprop.  I expect Boyle to be awarded the Hero of Socialist Labour, second class, any day now by our Dear Leader, Comrade David Cameron.  

The Rise of the Morlocks

Sociology is not my subject. More than that, it seemed to me to be one of more tendentious academic disciplines, the happy hunting ground for all sorts of lefties. Bogus theories compounded by bogus politics that, for me, is sociology.

Or, rather, was sociology. I’m pleased to say that my view here was far too partial! I delight in serendipity, the art of discovering things by chance. Charles Murray is a new discovery for me, a sociologist of unique and refreshing vision. Presently working for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Washington, he is best known for a book called The Bell Curve. In this he was rash enough to discuss the IQ levels of different ethnic groups, attracting a rush of liberal hatred.

But it’s his views on poverty that I find most compelling, his argument that state action in this area, the so-called ‘war on poverty’, has the reverse effect from that intended – it increases the number of poor people. More than that, it’s corrosive of personal responsibility and independence. This is my own view exactly. In an article I published here at the beginning of last year (The Dead Hand of Welfare, January 11) I opened in combative style;

The one certain consequence of aid, of any kind of welfare, is poverty. Look at this country, look at the dreadful Dependency State, a financial burden that has crippled us for years and resulted in a form of entrenched, institutionalised socialism, almost impossible to shift, no matter the political complexion of any given government. Billions of pounds have been spent and we are not a step closer to ending poverty.

In his work as a number cruncher Murray has added substance to this assertion in an American context. Like Britain, billions have been spent on antipoverty programmes but poverty remains stubbornly entrenched. Worse still, those targeted, the recipients of benefits, have lost the incentive to work hard and raise children within the context of a stable relationship.

Murray is also, I’m delighted to say, a libertarian, very much of my own kidney. He explained himself in What it Means to be a Libertarian, a book published in the late 1990s. In this he calls himself a ‘lower-case’ libertarian, too fond of the “indispensible role of tradition and classic virtues” to go along with the likes of Ayn Rand. Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, his heroes are my heroes!

In 1989 he was asked by the Sunday Times to investigate if we have an ‘underclass’ a term he popularised that same year, in this country. He used three measures in his investigation: drop-out from the labour force among young males, violent crime and births to unmarried women. These, he concluded, were associated with the growth of a class of “violent, unsocialised people who, if they become sufficiently numerous, will fundamentally degrade the life of society.”

He returned to the same theme, again at the behest of the Times, ten years later, saying that Britain had become “just another high-crime industrialised country”, and that the underclass was “driven by the breakdown in socialisation of the young, which in turn is driven by the breakdown of the family.” Last year’s London riots are sufficient proof of his claims, if any proof is needed.

He has now published Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 in which he discusses the growing fractures in American society and the dangers presented by an underclass, cut off from a common set of values. His fears are my fears; for, in the end, I suspect the Morlocks will consume us all.

Iron in the Soul

I have one major failing: I simply can’t abide fools. It’s not a question of a person having a different viewpoint from me; that’s a part of life. I can deeply disagree with people while still respecting what they have to say. What angers me is ignorance and the wilful misinterpretation of words. Let me show you what I mean.

I took part in a discussion recently on patriotism, on the meaning of patriotism, specifically directed to one’s own personal feelings on the matter. My answer was simple enough: I said it meant exactly the same thing to me as it did to Rupert Brooke, that golden boy of long-gone golden summer;

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
that is forever England. There shall be
in that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
a dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
a body of England's breathing English air,
washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
a pulse in the eternal mind, no less
gives back somewhere the thoughts by England given;
her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
and laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
in hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

It’s a poem by a soldier in the midst of war, a soldier writing from one of the theatres of war, but it’s not about war, not about hatred, not about enmity, not about vainglory; no, it’s simply about home, what home means, what love of home means, the words and sentiments of a patriot. The difference between this and nationalism could not be greater. As I’ve said on a number of occasions, a patriot is a person who loves their country; a nationalist a person who hates everyone else’s country.

In another essay posted last October (England, my England) I defined precisely what England means to me, what it is that defines me specifically as English, in all my uniqueness and eccentricity;

Yes, I’m not British; I’m English. I cycle from my rooms to college most days. I go riding just about every Sunday along old bridal paths. I like gymkhanas and country pursuits in general. I go hunting in season. I have a passion for the history of my country, particularly for the England of the seventeenth century, which has done so much to confirm my belief in the importance of monarchy in our constitution. I enjoy such food as roast beef - though I have a preference for venison -, fresh salmon, scones with high tea and stodgy puddings. I like to be taken punting on the Cam on warm spring days. I like May balls and daffodils. I like strawberries and cream at Wimbledon. I love the plays of William Shakespeare, the poetry of John Donne and the novels of Charles Dickens. I like Tudor and Stuart dance music and the orchestral work of Frederick Delius, particularly Brigg Fair and In a Summer Garden. I like old churches and ruined castles. I have a tremendous affection for the Church of England and an even greater affection for old English folkways. I like Christmas carols, the more traditional the better. I distrust alien ideologies, like socialism, communism and scientology, any form of fanaticism, really, in politics or religion. I distrust political enthusiasm and hero worship. Or if I do like heroes it's historic fatties like Sir John Falstaff or Horace Rumpole! I dislike American spellings of English English words. I like to go to Henley for the regatta and I far prefer tea, English Breakfast, to be precise, to cappuccino!

I am what I am; a single-minded English girl, whose simple love of home entails no harm and does no harm. But then, oh then, came the stupidity, those who could not tell the difference between introspective patriotism and aggressive nationalism, those who persisted in seeing patriotism as a form of wilful ignorance, as a mood of superiority, as a rejection of other nations and other loyalties; that one somehow perceived these as ‘inferior.’ I let rip in my inimitable way, doling out in full measure the kind of response this deserved.

There are some people, sad to say, not just of limited wit but almost completely lacking in basic comprehension. I have no hesitation at all in making a fool look like a fool, condemned not so much by what I say as their own choice of words. I’m neither going to mention the context of this discussion or the people in question. There are those, as Plato says, who only have iron in the soul.

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.

Setting the world on fire

Mary Corry is American. She’s now eight-one years old. When she heard of the engagement of William and Kate she had just had open heart surgery. In spite of her medical condition she flew in to London from Florida on Wednesday, spending the eve of the royal wedding on an inflatable mattress outside Buckingham Palace. “England would not be England without the monarchy”, she is reported as saying in the Times.

No, it would not; it’s part of what we are, part of the warp and weave of this nation. When we lose all other points of reference the monarchy will still serve to define what we are and where we have been. It’s the one guarantee, when Parliament and politicians have been found so wanting, have sacrificed so much of the sovereignty of this nation to an alien Continental power, that we will never be fully absorbed into the déclassé European Union.

Mother and I watched the wedding together on TV, not wishing to miss anything by being lost in the London crowd. I’ve never been so moved by a state occasion, by the majesty and the splendour of it all. We may have lost out in so many areas but we still do this kind of thing superlatively. I was concerned that the anarchists and thugs who recently rampaged in the streets of London would have spoiled it all, even in a minor show of sourness, but they were nowhere to be seen, the police for once doing a splendid job.

I have no hesitation in saying that from time to time my emotions took over, the tears rising to the point of overflowing. Kate looked magnificent in that McQueen dress. But the new Duchess of Cambridge is magnificent in every sense, full of quite humour, humanity, calmness and natural aristocratic poise. She will make a splendid Queen Catherine, the mother, one hopes, of generations of royals to come.

The most moving part of all for me was when the Bishop of London, the Right Reverend Richard Chartres, reminded the congregation in Westminster Abbey that the wedding day was also the festival of Saint Catherine of Siena, drawing on her beautiful words – “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”

William and Catherine will set the world on fire; they have set the world on fire for so many, here and abroad. Princess Diana would have been so proud. How proud the Middletons must be, proud to see their girl, the descendent on one side of the family from Durham coalminers, linked with the ancient royal blood of England. The monarchy does not need to be updated or modernised, does not need the interference of ignorant politicians. It invariably adjusts itself to the atmosphere and to the times. It always has, which is precisely why it has endured when so much else has gone.

I’m a royalist, that much is obvious; I will always be a royalist. I would even say that it’s in my blood, part of my makeup as a human being. My grandfather, an amateur genealogist, was able to trace our family lineage back so far as the Civil Wars of the seventeenth century, to people who served in the royal army of King Charles I. So, we were supporters of the crown then and remain supporters of the crown now, supporters of a wonderful and undying tradition. I’m writing this in a mood of heightened emotion, perhaps more than usually revealing, a measure of exactly how I feel at this moment in time.

Born to reign over us

On the eve of the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton I want to register my unqualified support for our monarchy and for the traditions behind the monarchy as it stands. It seems to me particularly important now, perhaps more than at any other time, not because the institution is in danger from republicans, a laughably small band of oddballs and Guardian columnists, but from those in office, like the even more laughable Nick Clegg, our benighted Deputy Prime Minister, a man about as savvy, as hapless and as hopeless as Mister Bean.

I was motivated to write this, not just because of tomorrow’s wedding, an occasion for celebration, but because of an excellent article by Simon Heffer published yesterday in the Telegraph (Politicians, not republicans, are a threat to the monarchy). The article ranges beyond politicians to touch on the attitude of certain sections of the national press. When it comes to royalty some newspapers switch rapidly from the fawningly obsequious to the savagely ill-informed, evidenced by their outrageous behaviour following the death of Princess Diana in 1997.

As a general principle let me make it quite clear that I am in favour of the equality of the sexes and against any form of discrimination on the grounds of religion, always, yes, always setting the monarchy to one side. There inequality and discrimination are an essential part of the constitution. So, there, I’ve said it; now let me justify my position.

Poor Corporal Clegg; he reminds me so much of Henry’s Cat, a cartoon character from my childhood, who “knows quite a lot about nothing and not too much about that,” so the theme tune went. Yes, that’s Clegg, who knows even less about our constitution than Henry’s Cat, seeing the monarchy as just another institution which needs to be ‘modernised’. Modernisation, by the lights of Clegg, would mean allowing the reigning monarch to marry a Catholic, contrary to the 1701 Act of Settlement, whose terms subsequently passed into the constitutions of other realms in the Commonwealth.

Oh, my, how terrible, how can we possibly discriminate against Catholics in the modern age, the age of Clegg? Let me be kind and say as little as I can about James II, the last Catholic king of England, apart from the fact that he was a total disaster as a ruler and as a man! But that’s not the point. The point is that a Catholic monarch, even one with more charm and political finesse than James, would be in an invidious position: Supreme Governor of one church, the Church of England, while professing loyalty to another, the Church of Rome. I find it difficult to believe that Clegg overlooked this obvious contradiction. Cue the Henry’s Cat theme.

Into the mix of ‘reform’ the sexism of male succession has been thrown. Instead, the argument goes, the law should be altered to allow older princesses to take precedence over younger princes. Andrew Roberts, writing in the Spectator, makes the point that if this kind of sex equality had been in place at the time of Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 then Kaiser Bill –“perhaps the most psychologically damaged monarch of the twentieth century” – would have succeeded as king of England!

Look, leave things as they are, the inequality, the sexism and the perceived discrimination. Let everything else change, not the monarchy. It remains the last sacred part of our constitution, wonderfully out of place, irrational, full of mystique and majesty. Wretched asses like Clegg interfere with it at its peril and ours, beginning a process that will lead to goodness knows what end. Well, I could suggest an end: it could lead to an Obama or a Sarkozy; it could have led to – wait for it - President Tony Blair, in other words, to the nadir of this nation.

Let’s have no more babble, promoted often by the press, about succession skipping a generation, no more gibberish about the Queen retiring and Charles standing aside in favour of William. William will be king but only in proper succession to his grandmother and his father.

Let all the sour nay-sayers, deniers and ‘modernisers’ have a rotten Friday. God bless William and Catherine, God bless this marriage and God bless the future of the monarchy, an institution imperfectly perfect, irrationally rational. The others can have their presidents, a traduced and compromised form of monarchy; not us, not ever.

Ecce Homo

Peter Tatchell, or Saint Peter Tatchell, is, for those who don’t know him (is there anyone know does not know Peter Tatchell?), a leading campaigner on gay rights; well, all sorts of rights, really; you name it, he’s there, fighting the good fight, shouting off his mouth at someone or other. It’s not just in England, of course; he’s also to be seen on the streets of Moscow telling people what’s good for them, telling people that he’s good for them.

Is it wrong to say that I find this man, this relentless self-publicist and secular martyr, a fatuous and tiresome bore? I suppose people will assume that I’m opposed to gay rights, because that’s his principal platform. No, I’m not opposed to gay rights; I’m just opposed to Peter Tatchell, this homo who is a no no, this bore who himself has become the medium and the message. He’s the one person who almost makes me feel sympathetic towards Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s thuggish dictator, and Nick Griffin, the equally thuggish leader of the British National Party (please note I wrote almost!)

When I see Tatchell I see hectoring self-righteousness; I see a prig who would reshape the world in his utterly tiresome image. I also see a self-serving hypocrite, but let me hold on that for a moment or two. Did you know that he is a member of the Green Party? More than that, he insists that he is on the ‘left wing’ of the Green Party. This immediately prompts one to ask if the Green Party is sane enough to have a right wing? Perhaps it does: perhaps there are those among the membership who think it’s a bad idea to have wind farms in back gardens up and down the land, perhaps there are those opposed to such communal delights as compulsory tofu Sundays.

OK, let me pause here: this is a waste of time, a spot of harmless fun, but still a waste of time. Saint Peter is not really worth such trouble, such a fuss about nothing. It’s just that the recent visit of Pope Benedict drew my attention to something else about him, and here I take up the cudgel of hypocrisy.

For Tatchell the Catholic Church is yet another ‘bad thing’. After all it’s filled with paedophile priests, men who have sex with children, we all know that; and even if we did not Tatchell took the trouble to remind us prior to the visit. He has also helpfully described the Pope as “the ideological inheritor of Nazi homophobia”, not a Catholic, not a Christian, just “the ideological inheritor of Nazi homophobia.” Is this simply because he is a German, or do I assume that every Pope since Peter (and here I really do mean Saint Peter) was the ‘ideological predecessor of Nazi homophobia’? Perhaps the Bible counts in this bizarre notion as the forerunner to Mein Kampf?

Anyway, the thing is, for Saint Peter (back to Tatchell), all tribes are equal but some tribes are more equal than others. Boy love is one thing in the Catholic Church, quite another among New Guinea tribesmen “where all young boys have sex with older warriors as part of their initiation into manhood and grow up to be happy, well-adjusted husbands and fathers.” Yes, I expect they do. His holiness goes on here in a letter he had published some years ago in The Guardian;

The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy. While it may be impossible to condone pedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.

And he, of course, would be the arbiter here, as he is in so many other areas of life, over what is harmful and what is not. So, yes, he does not condone pedophilia, he just thinks it’s alright for nine-year-old boys to have sex with men, allowing them to grow up to be “happy, well-adjusted husbands and fathers”, or even people like, say, Peter Tatchell.

How shall I finish? Well, I rather like the following response to an online Tatchell sermon by someone signed simply as ‘Derek. Go for it Derek!

Why doesn't Tatchell just get lost? He's got a minority point of view, represents nobody, stands for nothing, has no following, sounds empty and vacant, is self obsessed and is a shameless self-publicist. His entire life seems to revolve around sexual persuasions - what a total bore. He counts for nothing. Can you imagine going out for a beer and finding Thatchell sitting next to you? Ugh! You would simply have to "make your excuses and leave" - which he would, of course, construe as "homophobia" ... No ... It's not homophobia Peter- it's simply disinterest in him. Tatchell ..... Do yourself and everyone a favour. Go away!!!!

Hmm, sitting in a pub beside Peter Tatchell. I would not say that it would be a fare worse than death…it comes close, though, it comes close. :-)

Be seeing you

Portmeirion is one of my favourite Welsh villages, except for the fact that there is nothing Welsh about the place and it’s not really a village at all but an incredibly surreal resort and hotel! It’s certainly in Wales, in Gwynedd, to be precise, though it’s oddly out of place, beautifully situated, as it is, on the Dwyrd Estuary.

I've stayed there and I just love the design, the layout, the atmosphere and the setting. Designed and built by Sir Clough William-Ellis supposedly in the style of an Italian village it resembles no Italian village that I’ve ever seen, no, not even Portofino! But it has a generally exotic atmosphere suggestive of different worlds and distant places, a kind of Platonic Mediterranean settlement, an ideal, if you like, in stone. I was there under a leaden sky, not a southern one, which simply added to the charm and general sense of unreality.

It’s an inspiring place. It inspired Noel Coward to write Blythe Spirit while he was staying there. Film makers have used it as a location, no doubt because it is here and nowhere at one and the same time, suggestive of different times and other dimensions. It was used once in an episode of Doctor Who, the long-running BBC sci-fi series.

However, it’s probably best known as “The Village” in The Prisoner, a 1960s spy drama starring Patrick McGoohan, a show which subsequently inspired a cult following. Portmeirion still hosts annual fan conventions and not far from the entrance there is a shop, once serving as McGoohan’s home in the show, which sells Prisoner souvenirs. I’ve seen a couple of episodes of the series and while it was probably quite innovative and challenging for the day it seemed to me like so much hyper-active nonsense, George Orwell by way of Magical Mystery Tour, the sort of thing that I’m sure went down very well in the swinging psychedelic sixties!

I’m not going to go over the plot in detail, and I’m sure some of you may know the general premise, if not from the original then from a recent remake. In short it concerns an agent who resigns from his job suddenly and without reason, only to find himself captive in a mysterious community, a sort of upmarket holiday camp where everyone is simply known as a number. There the authorities try to extract any residual secrets from McGoohan, known simply as Number Six. Refusing to give away anything, and asserting that he is not a number but a free man, he attempts to escape only to be pursued by – wait for it – a giant balloon!

Still, for all its nonsense, the producers could not have chosen a better setting for their bogus metaphysics, a dream within a dream. If you've never been do go. I’m sure you will love the place as much as I love it. Be seeing you. :-)

The Song of Cassandra

Channel Four, one of the terrestrial television companies in Britain, broadcast a brief series of historical documentaries last week under the title Bloody Foreigners, detailing the involvement of outsiders in certain key events in our history.

The last of the series focused on the Emperor Septimus Severus’ futile attempt to subdue the tribes north of Hadrian’s Wall in the early third century AD. This was the last try by the Romans to conquer the whole island of Britain, a task which had frustrated emperors and generals all the way back to Agricola in the first century.

The narrative was generally good- though some of the dramatic recreations verged on the naff- completely spoiled by an ending that managed to get the facts of the subsequent fate of the Severan dynasty wildly wrong! Honestly, why don’t these TV companies get some decent advice? :-)

Sorry, that’s a wholly unnecessary diversion, just a small irritation that manages to get the hornets of my intellect buzzing like mad. The essential point the programme made was sound: that the Romans came mob-handed into a complex tribal society, hoping for a pitch-battle, hoping to for a single knock out blow against the ‘barbarians’ which would bring their ‘kingdom’ into final tutelage.

The whole thing was a disaster in men, money and materials. There was no pitch battle. Instead the tribes nibbled away at the Roman army in a series of guerrilla attacks that wore it down. There was no head of a ‘king’ to claim because the political structure of the Caledonian tribes allowed for as many ‘kings’ as there were communities. Severus retreated having achieved nothing, covering his failure in an issue of coins proclaiming a famous victory, the kind of misleading propaganda that Romans went in for.

The point is the Romans were victims of their own preconceptions about ‘barbarians.’ They came, they saw but they did not conquer, they could not conquer. They simply made matters worse, creating ever more enemies with every step. Severus’ army, forty-thousand strong, might as well have been chasing the wind.

Here is another thing that irritates me, the stupid incomprehension of politicians, their inability to read the runes of history. Yes, history does have a message if only one has the intelligence and the patience to take heed. As Septimus Severus marched into Scotland so did George Bush and Tony Blair march into Afghanistan two thousand years later. They found a bad situation and they made it worse. I could tell you exactly what the outcome is going to be, could tell you right now, but you probably already know.

It’s happened time and time again, this blindness in the face of history, this tendency to base strategy on the worst, most stupid preconceptions. And it’s not as if the two Bs had to look all the way back to the Romans in Britain; they had a more immediate example at hand, the example of British involvement in Afghanistan in the nineteenth century.

I would like to be there, in the corridors of power, saying stop! wait! look! think! every time some foreign adventure is being considered, every time a new campaign is being planned. But I know, like all historians, all those who understand the past and the lessons it brings to the present, my fate would be that of Cassandra.

Hideous Hindley

I’ve not long finished One of Your Own, The Life and Death of Myra Hindley by Carol Ann Lee. At close on four hundred pages it’s a detailed account of the life and crimes of one of the most infamous women in recent British history, but I read it over two days with complete fascination, though crime is not a subject that normally I am attracted to.

Hindley is different. There is something iconic about her, something that touches on the bigger issues, something over the nature and causes of evil itself that drew me irresistibly to this book. Lee tackles the subject with a scholarly sense of detachment, though she draws some pertinent and telling judgements at points.

It’s worth pointing out that she has also written extensively about the Holocaust, highly relevant for the simple reason that the mindset of Hindley was the same pathological mindset as people like Irma Grese or Elizabeth Volkenrath, both notorious concentration camp guards. It’s difficult for me to describe this with any precision; it’s evil, yes, but at its most banal, a combination of personal cruelty, maudlin self-pity and a total lack of sympathy for other human beings. During the period following her arrest along with Ian Brady for the murder of Edward Evans the only emotion Hindley ever showed was after she was told of the death of her dog.

Lee has a compelling relaxed style, writing with ease and considerable fluency. There were parts of her lucid account that I found so difficult, parts I almost skipped, especially the section dealing with the torment and murder of ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downie, which includes a transcript of the awful tape recording Brady and Hindley took.

Years later, when she was fighting her ruthless parole campaign, Hindley wrote to Ann West, Lesley’s mother, a letter which contains a particularly telling sentence;

I now want to say to you, and I implore you to believe me, because it is the truth, that your child was not physically tortured, as is widely believed.

Of this Lee says that Hindley, while trying to explain that Lesley was not mutilated prior to death, completely failed to grasp that the ordeal to which the little girl was subjected before her murder was precisely that – physical and psychological torture. Yes, what more need be said?

The part of the book that I found of particular interest was that dealing with Hindley’s years in prison prior to her death in November 2002, the time when she mounted a systematic campaign to convince people that she had changed, that she was no longer the same person, that she had rediscovered the Catholic faith of her youth. The whole thing seemed to me to be entirely fraudulent, as if she was not even beneath an attempt to deceive God himself in her cynical drive for freedom.

The one person she did not deceive was Diana Athill, a literary editor who was approached by Hindley’s supporters to work on a proposed autobiography. She insisted on meeting the woman before she would commit herself. The interviews took place but Athill declined to get involved, doubting the worth of the project as a means for Hindley to come to terms with the past. Afterwards she wrote:

When she did what she did she was not mad – as Brady was – and although she was young, she was an adult, and an intelligent one. It seems to me that there are strands of moral deformity which cannot be pardoned: that Stangl was right when, having faced the truth about himself, he said “I ought to be dead.”

Franz Stangl, for those who may not know, was a commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps.

There were plenty that Hindley did deceive, none more so than Frank Pakenham, the seventh earl of Longford, who was long active in her campaign for release. I have to say, though, I think she was particularly ill-served by this muddle-headed do-gooder (not a term I like, but it fits his character so.)

He raised her expectations in the early seventies, only a few years after she was sentenced to life imprisonment. It was because of him that her state of denial and self-deception deepened; because of him that she did not finally admit her part in the murder of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett until the late 1980s. There seems to me to be an odd kind of similarity between the liberal and the psychopath. Like Hindley Longford had no interest in the victims of the Moors murders, no interest in the feelings of the families of the butchered children.

At the end of the book I felt nothing for the subject other than contempt and distaste. I struggle sometimes with the concept of evil, asking myself if it is something tangible, is it something, in other words, that has an objective existence beyond the individual choices we make? It might be easy to answer if I believed in Christian notions of good and evil, but I don’t. All I can say is that in the person of Myra Hindley evil took on an objective form, one that never went away.

Lee concludes her book by commenting on the obituary of Hindley in the Independent, where it was said that she had no ‘judgement’ – “But judgement was precisely what Myra Hindley had –in a sense, it is all any of us have – and she chose to use it with the most wicked intent.”

I ended, I confess, by crying for the family of Keith Bennett, whose remains, never discovered, still lie somewhere on those bleak, windswept Moors.

The World according to Piers

In a piece in The Spectator (I want to stand for Parliament) Freddy Gray, who conducted an interview with Piers Morgan, says that he comes across as the consummate new Briton: boorish yet charming, vulgar yet strangely elitist, at once chauvinist and cosmopolitan. Sorry, Freddy; I can get boorish, vulgar and chauvinist but not the other side of the equation. I do agree with you, though, that Piers, a former tabloid journalist and now a general telly person, famous for being famous, is an archetype of the Blair era. I can think of some more of the same species - Jonathan 'join me after the noos' Ross, Alan Sugar, Simon Cowell and Gordon Ramsay.

Ramsay, yes, what can I say about him? Let me see. I share a blog with an Australian friend of mine, a place where I contribute from time to time. When Ramsay was down under last year, displaying his usual wit and charm, I offered the following brief contribution;

I see that that boorish and foul-mouthed cook, Gordon Ramsay, has been shooting of his f*****g mouth in Australia. Not wise, I feel sure; definitely not wise, especially as it even attracted the disapprobation of the esteemed Kevin Rudd.

I’m sure people know that there are some brands that have a very short shelf-life; such is with Gordon the Gormless, a man with little charm and less talent. I would really hope that people in Australia, not reluctant to express an opinion themselves in-how shall I say?-the earthiest of terms, do not take the Great Gormless as just another ‘whinging pom.’ He’s not; he’s a useless whinging pom, something altogether different!

Please, guys and gals of Oz, don’t be taken in by this man. You may think that while his remarks about and to Tracy Grimshaw were completely over the top, he is at least excused by his talent. Talent, what talent? I would not go near any of the restaurants and bistros he runs in London; none of my friends would and none of my family would. You may not have heard of this but he runs a back street kitchen here, which ships ready-made meals to his various establishments; meals made with cheap ingredients and then marked up some 600%. Yea, that’s right, 600%! Gordon the Gormless is not worth the energy of your contempt.

See, I don't take prisoners! Anyway, that was last year. Much has changed, I feel sure, though I still do not go anywhere near Ramsay Street. :-)

They truly are a dreadful tribe, the Blair Babes, those thrown up under the aegis of New Labour, under the rubric of New Britain. Morgan, it seems to me, is the most typical of the oikish crowd, something of an archetype, I would go so far as to suggest. OK, let me be quite honest- I am prejudiced; I like people with charm and talent; I like people with intellect and finesse, some degree of polish, class, if you prefer; I have no time for vulgarians like Morgan.

I'm sure the favour is returned tenfold, and Morgan had things to say about David Cameron in his interview. He's frightened by the prospect of a Conservative victory, something that almost makes him "want to stand", to use his own words, though stand for what I'm not at all sure. To be fair he says he would run on a ticket of "openness and frankness", not qualities I have to say that I associate with this man or any of his ilk. Bullying, yes, shouting, yes, tantrums, yes, all things he demonstrated when he was editor of the News of the World and The Daily Mirror, even punching a hole in a wall on one occasion. I seems to me that he would fit very well into the political and personal style of our present Prime Minister! "I'm not quite as moronic as [people] think", Morgan informed Gray. Well, that's good to know, though seem to recall seeing a rerun of a certain episode of Have I Got News For You.

Perhaps you would like to know the shape of the cabinet he would favour, this charming, non-moronic man? It goes like this;

I'd make Simon Cowell home secretary. I'd make Alan Sugar treasurer, chancellor. There are all sorts of people I'd have in there. Nobody can tell me that Gordon Ramsay wouldn't sort out the food of this country, or that Sugar wouldn't rule the treasury with an iron fist. I think the country would benefit hugely if it had Cowell, Sugar and people of that calibre in government. I'd rather have that than a bunch of shallow boring little people in suits.

Hmm, lots of storming and shouting, lots of effing and blinding; sacking here and punching there; yes, that's the way to get things done, that's the way to do it, that's our new political fashion, the wave of the future. I assume he would favour himself as Prime Minister, a job for which he is ideally suited, going by the Brown model. I'm just so disappointed, though, that there would be no place for Jonathan Ross. He could keep the elderly of the nation distracted with comforting phone messages, and we know that the poor man is in need of a job just at the present.

Health n Safety warns against reading this blog

In commenting on the European Union, on the absurdity of the European Union, I said on a recent blog that I was going to see Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland because I wanted to know what a sane world looked like. Yes, it was a joke, a snappy, glib comment. But seriously, looking at things as they are, the madder they seem to become, the madder reality becomes, the reality of our politically correct world, governed by such things as Health n Safety.

Health n Safety, yes, is there anything more maddening than Health n Safety? I’m sure people will be mindful of the story reported last month of the car that plunged into the Rive Avon, leaving a five year old girl trapped inside while police officers stood by, prevented from an attempted rescue by safety regulations. It took ninety-seven minutes before a diving team arrived and another twelve minutes to pull her free. The little girl died later in hospital.

I offer no further comment here other than to say it’s tragic, the delays were tragic, and I fell certain that the police officers who witnessed this must be fully aware of the depth of the tragedy.

Now comes another tale of Health n Safety, this time from Scotland. Last July Alison Hume, a solicitor and mother of two, fell sixty feet down a disused mine shaft near her home in Galston, Ayrshire. The Fire Brigade was called but refused to intervene. Why? Because a memo issued four months earlier banned the use of rope equipment for lifting members of the public to safety. Instead they stood by and waited for six hours for a mountain recue team to arrive. In the meantime Mrs Hume could be heard moaning at the bottom of the shaft, growing quieter as time passed. Soon after she was lifted out she suffered a heart attack and died.

All of these details came out earlier this week in an inquest into her death. During this a senior fire officer admitted that it would have been possible for the crew on the scene to recue Mrs Hume but for the memo, and that all eighteen fire officers present were trained and capable of using the rope equipment. But Health n Safety intervened and this unfortunate woman was allowed to die a slow and lingering death. Of this Murdo Fraser, the Scottish Tory deputy leader, has said:

Of course, the safety of rescue workers has to be a major consideration. But a strict adherence to health and safety rules in such circumstances should not prevent life-saving action.

I just wonder what’s coming next. Surely sending soldiers into war zones is a contravention of Health n Safety? You think that’s too fantastic? Well, perhaps, but I rule out nothing. After all, we live in a country where employers cannot advertise for ‘reliable workers’ because that would discriminate against unreliable workers; we live in a country where a senior police officer with a dubious record was effectively protected by institutional anti-racism; we live in a country where the police force and the fire service stand by and do nothing, trapped in a spreading web of Health n Safety.

The Marquise

In Saturday’s Telegraph Simon Heffer wrote a piece headed We can’t actually hate Labour more. Sorry, Simon, we can, or at least I can! The Hoon-Howell debacle showed just how contemptible senior Labour politicians are; shows, as was once said of German generals, that their heads are far too close to their arses because they have absolutely no backbone.

That for me is a truism, not something in itself that deepened my hatred. No, it was Harriet Harman’s latest motoring escapade which demonstrates how utterly contemptible the shabby Labour aristocracy truly is, contemptible in its conceit and condemnable in its arrogance. You may recall the chapter in Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities where the coach of the Marquis of St. Evrémonde runs down and kills the son of the peasant Gaspard. The said Marquis does not even get out of the carriage, merely throwing a coin to the grieving father as he drives off.

Now Harperson did not actually kill anyone in driving without due care and attention, an offence for which she was convicted and fined on Friday of last week. But, my, what haughtiness to drive off from the scene of an accident, saying “I'm Harriet Harman; you know where you can get me.” Yes, I know, it’s not quite St. Evrémonde but perhaps it’s not too far removed. It seems to me the mentality, the casualness and the dismissive of it all, might indeed bear comparison. The time for the heads to fall approaches ever faster.

The Romans in Britain

I rather suspect that Roman attitudes towards Britain were rather like British attitudes towards the north-west frontier of their own nineteenth century Indian Empire: important to hold but difficult to love. Dio Cassius, when writing of the third century campaign of Septimius Severus in the north of the island, was to lament the difficulties caused by the 'bogs and forests', the very same things that had hindered the conquest under Claudius almost two hundred years before. Ammianus Marcellinus, a fourth century Roman historian, was to praise the Emperor Constans for a surprise visit he made to the island in 343AD, in terms that would suggest he had crossed to the ends of the earth!

But Britain remained attractive, in economic and strategic terms, for the rest of the Roman world; at once a place of profit and settlement in the south, and mystery and barbarism in the north, the direction of Ultima Thule and the Fortunate Islands. Even Antoninus Pius, the most unwarlike of Emperors, was determined to make his mark there, advancing his army into what was later to become the south of Scotland, the only expansion of his reign. And it was from Britain that Constantine the Great began what was perhaps the last great military campaign of the Roman world, one that was to transform the Empire. "Fortunate Britain, now most blessed of lands since you have been the first to see Constantine as Caesar."

Sulis-Minerva

The brilliance and all-encompassing nature of Roman paganism is fully demonstrated by the tendency to adapt local cults and fit them within a wider pantheon. A perfect example of this can be found in the treatment of Sulis or Sul, the Celtic goddess of healing, long associated with the hot springs in what is now the city of Bath in south-west England.

After the occupation of Britain Sulis was conflated with Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. It was at the heart of the cult of Sulis-Minerva that the new city of Aquae Sulis arose, a destination for pilgrims from across the Empire. It is reasonable to assume that while the cult of Sulis had been in part latinised, the Celtic element was always uppermost, in that her name always came before that of Minerva.

Sulis, like most ancient deities, had more than one dimension their power. She was a gentle goddess, whose curative waters could be used to cure a whole range of conditions. But her name could also be invoked to bring vengeance upon the enemies of those who sought her protection.