How To Help Liz Truss
When Liz Truss visits Washington, DC she is entitled, as a former Prime Minister, to stay in a government-owned townhouse called Blair House. The property is part of the bequest to the nation that includes the Pennsylvania Avenue Presidential Townhouse, the grand home once owned by the great Supreme Court judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr and which every former US president can use when he is in town. It is a stark illustration of the varying degrees of respect the two nations hold for the former occupants of their top post. The Americans treat our former Prime Ministers better than we do.
We do not even grant them the title in perpetuity in the way the US does. The former Prime Minister receives very little beyond a pension that is based on half their annual salary at the time of leaving office. Before 1991, a former premier received nothing at all. John Major took pity on his predecessor Margaret Thatcher, who found it so hard to adjust to civilian life that she started to call previous staff members from her garage, with her bodyguards helping to dial the numbers. Major’s 1991 public duty cost allowance now provides an annual entitlement for the continued role in public life of former prime ministers, currently set at a maximum of £115,000 a year.
Former prime ministers therefore have to earn a living in a way that US presidents do not. Now, I can hardly imagine a less popular idea than to suggest that Liz Truss should receive more money from the public coffers, but she should. We are going to have a lot more ex-prime ministers than we used to have and not just because of the chaos of the Tory party. We spit politicians out early now. Benjamin Disraeli was 75 when he left office and Gladstone was 82 when he became prime minister for the fourth and final time, leaving Downing Street at the age of 84. Baldwin left office at 69, Chamberlain at 71, Churchill at 80 and Attlee at 68. Henry Campbell-Bannerman died two weeks or so after leaving office in 1908. Ramsay Macdonald only lived for two years after leaving Downing Street and Chamberlain lasted 183 days. John Major has already been retired for a quarter of a century. We are going to get a lot more of Liz Truss and it might be an idea to give her a living so we can gently make possible the prospect of a gilded retirement. Surely that is better than the alternative, which is her making her living in politics?
How To Get On In Society
Next door to the London Library in St James’s Square in London there is a blue plaque commemorating the life and work of Ada Lovelace, a pioneer in the early work that led to the breakthrough in modern computing. Ada Lovelace is the daughter of Lord Byron who died two centuries ago this month and I never cease to be amazed by the fact that there is such a close link between Byron and modern computing. They seem somehow eternally apart in time and space yet the father and daughter relationship in fact connects them.
Something similar happens when you put together a person born on the same day someone else died. There were five days in May 1984 when Mark Zuckerberg and the poet John Betjeman overlapped. Perhaps neither were in much of a state to notice as Prince released “When Doves Cry”, the USA performed a nuclear test in Nevada and Prince Charles called a proposed extension to the National Gallery “a monstrous carbuncle”. “Are the requisites all in the toilet?/ The frills around the cutlets can wait”. It is hard to imagine Zuckerberg caring much about that. How To Get On In Society changed a lot in May 1984.
Life and Times
I spent a convivial lunchtime yesterday hosting the Regional Press Awards. The regional papers have suffered more than most titles from the abundance of information brought forth online. Yet, as the winners came up to accept their awards for the local investigations, features, opinion pieces and reporting, it didn’t seem at all like a sector on its uppers. The journalists themselves enjoyed their work, which they rightly regarded as important. It reminded me, in the spirit of looking forward and not yielding to cynicism, of an ambition not yet realized. I have appeared in The Times of London, the Times of India and the New York Times. But never yet in the Bury Times, the best of times. Maybe one day.
The Wisdom of Naivete
Long exposure to politics grants you a sort of worldly wisdom. In a poor light that wisdom can often sound like cynicism, and it is a mood you have to guard against as the cycle of events comes round for the third or fourth time. It’s worth hanging onto some things you thought when you were young. Maybe your naivety contained a sort of wisdom rooted in intuition. And maybe time has eroded some of that. I think I still feel teenage when it comes to arms sales. I know all the arguments for and against and I can conduct the world-weary defence of the sales as well as anyone, and yet I still don’t really understand why we sell weapons at all, let alone to bad people.
Britain has granted export licences, over the years, so that companies could sell arms to Bahrain, Libya, Pakistan, Russia, Algeria and Saudi Arabia, among others. We don’t need to do this. Only one fifth of 1 per cent of the British workforce is employed in producing arms for export. The total arms trade, with good and bad regimes combined, accounts for only 1.5 per cent of total British exports. We sent a delivery of naval spares to Argentina ten days before it invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982. In the six years before the Iranian revolution in 1979, the UK supplied 875 Chieftain tanks to the Shah. The Indonesian military in East Timor and the Zimbabweans in the Democratic Republic of Congo have fired guns with our name on them.
We needn’t have done this. Of course someone else would have supplied the arms while we stand on the high moral ground. But that’s a clear victory. The world is the same and we are on the high moral ground. Which is the best place to put the moral case for democracy from. I think I was right back then when I was naive.
A Table For One
Wandering lost through the Cotswolds, I came into Kingham where I thought a quick lunch would be in order. I was alone and I wanted a pub with a quiet corner where I could read my book. I wandered into the pub in the village, asked if they had a table and was ushered round the corner where, to my silent horror, I walked into a vast culinary emporium, a serious restaurant in which the maître d’ tells you that they are passionate about the asparagus and you feel sad that you are not passionate about the asparagus too. They were so nice, finding me a table at the last minute, sitting me down at a table that could have accommodated four. By then I was committed and it would have been rude to walk away. It reminded me of Jean Baudrillard’s remark, in his once fashionable book America, that there were few things more sad than a man eating alone. I don’t think that’s true, though. I would have been perfectly happy if I hadn’t felt like an exhibit in a human zoo. I thought back to years ago when I sat, in the Café Museum in Vienna, at a table for one, designed by Alfred Loos. We need more of those, hidden away in the corner for people who want to get in and out quickly and don’t feel anything in particular either way about the asparagus.