Yes, I admit it, I did once apply to be a Lord. There was a short-lived scheme to appoint a few so-called ‘People’s Peers’. The idea was that they would speak for those who were not properly represented in Parliament.
I thought that morally, socially and educationally conservative people did not have many voices at Westminster. So I put myself forward. I had no great hope of success. Ages later, when I had more or less forgotten about it, I learned from the media that a ‘People’s Peer’ had at last been appointed and it wasn’t me.
It was a person called Elspeth Howe, wife of the soppy former Tory Cabinet Minister Sir Geoffrey Howe, and distantly related to Queen Camilla. I had to confess that I had thought she already was a peer, so great and so good was she.
She already sat on something called the Equal Opportunities Commission, a Leftist quango, and on the Broadcasting Standards Commission, ancestor of the ghastly Ofcom.
I am not sure which ‘people’ she spoke for, but I have always reckoned that she was a People’s Peer in much the same way that China is a People’s Republic.
So you are welcome to accuse me of bitterness, disappointment, envy etc (‘Sour Grapes’ is something else, as hardly anyone realises nowadays) when I carp at the recent honours lists.
Since Sir Anthony Blair wrecked the House of Lords, Tory and Labour leaders have together packed that chamber (with a few exceptions) with creeps and mediocrities. Even I now think it should be abolished. But the rest of the honours list infuriates me as well.
Real hard-working contributors to our national life, if they get anything at all, are palmed off with MBEs and BEMs, low-order trinkets. Celebrities, most of them already famous as well as rich, are garlanded with knighthoods. I think this process reached its natural end the other day, with the dubbing of Sir Stephen Fry.
Sir Stephen Fry has been made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours list for services to mental health awareness, the environment and to charity
Again, it will be pointed out that I do not like Sir Stephen. Why should I? He forced his obviously unwanted company on me at my late brother’s memorial service. I had been obviously trying to avoid him for hours, but he cornered me in the end.
When I was cool towards him, he retaliated by posting spiteful remarks about me, which even many of his own followers thought a bit much.
I think he has for years done great harm to society. His Uncle Treacle voice and air of erudition have given respectability to a number of pretty radical opinions, and on-air lavatory-wall language. They would have met more opposition if they had come (as would have suited them better) in the shouty tones of a Radio One DJ.
But I suppose that is subjective. What is objective about Sir Stephen is that he has publicly boasted not just of using illegal drugs, but of using them in places where most of us would try hard to behave ourselves – out of respect for the laws and institutions they represent.
As he revealed in his autobiography in 2014, he took cocaine in Buckingham Palace, the House of Commons and the House of Lords. During 15 years of abuse, he also took the drug (possession of it carries a maximum prison sentence of ten years) at Windsor Castle, Clarence House and Sandringham.
For, you see, Sir Stephen was caressed by the monarchy, even though most of his friends must despise it and I wonder what he really thinks about it. He has also stressed, interestingly, that he never took the drug while on stage or working in a TV studio.
In his book More Fool Me, Fry wrote: ‘There is no getting away from it. I am confessing to having broken the law and consumed, in public places, Class A sanctioned drugs. I have brought, you might say, gorgeous palaces, noble properties and elegant honest establishments into squalid disrepute.’
Well, there for once I entirely agree with him. Yet he is now Sir Stephen, while better men and women than him or me, who don’t swear in public and don’t take illegal drugs, must get by with the tiny baubles of the honours system.
And my late father didn’t get his Arctic Star for serving on the terrifying, gruelling Russian convoys in 1943, until 25 years after he had died. It came in a cheap plastic case.
I really hope that if anyone is ever fool enough to offer me an ‘honour’, I have the resolve to refuse it.
New look at a Britain that never existed
I was kept away from Enid Blyton as a child and so can’t pretend that I care all that much about the Famous Five, now yet again on the BBC’s TV screens.
I can see why modern programme-makers want to mess around with Blyton’s books. But the world in which they were set is hopelessly remote. Even children dress in tweeds and cable-knits, like Wallace of Gromit fame.
There is a simple solution: ignore this old stuff and make up your own stories about modern children. Why don’t they do that?
Maybe it’s the character ‘George’, a girl who dresses as a boy, which makes them so keen to remake it. But the real problem with this stuff is that it is so totally out of time – any time, past, present or future. The 1940s were not like this. The 2020s are not like this. No time in between the two was like this.
Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five is on the BBC’s screens yet again, writes Peter Hitchens
The children, especially George, are from the 21st century. So is everyone in the drama who is remotely good or nice. The bad people are grotesque, misunderstood caricatures of the adults of 80 years ago.
If people like me suggest this is odd, we are then called names, such as ‘gammon’, and accused of racial bigotry because some of the modern characters are black.
True, such characters are extremely unlikely in the ancient Britain the series tries to portray. But so are the non-black ones.
What we see is a misleading distortion, and propaganda. The past was sometimes better than the present, and sometimes worse. The same will be true of the future. If we are to learn from the past, and choose a better future, then we must above all be honest.
Is it ever safe to go out?
Boycotting the dreary, unEnglish holiday of New Year, as I always try to do, I made my way to work by train and bicycle, but was denied passage through London’s Kensington Gardens – because it was windy that day.
This sort of thing gets more common all the time. How can I explain to those responsible for the sign that they have got things out of proportion? Of course, a tree might fall on me.
But it is also possible that an eagle will drop a tortoise on my head, as happened to the great playwright Aeschylus in 455 BC. Should I never go out at all, because of this risk?
A sign on the gates of Kensington Gardens prohibiting access because of ‘hazardous’ weather conditions