In a free state, Ministers do not 'run the country'

Every year in the depth of summer there are stories in the papers about some middle-ranking Cabinet Minister (the most recent was Al ���Boris��� Johnson, the Foreign Secretary ���running the country��� because the Prime Minister is away. These stories make me grind my teeth in rage.

In free lands, the government does not ���run the country���. In fact, when the government is entirely absent ( as was the case for ages in Belgium recently, and is more or less the case now in Ireland and Spain) things often carry on just as well, if not better, than they did when there was an administration in place.

But I think this is (or was)  especially so in England, a land where for centuries self-reliant people have obeyed and enforced the Law of the Land, devised by them for their own pleasure and convenience.

The age and power of this idea isn���t very obvious in London. The capital is full of symbols of government, and much of the rest of it is an increasingly unattractive megacity in which the impossibly rich are served by the unconscionably poor in grotesque, even gross surroundings.  

But over the past few weeks I���ve been travelling through a part of the country that is often unvisited, stretching from Nottingham over towards the east coast.

And one sees, in the old heart of Nottingham, in the handsome broad streets of Derby , the glorious market square of Newark and the profound Anglican peace and elegance and beauty of Southwell (whose unvisited Minster contains some of the loveliest, most exuberant carved stone in Europe), the architectural relics of English independence and liberty.

There���s a plain, four-square, unpretending solidity about this style of building. It is confident without being arrogant, mostly undecorated, predominantly brick, its streets are not too straight or regular but its displays of wealth don���t have the cold haughty grandeur of their French equivalents. These houses were inhabited by stout, independent men who would stand up for themselves and not be ordered about, and their governments knew it, and treated them accordingly.

It speaks of an age in which a Member of Parliament really was somebody, and so was a Justice of the Peace and a Rector, and the editor of the town���s newspaper, and the head master (two words, not one) of its grammar school.

Now most of these people are cyphers, stifled into obedience by whips, quangoes and government inspectors,  and every town is pushed towards sameness and subservience.

And if it carries on like this much longer, someone like Al Johnson really will be ���running the country��� one day,. Though why anyone would ask him to do so, I do not know.