An Interview with the London Evening Standard

Some of you may be interested in reading an interview I recently gave to Richard Godwin of the London Evening Standard. It can be found here

It's inevitable, I think, that I'm both pleased at the attention, and irritated by some aspects of the interview. This time, I have the opportunity to offer a small critique and riposte. Here it is, in no particular order. Mr Godwin (who drank mint tea during our encounter) appears to think coffee is comparable to cannabis and alcohol. It isn't.  Is he a Mormon?  He hasn't quite got my hangover problem right. The 1971 Act didn't make cannabis illegal. It already was.  It changed the way in which it was illegal.  And then there are the inevitable sausage-machine questions about my brother, asked and answered so many times before in one shape or another. Did I spend 'much of my life' at war with him? Depends what you mean by 'much', I suppose. As for 'tearing into each other' on debating platforms, we debated three times (Conway Hall, 1999,  Grand Rapids 2008 and Washington DC 2009 ) , and I'd say that all three were pretty courteous, and good-humoured.  .  Plus ...thrill of horror here 'He (me) wants to bring back....hanging!'(Automatic bad person alert! Huge credit to interviewer for being prepared to share the same airspace as such a despicable pariah! Say no more!).  

I'm not quite sure what this 'vision for the country' may be, which 'sounds like Downton Abbey'. I have no vision for the country. I admit my cause is lost.  And even when I made a joke (about Rimbaud) he was convinced that I was being serious.

And I recollect a couple of passages differently from the writer. It's Cancer of the Oesophagus that I said was a family disease, not excess. Excess doesn't really make sense in the context, does it? And the children skinning up on buses - which I have seen in Oxford as it happens  - were nearer thirteen than ten. That could just be a mishearing of the tape, though.

He may have misunderstood the point of my answer about the whisky and cigarettes. I was trying to say that being admired for smoking and drinking might not necessarily be a good thing for the person being admired.

 And did I really say I was against all forms of self-indulgence? That was a hostage to fortune, if so. And why does an unwillingness to forgive yourself for past stupid mistakes 'deny the concept of learning from your mistakes'. I should have thought that you stopped learning from them as soon as you started excusing yourself for them, or minimising them. As the Prayer Book confession at Holy Communion expresses it 'The remembrance of them is grievous unto us. The burden of them is intolerable'. That's the point of Divine Grace. You are forgiven for those things of which your conscience is afraid, and for which you cannot forgive yourself. Not much use explaining that to metropolitan liberals, though, I suppose. Divine? It's an expression used by Noel Coward. Grace?  It's a girl's name.

Still, why quibble too much?  It's the first time the Evening Standard has ever come close to reviewing any of my books, in more than ten years.