Westminster Revisited, plus some thoughts on grammar schools, albatrosses and the Internationale

I hardly ever venture in to the Palace of Westminster any more. I spent many long days and nights there in the late 1980s, before I escaped from British politics into the more interesting world of the Cold War. When I do go back, I feel like a ghost. It’s not just that the politicians of that era are dead or gone, as are the political divisions and controversies.  The wise old coppers who knew every face and name seem to have disappeared, replaced by the modern type, including (to my horror) armed officers with sub-machine guns, who really should not be allowed near any legislative chamber.

 

 I can’t breeze in (as once I could), through three or four different entrances. Instead I must take my belt and watch off (I offered to take off my trousers too, but they said no) as if I were boarding an aircraft.  I can’t hang around in the members’ lobby waiting to pick up stories (I’m not sure many members pass that way in the new age of the Internet).   I doubt very much if I could find my way unchecked (as once I could) into the Ministerial corridor behind the Speaker’s chair, crammed as it then seemed to be with history and tension.

 

The old and myth-haunted Annie’s Bar (in all honesty a dingy and subterranean room, cheerlessly lit)  where lobby reporters could mingle on equal terms with MPs unwise enough to go in there and risk their reputations, has vanished. I believe reporters no longer have automatic access to the riverside terrace in summer. The House of Lords rifle range, where I would sometimes go on long dull evenings, to make sure I could shoot straight if the Russians ever arrived in force (I could never get the breathing right, and might have hit the occasional tank, but probably no people) , has I think been suppressed by some politically correct frenzy.

 

Heaven knows what has happened to the gamey old House of Lords Staff Bar, so well-hidden that you could never guarantee to find it two times in a row, in the tangled maze of corridors over towards the Victoria Tower.  It used to be the building’s nearest answer to an old-style working men’s club,  the only bar in the building where you could get Draught Guinness in those days, and also the place where a colleague of mine once hunted down George Brown, when that maudlin old liability was once again in serious trouble and thought he was safe.

 

Late at night, waiting for a final vote, I found it an entrancing building, though I must confess that I was hugely disappointed by the whole business of reporting politics. It was, despite its faults, (mainly the excessive closeness between politicians and journalists)  a good deal better than it is now. There was more variety of opinion.  There were men and women of long experience who could not be suborned by the government or the party machines. What has happened since makes it look like , well, a golden age. But of course it wasn’t.

 

Anyway, I was back there today for the launch of an interesting new book, of articles about school selection, published by the think tank Civitas. I am one of those contributors, and my essay, along with the others can be read here as a pdf http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/theselectiondebate

 free of charge:

 

My contribution is entitled ‘Why is selection by wealth better than selection by ability?’ and is on page 167, though the PDF thinks it is on page 187, in that way that PDFs have.

 

The launch, in Committee room 14 (which overlooks the Thames and is normally used by the Parliamentary Labour Party for its weekly meetings) was interestingly begun by two major political figures, David Davis ( a former grammar school boy who supports selection) and Tristram Hunt, a former public school boy who does not.  Also present was Graham Brady, the Tory MP who stood up for grammar schools when David Cameron was dismissing the issue as an ‘albatross’ (something he has since denied saying, absurdly since it is clearly on the record. I have checked).

 

But , while the shadow Secretary of State for Education was present,  in the boyish shape of Mr Hunt, there was no equivalent Tory establishment figure – only dissenters.

 

 Amusingly, in the debate among contributors which followed, my old Westminster colleague Fiona Millar (mother of Alastair Campbell’s children and a keen apostle of the comprehensive ideal)  gave warm praise to David Cameron and Michael Gove for sending their children to state schools, in this case the officially comprehensive Grey Coat Hospital single-sex Anglican school.

 

I don’t think a real educational conservative would relish the endorsement of Ms Millar, who is though herself a grammar school product, no supporter of such places.  My favourite story about her appeared in 2001 in the Daily Telegraph’s gossip column : ‘Even Alastair Campbell's consort, Fiona Millar,  finds remaining on-message a strain from time to time. I'm told that, as The Internationale faded out at Caroline Benn's memorial service, she was heard to sigh: “Great to hear language we aren't allowed to use any longer.”’

 

I should mention here that the Internationale (the first verse of which I can still sing badly in English and French) is the anthem of international revolutionary Marxism, and pops up at most New Labour funerals and memorial services, rather undermining the silly fancy that Blairism is really Toryism. believe me, it ain't.