When is it
morally right
to intervene?
Alan Fisher
A last-minute candidate?
‘Are there any
trees close
to your property?’
Vacancies
Fancy becoming a chair?
John Cameron
Norman St John-Stevas looked and sounded like an Edwardian dilettante which led the general public and many of his contemporaries to seriously under-rate his ability. He was an outstanding academic with an Oxbridge first and doctorates from London and Yale who in later life became a memorable master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Under Edward Heath, he was a respected minister for education and the arts while in the Thatcher era he not only retained the arts brief but was also leader of the House. He was in the latter post for only two years but introduced a major, seminal reform by creating the system of Commons select committees to hold government to account. It was wholly beneficial for democracy that panels of backbench MPs have since been able to interrogate cabinet ministers and launch inquiries into government policies.
Sadly the ‘Blessed Margaret’ – a sobriquet he invented – was unimpressed with the idea and his attitude which she rightly guessed was mockingly subversive. She sacked him and he remained a backbencher until, in his own words, he ‘succumbed to the extinction of ermine’ and accepted a life peerage as Lord St John of Fawsley. In the upper chamber he was free to shine as the elegant master of debate he had always been and to deride the free-market monetarist policies of ‘she who must be obeyed’.
A Disraelian Conservative, he was ‘a colourful, loquacious bon vivant with the grand manner of a courtier or an aesthete from a more elegant age’. As such he was much better suited to the world of high culture where he continued to write books and became a superb chairman of the Royal Fine Arts Commission.
The public knew him best as the most devout of Catholics and a legendary monarchist who went in to bat very effectively on all occasions for the royal family. Though a Marian Catholic, he was no Vatican dupe and in the debate on contraception publicly stated that the Pope should have left the matter to the consciences of his flock.
He wrote widely on the relationships between law, politics and religion, and his grasp of the British constitution made him to the very end an invaluable sounding board.
The Cafe
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I fear for my friend from
university. I fear his son
may soon reach for a bomb
Donald Murray
Over the last month or so, the pictures of men in football strips have been replaced by quotations from the Quran, monologues from hairy-faced
Islamic preachers, chants of prayer and worship broadcast from a mosque.
As this is a true story, names, places and other details have been changed.
Photograph by Carol Ann Peacock
