Ed West

Ed West is in favour of mercy — but not for a Californian member of the Taliban
Catholic Herald, 2 January 2009

As the Bushes pack the last of their belongings and agonise over whether to take the fridge, the family of John Walker Lindh have pleaded with the outgoing president to commute their son’s 20-year sentence as a final gesture of mercy. Lindh, also known as the “American Taliban”, was captured by US forces in Afghanistan soon after their invasion and is serving a 20-year stretch for treason.

Lindt came from a comfortable, if slightly bohemian, middle-class Californian family. He grew up in a free and forgiving society and so, like so many young men in the West, came to despise it, and sought to follow a more manly way of life. After first becoming a “wigger”, a self-hating white fan of hip-hop music, he then turned to Islam’s lunatic wing.

Lindh was dealt what Cecil Rhodes called the winning cards in life, but he threw them away to join a religious fascist movement.

“John made a mistake in joining the Afghan army at a time when their government was controlled by the Taliban,” his parents said, as if he did not know what he was doing, and Afghanistan was a Nordic-style democracy when he asked for the recruitment application.

I’m in favour of mercy – to those young Afghan and Arab ignoramuses pressured into becoming bombers. They should be released as soon as they have been educated in literacy, history and Western freedom – that same freedom that Lindh was trying to deny their fellow countrymen. Why should Lindh get off while they linger?

During the Cold War far more media coverage was ever given to the American victims of Joseph McCarthy, dozens of whom lost their jobs because of their beliefs, than to the foreign victims of Stalin and Mao, millions of whom lost their lives for theirs. That same view, that American lives are worth far more than Third World ones, still dominates American liberal thought today.

*** 

If the North-West Frontier Province is the last stronghold of Bin Laden then north London, my neck of the woods, is probably the last holdout of Marxism. In N1 this week a group of Cold War throwbacks will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution with a “CHElebration New Year party”, organised by a company that makes pretentious football shirts for students. 

I’ve never understood the whole Che Guevara icon thing. He was obviously good-looking, but so was Ted Bundy, and he killed fewer people, and was probably better company.

Why is it acceptable to wear a T-shirt with Che and not, for example, Ernst Röhm, or Franco? A few years back David Beckham got in trouble for having one of Eichmann, which a fan had, bizarrely, sent him as a present, but what’s the difference? Admittedly Eichmann killed far more people, but as the saying goes, it’s not a competition.

Guevara himself ordered the deaths of hundreds of people, and carried out many murders himself. He was a brutal man who, by his own admissions, got a kick out of violence (and like most middle-class Argentinians of his era despised the dark-skinned Caribbean people he came to liberate).

The organisers of the London party call him “an icon, a means of identifying with the anti-establishment, a unique mix of the revolutionary ideals and pop star celebrity”.

Che stopped being anti-establishment the moment he pointed a gun at an unarmed man. The real appeal is that inside every rebel is a tyrant, and it is the whiff of tyranny and violence that attracts people raised in complacent democracies to Che the butcher, not the tedious Marxism that he cloaked himself in.

From The Catholic Herald: Shadow education secretary Michael Gove tells Ed West that a Tory government would take a different approach to our schools

Michael Gove is so close to power he can almost smell the Government dispatch box. In 18 months, barring the mother of all comebacks by Gordon Brown, this eloquent, earnest-looking Aberdonian will be putting Ed Balls out of gainful employment. All the future Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families has to do is not say anything stupid in an interview. And he is not about to do that.

“The attitude for any political party never changes, whether you’re behind or ahead – you always have an enormous amount to do,” he says, in the coffee room of Portcullis House, the sixth-form common room for MPs opposite Parliament. “Of course the media climate can change, generous one week and hyper-critical the next. There are good and bad patches with the occasional favourable coverage you don’t deserve. You have to treat triumph and disaster just the same, maintain a level-headed recognition that nothing stays the same forever.” 

That statement seems almost Gove-esque: articulate, level-headed, moderate. The general consensus is that Gove is a rising star, or maybe it is just that, being a journalist himself, he is more popular with the media than other politicians.

Gove was a leader writer and campaigning journalist for the Times, covering the Brussels bureaucracy (like fellow hack-turned-Tory MP Boris Johnson), Northern Ireland, terrorism, small business and street crime. His coverage of the murder of Catholic headmaster Philip Lawrence was particularly noteworthy. He has also written for the Times Literary Supplement and Prospect, and books about the Ulster peace process and Islamic terrorism.

He landed the plum Tory seat of Surrey Heath, entering Parliament in the Tory partial revival of 2005. But this is his second stab at politics – before landing a job in Fleet Street he was rejected by the Tory party on the grounds of being “not a Conservative”. 

By the time David Cameron promoted him to become schools supremo in his shadow cabinet in 2007 Gove had become, through regular appearances on The Late Review or The Moral Maze, one of the small group of Tory MPs who are recognised outside of political circles and actually liked.

One of many things said about Cameron’s Tory Party is that it is stage-managed and looks-obsessed. Certainly Gove looks pretty well-groomed to me. Has he had a focus group-sanctioned makeover?

“No,” he says. “I don’t know what a makeover would do to me but no. If anyone had given me a makeover I would want my money back.” So no he’s not stage-managed, he says. Exactly what a stage-managed politician would say.

Born in Edinburgh, Gove was adopted at an early age. His adoptive father is still in the fishmongering business and his mother works with deaf children (his adoptive sister has hearing difficulties). He was baptised and confirmed in the Church of Scotland, and helped out in Sunday school, but he describes himself as a “Christian first” rather than a Presbyterian. At Oxford he attended Anglican services at St Thomas chapel, “not out of any doctrinal positioning”, and he was married in an Anglican service on the Cote d’Azur, where his in-laws live (Grove’s wife, Sarah Vine, is a successful journalist in her own right).

“I consider myself a Protestant and more broadly a Christian,” he said. “That’s broadly where I’m coming from in these areas.” But he certainly does not bang on about it. 

“I think there’s a slight disabling factor if you have a discussion, for example, about certain right to life issues people sometime assume you take the position you do purely because of religious belief. 

“When I try to make arguments, I try not to bring faith into it. Some people say that’s wrong. Inevitably they are shaped by religious experience. My argument is that it’s more important to say that you don’t need to be a believer.” 

It is no secret that his opposite number, Ed Balls, is not entirely loved by Catholics or by anyone who cannot afford the private school education he enjoyed. Gove, who is incidently the only member of the shadow cabinet to have been educated in both the state and private sector, and in England and Scotland, is more sympathetic.

“The whole questions of admissions became a hugely controversial area because Ed deliberately chose to attack faith schools, and in my judgment that was unfair,” he says. “The evidence subsequently uncovered showed they didn’t deserve to be treated that way.” 

Balls claimed that Christian and Jewish schools were “cheating” on admissions by slyly letting in more “middle-class” children than less successful neighbours.

So will Gove – and this is the big question for Catholic parents and teachers – allow schools to control admissions? Er, no.

“Schools have an absolute right to say that the ethos of this school demands that the parents acknowledge and the children accept the doctrinal basis on which the school was founded,” he says. “But the crucial thing is we mustn’t have selection by ability. If you do have Roman Catholic or Church of England or Jewish schools they have to be comprehensive schools. That means they can impose a set of rules over who is eligible. But once you cross that eligibility criteria it has to be all abilities.” 

I suggest that this is putting theory before practice. In reality better schools will always have slightly more so-called “middle-class” children. Interfering with school admissions will not change that.

“I don’t think that is true,” he replies. “I don’t think the good ones will necessarily have more middle-class kids. There are aspirational people in every class, but I certainly think the current system we have can favour the privileged wealthy middle class. That’s one of the reasons we believe it’s appropriate to have organisations, including the Catholic Church, setting up new schools, because that can provide alternatives.”

Gove’s grand idea is the “Swedish model”, whereby groups of parents can get together and establish their own schools, choosing how to spend the government grant themselves. It will encourage smaller, better-run and more independent schools, but critics say it will be expensive – the groups will have to find the buildings, for one. 

“Our ideal is where parents choose schools rather than schools choosing parents,” Gove says. “My view is the overwhelming majority of parents are aspirational. We want to give parents greater choice.

“Let’s imagine in your circumstances that an organisation took over an old building and set up a really good school in the area, to provide you with an alternative. Wouldn’t it better if that school were properly comprehensive and accepted every ability? You don’t have to have an academic selection for a school to be successful. I suspect that in some of the schools you worry about it’s not the intake problem, it’s where heads and the teams around them that aren’t committed to academic excellence and discipline.”

He also rules out grammar schools. 

The other big contention Catholics have with Gove (and Cameron) is that he voted for the Sexual Orientation Regulations. The law is likely to force some Catholic adoption agencies to close, which will mean hundreds of children – all of them hard cases who would have been placed with experienced, heterosexual foster parents anyway – will have no family to look after them. How does he square that?

“It’s an area where there are lots of issues,” he says. “I think it is prejudiced to say you won’t place children with people in effect because of their sexual orientation. The Church is wrong on questions of sexual orientation. The emotional impulse towards love, caring, commitment should be supported, whether that’s homosexual or heterosexual. We should not say because someone is homosexual they are incapable of entering into a committed relationship. I know there are some people who say it’s against natural law, but that’s my judgment.” 

I suggest that, while some Catholics would agree, the law was illiberal and against the founding principles of Edmund Burke’s party.

“It’s entirely fair for individuals to say this amounts to an attitude I find unappealing,” he says. But he adds that he does not believe people should be “tick-box liberals or conservatives”. 

I suspect that many fear that Cameron’s Tories are tick-box liberals. Either way Gove will be one of the central intellectual figures in the party. He has ideas. Whether they work is something we shall find out. Either way I suspect that a Tory government would have a very short honeymoon period.

“There are two ifs,” Gove says. “If we win – and I can’t get myself into the position where I assume we do – then you cannot allow yourself to be bewitched by the need to maintain popularity. You’ll end up not taking some of the necessary decisions in order to get things right long term. It certainly was the case that Tony Blair spent too much time husbanding his poll leads to get things done.”

Catholic Herald
November 7, 2008

When publishers come to chronicle the New Labour Years (1997-2010) one of the visual images I’d suggest for a front cover would be a line of cocaine, use of which has doubled since Tony Blair was elected.

Coke is the drug of choice for 21st century Britain. Its effects are everywhere to be seen, from the heart-attack victims in A&E wards to the arrogance of much of the British art, music and comedy scene.

Social acceptability is a strange beast. Twenty years ago people joked about drink-driving in a casual manner (at a family dinner recently someone recalled a policeman smiling when my uncle fell out of the driver’s seat after being stopped at 3 am). While in the past few years our attitude towards flying has undergone a sort of “stigma revolution” (so quick that one could film a time-travel comedy of manners like Life on Mars about flying in which the protagonist travels back to 2005).

Conversely, activities associated with youth and glamour on one hand and “the disadvantaged” on the other are protected from censure, which is why posters warning about drug abuse or casual sex never have the same stern puritanical tone as those aimed at “middle-class drinkers” or smokers, and only seek to “inform” and state the facts.

The drinks industry-funded nagging group Drink Aware recently produced adverts showing a load of wine bottles in a recycling box. Noticing that it looked just like the one in my kitchen, I assumed it was a pat on the back and was slightly taken aback by the small print. “I see you like to recycle,” it read. “Wow, you drink a lot.’”

We boring, law-abiding, play-by-the-rules types are always the bad guys. Yet if they wanted to attack a truly anti-social group the authorities could go after cocaine addicts and other hard drug users. Cocaine not only leads to violence in Britain but it also causes widespread political unrest in Colombia (and now in west Africa); it is ecologically unfriendly; and forget about your high-street rag merchants, if you want capitalism at its most inhumane look at the stuff being snorted off toilet cisterns in fashionable restaurants. For there is no such thing as Fair Trade cocaine, although I’m sure if there were dinner party guests in north London would hoover it up. And on top of all that it has to get flown in from South America – imagine the carbon footprint!

Two sure signs that Britain is turning into a Third World country. First, the Prime Minister wades into the BBC row about the actor who played Manuel (incidentally Fawlty Towers is still very popular in Spain, where Manuel is a Neopolitan). Second, a “police community support officer” nicks 15-year-old schoolboy Fabian Sabbara under terrorism laws, his crime being to take pictures of Wimbledon railway station for a school project. 

Like ASBOs, the anti-terrorist laws are quintessentially New Labour, both authoritarian and useless. They won’t stop radical Muslim groups, many of whom are funded by the state anyway, but they will be used to harass everyone else. Besides which, if a terrorist wanted pictures of Wimbledon station, or any other building for that matter, he could find hundreds of them on the website Flickr. 

But then what does one expect from one of “Blunkett’s Bobbies”, as those toy-town policemen are called? If they are the front line of the war against terror, expect a long wait for VT Day.

This is my least favourite time of year, festival-wise. A pseudo-religious invention where delinquent teenagers are free to extort goods from householders at will, held in the same week as a Catholic-bashing neo-pagan event where small explosives are sold to the exact same reprobates. Still, with any luck both Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night will soon fall foul of our anti-terror laws.

Catholic Herald
26 September, 2008

Why are so many men killing their families? There seems to be at least one case a month, and each new massacre slips further down the news, becoming just more background noise.

This type of crime is interesting because of its very unnaturalness. Most violent acts make some sort of sense in a brutal, primitive way, especially the killing of spouses, stepchildren and rivals. But the murder of one’s offspring is so uniquely wrong that Joseph Goebbels is still most vilified for killing his own children rather than his part in murdering 11 million civilians. 

It is a subject that has vexed our friends at Richarddawkins.net, that electronic City on the Hill of free-thinking-as-long-as-you-think-like-us. What evolutionary advantage, they have been debating this week, is there in destroying one’s entire family?

Somehow I doubt any would-be family killer has ever been dissuaded by The Selfish Gene. This modern phenomenon is a by-product of high levels of stress, low levels of religious hope and even lower levels of moral restraint, the result being rage, depression and, most of all, selfishness. It is not considerations of genetic self-interest that make human beings act nicely to each other, but abstract ideas of genuine altruism. This may also be why the followers of Dawkins seem least capable of passing on their selfish genes. 

I also suspect that these father-massacres are caused by the infantilisation of men. Tantrums, the breaking of one’s toys and violent rages against perceived unfairness are what children do before they learn to control their tempers; these man-children are treating their own offspring like toys to be smashed up to spite those around them.

Likewise, that other 21st-century plague, the teen-on-teen murder, is a symptom not of children growing up too quickly but of their failing to mature at all. Adults learn to take criticism rather than seeing it as a “diss”; adults learn to bury the hatchet for the wider good; adults learn to think about the consequences of losing their temper. It is pathetically fitting that one of the most recent London murders occurred after an argument caused by a water fight in a park.

An atheist / agnostic recently told me, following Sarah Palin’s meteoritic rise to fame / infamy, that religious belief, especially that espoused by hideously white and dangerously armed Americans, was evidence of low intelligence. (She also argued that criminals are by definition Right-wing because they are “anti-other”.) 

This argument was probably last correct some time around 1835 or 1836. At that time most of the dimmest people would have been religious and “Right-wing” because those were the default political views of the society; nowadays, where Left-liberalism and atheism are the social norms in Britain, most stupid people follow these creeds. 

A recent survey of anti-Americanism in Britain found that the less informed someone was about America the more anti-American they were. Likewise the bulk of the secular Left in favour of ruining Catholic schools and adoption agencies do not have letters after their name, except perhaps ASBO.

Speaking of Americans: last week, reviewing the spoof war film Tropic Thunder, I suggested that Nick Nolte’s character was “crazy in a way that only Vietnam vets can be”. I received a kind note from Mack Hall in Texas, who wrote: “The phonies who claim to be Vietnam veterans are often crazy; we Vietnam veterans tend not to be crazy / murderous / drugged-out, merely annoyed.” 

I was not aware of the phoney ’Nam vet as a figure, although all wars produce fakes. My favourite description of the Easter 1916 Rising states dryly: “Two hundred men walked into the GPO that day, 30,000 stumbled out.”

Tropic Thunder
Catholic Herald, September 19, 2008

Kingsley Amis used to say that book covers should carry the author’s year of birth so that he did not have to waste any time reading anything by a young person. In a similar way I have often thought that film classification should involve a maximum as well as a minimum recommended viewing age. 

After all, who is more likely to be upset by violence – an octogenarian brought up in pre-Woy 

Jenkins gentility, or some 

11-year-old who spends his evenings on computer games where the aim is to shoot strangers in leisure centres? 

I thought about this while watching Tropic Thunder, a comedy I found hilarious but which contains jokes about genitals, backsides and Class-A drug abuse that will horrify or bore many people older than me.

The film title refers to a Vietnam war blockbuster in the making based on the memoirs of grizzled Vietnam vet “Four Leaf” Tayback (Nick Nolte). Supposed to be the biggest and most expensive war movie of all time, the film is falling apart because director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) cannot control his stellar cast’s stellar egos. Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller), a fading action film star whose attempt at winning credibility by playing a Forrest Gump-style “retard” has recently backfired, is bitterly jealous of co-star Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr), a ludicrous Australian method actor. Also along for the ride are low-brow comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), who has a heroin addiction, a rapper-turned-actor and a struggling young actor desperate for a break.

Lazarus is the best Hollywood parody in many years, a hard-living method-acting genius, part Heath Ledger and part Russell Crowe. Before the film proper starts we see a trailer for one of five films Lazarus is supposed to have won an Oscar for, a medieval take on Brokeback Mountain involving two gay Irish monks. Lazarus, we learn, has taken a role in Tropic because he is attracted to the role of African-American sergeant Lincoln Osiris, and thinks that playing a black man is the ultimate acting challenge, so much so that he has an operation to graft on afro hair and stays in character throughout, even as the film-within-the-film falls to pieces.

After a particular bad telling off by the studio boss, the director is in despair. “Four Leaf”, clearly half-bonkers in a way that only Vietnam vets seem to be, suggests making the actors’ emotions more “realistic” by throwing them into the real jungle and filming them guerrilla-style. (It also transpires that Four Leaf is not entirely honest about his time in the “Tropic Thunder” platoon, a swipe at the dubious memoir industry.)

And so they stumble into real danger in the form of heroin smugglers who believe they are from the Drug Enforcement Administration. Speedman finds himself a prisoner in a drug-processing camp, still under the impression that the cameras are rolling. 

It might seem odd spoofing Vietnam films 20 years after Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Born on the Fourth of July came out, and Stiller says he first had the idea while playing a small part in Empire of the Sun in 1987.

But Tropic Thunder is about the absurdity of the acting profession, which reaches unironically smug peaks when actors get together to make war films (especially pompous ’Nam films about “America’s loss of innocence”). It mocks the fake boot camps, the pseud’s talk about the “intensity” of war, and the way that the actors often go slightly mad during filming (the reality behind the making of Apocalypse Now is only mildly less absurd than Tropic Thunder). 

Stiller, as a member of the Hollywood gentry (his parents are the comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara), is better placed than anyone else to mock the acting industry. But as a man, also, he has a wonderful insight into the absurdities of masculinity and machismo.

Notebook
August 29, 2008

Gary Glitter is obviously a villain – and the pop star has even, strangely, given himself a villainous, paedophile-style goatee while in Thai prison– but I cannot help feeling slightly uncomfortable with the media’s barely concealed salivation at the prospect of the pop star’s murder. A couple of columnists have effectively called for Glitter’s assassination.

It might not often feel like it, but we do live in a civilised society, and no one should be hunted down by a baying media-led pack. Also, the public’s obsession with paedophilia is not healthy moral revulsion, but a hysterical act of projection. As society has become sexualised to a tedious degree (just as boring people talk about sex a lot, the most boring towns and countries are also the most sex-mad), paedophilia and sex crime in general have become more common. 

Two things are directly feeding a rise in child sex abuse. The first is commercial media – including red-top newspapers, magazines and the music industry – that have no social, political or legal pressures to put the breaks on sexual content. Children born this century are fed a diet of music videos that are explicitly sexual in words and images, and the same newspapers that want to kill Glitter promote these “artists”.

Secondly, the acceptance that teenage casual sex is normal, as well as leading to a massive rise in teen pregnancies (even if we were to turn the entire Malaysian rainforest into condoms), will also lead to a massive increase in sexual abuse by adults.

Gary Glitter might be going to hell, but plenty of journalists, politicians and music industry folk will be there to keep him company.

Speaking of the music industry: a couple of weeks ago I mentioned the Reductio ad Hitlerum, the logical fallacy used by lazy people to compare their enemies to the Nazis. Last week at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium, ageing singer Madonna added her tuppennce worth to the presidential debate by holding up a picture of John McCain next to images of Hitler and Robert Mugabe. Just to drive home the point she then produced one of Obama with Mahatma Gandhi and John Lennon. It’s the sort of cheap jibe that the old wife-beater Lennon would have approved of. Whether it’s Bono trying to get African dictators let off their debts or American singers eulogising the glorious IRA, no popular musician has ever made an original, interesting political point in the history of mankind.

It is almost a year since Eurostar’s new London terminal at St Pancras opened. At the time it seemed a strange decision, spending hundreds of millions moving from a far more central and pleasant part of London, but it’s had a strange and wonderful knock-on effect. St Pancras’ renaissance has led to an upsurge in public awareness of John Betjeman and his earlier, failed campaign to save Euston, demolished in 1962 in one of those strange moments of human collective insanity, like witch hunts or suicide clusters.

Because the internet (and especially Google Images) has democratised architecture, it’s easier for the public to see through their own eyes what old Euston looked like, compared to the current thing, so ugly that it arguably wins the much-coveted title of ugliest building of the 1960s.

But Euston Mark II is falling apart, and while the plan for Mark III looks like the sort of bland glass and steel shopping centre one might except, there is a growing campaign to restore the old arch, which surprisingly was not demolished but left at the bottom of a river in Essex. I’d go the whole hog and rebuild the station as it was, but this is a step in the right direction. Go to 

www.eustonarch.org and join the campaign.

‘I?thought I?was a bit long in the tooth’
Catholic Herald, August 8, 2008: Ed West meets the convert given the daunting task of preserving the mother church of England and Wales

As the Church prepares for a new wave of converts we sometimes forget how many ex-Anglicans clerics we have already, and how far many have risen. Few have risen higher than Canon Christopher Tuckwell, Administrator of Westminster Cathedral since June.

As sub-administrator he was expected to take over the role from Mgr Mark Langham, but he says, in his measured drawl, that he was surprised by the appointment.

“I thought that at 62 I was a bit long in the tooth,” he says. “Also, as a fairly recent arrival, I thought it was one of the appointments that would not be given to a convert.” 

It’s the culmination of a strange journey for a man who grew up in a “middle-to-low church” family in Surrey and who entered Sandhurst in 1964 and served six years in Germany, Oman and Kenya. 

“From the age of 12 I wanted to be a soldier, but from 17 I began to take my faith quiet seriously, started to go to Bible discussion group and early morning Eucharist, and I began to pray. Out of the blue I had a sense that perhaps God was calling me to ordination. I then had to juggle these two ideas, a clergyman and a soldier, and very wisely my school chaplain said: ‘Why not go into the Army first and see what God has to say to you?’

“The Army was a testing ground to see whether this idea of a vocation was a nine-day wonder, but all the time I knew ultimately I had to answer this call.” 

After Chichester Theological College and a curacy in east London he arrived in the West Indies in 1976 and experienced a life-changing friendship. Before that, he says, it had simply never occurred to him to be a Catholic. 

“My father’s family had originally been Church of Ireland, and neither of my parents were regular churchgoers; while the school I went to was lowish Anglican. The first Roman Catholic Church I ever set foot in was Westminster Cathedral, when I was 14. A cousin of mine had a French exchange student staying, and we thought we should bring him here as well as Westminster Abbey. I remember just this big dark cavernous building with twinkling lights. It all seemed very strange. Not foreign, but just strange. I really knew very little about Roman Catholics.” 

That all changed in the Caribbean island of St Vincent with his friendship with a priest, a member of the Scarborough foreign missions in Canada. “He and I became very good friends and we spent a lot of time talking and reading Catholic devotional material. It all sort of came together. One day I just knew I must seek communion with Peter and his successor.”

Was he worried he’d hurt people’s feelings? “That’s why I didn’t convert in the West Indies, though I spoke with the bishop and he knew my feelings. When I was back in England it was more a reluctance to leave the familiar, a parish I was very happy and content in, to step out into the partially unknown. I kept finding good reasons to not do it yet.

“By the time I came to announce I was handing in my resignation I don’t think there was anybody in the parish who was surprised, and there were a number in the congregation who were making the journey with me. Out of 270 I suppose about 10 actually converted.” 

Instrumental in providing that vital helping hand was the then Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, who was, Canon Tuckwell says, the “final straw”. He then laughs. “No, that would give the wrong impression, Bishop Nichols was the opposite; he was the catalyst. We had an ecumenical service in my church and the local Catholic parish priest, Canon Frank Hegarty, a very good friend of mine and my sponsor in the Church, had spoken to Bishop Nichols.

“We spoke after the service, at the end of which he said: ‘Give me a call if I can be of any help.’ I phoned him a week later and he was very kind, arranged an interview, and that was it. 

“I was fortunate enough to be here in Westminster and between them Cardinal Hume and Bishop Nichols were very generous and very encouraging. They really put themselves out to assist us in coming into the Church. I can’t say it was the experience with some of my colleagues in other dioceses, some of whom received a less than warm welcome.

“I think a popular misconception was we were all ultra-conservative and were going to put the clock back – whatever that meant – and we would be an unsettling force within English Catholicism. Some bishops were very friendly and welcoming, some less so. I don’t think it was politics, more a matter of preference or prejudice.” 

He says he feels “very sorry” 

for those still in the Church of England who yearn for full communion with Rome. 

“I’ve a number of friends who ought to have converted some years ago given their feelings and beliefs. I wonder why they didn’t.  The parish is their family, and they are loyal to them, so it’s difficult for some people to make that break.” 

Today, Canon Tuckwell’s parish “includes Peabody estates, Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament”. About a third of the people who come through the doors of the Cathedral on a Sunday are regulars, he says, the rest travelling from further afield.

One of his main tasks, of course, is the Cathedral’s major fundraising appeal, which has £1m in the bank and another £500,000 pledged. 

“We’re re-launching the appeal in October, so my first task is to deal with that, then to see the completion of the work on the domes and the west front,” he explains. His job has been made immeasurably easier by one donor, a man “absolutely dedicated” to the Cathedral, who has personally pledged to continue the mission of the founder to have the schema of mosaics completed. So will the mosaics finally be finished?

“You’re asking me a question that’s difficult to answer,” he laughs. “If the donor has anything to do with it the answer is Yes. When I was first asked that I rather foolishly said, ‘Not in my lifetime’, and he said: ‘Don’t say that because they could very well be.’ His vision and enthusiasm has inspired me to think: ‘Yes, they could.’ 

“The building will always cost us money, and that’s something we will just have to accept. But this is a living cathedral, not a monument or tourist attraction. It is somewhere people come to pray, celebrate Mass, to worship, and go to confession. From the moment we open the doors there are people waiting outside on their way to work to make their visit. And it’s that prayerful presence which gives the lifeblood to the place.” 

To make a donation to the 

Westminster Cathedral appeal, 

telephone 020 7798 9059, visit www.rcdow.org.uk/cathedralappeal/single_donation.asp or e-mail charlesd@rcdow.org.uk

Features: August 8, 2008

The Spanish bishops have expressed outrage at their parliament’s plan to grant apes ‘human rights’. Ed West asks if they are right

There’s an old joke about a Christian ape standing in a zoo, with the Bible in one hand and Darwin in the other. “Am I my brother’s keeper,” he asks, “or my keeper’s brother?”

According to Pedro Pozas, Spanish director of the Great Apes Project, he might also be his keeper’s “evolutionary comrade”.

That’s how Mr Pozas described apes last month after a Spanish Parliamentary committee approved of the GAP’s resolutions, making it almost certain that Spain will become the first country to give animals, in this case the great apes, “human rights”. 

The Great Apes Project is the brainchild of Princeton philosopher and animal rights godfather Peter Singer, and has long lobbied for a UN Declaration on Great Apes and “the extension of the community of equals to include all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans”.

And while the Spanish bill is uncontroversial in practice – it makes it illegal to carry out harmful experiments on apes, though no such experiments currently take place in Spain – the principle of giving apes “human” rights has caused outrage in the Church.

The Bishop of Palencia said Spain “is being used as a guinea pig for post-Marxist ideology that is characterised by its rebellion against the cultural roots of Europe, against Christian anthropology, against reason and against nature itself”.

The outspoken bishop then argued: “There’s little doubt that the next step will be euthanasia, eugenics and ethnic cleansing.”

So will this resolution blur the line between man and beast? Deborah Jones of Catholic Concern for Animals says no.

“Animals don’t have human rights per se,” she says, “but animals have animal rights. They are the ‘five freedoms’ of the Farm Animal Welfare Council code, which are freedom from hunger and thirst, discomfort, pain, injury and disease and unnecessary suffering, fear and distress, and the freedom to express normal behaviour. None too outlandish, I’d have thought.”

She says the Spanish hierarchy’s objections are cultural, not theological. “The senior clerics are steeped in such an anthropocentric viewpoint. They can’t see the whole of creation as being interconnected.”

Miss Jones argues that much of the rage in Spain was down to the government’s liberalisation of abortion and stem-cell research, but she says there’s no reason one has to necessarily be both pro-abortion and pro-animal rights.

“We’re pro-life, and we’re pro-animals. What concerns us about unborn children and animals is their vulnerability. It gets us mad when it’s presented as either/or. Our stance is deeply traditional. Newman, Manning and Heenan were all pro-animal.” 

Certainly Catholics from St Francis onwards have been concerned for animals, and the Pope has argued against the production of foie gras, saying: “We cannot just do whatever we want” with ducks or geese.

The Catechism addresses the moral stance of Christians to animals in sections 2415 to 2418. The last states: “It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly,” but it also argues: “It is likewise unworthy to spend money on them that should as a priority go to the relief of human misery. One can love animals; one should not direct to them the affection due only to persons.” 

And for Catholics rights are inseparable from responsibilities. How can an ape be punished if it harms another ape, or a human “evolutionary comrade”?

“It would be a nonsense to give human rights to animals because they involve things inappropriate to animals,” says Miss Jones. “But the basic rights that all sentient beings have we should support, freedom from torture for instance.” 

But Mgr Paul Hypher, a retired Diocese of East Anglia priest, says the issue of rights is too new for the Church to rule on.

“The Church hasn’t considered the question of animal rights formally, but the whole issue of rights is relatively recent and I wouldn’t regard it as ‘un-Catholic’,” he says. Basically our humanity is totally dependent on the rest of creation. 

“It’s a question of the meaning of rights. An animal can’t carry responsibility, and if you put the two together you can’t get rights. The fundamental point of the Church is the respect for creation and animals.”

Still, it could still be the start of a slope. The Swiss Ethics Committee on Non Human Gene Technology has already released reports on primates and animals, exploring the “dignity” of plants, and attacking “decapitation of wild flowers at the roadside without rational reason”. We may well see a UN Declaration on Grass rights in our lifetime.

Notebook
August 8, 2008 

Some anti-alcohol fanatics have told off David Cameron for suggesting that parents should drink with their children, to encourage them to be sensible about booze. I’ve always thought that drunken violence could be reduced if we lowered the pub drinking age to 15, as long as someone over the age of 30 accompanied the teenager, who would obviously be held responsible if they misbehaved. Still, in our sex crime-obsessed country, no doubt some self-appointed, taxpayer-funded, children’s rights group would claim this would encourage paedophiles.

Drunkenness is like idleness and fatness – everyone at the very bottom of society is doing it more than ever, but the rest don’t have time. The Independent recently reported that “sobriety is in vogue” and listed famous non-drinkers: among them were celebrity eco-bores Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow, newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky, potty-mouthed BBC comedian Catherine Tate and David Walliams from Little Britain. I hate to use the phrase “represent everything wrong with Britain”, but…

Incidentally, actress Paltrow is one of several celebrities backing Barack Obama, yet even she could not stop his poll ratings plunging the week after he shook hands with Gordon Brown. I don’t think there is an rational explanation for Brown’s doom: he is just spiritually unlucky, a Jonah, and no amount of PR can change that. If he went out kissing babies they’d probably end up developing scrofula. 

A few weeks ago an article in this newspaper ended up being pasted on the Richard Dawkins site by one of the professor’s fans. The bile and hate the Dawkinites expressed for the Catholic Church and Christianity in general was weird and bizarre, and explains why so many people find his brand of atheism so sinister and off-putting, even if they think he is talking sense.

Prof Dawkins is certainly right to point out that racismophobia, the fear of being called racist, is preventing teachers from combating Islamic creationism. At university I was taught in social anthropology class that the heart wasn’t necessarily for pumping blood around the body. Australian Aborigines believed it was there to house our spirit animal, or some such rubbish, and this was just as valid as our western imperialist idea. I thought at the time that stabbing my teacher in the heart would have been a suitably witty and Johnsonian response, although the eurocentric courts no doubt would have deemed it “murder”.

I wonder what Dawkins would make of Massab Yousef, who has swapped one “bronze age myth” for another. It is brave enough for any Palestinian Muslim to convert to Christianity, but when your father is notorious Hamas leader Sheikh Hassan Yousef, you risk more than being ridiculed by Professor Dawkins.

Mr Yousef also probably did not endear himself to his father when he told an Israeli paper: “Send regards to Israel. I miss it. I respect Israel and admire it as a country.”  British Christians who complain about being “persecuted” by secularists should remember that millions of people across the Middle East would love to fear nothing more than a Dawkins tongue-lashing.

The Spanish parliament giving apes human rights is no bad thing, in that no one, except maybe a Spaniard, could possibly want to harm these beautiful, disturbingly human-looking animals. But it is the emptiest of empty gestures, considering there are about five apes in the whole of Iberia, while the poor creatures face extinction across Africa, Madagascar and Asia. We could save countless species of all kinds – monkeys, lemurs and rhinos – by buying up Third World forests and patrolling them with our own soldiers, but we’d rather all the animals in Africa died than be accused of colonialism. 

Film review
July 25, 2008

In my early teens I remember being something of a Batman nut. What insecure young man isn’t attracted to that mixture of eroticism and vigilantism, the playboy who spends his days on yachts with Russian ballerinas and his nights beating up drug dealers and rapists? The billionaire Bruce Wayne lives an extended childhood that is as much Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria as it is Roman Abramovich or Clint Eastwood. 

Yet Batman, easily the best of DC Comics’s superheroes, has never produced films as good as the Superman series. The late 1990s “capers” Batman Forever and Batman and Robin were as camp and as enjoyable as watching Michael Barrymore doing panto in Eastbourne. Even the pop art-ish Michael Keaton films were slightly ludicrous. Yet when Gotham’s Dark Knight is freed of the amateur dramatics and garish colours, and allowed to trawl the sewer of the human psyche, there is no better example of this American art form on earth.

This is the second in the latest cycle of Batman films and the critical and popular reaction is quite unprecedented. The film has already earned an improbably large figure in America, comparable to a small country’s annual GDP, and over here just one cinema, the Imax in Waterloo, has already sold 25,000 tickets before the film has even been released. 

Critically The Dark Knight is already the top-rated film on the Internet Movie Database – and nothing in the site’s history has ever shifted The Godfather from that position. 

Is it that good? Well, it is pretty good. People over a certain reading age might grow weary of the necessary blockbuster script and its simplistic political and philosophical points. “When their city was threatened the Romans appointed one man to protect them and suspended laws,” the district attorney explains to Wayne over dinner, before his female companion replies: “And the last, Caesar, never gave up that power.” Ho-hum, the old freedom versus security dilemma again.

At one point the Joker even gives Batman the “we’re two of a kind, you and I” bad guy speech, while Batman’s employee Lucius Fox (Batman’s version of Q from the James Bond series, played by Morgan Freeman) uses the phrase  “At what cost?” when looking at a new piece of snooping technology that will save lives immediately, but have civil liberties implications. Still, I am quibbling – this is an action movie, not high-brow literature.

This time around Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and his trusted butler Alfred (Michael Caine) are living in a city penthouse while Wayne Manor is rebuilt. Together with Lieutenant Jim Gordon (the truly excellent and perfectly cast Gary Oldman), they form an uncomfortable alliance with district attorney Harvey Dent. Dent (Aaron Eckhart, another strong performance) is presented as Gotham’s White Knight who will save the city from crime. While Wayne is jealous of Dent’s relationship with his ex-girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), he also wants to retire as Batman, and sees Dent as his replacement. But, of course, Batman cannot retire while terrorism threatens the city. 

“He can’t be bought, bullied or negotiated with… some people just want to see the world burn,” is how one policeman describes the villain, and since the film’s poster shows a skyscraper with an aeroplane-sized hole in the side some have suggested that this is a 9/11 film and the Joker is Bin Laden. Then again, in the Batman comics the Joker was always years ahead in the way he saw his atrocities as works of art, and his motives were always as insane and unrealistic as Bin Laden. 

The film opens with a bank heist, except, this being Gotham City, the men are all wearing sinister clown masks. It is effortlessly stylish, in the way that only morally corrupt, violence-obsessed Hollywood can be, and continues this way for two and a half hours of blood-pumping, endorphins-releasing entertainment. It is cinematic Ritalin. 

And here we get our first sighting of Batman’s nemesis par excellence. Personally I’ve never been a big fan of the Joker – all that prankery and cackling is irritating – but Heath Ledger’s portrayal is certainly the best to date. He might still look like a prat just on his way back from Camden Market, but at least Ledger has tried to make him a believably psychopath. He makes one wonder if this is what it’s really like being in the company of John Wayne Gacy or Ed Gein. (Since psychopaths are unable to feel empathy for someone else’s pain, presumably they also cannot tell when they’re being irritating.) Tragically it was the actor’s last performance before he died in January. If Ledger does win a posthumous Oscar it will not be just a sympathy vote but a well-deserved honour for a talented, tragic man.