New Statesman readers will not be surprised to learn that I favour Ed Miliband for the Labour leadership over his brother, David, whose references to "Next Labour" make one wonder if he is sponsored by a frock chain. However, Miliband minor persistently spurned my advice to make a principled resignation, and so he will get only my second-preference vote. My first will go to Diane Abbott, not because the sole female contender deserves substantial support, but because she rejects the current Labour mantra, repeated by both Milibands, that "we must listen to our people on immigration". As Abbott says, Labour should see to it that “our people" get higher wages, better housing, secure benefits and stronger trade unions. Then they would stop talking about immigration.
Trusts tragedy
According to the Sunday Times, the coalition cabinet includes 18 millionaires, of whom several will have benefited from family trusts. That makes their decision to end the modest Child Trust Fund, set up by Gordon Brown to help all children, particularly distasteful.
The idea - first aired in the NS - was to create a nest egg for every 18-year-old, with the government contributing £500 (doubled for children from poor homes), half at birth, half at age seven, and families allowed to top up. This magazine suggested that it could be a monument to Blair and Brown, as the National Health Service was to Attlee and Bevan. But it has been axed before even the first beneficiaries will collect their nest eggs. They were worth having and, by including them among its first targets (as proposed, incidentally, in the Lib Dem, not the Tory, manifesto), the coalition gives a taste of what is to come.
God botherer
Journalists report that the scientist Craig Venter has created "synthetic life" and accuse him of "playing God". As I understand it, however, Venter inserted DNA, created from naturally occurring chemicals, into a bacterium that normally does unpleasant things to goats. So, in order to "create life", he used something that was already alive. My grasp of both biology and theology is shaky, but I don't think the Old Testament God had that advantage.
Station to station
To St Bride's, Fleet Street, to say farewell to Alan Watkins, an NS and later Observer and Independent on Sunday political columnist, whom I always read with pleasure. His prose was elegant, witty and erudite, his insights acute. Yet when I was his boss at the IoS, our relations were uneasy.
I once insisted he remove a reference to "dusky African dictators" from his copy (aside from offence to more sensitive readers, the "dusky" was redundant, I pointed out) and the episode so rankled that it featured in his memoirs. I also implored him to elaborate on the identity of long-dead Labour ministers to whom he frequently referred: James Griffiths, a deputy party leader in the 1950s, was a favourite and Neil Kinnock observed that even he didn't know who Griffiths was. What I remember most, though, was Watkins's expenses, which appeared, at first sight, to be algebraic equations. N1-EC4, WC1-SW1, SW1-EC1 were typical claims. These, it transpired, represented his daily peregrinations, all by taxi, between his Islington home, El Vino's bar in Fleet Street, the Garrick Club, the Palace of Westminster and, once a week, the IoS offices. This lifestyle
was quite common among journalists of his generation. Whether it produced something better than does the present habit of sitting at computers all day, others must judge.
Bons mots
In his funeral address, my old friend Robert Harris, now a well-known writer, compared Watkins's stylish prose to that of the late historian A J P Taylor. Taylor, like Watkins, was an old-style lefty of idiosyncratic views. I was sorry to see the otherwise excellent David Herman, in these pages last week, attribute one of Taylor's best lines to the Thatcherite historian Norman Stone. Taylor wrote (I have two references from the early 1960s) that the Poles lost six million people in the Second World War and saw Warsaw destroyed; the Czechs lost 100,000 and Prague survived intact. Was it better, Taylor asked, to be a Czech, "betrayed" in 1938, or a Pole, "saved" in 1939? The left can claim ownership of few enough good writers without gifting their bons mots to the enemy.
Peter Wilby will be on holiday for the next three weeks.
