Monsieur François Bayrou, a secondary character and destined to remain so, is remarkable only for his perseverance in undermining the higher interests of France. He eminently possesses what the English call ‘nuisance value’.

At what point did his self-image begin to cloud his judgement? Here is a Béarnais, the son of a farmer, who, gifted for studies, became an agrégé in classical literature. At twenty-eight, he took his first steps in politics by entering the office of Monsieur Méhaignerie, Minister of Agriculture. At the same time, he joined the centrist party that Giscard d’Estaing created to serve his personal elevation. This party, which participated in overthrowing General de Gaulle in 1969, would become the UDF.

Monsieur Bayrou settled there and prospered. He was elected general councillor in his native department, then regional councillor. He was also an advisor to Monsieur Pierre Pfimlin, to the presidency of the European Assembly. Monsieur Pfimlin was an excellent man in every respect, who exercised very high functions with rectitude. He had only one fault: he was a centrist, that is to say, like all centrists, he was mistaken about the hierarchy of values.

He is credited with having made Paris lose its status as the capital of Europe. Indeed, it was agreed between Adenauer and de Gaulle that the institutions of the European Community would have their headquarters nearby. A large complex would be built in the near Paris region. On this, Pfimlin, an Alsatian, intervened, proclaiming: “Strasbourg, Strasbourg… the link between France and Germany, between the two cultures… reconciliation… Strasbourg, a symbolic city!” Could Alsace be insulted? The Parisian project was shelved.

The move was well-intentioned, but it was a misjudgement.

Paris, a great metropolis of the arts and business, as well as an international communications centre, had all the attractions for Members of the European Parliament, diplomats, and civil servants; Strasbourg, beautiful but provincial, with limited entertainment and above all poorly served, requiring changes of plane to reach its often foggy aerodrome, exercised little charm on the new community population. If the monthly sessions of Parliament – at what cost and for how long? – continue to be held there, everything else, commissions and services, has moved to Brussels and it is Brussels that has become the administrative capital of the Union.

Let us return to Monsieur Bayrou, who is following a fairly typical political path. Elected to parliament, he quickly showed a ministerial appetite by making education issues a specialty. He founded and chaired a permanent group to combat illiteracy. A laudable program. Unfortunately, during the time he was Minister of National Education, illiteracy continued to increase and the general level of education continued to decline. Was it during this period that he experienced a somewhat excessive expansion of his ego?

It is said that one night he woke up the members of his cabinet, urgently summoning them to the ministry, to consult them on a vision he had just had of his presidential future. The anecdote has been circulated with too much insistence for there not to be, at its origin, some reality.

Why am I dwelling so long on Monsieur Bayrou, when we have concerns that seem to be of greater importance? It is because, not content with creating disorder in our domestic policy, he is currently acting contrary to the interests of France in the European Parliament.

Monsieur Bayrou is a candidate for the presidency of the Republic: we know that. He has made it known urbi et orbi and, stubbornness being in his nature, there is every reason to believe that he will be one for life. He also ran in 2002 and, having arrived at the back of the pack, with 6.8%, he immediately put on the jersey with the bib number marked 2007.

Assuring that he is part of the majority in the National Assembly in order to keep his electorate, he keeps his parliamentary group on the fringes, under the pretext of refusing corporatisation; he never stops criticizing the government’s actions, often using the opposition’s arguments, and only votes for it with his fingertips, when he does not abstain, visibly waiting for its fall. Beautiful political logic! This is what Monsieur Bayrou calls cultivating one’s difference. When one benefits from such great support, one ends up preferring adversaries.

His programme? It is made up of nothing but worn-out words and formulas that have become hollow from being used too much. It is as if we had returned to the “more just, more humane Republic” of thirty years ago. Everything ages – even demagoguery. […]

What a waste! And all in keeping. Those who stick around François Bayrou for career interests, like those who stay there out of personal loyalty, expose themselves to serious disappointments.

In politics, I have no other criteria than services rendered to the country.

Prince Talleyrand said: “Without wealth, a nation is only poor; without patriotism, it is a poor nation.”

I nipped over to Civitas in Tufton Street yesterday for the launch of Esmé Partridge’s report Restoring the Value of Parishes: The foundations of welfare, community, and spiritual belonging in England.

She has produced a succinct and well-researched overview of the crisis facing Church of England parishes not just in rural areas but in our towns and cities too.

The discussion following had strong contributions from Danny Kruger MP, Imogen Sinclair, the Rev’d Marcus Walker of Great St Bart’s, Rebecca Chapman who sits on the Anglican Church’s General Synod, Eddie Tulasiewicz of the National Churches Trust, Bijan Omrani, and more.

As a devotee of England’s cult of the saints, what interested me particularly was the contribution from Rupert Sheldrake of the Choral Evensong Trust.

He explained that the CET was doing its bit for parish churches by creating a Patronal Festival Grants scheme to encourage more churches to celebrate the feast of their patron saint or dedication.

Grants of up to £500 are available to provide for choral evensong sung by a visiting choir and – deeply important – a party afterwards at which food and drink are free to those gathering.

“For example,” the Trust informs us, “at St Michael and All Angels in Dinder, near Wells, over ninety people attended a choral evensong on Michaelmas, sung by the Wells Cathedral Chamber Choir. The church was filled to capacity, with many attendees participating in church activities for the first time.”

This is a genius scheme for encouraging greater devotion to the saints as well as more frequent use of now sadly often shut C-of-E parish churches.

As it says in Deuteronomy, “thou shalt make merry in thy festival time, thou, thy son, and thy daughter, thy manservant, and thy maidservant, the Levite also and the stranger, and the fatherless and the widow that are within thy gates.”

More information on the CET’s 2025 Patronal Festival Grants can be found here and the deadline for next year’s applications is Candlemas (2 February 2025).

That evening I was a guest at high table in an Oxford college which is exhibiting signs of health and societal repair.

A few years ago, the head of house disregarded the strident protests of the students and banished the college grace as well as all dress codes for dining. (To the gratitude of many, she did not last long.)

After this unwelcome interruption, the college grace before meals has now been restored (in Latin), in addition to the return of formal meals with gowns (and, on Sundays, black tie).

In some place, where you let it and protect it, nature is healing.

Meanwhile, below, some beautiful music for Advent from my own parish church, St George’s Cathedral in Southwark.

This beautiful performance of Veni, Veni, Emmanuel by Malakai from St George’s Cathedral Choirs, performed at St George's Cathedral is a reminder that Jesus is God with us who witnessed to the love of the Father by dwelling among us.@StGeorgesCath @StGeorgesChoirs pic.twitter.com/L8VY31FmNA

— Archdiocese of Southwark (@RC_Southwark) December 5, 2024

There is a wonderful glimpse of the old days in the memoirs of the late Lord Waddington (1929-2017).

David Waddington was a Lancashire man who became a lawyer, Member of Parliament, Government Chief Whip, Home Secretary, peer of the realm, and eventually Governor of Bermuda. (In that final role, he was the last of the big dogs — all the ones since have been civil servants.)

The old British constitution — before New Labour’s ill-judged reforms — had a lithe efficiency in those days aptly reflected in quite how few people were employed by the highest court in the realm — and how unfussedly they were officed:

I had only been in the House for two days when I received a telephone call from the clerk of my Manchester chambers asking me if later in the week I was prepared to sit as a deputy County Court judge somewhere in London. This would allow my colleague Bob Hardy, who had contracted with the Lord Chancellor’s Department, to sit as a judge on that day, to take over a brief of mine, a libel action in Leeds.

At the eleventh hour someone pointed out that if I were to sit, my career as an MP would come to an abrupt end because as a result of the House of Commons Disqualification Act I would have disqualified myself from membership of the House, thereby precipitating another by-election. I was then begged by Bob to go and explain to the lady in the Lord Chancellor’s Department why he could not sit and why I had turned out to be an inappropriate replacement.

I set off and, after journeying along many corridors and ascending and descending many staircases, I eventually found a little old lady sitting alone in a tiny office at the bottom of a gloomy stairwell somewhere in the bowels of the House of Lords.

I apologised for troubling her and she said: ‘I can assure you it is no trouble. In fact I am delighted to see you. I have been in this office for thirty-five years and you are the first person who has ever visited me.’

In Jerusalem I had the privilege of interviewing Fr Piotr Zelazko, the Polish priest who heads the Saint James Vicariate for Hebrew-Speaking Catholics.

The community he looks after is a fascinating one and adds even more complexity to the rich tapestry of Christianity in the Holy Land.

The article is now up in its full form at the Catholic Herald online — including comments from Cardinal Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem — and a slightly shorter version appears in July’s summer issue of the magazine.

(My contribution to their summer books list is also in the July issue.)

Style, of course, was an essential element of ornamentalism, and another cool late practitioner of the 1950s or 1960s was the British Adviser to the Sultan of Mukalla, on the southern coast of Arabia. The title of Adviser was a euphemism. He really ran the place. The Mukalla governing council actually met in his house, and when I stayed there for a time myself, I sometimes used to walk into his drawing-room to find all its members, in their white gallabiyahs, sitting and arguing there on the sofas, sometimes very solemnly, sometimes laughing their heads off, sometimes banging the floor with their sticks or shouting imprecations at the Adviser – who, since he spoke perfect idiomatic Arabic, gave as good as he got.

His administrative style was not in the least authoritarian, or even paternalistic. In fact it was rather bohemian. If he wanted some coffee during those meetings he gave a piercing blast on a silver whistle; this didn’t seem to have any cataclysmic effect, but sooner or later a servant would shamble in with a pot on a silver dish, and as he served the Adviser he would give me a sly collusive smile, amounting almost to a wink.

Every afternoon the Adviser went for a long walk along the sands of the Indian Ocean, followed at a respectful distance by his driver in his somewhat ramshackle Land Rover. At a fast steady pace he would stride along, sometimes swerving to avoid a string of camels, or people digging holes for crabs, or small boys throwing sand at each other, or old men sitting on their haunches chewing. He had a word for them all, and they replied cheerfully in kind, or giggled, and as he disappeared into the distance, his car chugging hopefully along behind, he used to seem to me a summation of all I liked about the British Empire in its last years – for all its faults, generally kind, generally straight, well-intentioned, a bit too pleased with itself perhaps, a bit too slow to recognize realities, a bit lacking in the old splendour, but diligent, courageous and often rather funny.

And yes, there’s one last ingredient of the imperial ornamentalism that I haven’t touched upon – its humour. For my escapist tastes, humour was a saving grace of the British Empire, and I’d liked to end this resolutely escapist essay with a little cameo to illustrate it. The last of the great imperial adventures was the first ascent of Mount Everest, the top of the world, by a British expedition in 1953. This really was an exploit of empire. The climbing team included two New Zealanders, a Gurkha officer, a former officer of the Black Watch, a former Indian Army engineer, one or two Welshmen, from the final colony, and a Sherpa citizen of that archetypical imperial buffer state, Nepal. I went along to write about it for that old broadsheet of Empire, the London Times.

The most glamorous star of the adventure turned out to be the Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, who actually reached the summit with the New Zealander Edmund Hillary. When we all got back to London we were treated to a very grand banquet by the British Government – the old imperial government. I found myself sitting next to the majordomo of the occasion, a delightful old-school courtier, while opposite me sat Tenzing, out of Asia for the very first time in his life, who could not then read or write, but who looked marvellous.

The old gentleman turned to me halfway through the meal and said he hoped I was enjoying the claret – what the British call red Bordeaux wine. He said it was the last of its vintage in the government cellars, and was probably the last anywhere in the world. Well, I was terribly impressed, of course, and I looked across at Tenzing – who most certainly was enjoying the claret. It was probably the first time he’d ever tasted any wine. The lackeys were filling and refilling his glass, and he was radiant with pride and pleasure. He was a marvellously confident and exotic figure – a prophetic figure, actually.

Presently the old boy turned to me again. ‘Ah’, he said, ‘how very good it is to see that Mr Tenzing knows a decent claret when he has one.’

Sic transit gloria!

The Mosaic of Saint Patrick in the Palace of Westminster

This feast of St Patrick marks the hundredth anniversary of the mosaic of Saint Patrick in the Central Lobby of the Houses of Parliament. At the heart of the Palace of Westminster, four great arches include mosaic representations of the patron saints of the home nations: George, David, Andrew, and Patrick.

The joke offered about these saints and their positioning is that St George stands over the entrance to the House of Lords, because the English all think they’re lords. St David guards the route to the House of Commons because, according to the Welsh, that is the house of great oratory and the Welsh are great orators. (The English, snobbishly, claim St David is there because the Welsh are all common.) St Andrew wisely guards the way to the bar (a place where many Scots are found), while St Patrick stands atop the exit, since most of Ireland has left the Union.

The mosaic of Saint Patrick came about thanks to the munificence of Patrick Ford, the sometime Edinburgh MP, in honour of his name-saint. Saint George had been completed in 1870 with Saint David following in 1898.

Sir William Raeburn MP commissioned the artist Robert Anning Bell (depicted right) to design the mosaic of Saint Andrew in 1922, which so impressed Patrick Ford that he decided to commission the same artist to depict the patron saint of Ireland.

Anning Bell had earlier completed the mosaic on the tympanum of Westminster Cathedral from a sketch by the architect J.F. Bentley. Following his work in Central Lobby he also did a mosaic of Saint Stephen, King Stephen, and Saint Edward the Confessor in Saint Stephen’s Hall — the former House of Commons chamber.

In the mosaic, Saint Patrick is flanked by saints Columba and Brigid, with the Rock of Cashel behind him. As by this point Ireland had been partitioned, heraldic devices representing both Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State are present.

On St Patrick’s Day in 1924, the honour of the unveiling went to the Father of the House of Commons, who happened to be the great Irish nationalist politician T.P. O’Connor, then representing the English constituency of Liverpool Scotland (the only seat in Great Britain ever held by an Irish nationalist MP).

“That day,” The Times reported T.P.’s words at the unveiling, “in quite a thousand cities in the English-speaking world, Saint Patrick’s name and fame were being celebrated by gatherings of Irishmen and Irishwomen. Certainly he was the greatest unifying force in Ireland.”

“All questions of great rival nationalities were forgotten in that ceremony. From that sacred spot, the centre of the British Empire, there went forth a message of reconciliation and of peace between all parts of the great Commonwealth — none higher than the other, all coequal, and all, he hoped, to be joined in the bonds of common weal and common loyalty.”

T.P.’s remarks were greeting with cheers.

The Most Honourable the Marquess of Lincolnshire, Lord Great Chamberlain, accepted the ornamental addition to the royal palace of Westminster on behalf of His Majesty the King.

There is much talk these days of the nature of “high trust” societies and the many benefits which they bring, or once brought in the case of countries like Great Britain that, until relatively recently, fell into this category.

The young Lee Kuan Yew (1923-2015) was astounded when he exited the Underground station at Piccadilly Circus and saw a pile of newspapers and a box of coins and notes, with passers-by being trusted to pay for their own newspaper and calculate their own change. He determined that Singapore must emulate the high trust society that Britons had inherited.

In his excellent book, Britain Against Napoleon: The Organization of Victory 1793-1815, about the logistics of Britain’s fight against Old Boney, Roger Knight writes of how much trade and agriculture across Great Britain relied upon this trust.

Drovers, for example, would take on thousands of pounds worth of animals — pigs, cattle, etc. — from farmers to drive down to London en masse, not returning for weeks, and usually with little or no paper record.

Citing Bonser’s The Drovers: Who They Were and How They Went, An Epic of the English Countryside, Knight relays the following story:

Perhaps the most impressive demonstration of trust was the tradition of dogs being sent home to Scotland or Wales from London on their own. One story involved a Welsh dog named Carlo who journeyed all the way back to Wales from Kent. His owner sold the pony that he had ridden on the outward journey, intending to go home by coach. He fastened the pony’s harness to the dog’s back and attached a note to it, addressed to each of the inns on the route they had followed, to request food and shelter for the dog, to be repaid on a subsequent journey. Carlo reached home in Wales alone in a week.

Even dogs benefited from a high-trust society.

(more…)

In the collections of the New-York Historical Society there is a photograph deposited amidst the archives of the Seventh Regiment Gazette.

The scene is the Appleton Mess of the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue, where Company B of the “Silk-Stocking Regiment” was celebrating its one-hundred-and-thirty-fourth birthday.

It was May 1940. The other side of the Atlantic Ocean, British troops were evacuating from Norway, sparking the debate in the House of Commons that would lead to Winston Churchill being appointed Prime Minister.

But on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, all was still peaceful and calm.

With a packed calendar of events, the social life of B Company was as much of a whirl as any other in the Seventh Regiment.

“The members of the Second Company greeted the onrushing spring with a cocktail party and dance on the afternoon of February 11th,” the Gazette reported. “The time-stained rafters of the Veterans Room echoed back as melodious a medley of sweet, swing, and hot as these old ears have heard in many a year.”

“The spaghetti lovers are still meeting down at Tosca’s on Tuesdays,” the Gazette continued. “All members who drop in on this crowd are warned beforehand to eat fast and keep an eye on their plate. A darting fork awaits all unwatched portions and men have been known to sit down to a full dish of Italian cable only to arise half famished.”

Company B’s Entertainment Committee also found time for a Supper Dance at the end of March that year: “When Charley Botts heard ‘In The Mood’ he gathered up the jitterbugs and sent them scampering around in a breathless Big Apple, much to the delight of the wiser and unbruised amongst us who resisted his wiles.”

“Several of the more energetic members closed the evening by visiting that well-known late spot, the Kit-Kat Club, and are now offering mortgages on the family homestead to settle future bills.”

All the faces, the mode of dress — it’s a picture of a vanished New York, a year and a half before the attack on Pearl Harbor. (Incidentally, December 7, 1941 was also the day Col. Cusack — aka ‘Uncle Matt’ — was baptised.)

On another level, it looks just like the Seventh Regiment Mess I knew from my childhood, when it was in the firm but welcoming hands of Linda MacGregor.

The building has been restored physically but since the military was kicked out it is a beautiful but lifeless hulk, preserved as if in formaldehyde and reduced to being a mere “venue”.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

The Institute of Classical Architecture and Art is one of the absolute gems of American civic society.

As part of their remit of promoting traditional architecture and its many associated arts they have a good many videos on their website covering numerous subjects and in a variety of depths and lengths of time.

Here are just a handful.

The Urbanism of Greenwich Village — Part I (1h09m) and Part II (1h06)

Rodrigo Bollat Montenegro gives a half-hour introduction to traditional urbanism, followed by an hour and a half exploring the development, design, and streetscapes of Greenwich Village. (We will excuse his inability to pronounce Gansevoort Street.)

Colonial American Architecture: A Design Resource for Contemporary Traditional Architecture — Part I (46 min) and Part II (47 min)

Calder Loth survey’s America’s colonial-period buildings and their utility as a resource for domestic residential design today.

The Architecture of Place: Filling the ‘Missing Middle’ of the Housing Market — Video (55min)

Alireza Sagharchi, Robbie Kerr, Dan Parolek, and Jason Syvixay on solving the housing crisis through traditional methods that can create better places to live without harming the urban environment.

Edith Wharton & Her New York — Video (1h13m)

Francis Morrone — my favourite columnist from the New York Sun in its printed days — explores the Wharton’s home town from the time of her birth at 14 West 23rd Street in 1862 to her departure for France at the turn of the century, and the world of The Age of Innocence.

In Your Neighborhood: Pasadena City Hall — Video (5min)

There are also shorter videos like this one from the In Your Neighborhood series in which architect Christian Arndt explores the history and design of the almost preposterously — but gloriously — grandiose Pasadena City Hall.

JA JA JA, ons onthou: die Amerikaanse Episcopaalse biskop Phillips Brooks was nie ’n bolwerk van ortodoksie nie. Hy het die ryk van gevoel bo die waarheid verhef, maar nie noodwendig teen die waarheid nie — hulle het in die negentiende eeu nog ’n bietjie politesse gehad.

Soos R.R. Reno geskryf het: Brooks “het geen moeilike teologiese kwessies gedink of enige nuwe intellektuele grond gebreek nie.” In Nieu-Engeland was hy “heeltemal afgeleide en uiters invloedryk”.

Reg genoeg… en vandag leef ons in Brooks se nawêreld. Maar hy het ’n klein geskenk aan die wêreld gegee, en sy klein geskenkie was ’n lofsang — ’n Kersfees liedtjie.

Die wysie wat in Amerika gebruik word, is sakkarien. Maar die Britse een — “Forest Green” — is melodieus en goed. (’n Video hieronder, en Engels, gesing deur die koor van St George’s in Windsor-kasteel.)

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