This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column The strangest and most interesting thing I heard and saw in the past week was Samantha Cameron’s brief appearance in a programme about her husband on ITV. I have little interest in Mrs Cameron. Unlike, say, Cherie Blair - who stood for Parliament - she has never until now had anything to do with politics. I like all the accents of these Islands. I’m two generations from forebears who spoke broad Hampshire, and my own slightly strangled plummy tones aren’t to everyone’s taste. There’s no doubt that, like most people brought up to speak as I was, I’ve semi-consciously toned down my inner Trevor Howard - not least to avoid getting beaten up on the night bus. But I still think that it is enormously interesting and significant that the Tory leader’s wife, daughter of a land-owning baronet, brought up on broad acres, educated at a genteel private girls’ academy and then at one of the great Public Schools, and now running a business that caters to London’s dwindling but unflinching cut-glass classes, should speak Estuary English. It’s an outward sign of deep and important changes in our society. Compare Mrs Cameron with Dame Joan Bakewell. Dame Joan - like so many of her generation - got to Cambridge from a grammar school. And part of her hard upward climb was a deliberate effort to get rid of her Stockport tones and to sound more like Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter. The BBC may claim not to be snobbish, but I don’t think Dame Joan would ever have presented Late Night Line-Up if she’d kept her Cheshire accent. Now, you may think (as I do) that Joan Bakewell did better than a girl of her background would have done in the comprehensive age. Or you may not. But I think a country where people change the way they speak to aspire upwards is likely to be a good and optimistic place, full of hope and opportunity. And I think we would be better off with that arrangement than with today’s - a nation where people change the way they speak to fit in with a society that mistrusts aspiration; a nation where bright boys and girls are endlessly mocked and tormented in schools, simply for working hard and seeking to excel. Feeble bias from the 'Warmist' BBC The usually supine Advertising Standards Authority has managed to condemn some alarmist and political newspaper advertisements put out by the Government, warning of global warming doom. These pathetic propaganda efforts - cynically aimed at children - used nursery rhymes to claim that man-made global warming was bound to lead to drought and storms. There were 939 complaints, a very large number, and there would have been more if the ASA hadn’t announced they had enough to act on. Now, if the ASA condemns an advertisement, you can be sure it is really, really bad. But what did the BBC, whose Charter obliges it to be impartial, make of this latest blow to the Warmist movement? The fast-fading Today programme, whose feeble new presenters have blunted its edge so much that it is rapidly ceasing to be a flagship, and becoming a politically correct festival of boredom, aired the following exchange. Presenter Justin Webb was talking to media correspondent Torin Douglas. Mr Webb was plainly peeved by the ASA decision. He opined that the controversy pivoted on ‘just one word’, as if that meant that the difference between certainty and speculation was insignificant. ‘This is a sort of score draw between the Government and those who complained,’ Mr Webb editorialised. Well, I think he is wrong, and if the BBC had any real concern for impartiality, it would tell them both so. Heaven knows it’s hard for people to stay married in the modern world. The law makes it easier to walk out of a marriage than it is to get out of a car leasing agreement, where both sides have to agree to end it. Property and custody settlements penalise divorced husbands so hard - even when they’re blameless - that it’s amazing that so many people still bother to wed at all. Shoals of lawyers swim like sharks round every failing marriage, quick to encourage the divorce proceedings that pay their salaries. And much of this propaganda is spread by TV and movies, not least films such as American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, which just happen to have been made by Sam Mendes and, in one case, to have starred Kate Winslet. Hollywood didn’t always take this line, and I think producers, directors and actors should wonder what effect their dramas might have on the world we live in. ******************************************************** We have doctors who cannot speak proper English, and we cannot do anything about it. There is absolutely no point in getting angry about either of these things unless you are also prepared to recognise the solution - that this country must leave the European Union and re-establish control over its own frontiers. Any politician who will not address this huge and pressing question - which now affects almost every aspect of our daily life - is not worthy of your vote. Having met Mr Hague in Notting Hill on at least one occasion, I can deny this calumny on the Shadow Foreign Secretary’s map-reading skills - and it would indeed be worrying if a would-be foreign policy supremo couldn’t even grope his way round the capital of his own country. Much more worrying is whether Mr Cameron can find his way to a conservative policy. I am always telling you that the Cameron Tories are Blairism reborn, but you don’t have to take my word for it. Take the words of Shadow Schools Secretary Michael Gove, spoken a few days ago: ‘At its best, New Labour was a recognition that the values of enterprise and aspiration could be fused with a commitment to social justice and fairness. And the party that best exemplifies that view now is David Cameron’s Conservative Party.’ He said it.
20 March 2010 6:10 PM
Leave it aht, Samanfa...Mrs Cameron's Estuary English typifies a society that mistrusts aspiration and mocks excellence
Sunday, 21 March 2010
And what I say here isn’t meant as a criticism of her. As far as I’m concerned, she can speak in any way she likes and good luck to her.
‘Some of the advertisements passed and a couple, on almost a technicality, not.’
Mr Douglas replied: ‘I think you are right.’
Kate Winslet, victim of a malady she helped create
I’m one of those people who think that every marriage break-up wounds us all, including that of Sam Mendes and Kate Winslet.
But there’s also the cultural factor, the idea that marriage is a prison and
a trap, that the suburbs are a zone of frustrated misery, that motherhood is a mental desert and children are bound to hate their parents, and vice versa.
Places at good universities are being filled by young men and women from other countries, so depriving British students of courses for which they are qualified.
And we cannot do anything about that either.
*********************************************************
David Cameron, in a weird effort to prove that his party is not wholly dominated by louche West London swells, claims that the supposedly gritty Northerner William Hague couldn’t find his way to Notting Hill.
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