The trouble with Nick Robinson’s Thoughts for the Day

Thought for the Day appears every morning on BBC Radio 4. This preachy slot is hallowed by longevity, if not because of its content. But when Nick Robinson presents the accompanying Today programme, he often uses the moment after the hourly news and papers to contribute a political Thought for the Day of his own. Before he settles down to attack a government minister with his dentist’s drill, Nick likes to deliver his own wisdom about the foolishness of political leaders. ‘Making promises is easy,’ he told listeners on Tuesday. ‘Explaining how you’ll pay for them is rather harder, as the Chancellor and the Prime Minister are beginning to discover.’ What is the point of such remarks? Can there be a single listener who needs telling that promises are more easily made than fulfilled? Is it credible that the Chancellor and Prime Minister (‘beginning to discover’) have never thought of this before? The purpose – perhaps unconscious – of Nick’s Thoughts is to establish the superiority of interviewer over ministerial victim. This may be factually correct: we may agree with Nick that he is more brilliant than anyone who holds elected office. But it serves the licence-payer badly. The interviewer is not supposed to interpose his body (or his brain) between the listener and the politician, but to assist communication between the two.

While following the coverage of Michael Gove’s intrigues at the Conservative conference, I happened to be re-reading Right Ho, Jeeves. I found the following words highly applicable. ‘To be quite candid, Jeeves,’ says Bertie Wooster, ‘I have frequently noticed before now a tendency or disposition on your part to become – what’s the word?’ ‘I could not say, sir.’ ‘Eloquent? No, it’s not eloquent. Elusive? No, it’s not elusive. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Begins with an e and means being a jolly sight too clever.’ ‘Elaborate, sir?’ ‘That is the exact word I was after…your methods are not simple, not straightforward. You cloud the issue with a lot of fancy stuff.’

It is thrilling that Ukraine is now doing so well. Almost as impressive as the military victories are the dignity and restraint of most official Ukrainian propaganda. I do detect one risky trend, however. Kyiv’s pronouncements sometimes explicitly disagree with the idea that this is ‘Putin’s war’. No, they say, we are fighting the entire Russian people. This is understandable. After all, Russians have invaded, bombed, murdered and tortured Ukrainians, with little protest from the folks back home. Ukraine’s friends, however, will not support permanent conflict between two peoples. This war would not have happened without Putin, or someone very like him: it would probably end if he lost power.

The government is being urged to tell people how to save energy. On the whole, people will be driven to work this out for themselves by the best persuader, price. There may be good public information campaigns to be mounted, but if the government rushes in, there will be pitfalls. Some minister will almost certainly end up like the amiable Patrick Jenkin who, as Heath’s energy minister during the three-day week in early 1974, urged people to brush their teeth in the dark. (I tried it as a schoolboy at the time and found it surprisingly difficult.) One self-help avenue is insulating yourself – not your house, but your body. The former can cost many thousands of pounds. The latter can be done for quite small sums. Every winter, I wear silk vests and long johns when writing because it is a sedentary activity and my study faces north. An outlay of about £150 from a company like Patra enables the wearer to function at temperatures of 15˚C. I read that an office temperature lower than 20˚C ‘increases employee error rate’, but this can be true only if the employee in question is underdressed. If most male office workers wore jackets, ties and vests, as they did until this century, and female ones managed the equivalent, office energy bills could fall by 20 per cent. By the way, soaring energy prices will deter working from home. If the office pays to keep you warm, you will want to be there.

Girton College, Cambridge, was the first women’s college in Oxbridge. It was founded in 1869 by three women, Emily Davies, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, my great-great-great aunt, and Lady Stanley of Alderley, who was also a leading donor. In the summer, the present Lord Stanley of Alderley received a letter from the Mistress of Girton. After a preliminary paragraph about Lady Stanley’s benevolence, the college’s Stanley Library and its chestnut trees which came from her estate, the Mistress then explained that a college working group had been set up ‘to consider the extent to which the origins and growth of the College owe a legacy to enslaved labour’. She said the group had studied the Stanley papers in the Cheshire record office and found ‘nothing that identifies Lady Stanley’s benefaction in a direct way with the work of enslaved labour’. She sought the Stanley family’s consent for the transcription of the Stanley records, perhaps opening them to the public as a ‘research collection’. The family tells me they ‘do not like the tone’ of the Mistress’s letter. The quandary is that while the scholarly collection of records is laudable, the current hunt for slave-related material is more polemical than scholarly. If Lady Stanley had been found guilty of donating profits earned from slavery, would her name have been cancelled by Girton? Would she no longer have been honoured by the college she helped so much? Will further inquiries by the working group be used to trash other Girton benefactors and luminaries? The Stanleys have not answered the letter.

I recently heard a man who runs a small charity demanding government help because its work is ‘sustainable’. Surely his plea suggests that it isn’t.