David Cameron’s parting honours list received justifiable criticism for its cronyism, yet a sense of historical proportion was lacking. You do not have to go back to Lloyd George or Harold Wilson but simply to Tony Blair to remember honours awarded to those equally unworthy. Yet there is a particular problem in the Cameron list. I wonder whether it isn’t a result of the fact that our political class seems to have become transparent in recent years. The public appears not just to disagree with their representatives or dislike them, but rather to have seen through them, the MPs’ expenses scandal being the obvious catalyst. Now when a Prime Minister gives his chums a potential job for life in the Lords there is a sense that there is nothing else such people could do and that a peerage has become a sinecure. Was this always the case? In the past many people sat in the Lords to quell boredom, but how many did so merely to get the daily allowance? The place now seems packed with them, from disgraced expenses fiddlers like Baroness Uddin and Lord Hanningfield to former Lib Dem councillors bewildered by their luck. The public are right not to like this.
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Newspapers around the world noted the recent death of Bishop Edward Daly, made famous by images of him waving a bloodstained handkerchief while escorting the body of a young man in Londonderry on “Bloody Sunday”. Few noted one of the most telling facts about him: his unwillingness to compromise on telling the truth. During the seconds before the army opened fire Father Daly (as he then was) saw one man with a handgun among the civilians. Since the army’s justification for their shooting dead of 14 people would in part become the presence of civilian gunmen, many people would have refused to concede the presence of such a person among the crowd, fearing that they would be giving ammunition to the army’s unjustifiable case. Daly never had any such trouble, always acknowledging the presence of the person he saw even while being adamant that the army had no justification for shooting where and when they did. There are many reasons to honour Bishop Daly’s memory, but in our present culture such a commitment to truth seems especially praiseworthy.
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Newspapers around the world noted the recent death of Bishop Edward Daly, made famous by images of him waving a bloodstained handkerchief while escorting the body of a young man in Londonderry on “Bloody Sunday”. Few noted one of the most telling facts about him: his unwillingness to compromise on telling the truth. During the seconds before the army opened fire Father Daly (as he then was) saw one man with a handgun among the civilians. Since the army’s justification for their shooting dead of 14 people would in part become the presence of civilian gunmen, many people would have refused to concede the presence of such a person among the crowd, fearing that they would be giving ammunition to the army’s unjustifiable case. Daly never had any such trouble, always acknowledging the presence of the person he saw even while being adamant that the army had no justification for shooting where and when they did. There are many reasons to honour Bishop Daly’s memory, but in our present culture such a commitment to truth seems especially praiseworthy.
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