One of my less harmful addictions is to crime fiction, particularly the English variety. I'm quite aware of the limits of a genre which sets a murder in the confines of a closed, remote community and then presents a solution that is as comforting as it is unrealistic; but my life would be the poorer without it, and so my Conference week was book-ended by the latest novel by P. D. James, the Tory peer. I started the first page of The Private Patient as my train pulled out from Euston and closed the final page with a sigh (in my view this is her masterpiece) as we returned to the capital yesterday. Without giving away anything to do with the plot, I was struck strongly by this passage at the end of the book:
The world is a beautiful and a terrible place. Deeds of horror are committed every minute and in the end those we love die. If the screams of all earth's living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars. But we have love. It may seem a frail defence against the horrors of the world but we must hold fast and believe in it, for it is all we have.
Surely those words could only have been written by a Tory? The unflinching recognition of a reality so hard to deal with that many choose not to look directly at it; the bold assertion that the only path through that pain is to love, love and love again (Baroness James offers no man-made constructs as a coping strategy for death). Implicitly stating that love, the strongest force, can be a terrible thing (because those you love will die), but that (as with the life-giving rays from the sun) in the end we can do no better than to turn our faces towards it.
Now I don't want to sound over-parochial, but this reminded me - thematically - of David Cameron's speech. In particular, this very important passage from it:
Come with me to Wandsworth prison and meet the inmates. Yes you meet the mugger, the robber and the burglar. But you also meet the boy who can’t read and never could. The teenager hooked on heroin. The young man who never knew the love of a father. The middle aged failure where no-one in the family has known what it’s like to go out and work for two generations or maybe more. Miss the context, miss the cause, miss the background and you’ll never get the true picture of why crime is so high in our country.
Much of the commentary on the speech has remarked on the contrast of yesterday's sober declarations with previous DC performances, claiming to see a difference from his 'sunshine optimism' of a few years back. Forgive me, I don't see the supposed contradiction at all. A loveless society, one where the sun never shines, one where there's no concept of renewal, of a second chance, would visit Wandsworth prison and think 'Ha! Serves them right', before scurrying on, head down, eyes averted from passers-by. It is now clear that the Tory government led by David Cameron will not have its head down and will not avert its gaze from anyone.
To love people, to help them to renew themselves through that love, is not an easy option, but it is the only path through the carnage wreaked on the national heart by a decade of leftwing utopic machine-based systems engineering. Machines (in the form of nationwide policy prescriptions and their consequent implementation organisations) are not better than humans at understanding other humans: the complete reason for Labour failure. And machines don't know how to love. This is not a coincidence.
The Tory mission: Love & Rebirth/Renewal (select according to your theistic disposition). You have, I'm sure, guessed already that I'm going to finish by quoting the words of a certain lady: In the end, all our failures are failures of love. For the first time in a long time, I don't think the next government of the United Kingdom is going to fail.
