Simon Hoggart's week: trapped in a hardline bubble

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2012/may/11/simon-hoggarts-week-trapped-hardline-bubble

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✒ Gay marriage is responsible for so much. Back in 2007, when we last had serious floods, some bonkers bishop in the north said they were God's punishment. Rightwing Tory MPs have blamed the party's failures in local elections on gay marriage and Lords reform, as if voters were saying, "Hmm, my children are out of work, and I could be made redundant any day, but that's nothing compared with Cameron's assault on marriage as a sacrament between a man and a woman!"

The fact is that hardliners of all kinds tend to mingle with people who share their views, and can't quite comprehend that most others don't. It's the same on the left. Tony Benn, who used to call opinion polls "the enemy's intelligence reports", simply believed that everyone thought like him because he rarely met anyone who didn't. At the height of some rail strike in the 1970s, he suggested the union should have collecting boxes at mainline stations so that commuters could demonstrate their solidarity with the strikers. Trapped in their own bubble, the hardliners are more out of touch than Cameron and Osborne ever could be.

✒ Why no monument to Spencer Perceval, who was assassinated 200 years ago on Friday? Since he was the only British prime minister to be murdered, it's odd that we don't make more of him. There is no memorial in the Commons, even though he was shot in the lobby itself. Perhaps we secretly compare ourselves with the Americans, whose presidents seem to exist in a hail of gunfire, even those that don't die as a result.

Perceval was an unusual man. In many ways, he was what David Cameron aspires to be. Though he opposed Catholic emancipation, he opposed slavery even more fiercely and diverted the Royal Navy to apprehend illegal slave-runners. This was not popular at the time, at least with people who weren't slaves. He was against foxhunting, but pursued the Peninsular war against Napoleon with great success. It might have been his Falklands. In the days when his hero, Pitt, would regard two bottles of port (just table wine then) as essential ballast before setting off on a speech, he drank very little. He would have loathed the Bullingdon Club. His position on gay marriage remains uncertain.

They hanged his killer, John Bellingham, within a week – some say this was to cover up a conspiracy, like the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. We will probably never know. But it does seem unfair on the poor fellow; a modest bust or plaque might be fitting.

✒ A friend reports from Sussex: "My son has a schoolfriend whose mum likes to think she's really up to the minute. So when she heard that another mum had lost her own mother, she decided what was needed was a sympathetic text. Unfortunately she ended it 'LOL' because she thought it meant 'lots of love'."

✒ This week I made a flying visit to Belfast to give a talk at the excellent Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. It's always a pleasure to go back to Northern Ireland: as I thought when I worked there, they really are the nicest people in the world except when they're trying to kill you.

Driving in from the out-of-town airport, we passed landmarks from my time there … The Crumlin Road jail, from which an IRA football team escaped by climbing over the wall; they got away because they were in their innocent-looking kit. Someone wrote a song, The Crumlin Kangaroos.

There was the Mater hospital, where the IRA's Máire Drumm was murdered by Protestants who fled past her husband in the corridor as he arrived for visiting time. There was the old Court House, soon to be a hotel, with its tunnel leading to the prison; no doubt the passage, where various prisoners tried to beat each other up, will become a chic bar.

We passed a corner where one IRA man was kicked to death by rival IRA men. Belfast has changed immeasurably, but it still wears its scars proudly, like the medals pinned on an old soldier's civvies.

The residents I talked to were getting just a bit weary of the Titanic. It's everywhere you turn, even ads for some grocers: "We put the Tea in Titanic!" As someone said to me: "It's bad enough now. Imagine the fuss if it hadn't sunk."

Though you can now walk safely at night down streets where in the 1970s I would not willingly have driven in a locked car during the noonday rain, some things don't change. Outside Debenhams in the city centre I saw three drunk youths singing the old sectarian song The Sash my Father Wore. But as my friend Piers said: "They were probably on an Arts Council grant."

✒ Air travel just gets horribly worse. At Heathrow security I was trapped behind a woman who needed no fewer than four of those big trays for all the stuff she was taking on board: her coat, her jacket, her laptop, her shoes, various items of metal jewellery, along with her vast carry-on suitcase and her almost as vast handbag. And they didn't even see her underwear, which apparently is the new threat.

No wonder queues take forever. On the Aer Lingus flight I asked for a glass of plain water and they wanted to charge me £2.20 for a half-litre bottle. That's three times as expensive as unleaded petrol.

✒ Two weeks ago I mocked the product placement that has James Bond drinking Heineken lager in his next film. But Lawrence Long writes to point out that in Live and Let Die, the second Bond novel, he is offered "as good a Liebfraumilch as could be found in America" and replies not "bleugh!" but "that sounds fine".

Mind you, back in 1954 even cosmopolitan secret agents could hardly be expected to know better.

✒ Labels: Kate Anderson bought a cat flap, which states: "Warning – this product will not prevent unwanted animals or people including small children from passing through the pet-door."