I’ve always had a romantic attachment to Christian socialism – the idea that if love is so great an idea then why not make it government policy? I don’t write that with any sense of irony. As the state grew in the late 19th century and social problems that were once grim tragedies became curable problems, it was logical to make Christian compassion the cornerstone of government policy. That effort was combined with a dash of Millenarian zeal. We could, with high enough taxes, build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. 

Although the Anglican Church doesn’t have a strict doctrine, Christian Socialism has become its unofficial agenda. Because it is an established church, it has evolved into an unofficial branch of the welfare state. Because people are born into it, it also doesn’t feel the need to evangelize quite as much as its competitors. The result is an organization that exists to serve the community without question or reciprocity. The Church of England is a triumph of love.

Yet there have been consequences. The BBCTV show Rev explores them rather well. It features a well-intentioned vicar whose faith is tested by the sheer awfulness of his congregation. The show covers every stereotype of the Anglican fellow-traveler: an Afro-Caribbean lady who is in love with the priest, a socially awkward deacon who approaches religion with all the mysticism of algebra, people who demand “bells and smells” on their wedding day but literally never attend church any other day of the year, a cadging drug addict etc. The most pitiful and atrocious character is an alcoholic tramp who shows up on the Rev’s doorstep every morning to demand food. Only in season two is he actually baptized a Christian, and that doesn’t stop him head-butting our hero in the Christmas special. When he has sobered up, he says to the Rev, “You’ve got to forgive me. You’re a priest, that’s what you have to do.” Contrition isn’t in evidence, but the Rev forgives him anyway.

Religion is ever present in Rev, but faith rarely puts in an appearance. Tellingly, we never see a sermon. The Rev believes deeply in God, but he doesn’t like to bring it up too often. He isn’t a priest, he’s a social worker. In many ways, he is a living martyr. But then “martyr” actually translates as “witness,” and the whole point of martyrdom is to suffer as a testament to God’s existence. The Rev doesn’t do that: he just suffers. And because he never engages with the appalling immorality of his congregation – he never points out their failings but instead indulges them by “forgiving” them without demanding contrition in return – his suffering feels pointless. In some ways, his charity is selfish because it seems to be all about a dialogue with his own faith, a constant test of will. It feeds the flesh, but it doesn’t save souls.

Rev’s experience is a legacy of Christian Socialism, with its priority on social justice rather than personal salvation. It is also horribly common. A friend called me this morning to tell me about his new life as a deacon in a working-class parish in the southwest of England. Nearly half of the people in his parish live on benefits. Their town was destroyed by the recession of the 1980s, throwing much of the population onto unemployment relief. Long periods of doing nothing sapped their health and they graduated to incapacity benefit. Families were torn apart and most of my friend’s congregation is on a third or even fourth marriage. Seeing all of this, one can understand why everyone there votes Labour.

Yet, my pal senses that he isn’t saving any souls. The congregation is tiny (about 26) and he is basically a social worker to 10 of them. He listens to their complaints but is at pains not to judge. The vicar rarely raises theology in her sermons and some services consist of showing a video. One week they screened a documentary about Margaret Thatcher. It was an exercise in exorcising the ghosts of the 1980s.

My friend is suffering in two regards. First, one might infer that his clerical training was a waste of time. He spent six years studying theology, including learning Greek and Latin. Yet God is almost a taboo subject. When it is raised, it’s as a conduit to a discussion of human problems: God is shorthand for the compassion of friends, Satan for absent fathers. The emphasis is upon how much Jesus loves us – not who is he is, what he died for, or why. There’s a lot of yoga and Eastern religion thrown in for good measure. Faith as therapy.

Second, he is frustrated by the fact that he can’t engage in moral theology. Christian Socialism teaches that sin is either encouraged by, or is a product of, material circumstances. So how can one preach moral behavior to people living in grinding poverty? They have no agency. Yet, my friend is aware that many of the bad things about life in his parish are the product of lifestyle choices. There is nothing to stop anyone getting a job, sticking to one partner, quitting the booze, or picking up a Bible. But he is compelled by the “turn the other cheek” culture of Anglicanism to offer comfort but never criticism. His moral responsibility stops at the point of making a cup of sugary tea. 

We see the problems of Christian Socialism on a macro level with the church’s opposition to the UK government’s program of welfare reform. It is the church’s duty to stand up for poor people and challenge the establishment. But the Anglican hierarchy’s position in favor of social justice doesn’t seem balanced by an articulation of the value of work, personal responsibility, or moral order. Its approach is more suited to the 19th century – an age of robber barons and villainous pit owners. In those days, if you didn’t work – you starved. If you left your husband and had a kid out of wedlock – you starved. If you spent all your money on alcohol – you starved. Back then, poverty was truly a question of material iniquity.

But today, poverty is as much cultural as economic. The Anglican Church, which is a church after all, ought to be well placed to offer moral leadership and a path of redemption. Instead, it is trapped by the romanticism of Christian Socialism. Rather than being an opponent of poverty in every sense, it is its enabler.

Hung-to-the-over and clutching at a bottle of warm Coke, I sat through most of Alien 4 today. It’s not a good movie, but it’s more interesting that the previous two in the Alien franchise (none of them come close to the original’s shock and awe). The director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, plays it for laughs, insofar as a movie about chest-bursting aliens can be funny. Heroine Ellen Ripley has been reconstructed from a blood sample of her former self, along with an ickle baby alien insider her (“Oogie-woo, who’s a pretty boy? Don't bite. It's rude.”) The monster is removed surgically and allowed to grow into a Queen. The Queen retains Ripley’s ability to reproduce in the mammalian manner (ie, the father is down the pub throughout) and gives birth to a bouncing baby boy – who then kills his alien mother with a mean right hook. Ripley, understandably conflicted, then kills her “son” by burning a window open with her acidic blood and flushing him out into space. If all this didn’t take place in the year 2525, it could easily be a Greek myth. There’s certainly the right amount of incest and matricide. 

I will definitely die a Catholic. No doubt about it. A Catholic doesn’t just die – they reconcile. They accept their mortality and submit to the will of God, trusting that he will forgive them for all the evil that they have done. Like the Prodigal son, they come home. I have accepted the teachings of the Catholic Church and I have faith that the Last Rites, honestly sought and validly delivered, will see me to Heaven’s gate. In the final analysis, it is this faith that makes me a Catholic.

But I often find it hard to live like a Catholic. Part of the problem is that I am a convert. Going to Mass and sitting through dirge-like hymns, masticated liturgy, and boring sermons doesn’t come naturally. I was raised a Baptist, and although I rejected it in my teens, I am starting to realize what an impact it had upon me. As a personality type, I am a fire and brimstone evangelical.

I should stress that theologically I am strictly Catholic. But, o, what I’d give to hear a bit of gospel! A sermon with shouting! A tambourine! A bass guitar! And-a-one-two-three-four – “Majesty! Worship his Majesty! Unto Jesus, be all glory, honor, and praise!” To anyone not born within the sound of righteous clarinets, this probably all seems bizarre. But I was twelve years old when I saw my first demon being cast out. I am cut from a different polyester.

Much of modern Catholic culture lacks the certainty that I was raised with. As a child, I was taught that everything you need to know about God and man is found in the Bible. If the Bible had said Newt Gingrich was a virgin, we’d have believed it. Faith was a matter of black and white, right and wrong. Sunday School wasn’t a thoughtful flick through a “moral matters” textbook, it was a trial of fire. God was everywhere, always watching you. Failure to feel His presence was your fault – your lack of faith. There was no slowing down for doubters. 

The most ubiquitous phrase was “God willing.” It articulated an almost Islamic faith that God was behind every action and consequence. “I’ll pass my exams, God willing.” “I’ll get a job, God willing.” “I’ll be out in nine to ten months, God willing.” God willed it and it was done. And you didn’t ask any damned questions about it.

My upbringing made converting to Catholicism difficult – although not in the way that I expected. I accepted the theology totally and without equivocation. But without any ethnic link to Catholicism (my father’s family are Irish Catholics, but totally out of practice) I found it a bit of a culture shock. 

Baptism reinforces its tenets every day with aggressive proselytizing. Not so Catholicism. Catholicism is a religion of silence and contemplation. That’s fine and understood, but sometimes – and, yes, this is a subjective judgment – the modern Church is a little too quiet for my taste. Bishops, it can feel, prefer tolerance to truth. Many parishes have a limp sociability that papers-over cracks of disbelief. Priests bend over backwards to reassure people of other faiths but are reticent about pushing the validity of their own. Evangelism is a strict no-no. All too often, it is lay people who have to pick up the banner of social conservatism; the church hierarchy seems scared of it.

All of this is a long winded way of articulating why I’m so frustrated with polls that show that American Catholics are overwhelmingly in favor of contraception. Public Policy Polling reports that, “There is a major disconnect between the leadership of the Catholic Church and rank and file Catholic voters on this issue. We did an over sample of almost 400 Catholics and found that they support [Obama’s mandate for contraception coverage in Catholic healthcare plans] 53-44, and oppose an exception for Catholic hospitals and universities, 53-45. The Bishops really are not speaking for Catholics as a whole on this issue.”

This is the phenomenon of “I’m a Catholic but…,” and it really makes no sense to a former Baptist. No Baptist would ever say, “I’m a fundamentalist but I don’t believe in all of it.” That would be a contradiction and a rejection of faith and might even get you excluded from the church. But in the contemporary Catholic Church, it is something I hear from the laity all too often. It makes no sense. For what is a Catholic except someone who accepts Catholic doctrine? Isn’t that what defines us?

There are many complex reasons why the “I’m a Catholic but…” phenomenon is widespread. But a good insight into it is offered in a fine blog post by my friend and colleague Peter Foster. Peter is a Catholic, but he writes in the Daily Telegraph of his dislike of Rick Santorum thus: “I can’t escape the whiff of the witch-hunt about Mr Santorum, who is of a breed of Catholic unfamiliar to us English: a man of the strictest Catholic theology … whose message is transmitted through a distinctly evangelical amplifier … I’m afraid I can’t find much that’s terribly sympathetic or merciful in Mr Santorum, and I’m not sure that’s a particularly good quality in a man who wants to assume the awesome responsibilities of the US presidency.”

Peter’s problem with Santorum is partly his opposition to government funded pre-natal testing. Peter concedes that Santorum’s critique is “truthful”, but what disturbs him is the presidential candidate’s tone. He writes, “Perhaps it is because I was brought up as a middle-of-the-road English Catholic – show up on Sundays, eat fish on Fridays (more expensive than meat now, of course) and don’t ever sing the hymns too loudly (that’s a vulgar habit Anglicans have) – that I find Rick Santorum so, um, scary.”

I don’t find Santorum scary. In fact, I find his tone on moral matters refreshingly clear. But here is the likely difference between me and Peter. I was raised in an evangelical culture that is largely imported from America. He was raised in a cradle Catholic community that is steeped in the modern Catholic culture of sober reflection and ecumenical goodwill. Yet – acknowledging the cultural differences – I still struggle to empathize with Peter’s reaction to Santorum’s rhetoric. Do you believe that Santorum is right or not? If yes, then what’s the problem?

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve sat with Catholic priests, listened to them talk softly about the problems of the world, and wanted to scream, “What do you believe, man?! Identity it, testify it, and let’s save some souls!” But instead, everything is deadened by another cup of tea and a sleepy rosary by the fire. Naturally, there are priests who are thrilling and compelling – men who wage a permanent war on apathy and indecision. But there is, in many quarters, a scent of death about the Catholic Church. We are waiting for our extinction at the hands of barbarians or old age.

It wasn’t always like this. My new biography of Pat Buchanan explores an age when Catholics were confident and outspoken. In the 1950s, American Catholics filled whole stadiums to pray for the conversion of Russia. They believed that they were right and they weren’t afraid to say so. Santorum represents a revival of this spirit.

I shall close on a quote from Buchanan’s memoirs, Right From the Beginning: “There was an awe-inspiring solemnity, power, and beauty about the old Church, which attracted people who were seeking the permanent things of life … Not only did we proclaim ourselves to be “the one holy Catholic and apostolic Church,” under the watchful eye of the Holy Ghost – with all others heretical – we were gaining converts by the scores of thousands, yearly … Ecumenism was not what we were about; we were on the road to victory. Why compromise when you have the true Faith?”

Pray for me during the Lenten season, a sinner also.

It’s the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne. I was born a republican and I suspect I’ll die a republican, but I’ve always admired and loved HRH. Through all the awful things that have happened to Britain in the past 60 years, she alone has survived with her dignity intact. Stanley Baxter (a Scottish comedian) used to do a wicked parody of her icy protocol, asking “Did you come far?” to anyone and everyone she met. A girl presents her with a bunch of flowers – “Did you come far?” A man streaks across the pitch – “Did you come far?” Prince Philip wakes her up with a cup of tea – “Did you come far?” We must be a sea of faces to Her Majesty; unfamiliar and ubiquitous.

Her success lies in her passivity, which is the English genius. Long after the bombs have fallen and the Caliph has triumphed, there will be a small group of English tourists at the feet of the Sphinx drinking tea in the midday sun. People scorn us for our lack of passion and complete indifference to events. But the Queen’s endurance is a testament to how far doing very little very well will get you.

If only Britain’s other institutions had shown her reluctance to change. We might now have a Church that believes in God, schools that teach, or a Parliament that debates. HRH understood – unlike her liberal counselors – that at the heart of a healthy institution is ritual. The moment one undoes one’s tie or lifts one’s hem, all is lost. The smallest concession to modernity will, in short order, become a flood of change. Her Majesty has never changed. She is indefatigable. I can’t imagine life without her. I don’t want to.

I am sad to be so far away from home during a rare moment of national unity. But even when I am home, I feel distant from it. Apologies to the English, but I probably don’t belong among them anymore. It’s only the idea of England that I love. The Queen embodies it because she is the last remaining ritual.

My views on England are summed up in a play by Dennis Potter called, A Blade on the Feather. In a pivotal scene an aged professor tries to explain to his daughter the importance of always serving jam roll with custard. This is all England is and ever was, he says: not an ideology or an ethnicity, but a tradition. Remove the tradition and you remove the identity. The professor’s daughter laughs and he begins to cry. “There isn't any sort of England someone of my generation would think he had inherited,” he says. “Take away the pudding and the baked jam roll and the custard and there isn't very much left.” I suppose to outsiders, the professor’s talk is hollow and even effeminate (redolent of so many Brideshead boys walking around with their teddy bears). But you guys have to understand something about us English and our jam roll and custard – we have nothing else left.

Of course, the thought of the Queen makes me nostalgic for certain things: Plymouth gin, Granchester, wet dogs, warm pubs, rain, women with horse whips, making love in July, boats, bowties, shortbread – even shorter tutorials – evensong, bookshops, and Barton Lake. But most of all it does make me miss the stability of the Windsors. The monarchy might still keep the English living at the status of serfs, but at least it has preserved us from the horror of the presidential primaries.

(Only joking – bring ‘em on!)

Snow finally fell last weekend in DC. Not much, but enough to cover the ground in a thin layer of white crystal. On Sunday afternoon I smoked a cigarette and watched a squirrel loop its way down the trunk of a tree, like it was riding a helter-skelter. There’s a stillness to ice that nothing else can imitate. Man’s footprint is hidden in the snow. It’s a great time for contemplating the essentials.

I was fortunate enough over the weekend to catch a screening of The Iron Lady, the recent biopic of Margaret Thatcher. As I have written before, I was anxious about watching the movie because I have issues with the Lady’s time in office. But I was pleasantly surprised. Much like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy has little to do with espionage, The Iron Lady has next to nothing to do with politics. It’s about the tyranny of old age and whilst it might not be an accurate portrayal of Thatcher’s present state of health, it is an incredibly moving one.

Director Phyllida Lloyd made the controversial decision to use senility as a narrative device. The story of Thatcher’s life is told in flashbacks, while the present day plot concerns her battle against hallucinations of her long dead husband. The first time we see her, she is not the fierce vision in shoulder pads that we all knew in the 1980s. She is instead a little old lady buying a pint of milk in the local shop. Her face expresses a mix of fear and defiance. The music is too loud and the other customers too coarse; she is vulnerable. But she is also mightily pissed off that the price of milk has gone up again. We see a flash of resilience in her eyes. One can imagine her demanding more change and, when threatened with security, crying, “No, no, no!”

In some ways, the movie is a lot of fun. There’s plenty of silly departures from the written record (Thatcher did not run towards Airey Neave’s exploded car crying, “Noooo!”), plus we get some splendid impersonations of the cast of little men who dogged Margaret throughout her life. Anthony Head is splendid as Geoffrey Howe, who was the most boring yet most radical chancellor in British history. Also delightful is John Sessions as Ted Heath. He captures Heath’s strangulated Kentish twang perfectly – the flat ugly noise that I use, too. The story of Ted’s premiership has always been a personal inspiration, because he proved that you could be utterly charmless and still go far. I take comfort from that.

Meryl Streep is outstanding. Unlike Leonard Dicaprio’s recent turn as J Edgar Hoover, her performance evolves. We see Thatcher patiently learning and then owning the verbal and physical tics that are necessary to command a room. And we see her become a prisoner of them. There is one scene in which she gives Howe a dressing down in cabinet. It’s like torture porn. She humiliates him in front of his colleagues and even corrects his spelling. Furious with the incompetence of lesser mortals, she dismisses everyone from the room. Only when they are gone does she realize that she has done something wrong. She shifts uncomfortably in her chair and bites her lip. She realizes that she has taken a step closer to destruction. A good leader must be feared not loved. But while the fear commands respect for a season, it leads inexorably to usurpation – and that is what happened to the Iron Lady.

The deconstruction of Margaret Thatcher is complete by the time she is old. Like the rest of us, she shifts quietly from being hated to being a nuisance. Her daughter mothers her and her son ignores her. “We must draft a statement,” says Margaret when she hears that terrorists have attacked London. “Mummy, you’re not Prime Minister anymore,” her daughter reminds her. 

Vulnerability is the great curse of ageing. It comes harder in Britain, where work-life patterns undermine strong families. No one wants to be dependent upon their children, but that is the sad reality of physical decline. Margaret scuttles about, listening through key holes to what the others are saying about her – like an errant toddler. She is trapped in a world of memories, some accurate and others not. What is she to do with these years of physical decrepitude? Write another press release?

The Iron Lady does its eponymous hero a good deed, for it reminds her critics that she is a human being. Her condition is certainly universal. As a child I watched my grandmother grow old and die in a short space of time, the decades catching up with her in a matter of months. The gas was often left on and tea cups got broken. The keys were always in the front door. Thieves took advantage of her kindness and ransacked the apartment. She fell down the stairs and came up purple with bruises. She was terrified: every slip or smash was a shock to her. How did I feel, at eleven-years old? I was annoyed. She walked too slow, her hand drawing my progress along the pavement to a painful crawl. She repeated herself endlessly and confused her own life with bits of soap opera. She slept all the damn time. One Christmas Eve, she rang to say that she felt too tired to stay with us. I berated her on the phone: “You foolish old woman,” I said. “Don’t you know that I need you here? Don’t you know that I love you?” The next day she was dead.

After watching The Iron Lady, I have revised my opinion. I think Margaret Thatcher should be given a state funeral. Not because she was special, but because she was an ordinary woman who did remarkable things. She was us and we are she – and we owe this fragile human being a little of the dignity that old age robs from us all.

How did our eponymous hero survive his fall from a tower bloc in Sunday night’s episode of Sherlock? The British media is abuzz with speculation. The scene was a parody of the titanic struggle between Holmes and his archnemesis Moriarty that takes place in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Final Problem. In Doyle’s work, the two men take a dive over the edge of the Reichenbach Falls. In the BBC’s contemporary adaptation, Moriarty shoots himself and Holmes then jumps off an office building. All very postmodern – ugly and bathetic.

I’m one of about half a dozen people in the world who doesn’t like Sherlock. I started out with an open mind, missed a few episodes, and then returned last night during a period of consciousness between bouts of jet lag. If this were an adaptation of any other character from literature, I probably wouldn’t mind the liberties that have been taken with him. But Holmes is a national treasure – and the BBC has stolen and vandalized him. In their brazen effort to compete with other eccentric exports like Downton Abbey, they have retooled him for the US market. Like much of British TV, the result is an ugly chimera of different styles – melodramatic, camp, gaudy, and inconsequential. The quiet intelligence of the source material is completely lost.

Historically, the difference between British and American detective stories has always been this: the British are interested in how someone was murdered, the Americans in why.

The average Agatha Christie novel is a mental puzzle. Someone dies improbably, red herrings are introduced, clues are dangled, and the killer is unmasked. There is little emotion involved. In contrast, the great mystery fiction of the USA is motivated by the human drama surrounding the kill rather than the kill itself. Raymond Chandler’s novels were so disinterested in the mechanics of crime that he confessed that he didn’t know who murdered the chauffer in The Big Sleep. His detectives were flawed human beings who often got it wrong. The thrill of Farewell My Lovely – for my money, the greatest noir ever written – is neither the murder (we never see it) nor the unmasking of the culprit (which surprises the hero as much as us). Likewise, the novels of Ed McBain are more violent pornography than they are criminal fiction, while Dashiell Hammett is just as keen to expose the hypocrisies of capitalism as he is a murderer.

The differences between these two traditions reflect the differences between our two cultures – or at least they used to. It was once the case that British society was mannered and cerebral, while Americans were more tactile and human. Compare Father Brown with Mike Hammer and you’ll see what I mean.

In the last twenty years, British culture has lost a lot of its Anglo-Saxon restraint, which is why I find watching the BBC drama Sherlock painful. Sherlock Holmes is the most intellectual detective of all. In fact, he pretty much set the standard for the English obsession with the nuts and bolts of detection. It’s not true – as the TV series labors – that he guessed everything from a mustard stain on a lapel. Aside from pioneering forensics, he was also a master of disguise and tasty with his fists. He wasn’t excessively rude (I don’t know why Sherlock has turned him into a morose teenager with undiagnosed autism) and he often expressed admiration for feminine pulchritude. He was not gay and he certainly did not have a thing for Moriarty – a character who he met only once in the novels.

In the hands of producer Stephen Moffat, however, Sherlock is a very modern young man. His relationship with Watson has been elevated (or lowered) to platonic love affair. He has a past and a complex relationship with his brother. He hates the world – or does he love it, we cannot tell? – and he desires competition above all else. He is young to the point of hip. The “Bohemian” lifestyle alluded to in the books is here a student digs with psychedelic wall paper. This is the BBC, so our hero cannot possibly smoke. Instead, he wears nicotine patches.

Ignore the endless references to Holmes’ “genius” played out in the show: Sherlock is not a British puzzle, it is an American soap. The absence of intellectual gameplay is reflected in the fact that Moffat will often crowbar several Holmes stories into one episode. The care and attention that Doyle put into explaining how the “impossible” could be made “plausible” is gone. It is replaced by fast paced camera work and high-tech graphics. A kidnapper is identified by the soles of his feet in ten seconds – Huzzah! – allowing the pre-pubescent Sherlock to move one step closer to unmasking Moriarty, the overacted criminal mastermind who, let us not forget, he only met in one Doyle story!

To disguise the lack of plot between each set piece, the director makes his cast run around a great deal and occasionally sends the camera zooming up the actor’s nose. But visual tricks aside, Sherlock is an exercise in character study – and this should come as no surprise. Stephen Moffat is one of the villains who also corrupted Dr. Who. He helped turn a science fiction show aimed at kids into Coronation Street in Space, replete with histrionics, gay kisses, regional accents, brassy women, and special guest stars of the Ken Dodd variety. As with crime fiction, science fiction is technically all about ideas. But Dr. Who’s producers have replaced those ideas with a by-the-numbers drama about human relationships. Will the time travelling doctor ever find love? Do any of us really care? Aside from an admirable taste in bowties, he strikes me as a gurning simpleton.

We once did crime so well. The 1980s were a golden age of TV detectives, all loyal to their textual source. For my generation, Sherlock Holmes is Jeremy Brett (yes, I know that some of his later stories weren’t Doyle’s) – a man so obsessed with capturing the character of Holmes accurately that it actually drove him mad. Likewise, Joan Hickson’s Jane Marple was spot on – down to the lady’s cold stillness, her ability to detect evil at a glance over a tea cup. These shows usually took one story and stretched it out over 2 hours, or several weeks of shorter episodes. They were long, languid, and gorgeous. They were also very sad. The joy of English conversation lies in what is unspoken rather than what is said. We scream at each other in silence. It takes time and care to evoke that kind of pain.* The whizz-bang, cinematic rollercoaster of modern television cannot do it.

I don’t intend this to be read as a condemnation of American culture. On the contrary, I’m as home in the world of pulp as I am on Baker Street. But rather it’s a lament for the fact that the British seem to have forgotten how to do that which we used to do uniquely and so well. The English ability to blend complexity with understatement – to say a thousand words with one handshake – is leaving us. _We are not the people we once were. Nor, I fear, shall we ever be so again.

*Consider how well it was done in the Brett version of The Final Problem.

_ I have arrived in the United States and am now breathing the sweet air of freedom. It always takes a couple of days to get used to America. People talk to each other here, which is very unnerving. In Britain, if a stranger speaks to you on the subway, it’s a sign of criminal intent. If you reply, it’s a sign of madness.

By way of smoothing the transition, Virgin showed one of the most English movies ever made (produced, of course, by the French). This was the first time that I ever saw Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and I was blown away. It’s two and a half hours of solid gold Anglo-Saxon repression. The movie has hardly anything to do with espionage and a lot to do with the British class system. I’d imagine that foreigners watching it would require subtitles for the subtitles, to explain the innuendo and double meaning of every twisted phrase.

Tinker is about a group of men who met at Oxbridge, fought a war together, went their separate ways, and then returned to the fold thirty years later. They are prisoners of the past, chained to each other by nostalgia and bitterness. In place of living, they have seduction and wordplay. One oft-repeated scene is of an office party, the likes of which I have been to many, many times. It features grown men pouring vodka into the punch and dancing to cheesy disco music. Then comes the Lenin-themed drag act and a rousing rendition of the Soviet national anthem. When I heard that on the plane, I nearly leapt to my feet (for reasons that will become obvious later).

Tinker is a family drama, which is what makes the betrayal at the heart of it both pointless and profound. [Spoiler alert.] When we discover that Bill Hayden has been passing on secrets to the Russians, it isn’t England that he has let down – it’s his friends. On the one hand, he seems vain and petty (“Don’t you think the West has become ugly of late?” he says by way of explanation). On the other hand, it is his former lover that has been left to be tortured by the Soviets. King and country aside, what really matters in Tinker is the awful betrayals that occur in everyday life – the insincere kiss, the last goodbye, the unanswered call.

There’s a palpable sense of relief when Hayden is caught, and not just because he doesn’t have to lie anymore. Bill has contempt for England and contempt for his peers. He betrays their superciliousness, their stupidity, by doing something equally childish. He does it because he can. “I am a man who has left his mark,” he says – implying that Smiley’s people are mere shadows that leave no impression on the world around them. Spooks, indeed.

It’s interesting how much the English love their traitors. We have a long heritage of literature and films about the Cambridge Four, much of its hagiographic. How can we express admiration for silly boys who sold us out to the Communists and sent so many men to the firing squad? The answer is partly the English love of eccentricity and bloody-mindedness. But I suspect that we also share their frustration – even disgust - with modern Britain. The feeling that it has become “ugly of late” is widespread. Anyone observing my own lifestyle might conclude that I harbor Bill Hayden’s contempt for England. It’s not entirely true, but my alter egos of Marxist and Catholic probably look like betrayals of my class. Even my love of American conservatism has a hint of subterfuge. I once read a web chat about me in which a liberal asked why I was writing a biography of Right-wing pundit Pat Buchanan. “They met at NBC and Buchanan recruited him,” another liberal replied. “Their relationship is like Blunt and Burgess.” It most certainly is not.

The English personality contains an instinct for treachery – a reflexive urge to betray the mendacity of our race. But we can never quite bring ourselves to leave Britain altogether. We are tied to the thing that we hate the most. Like Bill Hayden, we refuse to do the decent thing and defect. Why should we? England is all we have.

Sadly, I was never a spy. I knew lots of people at Cambridge who were recruited. None of them was a James Bond: the classic profile was a shifty know-it-all with a first in Oriental Studies. I always wondered why they were tapped and I wasn’t. But, in retrospect, I had security risk written all over me. Not only was I an inveterate drunk, but I was also a communist. My first Michaelmas report concluded with “adheres to an outdated, simplistic Marxism that is bound to leave him with a poor third.” My tutor lowered the report and said in an ominous voice, “Are you a socialist?” My grade was much less important than the college’s reputation for producing Conservative cabinet members.

In the last year of my BA, I thought my moment had come. I got a mysterious invite from the college’s recruiter to come to dinner. I went expecting to be ushered into a world of international intrigue and beautiful women, but was disappointed when it turned out to be a dinner in honor of a visiting historian of the American Civil War. I knew nothing about the Civil War, so I guessed this was all a cover. But the hours clocked by while the old duffer rambled on about the Battle of the Bull Run, and still no effort to recruit me was made. I started to hit the table wine, which was, unusually, quite good. By midnight I was several sheets to the wind and dangerously bored. Finally, I found a moment over the port and cheese to sidle up to my host and make my move.

“Is there anything you want to ask me?” I whispered. He was sitting and I was standing, so I leant down and spoke softly into his ear. “Anything playing on your mind?” I gave him a wink that was, in retrospect, obscene. “You can trust me,” I breathed. “I can keep a secret.” The old don gave me a look of pure terror. Several seconds of silence passed until I realised I had a hand resting on his thigh. I stood up straight. “If there’s anything you ever want to ask of me, Professor, you know where I am.” And with that I slunk away to the door. As far as I was concerned, it was a performance worthy of Sean Connery himself.

A couple of days later, another professor told me that the recruiter had been most surprised when I had apparently tried to seduce him after a rather dry seminar on the history of the Civil War. It turned out that he had no intention of recruiting me – I was the only boy in college with an interest in America, which is why I had been invited to bulk out numbers. Humiliated by the horrible misunderstanding – and by the rumor running around that I had a thing for fat old men – I returned once again to drink. A few weeks later, I broke into the don’s shared bathroom and drew a hammer and sickle on the mirror with toothpaste. In my own, small way, I probably contributed to a national security alert.

_ So, Britain finds itself “isolated within Europe”. I’ve never been happier. For all the problems in our world – recession, war, riots, the album sales of One Direction – I end this year with a greater sense of hope in the future than I’ve had in a long time. Britain has regained a little bit of her independence. From self-governance flows ambition – and the bride of ambition is hope.

There’s always a temptation for Eurosceptics to say, “I don’t hate Europe, I just dislike the European Union.” Conservative MEP Dan Hannan (made famous in the US by Glenn Beck) does it all the time. Whenever he’s interviewed, Hannan will say something like, “I speak fluent French, Spanish, and Ukrainian; I married an Albanian chicken farmer; I holiday regularly in Latvia; and I never say no to a plate of paella.” Tony Benn (an old fashioned socialist Eurosceptic) will tell anyone who’ll listen that he’s a “passionate European”. Both men insist that it’s the undemocratic structures of the EU that have alienated them from the enterprise, not the culture of the continent itself. In reality, the two phenomena are inseparable. The EU is undemocratic because it is a European construct. The British are not European, and that’s why we don’t like it.

Of course, like Britain itself, I am a little bit European. I am of Dutch, French, and Irish extraction. My language and thought owes much to the continent. I prefer European movies to Anglo-Saxon cinema (I’ve spent a happy week rediscovering Fassbinder and Visconti), and then there’s the delights of German beer, Italian opera, Russian literature, and whatever it is that the Swiss do. I once spent a happy Christmas in Vienna, watching Bellini at the State Opera – directly behind a huge man with steel-tipped shoes that he tap-tap-tapped on the marble floor.

But there is a fundamental difference between the Brits and the Europeans. I sensed it during a televised discussion I took part in this week. Most of the continental speakers made the same, idealistic point: that it would have been wise to sign the latest European treaty because it was good for Europe. I reiterated that I don’t care about Europe – whatever you define it as – I care about what is good for my own country. Diplomacy is supposed to be governed by self-interest: economic negotiations especially so. Interestingly, the only two guests who agreed with me were from the outskirts of the continent: Finland and Bulgaria.

The point of democracy is to represent the people who elect you. The MP for Woking is duty bound to represent the interests of Woking and Woking alone – not Andalusia or the mountain folk of Carpathia. Yet there is an attitude within the Eurozone that a noble goal beyond the process of democracy calls us to sacrifice sovereignty and material wealth for a higher cause: the blessed United States of Europe. The MP for Woking should, say the true believers, sacrifice his constituents’ interests for the benefit of a wider ideological project. This is what my opponents seemed to be saying. “It is bad for me,” I’d argue. “Ah,” they’d reply, “But it is good for Europe.”

These contrasting attitudes towards political representation are the product of two different cultures. In Britain we’ve made a fetish of the individual; we loathe anything collective and worship eccentricity. Since the 16th century (arguably before), we’ve jealously guarded our sovereignty – going so far as to rewrite the Bible and build a national church so that we can dispense with Popes. That everyone deserves to be tried by their peers, or that a man is innocent until proven guilty, has dominated English law far longer than the imported notion of “universal human rights”. If the American legal and political systems seem close to our own then that is because the American Revolution was fundamentally a civil war between Britons. Consider that the intellectual father of British Toryism, Edmund Burke, actually supported the revolutionaries.

The single aim of foreign policy from the late 16th century on was to engage in European affairs only in so far as it protected our interests elsewhere. Our eye was on the globe, where our commercial interests have lain ever since. Railways through Africa, banks in Hong Kong, dams across the Amazon – this empire of goods made us rich in the 19th century. With the rise of India and China, it is in the developing world that our future lies. As an old sun sets in the West, a new one rises in the East. This is not, as the Europeans think, a doomsday scenario. It is a challenge.

But Europe’s instinct is to protect. It believes that by clubbing together, it can create a trading superpower to challenge America and defend itself against the globalized greed of the emerging nations. Combine that narcissism with a history of collectivism of the statist kind and you have a recipe for something very unEnglish. The guiding principle of Western European history in the last 300 years has been centralization. The French Revolution abolished local governments, created a national conscript army, and terrified the continent with its dreams of egalite. The Italian Risorgimento crafted an artificial Italy out of a patchwork of republics and monarchies. The Prussian state first cultivated a German Empire and then the domination of Mitteleuropa. The result of all of this is a culture that leans towards bureaucratic authoritarianism. The idea that the problems of an entire continent can be solved around a boardroom table appeals to the European mind. Of course, it contradicts the English belief that diversity is strength. One might argue that this is reflected in our rather more successful experiment in multiculturalism. The British obsess about how obsessed we are with immigration but, in fact, where is the British electoral equivalent of the French Front Nationale or the Hungarian Jobbik?

The British Labour Party is arguing that David Cameron could have negotiated harder, gained bigger concessions, and signed the new treaty. But Cameron’s use of the veto was inevitable. It was inevitable because the French and Germans didn’t want to negotiate, and the offer they put on the table would have led inexorably to the crippling of our finance sector and the stagnation of our economy. But it was also inevitable because Britain is not a culturally European country. The single market suited our passion for free trade, but we have no interest in joining a centralized, bureaucratic unitary state. And we not interested in serving the interests of some future utopia – a metric land of milk and honey. It is enough for us to govern ourselves, and to do so as lightly as possible.

_ Advent always brings out mixed emotions in me. On the one hand there is the thrill of Christmas’s approach – the promise of new life and rebirth. On the other, there is the niggling knowledge that some people will spend the holiday season alone. It’s a time for introspection, for asking “Have I done enough for others during the year?” The answer is almost always, “No.” The cold weather and the bare branches of the trees make it all so much worse. There’s a ring of finality about the season: “Ah well, another year of being an indolent, selfish layabout. Nothing you can do about it now.”

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks living in a monastery, largely to complete a book chapter (now uncompleted) but also to commune with God in the run up to Christmas. The guest house is about 300 yards from the chapel, yet that hasn’t stopped me from never entering it. I’ve spent most of the time curled up in a warm bed reading Margaret Atwood’s latest novel and watching reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond (I love that guy). The monks tell me that this is nothing to be ashamed of, that I’m here to rest as well as worship. But monks are like that: they never complain, never criticize.

At least, that’s how Benedictine monks behave. I’ve stayed with the Dominicans and it wasn’t such an easy ride. It was a silent order and services began at 5 in the morning. Conversation was restricted to an hour after lunch, accompanied by some bitter coffee and leaf raking. I managed to make one Mass at 7 am. The guest master came to my cell afterwards to invite me to breakfast only to discover that I had got straight back into my pajamas and into bed. It was a miserable week and, because I presumed they’d have internet (who doesn’t?!) I didn’t bring any entertainment. The result: seven silent days in the company of an Italian novel (unread) and a 1,200 piece jigsaw puzzle (unfinished). Needless to say, I never touched the Bible in the bedside drawer. Thankfully, the Benedictines are far more clubbable than that (and they drink wine).

My Protestant friends and family find my frequent stays in monasteries odd. They ask, why do you go and why do they let you in? I go because I can and they let me in because they should. There’s nothing contractual about it, no exchange of material things. Of course, I give whatever donation I can afford (not very much, thankyou George Osborne) but we approach the arrangement as autonomous individuals. I go because it is good for my soul. They let me in because they think it is good for theirs.

It occurred to me while on my retreat that the modern welfare system could learn a lot from the abbeys. Until the Reformation, the monastery offered alms to the poor and somewhere for people fleeing tyranny to hide. Post Reformation, the safety net was undone and people threw themselves on the charity of the local lay community. With the coming of the industrial era, the state started to take up the burden of poor relief. Dealing with ever bigger numbers, they resorted to systematization and control. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon provided the literal and mental architecture of the new age. Bentham conceived a structure that would allow an official to observe ("opticon") all ("pan") inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. He settled on a circular structure with an inspection house at the center – from which said officials watch the inmates stationed around the perimeter. Bentham wanted his design to be used in hospitals, schools, poorhouses, and madhouses. Today it is still used to plan prisons.

Sociologist Michel Foucault correctly surmised that the Panopitcon represented the West’s evolution from a culture that punished the body to one that controlled it through subtle, but non-invasive, fascisms. What applied to penal reform also applied to welfare. Consider that the charity found in a Medieval monastery was personal: a beggar approached a monk and the monk made the individual choice to care for him. Today's Benthamite welfare state is impersonal: people “sign on” and collect benefits from employed civil servants. Visits from social workers are centrally coordinated (and sometimes unwelcome). Moreover, the Medieval monk never demanded anything of the beggar. In contrast, the welfare state has evolved from "contract" to tool of personal reform – the state expects dole recipients to kick the drugs, look for work, do a training course etc. Even our beloved NHS is now being used as leverage to get people to stop eating or smoking.

Fr Ray Blake has posted on his website some etches by Pugin illustrating the differences between Medieval and industrial public life. The most striking is his “contrasted residences for the poor” (see picture above). At the bottom is a monastery that is really a self-contained village: church, vegetable garden, place to eat, place to sleep, burial ground with Last Rites. At the top is a modern poor house that looks a lot like Bentham’s Panopticon. Residences are now cells, men are clapped in irons, food is meager, and inmates are buried in unmarked graves. Tellingly, the church is some miles from the poor house. This model of charity is really a method of control and reform. It is hard to believe that anyone’s soul benefits from it, including that of the wider society that tolerates it.

True charity must surely display "compassion", which means "to suffer with". Again, it is the personalized nature of monasteries which enabled them to show the appropriate degree of compassion. When the countryside was hit by famine, the monks starved with their flock. When plague came, they exposed themselves to the pestilence by taking in sufferers; whole monasteries were wiped out this way. What they could not offer in physical sacrifice, they provided in existential comfort. Plague bearers could pray to Saint Sebastian for relief. This was not a distraction for the gullible, but a way of reinforcing the physical reality that the Church suffered with its people. Sebastian was tied to a post and shot full of arrows. Like other martyrs, his story brings the comfort of knowing that pain is a universal condition – and that relief is available in the life to come. A lot of people think that the ritual of Catholicism creates distance from the laity. On the contrary, it is a very human faith.

I am not proposing that our welfare system is completely broken or that it should be replaced with the meager means of the modern Catholic Church. But across the West, there is a sense that social security has become detached from its original intention. Such a moral enterprise can easily descend into a tool of bureaucratic control. It is certainly no replacement for the unquestioning, boundless love of one brother for another.

__When I was a boy, “Thatcher” was a curse word. My family loathed Mrs. T with a passion that burned hotter than the sun. They weren’t particularly political: my father was a lapsed trades-unionist and my mother was too well bred to vote. It was simply axiomatic that “she” was the enemy and “she” had to go. They drank a toast when she resigned from office.

I carried that burning faith well into my twenties, before I discovered history and retired from politics. Now it is with mixed feelings that I discover that a Hollywood movie has been made about Mrs. Thatcher’s life. For starters, it’s too early to make a film like this. Emotions are too raw for it to be watched objectively, and the lady is too advanced in years to offer a fair rebuttal. The kind of sordid details that make a biopic worth watching can only offend her family. The inevitable absence of the stories of ordinary people caught up in the Thatcher Revolution will equally offend the rest of us. Margaret Thatcher did not single handedly drag Britain into the postmodern era. We got there ourselves by putting pins through our noses and marrying the servants. (At least, that’s how mummy did it).

But the movie does offer those of us who are the “children of Thatcher” an opportunity to reflect on her legacy, especially now that the Credit Crunch has called so much of it into question. Since leaving the world of my parents far behind, I’ve settled into an idiosyncratic brand of conservatism that allies me more comfortably with the Right. Yet, I'm still uncomfortable with what happened to Britain in the 1980s and I lack the enthusiasm that many of my peers feel for Mrs. Thatcher. My critique of her is a Tory one, but it is critical nonetheless.

Margaret Thatcher’s analysis of what was wrong with Britain in 1979 was spot on. Militant unions, spiraling costs, outdated infrastructure, punishing tax rates – all these things crippled our industrial base and prevented growth. Then, as now, we were spending too much and taking too little in. A restive Left complicated matters. The Seventies breed of trades-unionist had less interest in a good deal for their workers than they did in replacing Parliament with a Supreme Soviet. In this climate, the medicine that Thatcher applied was correct: tax cuts, regulations on union power, privatization. Her measures were sensible enough for most other Western governments to copy them. Even social democratic parties in Germany, Sweden, and Australia cut and privatized their way out of recession.

But the sense of social dislocation that resulted from these policies was far bigger in Britain than anywhere else. Reaganomics could be equally as harsh, but Reagan’s approval rating was consistently high and he died a father figure appropriated by both Left and Right. So why does Mrs. T get such bad press?

The answer partly lies in the severity of the early Eighties recession, which still looms large in the public imagination. As the government cut off subsidies to failing businesses, the fall in productivity was the largest since the Great Depression and unemployment tripled to three million. Rioting in major cities became ubiquitous and crime soared. Thatcher’s policies tore up a “postwar settlement” that had promised an ever increasing standard of living through full employment. Right-wing ideologues saw that settlement as a shameful sell-out to socialism that swapped empire for welfare state. But the settlement had endured for so long because it was supported by consecutive Conservative governments. Those Tory grandees felt a sense of duty to the men they had fought and died alongside in the trenches, so they accepted the consensus regardless of its financial cost.

By dismantling the postwar settlement in the name of rescuing Britain from decline, Margaret Thatcher became a more revolutionary figure than her Labour Party opponents. In an excellent piece in the Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore writes that she redefined conservatism as “insurrection”. By so doing, she created a paradox. The point of conservatism is to preserve as much as possible of the social order that we inherit. It can be necessary sometimes to throw out the bad to preserve the good – which is why previous Conservative governments emancipated the Catholics or expanded the franchise. But the idea of purposefully uprooting the social order – even to return to a pre-Lapsarian, pre-socialist past – contradicts the conservative instinct for cohesion and order. A more traditional Conservative leader might have responded to the crisis of 1979 by trying to build a new consensus for piecemeal reform – to defend what was best about the postwar settlement by discarding what was worst.

Instead, the Thatcher government regarded its task as starting the world over again, and they approached it with the unbending fervor of the ideologue. As much was recently acknowledged by Norman Tebbit, the former “enforcer” of Thatcherism. In 1981, in response to the suggestion that rioting was the natural response to unemployment, the then Employment Secretary said, “I grew up in the 30s with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking ‘til he found it.” The paraphrase “on yer bike” became shorthand for the government’s firmness in the face of social protest. In 2009, Tebbit admitted that Thatcherism, particularly its conflict with the miners, had resurrected the British economy at a terrible price: “Black-hearted old Tory that I am, I recognize that in those mining towns and villages crime was very low, as was school truancy and yobbish behavior, because here there was a close-knit social structure in which there was a great deal of social stability. The rapid collapse of the coal mining industry did break up those communities in a terrible manner. I think it was a contributory factor to what was going on in society and the change in a lot of our old inner cities, where once, even if you were Norman Tebbit, you could walk safely through the streets.”

It should be stressed that the decline of the mining and industrial sectors was inevitable and germane to the Western world: Thatcher didn’t start it and she couldn’t have stopped it. But something about her government gave the impression that she didn’t really care about it, that her policies were class war masquerading as public policy. It wasn’t just the brutalism of her manifesto, or the fact that she was (inaccurately) quoted as saying there was “no such thing as society”. It was the lady herself. Her terrifying, patiently rehearsed vowels rang with the fiery anger of the Puritan. Her frightening stare barely contained the rage of the overtaxed haves against the indolence of the have nots. She was the silent majority personified, on the phone yet again to complain about the late delivery of the post or the foul language of the garbage men. Such a Conservative woman is infinitely more chilling than their male counterparts. She could not be mellowed by Rotary Bridge or public school frolics. She was the revolutionary vanguard of a late-to-liberation, female bourgeoisie.

Since 1945, Socialism and the welfare state have been responsible for the deaths of many great British characteristics, particularly frugality and chivalry. But Capitalism has done a lot of damage, too. The deregulated marketplace has brought competition, but also ugly chain stores, a taste for drugs, pornography, violent television, avarice, and materialism. Post-Thatcher, the Conservative Party seemed to lose sight of the fact that the freedom to make money isn’t the only pillar of the Good Society (although it’s a strong one). Ask a Conservative what kind of society they’d like to live in and they’ll generally identify the 1950s. This is highly ironic, because the faithful, decent national community that we imagine the 1950s to have been was also economically highly regulated and strongly wedded to the postwar consensus that Margaret Thatcher tore up.

If there is a psychological problem with the post-Thatcher generation of Conservatives, it is that they lack the emotional condition that forged the postwar settlement. I don’t expect them to endorse it or revive it, but the kind of Tories who signed up to it in the 1950s were men and women who had greater sympathy for the Britain of yesterday and today. They took pride in Church and Empire and they loved the people who had stood by them at Ypres and Dunkirk. They governed Britain because they felt they owed it something. They were burdened, even blinded, by duty. Mrs. Thatcher had her own faith, and it was strong enough to pull Britain out of the abyss. But I see little such passion or compassion in George Obsorne or David Cameron. These are ambitious young men with little experience of the world beyond Westminster. Their forebears might have called them vulgar. At least Margaret Thatcher had conviction and wit, and the withering tone of voice that gets things done.