David Cameron being appointed Prime Minister by the Queen

Ed Miliband’s claim to One Nationhood at last week’s Labour conference was as bogus as his aspiration to the common/centre ground.

He and his party owe allegiance to the Marxist notion of class warfare. They picture themselves as tribunes of “the people” in perpetual “struggle” with those who seek to better themselves and their families by hard work: “the Tories”.

I have always believed that the Labour Party can never truly represent the whole nation because of their bloodthirsty history of revolution. They only win elections in the aftermath of war (1945-1951) or when an emollient leader poses as a Conservative (Tony Blair).

Margaret Thatcher, whom they despise, knew that the only permanent way to overcome this destructive tendency in Britain is to turn so-called socialists into property-owning conservatives.

Thus the Conservatives are the natural party of government because they mostly come from a “ruling” class whose job it is to manage success and prosperity. The property owners of old knew instinctively that if they failed to look after their managers and staff their estates would crumble.

Downton Abbey is remarkably accurate in that respect. The big house is a microcosm of the cooperative State. Imagine it written by one of the Angry Young Men of the 1950s rather than the easy-going Julian Fellowes. A life of constant struggle and violence is a life not worth living.

Natural Conservatives, irrespective of party or class, have known this all their lives. It transcends intellect and was once described as “gentlemanly conduct,” devoid of rancour and division, but without the intervention of a harsh State.

What has all this got to do with mysticism? Everything. Read on …

So it was that David Cameron stepped up to the lectern yesterday as heir to that noble tradition. He didn’t let it down.

In a speech notable for its mildness and generosity he won over the hard-bitten journalists and commentators, even of the Left wing press. It helped that he is no performer. He’s stiff rather than actorly like Boris. But that only served to highlight his transparent decency.

The contrast between the class war of Labour’s two Eds and the mild Conservativism that proper Tories have mostly aspired to was stark and refreshing.

We must distinguish here between the American tradition of conservatism, which arises out of historical revolution, and the British Burkean variety of a compact between generations and classes.

The transatlantic version, which has been picked up by many in Britain over the years, including Margaret Thatcher, is as divisive and confrontational as Labour’s revolutionary tendencies. Except insofar that Maggie, brought up in a flat above a corner shop, was acutely aware that no section of the population should ever be left significantly behind.

Her solution was to educate the young always to be industrious and take pride in supporting themselves and their families.

If you ask whether a globalised “capitalism red in tooth and claw” is more efficient in our modern age, the answer lies among the wreckage of the world’s economies. The outer shell of human nature is not naturally humane.

British Conservatives have always believed in moderation in business affairs, balancing the urge to make capitalism into a rampaging bull, with the need for stability — plus Edmund Burke’s pledge to future generations.

David Cameron’s wise oration yesterday sealed that deal. He should spread the message in many other ways now. It is the basis for a truly unified country, One Nation in reality, not just a slogan and vote-catching label.

Yesterday, Cameron built the base for an extended period in office. But to make his message work in practice, he must dispense with the European psychoses that have infiltrated Britain’s airspace for 40 years. They are the remnants of Nazism and the heirs to perpetual conflict, the opposite of Conservatism.

He will not be an obvious success if he shirks that challenge.

John Evans

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Ken Livingstone, eh? You can’t live with him, and you certainly can live without him.

There’s an apocryphal tale told about his first period as Mayor of London which, I suspect, has grown with the telling.

On coming into office, as an indication of his Internationalist credentials he instructed a Labour sidekick to arrange an exhibition of the work of Nigerian rural artists.

When none could be found in London, he sent a team to Nigeria to round up the best of them and bring them back to display their work.

Unfortunately, Ken’s emissaries were told, at the highest level, that there was no such thing as country artists in Nigeria. Appalled, the new Mayor ordered his people to bring back a dozen Nigerian actors to play the parts.

“What about the pictures?” he was asked by his incredulous sherpa. “We’ll think of something,” replied the optimistic Livingstone.

Eventually, a group of actors, accountants and farm labourers duly arrived at Heathrow, fitted out in smart, dark suits. “Suits,” yelled the Mayor, “they’re supposed to be rural artists from Africa! Get them down to the theatrical outfitters in Monmouth Street.”

When the hapless underling presented them to the costumiers, he was in luck … or so he thought. “We’ve got just the thing,” said the attendant. “The D’Oyly Carte has just finished a production of The Mikado and all the costumes have been returned to us.” A white-faced emissary reluctantly agreed to take them.

Meanwhile, the Mayor had arranged a smart black-tie reception, including the pick of the London arts establishment as well as top broadsheet art journalists. It was intended to be a glittering occasion to launch his mayoralty with a bang.

“What are we going to do for art?” demanded his despondent aide de camp. “I’m sure you can find something in the junk shops,” says his nibs, “Or just give them some oil paints and make them daub stuff on big canvases. If schoolkids can do it, I’m sure a bunch of accountants and farmers can.”

The day of the reception at City Hall arrived. The great and the good were shepherded into the grand hall where a remarkable sight awaited them. Splodges of paint splashed all over the walls were running down onto the sprung parqued floor. “I’m afraid they got drunk,” said the aide, “I couldn’t stop them. They just went beserk.”

“Well, they are country artists,” says Ken to the startled art critics. “And here they come!”

Into the hall, in single file, staggered ten drunken Nigerians dressed as characters from The Mikado.

Now I’m sure that story has been embroidered mightily, but Reader, I suggest it’s too bizarre to be made up.

* The lower picture is published with the permission of Lamplighters Music Theatre, San Francisco.

John Evans

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There is a lot of scratchy talk at the moment about spending our way out of recession. Simon Jenkins was at it in the Guardian yesterday. It seems Keynes never went away during the past 30 years of monetarism and “tight” fiscal rules.

His easy way out of the soup: spend, spend, spend, has always been grasped at eagerly by Labour governments to expand their beloved state sector with yet more bureaucrats. They are the economy, said Yvette Cooper during the long years of Gordon Brown’s dominance of the fiscal scene.

Conservatives usually want to cut the “public realm” and transfer the workers into private sector jobs — productive sector would be a better term. The idea is to stop them being a burden on taxpayers and transform them into contributors to the national wealth.

Britain ran the largest empire the world has ever known with 10,000 civil servants. It now employs many millions to perform a similar role in the UK alone.

The current “austerity” is not a mean-spirited reversal of everything Labour did in office, but a macroeconomic transformation of the balance between the payers and the paid. A healthy economy needs nothing less.

In a prudent way, the public spending route can be a useful tweak in times of manageable budget deficits and lowish national debt. That situation no longer applies. Brown ran hefty deficits during the times of plenty, putting nothing away for the recession he denied was coming.

Britain is at the limits of its debt dynamics now, holding off calamity by its good ratings in the bond markets. Another spending spree would unleash a truly momentous perfect storm. Look around Europe and smell the fear.

So we have to stick with the medicine. There is no other option.

Gordon ate all the pies.

John Evans

Is there a quota system for the number of “Big Beasts” a political party can have? Another EU directive, perhaps?

I ask because ConservativeHome’s Tim Montgomerie wrote the following in Saturday’s Daily Mail: “A few big Labour beasts including Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander and defence spokesman Jim Murphy are quietly muttering in the corner …”.

Do Big Beasts mutter in corners? And quietly?

Douglas Alexander, “wee Dougie”, is a personable fellow who made a rather good joke in the Libyan debate, although I can’t for the life of me remember what it was.

Jim Murphy talks very quietly on aspects of defence, but I’m not sure I recall any details.

Nowadays, parties are defined by their Big Beasts and their roars. Ed Balls certainly roars, and is very beastly, but “Big Ed”?

Don’t you get the impression that Labour is the Incredible Shrinking Party?

Poppycock Watch
So CERN has captured antimatter — antihydrogen atoms, to be precise — for 16 minutes and 40 seconds. What are the implications of this for the rest of us?

For science it’s a chance to reconstruct the beginnings of the universe. Isn’t it always?

What though if the universe didn’t have a beginning? Is it inconceivable to the boffin bonce that not everything has to start somewhen?

It’s interesting to the mystic mind because it gives physical validation to one of its profoundest tenets: that matter is really “mind” or rather, consciousness.

Consider, if every particle in the universe has an antiparticle which destroys both on contact, and therefore the sum total is Zero, ie, the universe only exists physically as a state of tension between equal but opposite and, crucially, separate electrical charges, an overview of all of it would reveal nothing but emptiness. A void, in fact.

Once again, scientists reduce everything to nothingness, but miss one important element: Intelligence. The aliveness of space, in its general and particular senses, completely eludes them.

At its heart, the universe is made up of consciousness alone, or what used to be called Spirit. That is the mystic’s view. It actually explains everything so much better than science does, because consciousness/spirit displays “intelligence,” something science claims as its own yet denies to the void that is the universe.

The problem has always been that consciousness/spirit is so close to us, all-pervading in fact, that it’s possible to stumble through life without ever knowing it exists. It’s easy to view life as just a barrage of thoughts.

Look at existence through a telescope and spirit/consciousness is invisible. View life through a spiritual lens, by creating a silent space within, and all becomes clear.

And when you see it, everything makes sense. Scientists appear as primitive creatures, rattling around and making a lot of noise in a universe beyond their understanding.

Mystics try not to laugh. They are basically compassionate people. They would not be mystics if they didn’t have all-embracing temperaments.

But sometimes it’s very hard not to.

I spend a lot of my time tracking one of the great tragedies/farces of our age. I refer, of course, to the fate of the euro.

I’m not sure why, especially since Great Britain — as we should now get used to calling our homeland — avoided it by the skin its teeth. The “great and the good,” as is usual, unerringly chose the wrong option, loudly proclaiming that staying out would be disastrous. Tut, tut.

There is a fascination in observing a slow-motion system wreckage in real time. Most economists — not the most accurate of prophets — now fall on the side of pessimism about this wonky, schizoid currency group.

The psychology of the process is even more interesting than watching the gradually disintegrating Heath-Robinson contraption.

Politicians are in an enormous quandary, damned if they do, and obliterated if they don’t. Eurocrats are chasing what tails they have left after the kicking they’ve taken by the forces of history. The astonishing part is that most of them have yet to budge from their pre-set positions. It’s as if they are frozen in a prehistoric landscape unable to summon the will to awaken.

Most interesting is observing those few who do come round from the Brussels Trance and either slink away into obscurity, or shrug a pair of pragmatic shoulders and carry on as if nothing had happened.

The pachyderm in the tool shed though is the European Central Bank (ECB) which is so stuffed with almost worthless Greek and peripheral countries’ debt that it is effectively bankrupt. It daren’t let Greece default because its balance sheet would collapse.

Prognosis? Some species of disaster, ranging from a devastating bust up, to total collapse of the system, leading to another calamitous global financial crash.

China might then emerge as the dominant power in the world, and we will dance to a Communist tune. The Marxist-Leninists will have won after all.

Britain might at least break away from this self-inflicted tragedy by calling the promised in-out referendum on the EU.

It would, at minimum, show a direction of travel that is inevitable at some point.

Book of the Week
The travails of many big political projects remind me of one of my favourite books:

Back in the 1970s Shunryu Suzuki (not to be confused with D.T. Suzuki), was then Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. He wrote a classic of Zen and world literature called Zen Mind, Beginners’ Mind.

The theme of the book was that “experts” have closed minds with few possibilities, while “beginners” have open minds with many possibilities. Therefore it’s better to be a beginner than an expert.

It’s a wonderful book, full of wisdom and terrific writing. But is it true? In our society, experts are the ones who make the money. And money is the measure of success or failure. Beginners: students, interns, rookies, greenhorns, apprentices, newbies … are the ones we pass over in silence, and often without pay.

What Suzuki was really getting at is that beginners view everything as if it were new, fresh, and deeply interesting. Their minds are focused ferociously on the matter in hand, like a child with a new toy. They get more out of every experience because they are fully present to it — the essence of Zen.

Experts, by contrast, take a rather jaded, “seen it all before” view of the same events. Their minds are turning to “more important” matters like their diary for the coming week, upcoming meetings, papers to be written and presented, dinner parties to attend, boards to chair …

Suzuki felt that “attention” is the most important aspect of any person’s life. Attend fully to the matter in hand and you are fully alive. Split your mind by putting some things on autopilot and you’re not present to the moment, so partially dead. Marriages often suffer from this tendency and don’t last long once the robot takes over.

I’ve read Suzuki’s book a number of times in the past few years and I’m always amazed at the influence his simple message continues to have at the highest levels, especially among experts.

Steve Jobs, legendary founder of Apple, advises: “Stay hungry, stay foolish”.

Thought of the Week
Plan A supposes a Plan B. A plan is just a plan, but an A without a B is superfluous and misleading. If George Osborne is set on only one plan for the economy, he should say, “There is no Plan A, just The Plan.”

Any philosopher worth his hemlock will tell you that.

John Evans

Who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

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In a field of stunted poppies a tall plant stands out. Replant it in a well-tended garden and its mediocrity becomes apparent.

The problem for all of Labour’s leadership candidates in today’s contest is that one of them must win.

Together in the field of five, they have some cover to hide their inadequacies. Out in the open, the winner will be cruelly exposed. Ask William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith or Michael Howard.

David Miliband should consult Hague (maybe he has) who has mirrored his own career in reverse. First Leader of the Opposition, then Foreign Secretary, a post noted for its invisibility. Hague will testify how he was vilified as Leader, mainly by Labour thugs. Eventually he cut a ridiculous figure in the eyes of the public.

The new Dave-on-the-block is already tainted by low-hanging fruit: the banana.

Germans are said to be the biggest banana eaters in the world. Add in their alleged lack of humour and it appears to do them no harm. We don’t describe the land of Beethoven and Bach as Bananarama.

It’s very different over here. British taste for the ridiculous makes any association with that iconic fruit perilous in the extreme. Not only is its shape wide open to invidious comparisons, but the peel is inevitably linked with slippery mishaps. It is not an object that a serious politician wants a close encounter with.

David Miliband has passed the point of no return on that. His stunt at the Party Conference last year waving a banana will forever define his leadership qualities and lack of an innate sense of danger. His gung-ho escapades in the Russia-Georgia confrontation left many of us open-mouthed with astonishment. It stands alongside his casual insistence that the constitutional Lisbon Treaty should be ratified by a whipped Parliament rather than the promised national plebiscite.

Syntagma expects the rank and file of the party to reject this oddly insignificant character.

Ed Miliband is a different class of poppy. Rangey rather than tall, he’s been sucking up to the leading bloom on the plot: the manic trade union, Unite.

He’s been using once outlawed words, such as comrade and fraternity. How very early 20th century they sound. He’s clearly going to make the classic mistake of veering the party to the Left once he occupies the top spot. His Mephistophelean bosses will accept no other path from him. His soul is trussed up like a bird in a tarantula’s web. Weakness is written all over him.

The fact is, whichever Miliboy wins today, the other will most likely succeed him after defeat at the next election. There’s no time for another generation of potential leaders to emerge by then. It took the Tories a decade of insignificance for the Camerons, Osbornes and Goves to spring up in a faded poppy field of little distinction.

If Ed, soon David. If David, soon Ed. That’s the Einsteinian formula for Labour’s future well into the second decade of this century. Buggins will get his turn.

The public sector, so beloved of their party, will be so pleased.

Updated 5.15 pm: Ed Miliband is the new Labour leader. He won by the narrow margin of 1.3% in only the fourth and final round of preferences. David Miliband had been ahead on the first three.

In his acceptance speech, he emphasised the need for change, and even adopted David Cameron’s posture of supporting the Government when he thought it was right.

We will see if his policy stance reflects his union backers or backs the essential needs of the nation.

The Shadow Cabinet will be elected in 10 days, after which the new Labour Leader will be able to allocate jobs among them.

John Evans

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