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Rt Hon Michael Ancram QC MP

Last week’s announcement by my fellow-Gazette columnist, constituency neighbour, Parliamentary colleague and good friend, Michael Ancram that he is to stand down from the Commons at the General Election was greeted by people across the political spectrum in Wiltshire and in Westminster with great sadness. He will be much missed at least at my end of the Palace of Westminster and in every corner of his great constituency. But he is living disproof of the old cliché that “all political careers end in failure.” Nothing could be further from the truth in Michael’s case.

His Parliamentary and ministerial career, of course, has been immensely distinguished. MP for Berwick and East Lothian in 1974, then for Edinburgh South, 1979-87, and of course Devizes from 1992, a junior minister in the Scottish Office under Margaret Thatcher, 1983-87, he truly came into his own in the Northern Ireland Office at the height of the troubles, 1993/97 playing amongst other things a crucial role in the secret contacts with the IRA which led ultimately to the Good Friday Peace Agreement. In Opposition from 1997, he was consecutively Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party under William Hague, then Shadow Foreign Secretary, then Chairman of the Party before finally retiring from the front bench and focussing on his great interest in defence and foreign affairs. The whole House listens attentively whenever Michael is on his feet during a foreign affairs debate.

Yet throughout all of that, you would not find a more hard-working, constituency MP, flying home to Lyneham from Aldegrove and rarely missing a weekend in or around Devizes. His enviable majorities are a testament to his huge popularity amongst every sort of people in the area. To look at him, you’d hardly know that he is also the 13^th Marquess of Lothian and the proprietor of more stately homes than you and I can imagine; he’s a Privy Councillor, Queen’s Counsel, Deputy Lieutenant of Roxburgh, Ettrick and Lauderdale, and has a host of other distinctions to his name.

I like the story of how he was –unusually – wearing a name badge “The Marquess of Lothian” at some Buckingham Palace function. Cherie Blair made a rather scathing remark about how he was a Marquess up here, just plain Mr Ancram back in the Commons. “Yes, Ms Booth,” Michael is reputed to have replied to the Prime Minister’s wife.

Well I’ve met a few Dukes and such like in my time, but as the people of the Devizes Constituency will attest, you wouldn’t meet a less snooty one than Michael.

Michael, you have given great service to the Nation, to Parliament, to the Conservative Party and to your constituency – the last of these I suspect being closest to your heart. We will miss your wise counsel in the Commons, and yours will be big shoes to fill in Devizes. I hope that you will be making a great contribution to politics and current affairs for many years to come. But in the meantime, on behalf of all of us, I would just say to you and to Jane who has been by your side throughout it all: - “A thousand thank-yous.”

Major Phil Packer

The sheer guts and determination of some of our fellow human beings can be humbling. I went along to Jennifer Shah’s brilliant charity dinner for the Nicholls Spinal Injury Foundation at the Wiltshire Golf Club on Sunday, where the guest speaker was Phil Packer. Just last summer, Phil was told that he would never walk again having crushed his pelvis and lost control of his lower body while serving in Iraq. But four months in a military bed alongside a quadriplegic stiffened his resolve, and of course since then he has competed in the London Marathon, raising £1 million for help for heroes, but also rowed the English Channel and climbed a 3000 vertical rock formation in California. These are challenges at which most of us who are able bodied would quail. Now he wants to go on to set up a charity to provide inspiration for other disabled people to give them the same determination and guts. I will do whatever I can to help him. People like Phil are an inspiration to us all.

The continuing tragic deaths in Afghanistan, and the moving Repatriation ceremonies in Wootton Bassett should neither lead us to want to give up the fight, but nor should they lead us to focussing  all of our attention on our fallen heroes, at the expense of the wounded and disabled service people. The Royal British Legion – and how good it is to see the Legion Bikers at each of the repatriations- Help for Heroes, Blesma, the Army Benevolent Fund and so many other fine organisations do great work. I am proud, for example, to be Patron of Mutual Support, the MS Society branch for service people, many of whom believe that they can attribute their MS to some aspect of their service lives. These organisations need our help and support – financially and in every way.

But the point which Phil Packer was making was not just that disabled servicemen need our money – which they do- they also need our respect and our honour to the same degree or even more than the respect which we pay to our dead heroes as they pass down Wootton Bassett High Street. They have given up their livelihood and their liveliness in the service of the Nation almost as much as those who have been killed. And they need and deserve our help and our support and inspiration to get on with the rest of their lives.

Local man David Hempleman- Adams is another example. He very kindly took Philippa and me up in his balloon during the week for a superb flight over the Wiltshire countryside, thankfully not re-enacting the tragic death of my predecessor Walter Powell in his hot air balloon 150 years ago. Famous explorer that he is (having climbed the highest mountain in each of the five continents, trekked to North and South poles both magnetic and geographic, hot air ballooned to the North Pole and over the Andes, and won the Gordon Bennett Prize for the longest balloon flight), he nonetheless spends much of his time helping run the Duke of Edinburgh Scheme which inspires in a similar way both disabled and more able-bodied people to get out and about and do what they can with determination and grit.

People like me- and I guess most of us – can but look on with awe and wonder as people overcome amazing disabilities and disadvantages in life and even put them to good use in supporting and inspiring others. We all salute Major Phil Packer.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

“Let us now praise famous men…….”

Have you ever wondered what your obituary might be like in the local paper? An old friend opened the Times one morning to read his own one, the editor having confused him with someone of an identical name who had died. Unnerving, if very flattering! 

For example, what would Harry Patch have made of all the fuss over his death last week? He was well worthy of the magnificent thanksgiving service in Wells Cathedral. But that was all about his fame as the last surviving Tommy- a link to a previous generation, most certainly. But what about the 90 years since he was demobbed. What of his family, life, jobs, hobbies, friends?  His “15 minutes of fame” as Andy Warhol described it, were before he was 18 years of age.

William Henry Fox Talbot’s obituary appeared in the House Magazine this week, commemorating the fact that he was MP for Chippenham 1832- 1835. But he was never comfortable in Parliament, confessing to his Mother “I don’t comprehend anything about it – it is all an enigma to me.” His Mother replied “Politics is an ungrateful profession, which after men have strutted their hour, leave not a wrack behind.”  Indeed so. No one now remembers that Fox Talbot was the MP for Chippenham. He went on, of course, to invent photography!

Then I dug out my old University thesis to read up on one Robert of Cricklade. He was a Twelfth Century monk born and brought up in Cricklade, and famous at the time for various learned theological theses of which he was doubtless most proud. But they, of course, are all forgotten now. Almost incidental was that he was Prior of the Abbey of St Frideswide in Oxford, as a result of which he can probably be counted as the founder of Oxford University about 1150 (70 years or so prior to Cambridge.) Robert would have been amazed to learn that he had founded the greatest University in the land.

How would Eadmer have felt about the fact that he is remembered 880 years later as the monk who tried to fly by launching himself off Malmesbury Abbey? Or my predecessors Walter Powell, the MP who died when the War Office balloon, Saladin, launched from Bath blew away into the Atlantic. He is commemorated more for his ballooning efforts, than his doubtless distinguished career as MP, and gave his name to the Primary School in Little Somerford. Likewise Sir Robert Peel, after whom police are called Bobbies or Peelers, and Charles James Fox who is commemorated by hunting people calling their prey “Charlies” in memory of his wily ways. “Let us now praise famous men…”

For me, I am just so glad that Philippa and I were married in Chippenham Registry Office last weekend. And that’s more important than the rest of it put together!

A Thousand Splendid Suns

It is astonishing how the affairs of a vast, dusty, positively mediaeval country half way round the world – Afghanistan – play such a central part in world affairs. So much hinges on it, and on Pakistan. Yet who’d have thought it?

At the start of my Summer reading, I have at last got around to that wonderfully moving book, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. It’s a gripping account of the horrors of war – and of unjust and unholy Government. It tells of the fall of the Afghan Monarchy in 1980, the Jihad, the Communist regime which welcomed in the Soviets, the Mujaheddin united against them, but then vicious fighting amongst their constituent warlords when the Soviets withdrew after the collapse of communism; the Taleban welcomed at first as they defeated the warlord Mujaheddin, but then hated and feared in equal measure until they were removed by ISAF and Karsai. And through it all bloodshed, sorrow, agony, despair, poverty and destruction. The various peoples of Afghanistan have suffered more than almost any other nation over the last 40 years, and we owe it to them as much as to ourselves to try to find some kind of peace and security, decency and fairness in their country.

Nevertheless, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee’s report this week which describes a kind of mission creep in Afghanistan has got it just right. We are not there to rebuild their nation, nor repair their war-torn infrastructure, nor establish a Guildford-style democracy, nor eradicate poppies, nor provide decent education for girls, nor pursue gender balance in their Parliament, although most of those things are doubtless worthy enough. But they do not and cannot justify the kind of warfare we have been seeing especially over the last month or so. Nothing under international law, nor the Charter of the UN allows an invasion of a foreign nation state for ends such as those, no matter how laudable they may be.

We are there for one thing and one thing only:- the final eradication of Al Qaeda, Jihadist fundamentalist Islamic terrorists of all sorts, and their hosts, the drug barons, warlords and Taleban of both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The World will not be a safe place until we achieve that end. And that is what Operation Panther’s Claw, and British, American and Pakistani Army efforts in Helmand and in Waziristan, the Swat Valley and The FATA are all about. Make no mistake, Osama Bin Laden is as vile a man as Hitler, Al Qaeda as wicked a creed as Nazism; and we owe it to succeeding generations to make sure that their evil is ended.

I was struck by the slogan on a tee-shirt of a young man at the most recent Repatriation in Wootton Bassett. It read: “If you don’t stand behind our troops, then stand in front of them.” How true that is. Our troops need to know exactly what they are supposed to be doing in Afghanistan, and then they need our wholehearted support and the correct manpower and resources to carry out their horrendously difficult task. We surely owe them nothing less.

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