The View From Mount Nebo

We are invited to consider what Lord Tebbit might have to say to Baroness Fox. Well, he and Brendan O'Neill were already colleagues on the Telegraph at the time of my brief sojourn as a blogger there. Unlike me, they were in the paper. Well over a decade later, they still are.

Everyone was talking to the IRA. Everyone. Jeremy Corbyn was different for doing it out in the open, but then he was not in a position to deliver anything. The voters of London have never held that against Corbyn, or against John McDonnell. They did not take against Ken Livingstone until long afterwards, when they chose instead the man who has now given a peerage to Claire Fox while giving the Directorship of the Number 10 Policy Unit to Munira Mirza, who must have joined the Revolutionary Communist Party when it was opposing the Good Friday Agreement and calling on the IRA to fight on.

The Thatcher Government's continuous contact with the IRA, universally assumed at the time, has long since been confirmed. Margaret Thatcher's "miraculous" escape from the Brighton Bomb is inexplicable in any other terms. But then, four of the Hunger Strikers' Five Demands had been granted on 6th October 1981, and by 1983 even the right not to do prison work had been conceded. The Lady was as Iron about this as she was about anything else, namely not at all.

There was plenty wrong with the RCP, but it has ended up running a Conservative Government, so there is hope for any of us yet. Not for me personally. I am already over 40, and I have always been, as John Milbank puts it, a "prophet", rather than a priest or a king. But we have some brilliant young men, and there are no doubt many other brilliant young men and women of similar mind. 

I was a cynical young man, and not without cause. But I am shaping up to become a very optimistic old man. Moses never did enter the Promised Land. But Joshua did. We have Joshuas aplenty. And I can already see into the Promised Land, flowing with milk and honey.