Michael Gove hasn't a clue what ‘Levelling-up’ means

Boris Johnson has a gift for using words in an imaginative way, sometimes so imaginative as to reverse or negate their very meaning. It was in one of those moments that he created a Department for Levelling Up and appointed Michael Gove to lead it. 

Now that the work to repair the decaying structure of the Palace of Westminster becomes ever more urgent, some of those who work in the building must soon be moved to a new location to allow the necessary building repairs to get under way. Quite reasonably it has been decided to start work on the northern end of the building – that is the part presently occupied by the House of Lords. This will require the Lords to be given a temporary new base and the best place for that, it has generally been assumed, is the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre on Westminster Square. 

But that seems not to suit the purpose or thoughts of Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up. He has written to the Lord Speaker to say that “as the Minister for Levelling Up it is clear to me that the House of Lords moving elsewhere, even for a short period, would be widely welcomed”. 

Why on earth should it be “widely welcomed” to separate the two parts of the legislature? What are the gains in the efficiency of the administration or the purpose of government to be expected by lengthening the corridor between the two chambers by almost  a couple of hundred miles.

In The Telegraph last week, Michael Deacon contributed a delightfully funny picture of the difficulties of the State Opening of Parliament at which Members of the Commons walk from their chamber to that of the Lords, which under Mr Gove’s proposal would be about a hundred and seventy miles each way. Even more strangely, Mr Gove listed Burnley, Edinburgh, Sunderland, Plymouth, Wolverhampton and York as further options, although it was thought that York “might be too prosperous”. 

Baroness Hayman, a former Lords Speaker, was spot on when she told BBC Radio Four listeners, that it was “bonkerooney”, and I think that for once she may have underestimated the strength of her case. 

Thatcher keeps embarrassing her opponents

Margaret Thatcher, that formidable lady who remains the only prime minister to have attracted more votes at a third consecutive general election victory than at the first, was back on the front pages last week.

Of course she ruffled a few feathers in her time, not least the most reactionary of the old guard of trades union bosses, by making them responsible in law to their own members and by ending the immunity from civil law which their organisations enjoyed.  

Perhaps the 59-year-old Mr Jeremy Webster (the deputy boss of a university arts centre who threw eggs at the new Thatcher statue in Grantham) is too young to remember the importance of bringing trades unions within the law, or perhaps he would like to return to those days when manufacturing businesses were closing down or returning overseas. 

Would we have resisted as the Ukrainians are? 

At the age of ninety one, I am one of the decreasing few who can recollect the second Great War. Now, as I look at the unfolding of events in Ukraine I ask myself what might have been had Hitler’s Luftwaffe defeated the Royal Air Force in 1940, won the Battle of Britain and paved the way for a successful invasion of the United  Kingdom? Would Hitler’s army of occupation have behaved with a savagery to match that of Putin’s troops in the suburbs of Kyiv?

It would have been different in that our army in Europe, the British Expeditionary Force, together with the rest of the army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force, all owed loyalty to King George VI, who would have been spirited off to Canada together with the lawful government of these islands led by Churchill and Attlee.

We “Brits” left here, many like my own father, veterans of the First World War of 1914-1918, would have remained under the obligation to continue to resist Hitler’s army of occupation. Would we, I wonder, have resisted the occupying German forces with the bravery and passion shown by the people in Ukraine? 

My old friend Airey Neave, recounts in his book, They have their Exits, how he and his fellow prisoners at Colditz Castle tormented their German captors who played by the rules despite the provocations to which they were subjected. And my German opposite number at the Council of Ministers, Count Otto Lambsdorff, told me of how he was severely wounded and captured by British troops and then spent the rest of the war as a prisoner in hospital, well cared for whilst recovering from injuries which included the loss of a leg. 

The terrible stain on the history of interwar Germany under Hitler’s Nazis is the persecution of Jews for which there can be no excuse, but Germany was not alone in that. Nor indeed has the world yet been freed of antisemitism, which I saw in action at times against my old friend Maurice Djanogly, who was my right hand man during the construction of the Battle of Britain London Memorial on the Thames Embankment at Westminster some twenty years ago. 

Pointless pigeons

This spring I have not roamed far from home. Instead I have been enjoying my courtyard garden where the roses and the pyracantha are in full bloom and have just put out my tomato plants and a dozen sweet peas to clamber up a wonderful six foot high frame. All being well, that will be covered in blossom until the frosts return.  

The only blight on it all are the wretched pigeons which not only peck at seedlings, but hog the bird food from the sparrows, blue tits, robins and other smaller breeds. What purpose in the scheme of things, I often wonder, do they serve? I can think only of pigeon pie. 

Norman Tebbit's fortnightly blog is published on Mondays