Issue: 12 March 2005

About once a decade, the editor of The Spectator asks me to write a diary column. I always accept, though diaries, contrary to what might be supposed, are among the most difficult types of journalism to write. I accept partly because I like The Spectator, and partly because of an early memory of Peter Fleming; he was Ian Fleming’s brother and, before the Bond books appeared, much the better known of the two. He was the author of a weekly Spectator diary. As a schoolboy I wrote a letter of comment on something he had written. Peter was a kind man and replied with the sort of encouraging letter journalists ought to write to 13-year-old critics of their arguments.

I have known nine editors of The Spectator, all as personal friends and none as personal enemies. I am not now sure of the exact order in which they come, but I think it runs Ian Gilmour, Brian Inglis, Iain Macleod, Nigel Lawson, Alexander Chancellor, Charles Moore, Dominic Lawson, Frank Johnson, Boris Johnson. There was a regrettable period in the middle when the magazine was owned by a businessman, who sold the old house in Gower Street at a profit. It seems to me that the list is an impressive one. Iain Macleod had the biggest scoop, which was his own account of the Tory leadership contest of 1963. I would not dream of deciding who was the best editor, but Alexander Chancellor was the man who turned the magazine around and started decades of rising success which have continued to this day.

One of these editors asked me to write a diary column in the 1980s. It was probably Dominic Lawson, whom I first remember as a toddler in Chelsea, walking beside Nigella’s pram. I used that diary to ask questions to which I did not know the answer. One of them was the interesting genealogical issue of the descent of Her Majesty the Queen from the Prophet Mohammed. I had assumed that it came through the marriage of Eleanor of Castile to King Edward I, a marriage from which Colin Powell is also descended, through the Coote family. This was before Colin Powell came to public fame.

I had a charming letter from a Spanish marquis — can one imagine a better example of the old culture than a Spanish marquis who reads The Spectator? He informed me that this was not the connection I sought. The Queen is descended from the marriage of Edmund of Langley, the fifth son of King Edward III, to Isabel of Castile in 1372. She was the daughter of Pedro the Cruel; Pedro the Cruel was descended from the Prophet.

It is Pedro the Cruel’s descent, or possibly that of Mrs Pedro the Cruel, which now worries me. The Queen’s descent from Edmund of Langley is straightforward. It runs through Edward IV, Edmund’s great grandson, to Edward IV’s great grand-daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, down through James I to the Hanoverian line, and so on to the House of Windsor. But is there any reader of The Spectator who can trace the ancestry of Pedro the Cruel? If so, I hope he or she will start a lively correspondence in the letters column.

However, I have recently been given two more immediate insights into religion and the modern world. Signor Rocco Buttiglione, the Italian minister for Europe, has been in London. He became famous as the proposed Italian commissioner who was sandbagged by the European Parliament. In a carefully prepared coup d’état, the Social Democrats pressed him on his views on homosexuality, knowing that, like the ancient martyrs, they could rely on him not to betray his Catholic beliefs. He said that he thought that homosexual activity was sinful — he would have said the same if they had asked him about any sex outside marriage. In traditional Catholic teaching, all fornication is sinful. He added that he was a sinner himself. These answers were thought to disqualify him as a commissioner, though Pope John Paul II would have said the same.

I find it disturbing that the European Parliament finds orthodox Catholic belief incompatible with being a commissioner. When he came to London, Rocco Buttiglione made an excellent impression at a meeting of Members of Parliament. He is a serious philosopher, speaks six languages and has an attractively gentle style. I had an opportunity for a word with him, and observed that Catholics in Britain who sympathised with him seemed also to be Eurosceptics. He said that he found the same in Poland, but he himself supports the European constitution on the grounds that this is the only Europe we have got. I am told by other Italians that his rejection by the European Parliament has made him the natural leader of what remains of the conservative wing of the old Christian Democrats.

The Church of England has been having a most difficult conference of primates on much the same issue. I have not had any contact with that, but I did recently hear a brilliant lecture on fundamentalism by Karen Armstrong, the religious writer and broadcaster. It was given to the Scientific and Medical Network. She regards fundamentalism, in its various forms, as a natural and widespread reaction to the attacks on religion in the modern world. She herself has broad ecumenical views; she could be called a modernist. But she recognises the pain that is felt by people who feel that their sacred beliefs are under attack.

Armstrong observes that fundamentalism is an almost universal reaction to modernism, to what one might call the intolerant edge of the Enlightenment. We tend to think of the fundamentalism of the American Bible belt, which is based on a literal interpretation of the Bible, or of the Islamic extremists, which is based on Wahabi doctrines. However, there is a similar movement in almost all religions, in Hinduism, in Buddhism, very obviously in Judaism, even in Confucianism. The form fundamentalism may take varies. Scriptural literalism is a particularly Christian phenomenon.

I found Miss Armstrong’s lecture very illuminating. I think that Signor Buttiglione’s open-minded religious conservatism stands for an important point of view in European Catholicism. So perhaps does the Catholicism of the Secretary of State for Education, Ruth Kelly. We shall hear more of both of them. For my part, I prefer the enlightenment of Pascal to that of Voltaire.