2 days ago
Buxton festival is some legacy for boozy pal Spencer Le Marchant
We're heading soon for Buxton, and the Buxton International Festival. It's a big thing now, and my partner is a board member (unpaid). But can it really be 45 years since dear old Spencer Le Marchant, then Buxton's MP, used to yell at me for missing votes, or for voting in the wrong lobby by mistake? Spencer was my whip. The whips' office shared alcohol bills. Spencer's half-pint tankard of champagne every morning fell heavily on some of his less thirsty colleagues. But he took me, a new 29-year-old MP, generously under his wing, and introduced me to the project of his dreams: a great annual festival of the arts and music centred upon Buxton's little jewel of an opera house.
Imagine Spencer's delight, had his drinking not killed him, at what that festival has become. This July he'd see Hamlet transported from Denmark into the green hills of the Peak District by the 19th-century composer Ambroise Thomas — one of a string of operas with top-class singers at the start of their careers. He'd stay for Shorts: four composers, four new operas, each 20 minutes long … it's almost a competition. African boy that I am, I'll be rooting for the brilliant young South African composer Thanda Gumede, his piece sung in Zulu, Ndebele and English.
Fools at the Arts Council may think opera is all stuck-up rich blokes dressed in black tie. Buxton is proving them wrong. Cheers, Spencer! What did buttoned-up little me ever achieve in politics? And look at you — shambling, bleary, dishevelled, passionate — and this is what you started.
Do all pines have needles? Do all conifers bear pine cones? Are fir trees conifers, pines or neither? Is the larch, which loses its foliage in winter, a proper conifer? Surely there's a generic name for a type of tree we know when we see it? There is, and the name could be Bedgebury, one of the world's great collections of every tree we might call fir, pine or conifer. I was at this pinetum in Kent last week for a guided walk to celebrate the centenary of the Institute of Chartered Foresters, of which I'm an honorary member. I admit that, though I love and plant trees, I have until quite recently thought of the coniferous ones as rather boring, hardly distinguishing between different species and thinking of pine forests as somehow deadening, homogeneous, soulless, sterile, almost antiseptic.
How wrong that is! A morning at Bedgebury (you'll need time for longish walks over huge grounds) will console you after the Times report from the Woodland Trust concerned at the collapse of our forest habitats. Bedgebury opens your eyes to a dazzling display of bright colours and amazing shapes, from ground-creepers to redwoods seeming to touch the sky. I had a similar eye-opening at the botanic gardens in Denver, Colorado, and returned determined to grow a ponderosa pine, its needled foliage presented like a poodle's pom-poms. Two saplings are now in the ground and making a good start. Wish them luck: the tree nursery told me we'd need it.
I listened to Ed Miliband, energy security and net-zero secretary, on the radio. I know, I know, he's obsessive about global warming and may be wrong about what we can afford — but what a breath of fresh air to hear a member of this cabinet who really believes in something. Focused and concise, he was in passionate command of his brief, an oasis of conviction in today's desert of political ideas. I do so admire politicians — William Hague, Michael Heseltine, Chris Patten, George Robertson — who, having not quite reached the very top, do not slink into comfortable obscurity but battle on, finding new mountains to climb.
Don't imagine that howls of anguish, prophecies of doom and semi-public spats between beleaguered ministers — a backing track to Rachel Reeves's imminent spending review — are anything but music to the chancellor's ears. Every departmental shriek only bolsters the myth that this is a stern government taking an iron grip on our national debt. Reeves needs the world's money markets to think her merciless. She isn't. She's giving ground. The whip-cracking is performative and suits a struggling chancellor well.
