Diary

Last Friday evening I gave a talk to the Hinton Blewitt history society: Hinton Blewitt is the Somerset village in which we live. Something close to 50 people turned up at the old village school, which was closed in 1933; they comprised about a quarter of the adult population of the village. There may be a decline in interest in national history, but there certainly seems to be rising interest in local history. I was impressed by this interest, but also by the knowledge that was shown. A local historian gave me a photocopy of a document which showed the firm of solicitors to which my great-great-uncle John Rees-Mogg had been articled in 1825. I had not known that, though I have some of his papers. In the schoolroom we discussed questions which covered such matters as the possible Iron Age fortifications on the village green, the location of the public houses in the 19th century and - a perennial topic - how Blewitt should be spelt. Is Blewitt correct, or should it be Bluet, Bluett, Blewet, Blewett (a popular alternative) or Blewit? Nobody knows. Nine hundred years after the Norman Conquest, the spelling remains unfixed. Even the local signposts disagree. I was asked a question to which I did not know the answer. Why does Domesday Book only name 20 churches in Somerset? Was it because the Domesday Book clerks had no instructions to list churches? Was it that they only counted solid stone Norman churches, and regarded Saxon churches as so many unimportant pigsties? If any reader of The Spectator knows the answer, I will pass it on.

Apart from the missing churches in Domesday Book, there are a number of unanswered questions which have recently been nagging at my mind. My son Jacob has been chosen as the prospective Conservative candidate for Central Fife; he is, I gather, one of only two English Unionist candidates standing in Scotland, and as the other is a Campbell-Bannerman, he may in truth be the only one. Central Fife is of course part of the kingdom of Fife, but who were the kings of Fife? I believe they were Picts rather than Scots; indeed, the Scoti to be found in Tacitus were Celtic Beaker Folk who arrived in Scotland from the Black Sea by way of the Danube, the Rhine, Denmark (after they took a right turn at Rotterdam), northern Spain (after they retraced their steps from Denmark), and ultimately Ireland. That is the archaeological evidence, as I understand it. Anyone who can point me to a good history of the Pictish kings will much oblige me. On their way, these Celts seem to have left behind Celtic place names like so many bird droppings. Characteristically these names start with 'Gal', or, in the case of Wales, with the transliteration, 'Wal'. But are all these 'Gal' names Celtic? I recognise Wales, Gaul, Galicia, Galashiels and even the Galatians as Celtic; one could say that the Epistle to the Galatians is St Paul addressing himself to the Welsh. But what about Galilee? Is that another Celtic place name? And if so, does the particular culture of Galilee relate in any way to the Celtic culture we can study in Welsh and early Irish history? All the first Apostles came from Galilee, and St Peter denied that he was a Galilean because that was seen as a mark of the followers of Jesus. Is the 'Gal' in Galilee the same root as the 'Wal' in Wales? Did Jesus perhaps speak Aramaic with a Welsh accent? Perhaps another Spectator reader can tell me.

I did a lot of dining last week for the benefit of Spectator readers. I even drank two glasses of Pol Roger 1975 in their service. I forecast the Wirral South by-election correctly at one dinner table, saying modestly that I thought Labour would have a majority of over 6,000 on a swing of 17 per cent. I mention this because I have a reputation for mistaken election forecasts, for which I have been much ridiculed by my friends. I am also often ridiculed for having forecast that Colin Powell would become President of the United States. Indeed, if I had been correct, he would now be in the White House, which might well have been a good thing. My mistake was not in thinking that he could get the Republican nomination it was there for the taking. It was not in thinking that if nominated he would be elected - he would have been. Where I was wrong was in thinking that nobody would turn down the historic opportunity to become the first black President of the United States. Of course, there would have been a high risk of his being assassinated like Martin Luther King. Colin Powell is descended, through the Coote family, from King Edward I. It was an early-19th-century Coote whose scandalous court martial resulted in the saying `as queer as a Coote'. The 'e' was dropped, and it was wrongly assumed that the little bird is gay. As every schoolgirl knows, Edward I married Eleanor, daughter of Ferdinand III, King of Castile, in October 1254 in Burgos. They had 16 children, from one of whom the Cootes are probably descended. I believe that the Castilian royal family had previously married a daughter of one of the Moorish kings of Spain, and that Queen Elizabeth II owes her descent from the Prophet Mohammed to that line. But if the Queen is descended from Mohammed through Eleanor of Castile, so is Colin Powell. Such a connection, if proven, could have made his election even more certain. But am I right? Again I appeal to the erudition of Spectator readers.

The other topic of the dinner tables has been, as usual, the leadership of the Conservative Party, on the assumption that John Major is going to lose the election. I hear an intriguing theory, which I have been busily passing on. The reason Norman Tebbit wrote so sharp - some would say harsh - an attack on Michael Heseltine in The Spectator is said to be that he is convinced that Michael is the front-runner. He would not have been so unkind if he had not felt that a pre-emptive strike was needed to stop the Heseltine bandwagon. Certainly the bandwagon is rolling. The proHeseltine argument runs like this: Michael is old, and that leaves room for younger men to succeed him. He makes fiery speeches and will be good in Opposition. He is not quite as Eurofanatic as Kenneth Clarke, whom most people would like to see as leader if they did not totally disagree with his views on Europe. It is also said that the Tories could easily lose the next two elections, in which case Michael could be replaced by William Hague, Michael Forsyth or some other stripling as yet unblooded in battle. At all events, Michael Heseltine is the current favourite to win the succession, at least around the dinner tables. If I tipped him he would be no more likely to get to Downing Street than Colin Powell now is to get to the White House.

Copyright Spectator Mar 8, 1997
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