Reflections on the end of an era
Thirty years ago today, I remember sitting in my place in the choir stalls in St Albans Cathedral during the regular Friday morning service for the school at which I was then a sixth former. The BBC Parliament channel retrospective today of the election night special has strengthened the memory (though of course I have been a little too busy with this year's elections to spend all day watching a result from one three decades ago).
A few months before the 1979 election, my father had been telephoned on the morning he was due to go into Guys for heart surgery, and told that, because the shops stewards who were taking industrial action against the Labour government's NHS cuts had ruled that heart valve replacements were "not an emergency" - apparently NUPE and COHSE shop stewards thought they knew better than doctors about this. I had joined the Conservative party when this happened and for the past few weeks had been campaigning hard for the election of a Conservative government.
By the grace of God and the skill of NHS doctors and nurses, but no thanks whatever to Labour or the NHS unions, my father survived to have his operation under a Conservative government, which took office thirty years ago today.
And the lesson at the service that morning, the first day of a new government, was Revelations, Chapter 21, Verses 1 to 7
That passage of scripture begins
"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth"
and continues, depending on which edition of the bible you are reading, with lines like
"He will wipe away every tear from their eyes" and
"For the old order has passed away, and the new order has come."
(I should perhaps add that the school chaplain, the Reverend Andy Daynes, had chosen that reading some weeks earlier, before we knew for certain that there would be a change of government on that day.)
People who were able to see both of us during the reading of this lesson told me subsequently that it was hard to decide whether it was I or the Headmaster who was having the most obvious difficulty restraining the urge to roar with laughter.
I would never suggest that either the new order which Mrs Thatcher was elected to bring in 1979, or that which I hope David Cameron will be elected to bring when we finally get a general election at some time in the next year, should be compared to the new order which God will bring and which was foretold in that passage of Revelations.
But I sense now, as I sensed in 1979 (and less happily for my party, in 1997) that there is a strong desire in the country for change.
May that change come soon.
A few months before the 1979 election, my father had been telephoned on the morning he was due to go into Guys for heart surgery, and told that, because the shops stewards who were taking industrial action against the Labour government's NHS cuts had ruled that heart valve replacements were "not an emergency" - apparently NUPE and COHSE shop stewards thought they knew better than doctors about this. I had joined the Conservative party when this happened and for the past few weeks had been campaigning hard for the election of a Conservative government.
By the grace of God and the skill of NHS doctors and nurses, but no thanks whatever to Labour or the NHS unions, my father survived to have his operation under a Conservative government, which took office thirty years ago today.
And the lesson at the service that morning, the first day of a new government, was Revelations, Chapter 21, Verses 1 to 7
That passage of scripture begins
"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth"
and continues, depending on which edition of the bible you are reading, with lines like
"He will wipe away every tear from their eyes" and
"For the old order has passed away, and the new order has come."
(I should perhaps add that the school chaplain, the Reverend Andy Daynes, had chosen that reading some weeks earlier, before we knew for certain that there would be a change of government on that day.)
People who were able to see both of us during the reading of this lesson told me subsequently that it was hard to decide whether it was I or the Headmaster who was having the most obvious difficulty restraining the urge to roar with laughter.
I would never suggest that either the new order which Mrs Thatcher was elected to bring in 1979, or that which I hope David Cameron will be elected to bring when we finally get a general election at some time in the next year, should be compared to the new order which God will bring and which was foretold in that passage of Revelations.
But I sense now, as I sensed in 1979 (and less happily for my party, in 1997) that there is a strong desire in the country for change.
May that change come soon.
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