Sitting in the Chamber late on Monday afternoon for the Lords debate on the UK-Rwanda treaty, I was impressed by the standard of oratory. Most of the best speeches came from those – Lords Goldsmith (the Labour one), Kerr of Kinlochard, Anderson of Ipswich – who argued that the treaty was not, in itself, proof of the government’s contention, which the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill seeks to turn into law, that Rwanda is now a safe country. Not for the first time, I felt an unease about how the government has got itself into this tight corner. But then up popped the Bishop of Gloucester: ‘I will just say,’ she just said, ‘that as Lord Bishops we take no party position… based on tribal loyalty and we are not whipped. Instead, and because of what our Christian faith teaches us about care for the stranger, we have spoken with one voice on these benches.’ As the late Sir John Junor used to put it: ‘Pass the sick bag, Alice.’ Does Jesus really insist that His followers must all, if given the chance, vote for Lord Goldsmith’s motion not to ratify the treaty? Cannot He rely on us to exercise our consciences? Does He not have bigger fish to fry? It is a curious thing that our now almost uniformly left-wing diocesan bishops look down on African nations and churches (with whom they disagree about things like same-sex marriages) just as much as did their missionary, colonial predecessors. Their pride reminds me of Bishop Heber’s imperial hymn ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’: ‘Can we whose souls are lighted/With wisdom from on high/ To a land benighted/ the lamp of life deny?’ Thanks to Bishop Treweek, I remembered just in time that cant is not the same as virtue and that the brilliant arguments of the Bill’s opponents have the overriding ungodly purpose of impeding Britain’s attempts to reduce illegal immigration.

One must not be drawn into any culture war by Sir Keir Starmer’s accusation that only Conservatives (which I am not) and conservatives (which I am) are spoiling for one. I would merely ask him to consider career patterns in the great British institutions he claims to defend. Here is one example. Zarin Patel was chief financial officer at the BBC from 2004-11. In her role of collecting television licence money, she allowed to be sent out 6.6 million letters threatening people (including me) that unless we had a television licence we would have to admit enforcement officers into our homes. She had to apologise for this. Ms Patel is also on the Board of Trustees of the National Trust and chairs its Audit Committee. She was appointed to this role in 2018 under the NT chairmanship of Tim Parker, who was also chairman of the Post Office during part of the painful saga of the wronged sub-postmasters. In addition, Zarin Patel was the senior independent director of the Post Office from 2019 to March last year, beginning under Mr Parker’s chairmanship. I think such interconnections are worthy of notice, perhaps even of criticism.

A recent study by the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at Cambridge University suggests that if wine is sold in smaller glasses, people drink less – ‘just under 8 per cent’ less in this case. It followed four weeks’ drinking patterns in 21 licensed premises. This finding contradicts work undertaken years ago at my own Cambridge college. Trinity (winner of more Nobel prizes than France, as our Master, the late R.A. Butler used, inaccurately, to boast) studied wine-drinking only at its own high table. When presented with smaller glasses, the dons increased their consumption by a third. Why the difference? I suspect it relates to price. The Behaviour and Health Research Unit notes ‘the higher profit margins of smaller serving sizes of wine’ for publicans but does not consider how the consumers might have become more reluctant, if they knew they were paying the same price for less wine, to order another round. The Trinity study, however, was looking at a situation in which the consumers were not billed. Like the NHS, Trinity’s wine was ‘free at the point of use’. The dons therefore feared that small glasses would give them less. So they kept refilling, increasingly merrily.

It was deplorable that a Hindu mob destroyed the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992, and controversial that the Indian Supreme Court eventually decided to give the land to Hindus for the construction of a temple. It is also deplorable that Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, made himself the main consecrator of the new temple this week, timing the ceremony with an eye to the forthcoming general election. This is a prime example of the ‘communalism’ which compromises the deliberately secular state of India. There is, however, a historical irony here which wokeists should bear in mind. The Babri mosque was constructed in the 16th century by a general of Babur, the first Mughal emperor. In the eyes of many Hindus, therefore, its destruction hundreds of years later was a ‘decolonising’ act. The current mania for destroying or removing beautiful things associated with an imperial power is not confined solely to white Christian empires.

In the West, parents no sooner have children than they wish to farm them out to carers, crèches, preschools etc. Political parties compete to expand these facilities at public expense. Is a similar trend now observable in relation to dogs, probably accelerated by Covid, when hundreds of thousands wanted a dog to keep them company when stuck at home? Now the word ‘barkyard’ has entered the English language. These can be workplace areas or boarding facilities where you deposit your dog with other dogs, and minders. I have long argued that any party which promised to create a National Health Service for pets would win the election (and bankrupt the country). ‘Free’ barkyards would be an almost equally popular election promise and a smaller burden on the taxpayer.