No way to treat a great English composer

For those who haven't heard the story, it seems the BBC has sent a rejection letter to an independent producer who wanted to make a film about the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, citing lack of topicality (or "findability" in the new jargon) as the reason.

The letter includes a now-infamous request to the producer in question to let them know about any forthcoming premieres of Mr Williams' work, so that this apparent "findability" deficit could be addressed. As any fule kno, Vaughan Williams died in 1958 and the whole point of the proposed film was to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death next year.

I have to confess that this story, originally published in the Observer, had me checking the date on Sunday to make sure it wasn't an April Fool, but I'm not going to blog in detail on it because (a) it's a few days old now, and (b) The Half-Blood Welshman has said all I would really want to say on his blog.

Suffice to say that RVW was, as Half-Blood says, a signifcant musical figure. One of his most under-rated pieces, in my view, is Five Tudor Portraits, which I sung at the Royal Festival Hall in 1978 as part of the Hertfordshire County Youth Choir. Happy memories.

Is Richard Dawkins a tad confused?

I've avoided commenting on the whole "Christianophobia" debate thus far, mainly because I think protesting about "wintervals" and the demise in school nativity plays is the kind of thing that makes Christians look slightly absurd - in much the same way as I regularly despair of that group of people in the Church of England who think the biggest issue facing Christians today is not injustice, or poverty, or climate change, but homosexuality.

However the recent intervention on the issue by the UK's most well-known atheist Richard Dawkins has finally compelled me to put finger to keyboard.

Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, claims to be a "cultural Christian" who, far from wanting to marginalise Christian traditions and "purge our society of its Christian history," is quite happy to take part in some of them himself.

He then comes out with the quite remarkable statement, for someone of his stated views: "I like singing carols along with everybody else."

Let's look at the words of some of those carols for a moment. How about:

"Christ by highest heaven adored,
Christ the everlasting Lord"
(Hark the Herald Angels Sing.)

Or

"Not in that poor lowly stable
With the oxen standing by
We shall see him, but in heaven
Set at God's right hand on high."
(Once in Royal David's City)

Or

"Yea, Lord, we greet thee,
Born this happy morning,
Jesus to thee be glory given,
Word of the Father,
Now in flesh appearing....
O come let us adore him, Christ the Lord"
(O Come All Ye Faithful)

There is no doubt what all these carols are saying - that Jesus is the Lord of creation, or in the words of St John, the eternal Word who was not only with God in the beginning, but who was God.

Don't get me wrong, I am glad that Richard Dawkins likes singing carols, glad that someone who has been as militantly anti-Christian as he has even celebrates Christmas at all.

But as he sings them again this Christmas, I hope he can reflect on what they really mean - and maybe ask himself again the question "....and is it true, this most tremendous tale of all?"

Is it time for a Ken Clarke comeback?

Fraser Nelson spent most of this article in the Spectator assessing the state of the Brown premiership, but in a revealing throwaway paragraph near the end he also had some trenchant words for David Cameron and his team.

David Cameron has meanwhile been going back to his constituency and preparing for government. This has involved a fairly sober assessment of how many genuinely Cabinet-grade people he has on his team (he struggled to get into double digits). Ideally, his next reshuffle should be the last. It is vital for his prospects that the Tory frontbench look and sound like a competent government-in-waiting in comparison to the disintegrating Brown Cabinet.

I think this assessment is pretty near the mark. For all the government's troubles, there are really only two shadow spokesmen who look as if they could do a better job than their opposite numbers - David Davis (Home Affairs) and George Osborne (Treasury.) What they are desperately short of is gravitas.

If Cameron wants his Shadow Cabinet to look like a government-in-waiting as Nelson suggests, the man he needs is Ken Clarke, ideally in a cross-cutting, non-departmental role such as Shadow Leader of the House where he could deploy his political skills across the board.

Iain Dale once wrote a light-hearted but brilliantly entertaining political counterfactual about how a Michael Portillo-led Tory Party managed to overturn Tony Blair's first majority and win the 2001 election. Key to Portillo's victory was persuading Clarke to rejoin the frontbench.

Okay, so that was fiction, but I reckon that if Cameron were to pull off the same stunt now, it would have a not dissimilar effect on his election chances. Ken Clarke is still one of the most popular politicians in the country, and as last week's Question Time showed, remains a class act.