Not long ago I happened to be invited to an upper class wedding in the depths of rural Hampshire. At the lavish reception in a grand marquee in the grounds of a lovely house, I found myself separated from my wife and seated at a table opposite a man — one of the great and good — who used to be a member of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet back in the 1980s.
His conversation moved over many topics but in particular he spoke on the way the advent of email had made a Parliamentarian’s job more burdensome. ‘In former days, to contact your MP, you had to sit down with pen and paper. You had to find an envelope and a stamp. Then a walk to the post box was required. All this slowed the process. It meant that there was plenty of time for reflection before the note was sent. But with email all that has gone.’
The implication was not only that MPs receive far more communications to deal with but that the electorate these days fire off the most hot-headed and ill-thought-out messages to their MPs to which he or she is obliged to respond. Admittedly, there is much in contemporary society to make even a saint’s blood boil. But questions like, ‘Is the MP the most appropriate person to contact about this matter?’ or ‘Does this subject actually merit such a vitriolic use of language?’ seem never to have been considered amid the lightning speed of the modern electronic process. A brief rustle of fingers across the computer keyboard and the click of a mouse and the undigested missive (missile?) is gone, never to be retrieved.
The re-emergence of heavy shepherds
What would you think if you received a letter from your church leaders that read like this? ‘Are church members …