Favourite Things – David Lidington
Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.
David Lidington was the Member of Parliament for Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire from 1992 to 2019. He has held a number of positions including Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He was also Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice.
These are a few of David Lidington’s favourite things.
Summer puddings in February
I enjoy cooking with the seasons. We’re now into berries, summer pudding season. I like to have a summer pudding or two in the freezer. You get to a really gloomy day in February where everything is grey and you get a summer pudding out of the freezer to remind yourself that summer will come around again. When I was in cabinet and under quite a lot of pressure, cooking on Sunday morning, doing the traditional Sunday lunch and pudding with the radio on in the background, that was the only thing that could get me to switch off. It’s a bit of an oasis.
Walking in the Chiltern Hills
We are very lucky where we live. You can walk to the Chiltern escarpment in 30 minutes. You take a footpath through a housing estate and then you’re up on the farmland in the hills. It is a lovely reminder of how incredibly beautiful the English countryside still is. I work on the expectation in this country that you prepare for rain; good walking boots, good raincoats and you can tolerate poor weather conditions.
One of the consolations of the lockdown this year is that you do appreciate the countryside and wildlife more. I’ve lived in this part of Buckinghamshire for nearly 30 years now and there were still footpaths and bridle paths I had not had the time to explore. This has been the first time in years I have been able to enjoy the transition of spring into summer, without having to merely glimpse it from an office window in London somewhere.
I get conscious of the fact that it’s more of an effort to do a walk these days than when I was in my 20s. But Wordsworth climbed Helvellyn for the last time on his 70th birthday. It is a tremendous solace, being able to get out.
Choir singing
I have been in choirs and choral societies since I was a wee lad, right as far as I can remember. When I turned eleven I had my voice tested, if you were any good as a treble you didn’t have an option. Compulsion might have been the only way to get boys to do that but, but by the time our voices broke we had learnt to really enjoy it.
When the parliament choir was started by some of the Blairite peers, I was a founding member. I last sang with them last year. It was a very moving performance of The Dream of Gerontius at Westminster cathedral.
I am very impatient for the government to get on and do the proper scientific research and work out how great the covid risk from singing really is because there’s been conflicting studies from different countries. I don’t think you can indefinitely ban what is a great joy to many people. It’s just as important as football or the cinema; we need to find a route back.
Tudor History
I did a PHD after my first degree with Sir Geoffrey Elton who is one of the great scholars of his generation of Tudor history. I think I was the first of his students to join the privy council to study it; I still read a lot of history for pleasure.
What I would like to do, I’ve been digging my doctoral notes out now I have had a bit more time, is write about William Cecil, Lord Burghley who was Elizabeth 1st great chief minister. He was in effect prime minister, though we didn’t use the title then, for 40 years. From the start of Elizabeth’s reign in 1558 till he died in 1598… how on earth did he do it?
I think an understanding of the past is very important in politics, especially in foreign affairs. When I was Europe minister, understanding the historical experience of a particular country helped you to understand their mindset. One of the explanations for the sort of friction between the UK’s outlook on the European project and that of most other European democracies is contrasting experiences in the mid 20th century. Britain at that time was about national institutions, national identities and solidarity that enabled us to resist Nazism. For most of Europe that was a period that saw a failure of these national institutions and identities in the face of extremism and aggression.
Finding poetry to match a mood
I have a bookcase in my study which is almost entirely full of poetry, anthologies and volumes of individual poets. I don’t normally sit and read poetry for hours on end, I dip in. I think you can always find a poem, a passage or verse that matches every mood you have. The right passage will provide you with consolation, or uplift you, or allow a sort of ray of joy to pierce through a gloomy mood. And there’s poems which are just very funny or witty. If I was stranded on a desert island the object I would want would definitely be an anthology, perhaps The New Oxford Book of English Verse edited by Helen Gardener.