How odd that Tom Watson is so forgiving for once

Opinions could legitimately differ about Max Mosley in his youth. Some say that his active support for his father Oswald’s fascist party when he was 20 or so damns him forever. Others point out that many young people adopt extreme positions and that it is forgivable, when very young, to be in thrall to your parents’ strong views.

I lean to the latter view – after all, it was out of filial piety that I voted, aged 18, to remain in what was then the European Economic Community. This fact should not be used to question my authenticity as a Brexiteer.

(It is even perfectly possible, by the way, that Max is his father in reverse. Oswald Mosley started out as a Conservative, but later became a Labour minister. His socialist hatred of free markets then led him to fascism. Perhaps Max, who has been Labour for many years, will join the Tories in extreme old age.)

What is odder, though, is that the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Tom Watson, should be so forgiving. No one is more zealous than Mr Watson in hunting down iniquity. Indeed, he hunts it down even where it does not exist, as when he used parliamentary privilege to claim the existence of a “paedophile network” linking Parliament and 10 Downing Street. He also falsely accused the late Leon Brittan and others of child abuse on the basis of “evidence” from the liar and convicted sex abuser “Nick”. Yet Mr Watson, whose office has received £540,000 from Mr Mosley, does not feel that he should return the money. His stated reason – though obviously he has 540,000 other ones – is that Mr Mosley has used his money to “help the weak [Mr Watson?] against the strong”.

There are signs that this position may not hold. The Shadow Chancellor, John Mcdonnell, who has more personal knowledge of extremism’s tenacious roots than anyone else in the shadow Cabinet – except perhaps Jeremy Corbyn – now says that Mr Mosley’s nasty views about immigration seem not to have changed. He hints that Mr Watson should return the money after all. If so, how far back will this have to go? At the time of the row about exempting Formula 1’s tobacco sponsorship from curbs in 1997, shortly after Tony Blair became prime minister, it was admitted that Max Mosley, then F1’s second biggest cheese, was paying money to Labour.

It would a laugh if Mr Mosley, having bought many years of influence with the party, now gets all his money back.

When I Google “cherry-picking”, the first thing that comes up is a list of Sussex fruit farms. In our neighbourhood at least, cherrypicking is a beneficial and pleasurable activity. You pick the cherries in two senses – taking them off the trees for consumption, and selecting the good fruit while discarding the bad.

In the European Union, however, “cherry-picking” is a sin against the Holy Ghost. Whenever a country says it wants something which is different from what Brussels wants, that is cherry-picking. If – as now, but as never before – a country wants to leave the EU altogether but retain close trading relationships, the very idea is, by Brussels definition, cherrypicking. This is part of the unique rigidity of the EU system. It is quite unlike normal trade agreements between independent countries, which work on the principle of mutual advantage.

Our Brexit negotiations are proving so hard because Michel Barnier and his friends regard divergence as unacceptable in principle, even if its upshot would be good for both sides. That is why he is particularly bloody over Northern Ireland. He feels he must prevent the Irish Republic and the United Kingdom from making the open-border arrangements which are so obviously in both their interests – because that, too, would be cherrypicking.

A great many Brussels metaphors derive from food. As well as cherrypicking, Britain is accused of trying to go “à la carte”. This is presented as disgraceful, but eating à la carte is a perfectly respectable practice, provided for by all but the simplest restaurants. Eating à la carte normally costs the customer a bit more, but gives him more freedom. A continent which forces everyone to eat the “table d’hôte” is asking for trouble in a world where dietary preferences vary so greatly.

After a bit, people naturally ask: “Who is the hôte, and by what right does he set the menu for all of us?” If there comes no good answer, they decide to try a different restaurant, or eat at home.

We have long had Christmas trees. Here come Easter ones. Carolyn Bailey of Good Housekeeping says, “Easter weekend has now become an event.” She is not much of a trend-spotter: Easter has been an event for nearly 2,000 years. For Christians, it is the most important event ever.

Seen from that point of view, it would be quite wrong to have Easter trees on Good Friday. This is the time of greatest sorrow, the day when Jesus was crucified. Easter Sunday, however, is a day of joy. And since the cross upon which Jesus hung on Good Friday is often, in literature, referred to as “the tree”, there would be a good case for inventing a tradition of a tree which, like Jesus, returns to life on Easter Day. It would have to be deciduous. The bare wood becomes green.

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