Richard Spring MP
Member of Parliament for West Suffolk

I wonder if the people of Belgium have actually noticed, on a day to day level, whether they have a Government or not. There is something appealing to many British people who suffer from comprehensive over-government that Belgians are spared the continuous micro-management we have to endure in this country. Presumably, the Belgian people are also spared the army of taxpayer funded spin doctors who so degrade our national life. 

Italy has had its fair share of Governments since 1945. Many Italians simply say that Brussels would do a better job than Rome. No country is more enthusiastic about the European project than the Belgians. It cannot provide an overriding national sense of purpose, so it favours a pan-European structure suited to itself rather then countries like ourselves, which still have a national sense of identity. 

People want to have a feeling of ownership of the institutions which impact on their lives. Every day that passes more people are recognising the limits of Big Government. However part of me secretly is envious of a country like Belgium which makes do without the sort of Government Ministers we have to put up with here.     

Are the political lives of Wendy Alexander and Harriet Harman drawing not so peacefully to a close? And if indeed they are on life support, will Gordon Brown be forced to flick the switch off? Or indeed others in the frame?  It makes one reflect on the insecurities of politicians’ lives, a thought which must be running powerfully up and down Downing Street at present. 

In the last two weeks I have been to two funerals. One was a very senior figure in the horseracing industry, a most cheerful and larger then life character, where the service took place in a beautiful arts and crafts church in south London. How movingly his children spoke. Another was a constituent, a true countryman, former master of the local hunt, a member of the Vestey family, whose fortune was founded on meat. The vicar observed amusingly that the Vesteys were to cholesterol what the Rockefellers were to oil. The funeral was for one of the kindest, most modest and understated people imaginable. This week is for the mother of two sons my age. She was born in what was then Austria, now Italy, to an elderly father, an extraordinary figure called Slatin Pasha, one of the most romantic characters of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was a link to a central European way of life now gone forever: she subsequently made her home in Suffolk.   

They were respectively in their sixties, seventies and eighties. They were all exceptional people who brought friendship and laughter to those around them. 

Life indeed, whether for politicians or anybody else, is certainly no dress rehearsal, but a frail gift indeed.     

The two most exceptional religious leaders I have ever met are the Dalai Lama, and only very fleetingly, when he once came to the Palace of Westminster. His humanity and humility shone through. 

Then there is the Grand Mufti of Syria, Sheikh Ahmad Hassoun. When 250,000 Lebanese fled to Syria during the Israel- Hezbollah conflict, he went to greet them at the Sednaya monastery with Catholic and Orthodox bishops. To a unique extent in the Middle East – apart from in Lebanon- there is no hostility towards the country’s Christian minority. Their numbers have been swollen by the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians who have been forced to flee. 

Sheikh Hassoun has asked me twice to speak at Friday prayers in his mosque in Aleppo. I cannot imagine this happening to a Gentile Member of Parliament in virtually any other part of the world. There was no difficulty with the congregation, on the contrary. The Grand Mufti talks of his Christian and Jewish brothers and sisters, of our common link to Abraham. When visiting Britain with the Greek Catholic patriarch, he met representatives of the Jewish community and the Archbishop of Canterbury. He radiates spirituality, a joy of life and a generosity of spirit.

When we view the scenes and attitudes in Khartoum, it is light years away from anything he believes in and stands for. I keep reminding myself   of this. I can just imagine how he, and many others of his co-religionists, must feel over this most astonishing situation in the Sudan.