I saw the concert in Tokyo last Saturday and some people were so moved that they came out crying.”A selection of popular classics, including the inevitable “Nessun Dorma”, are promised. Mr Major and his wife, Norma, are expected to attend, their VIP status not in doubt.. Four MPs and a member of the House of Lords are spending this weekend at a luxury Mediterranean resort as all-expenses-paid guests of a foreign airline. The staging will be beautiful and the singers are in a very good mood.

Normal prices range from pounds 35 to pounds 350, and, despite the unsold tickets, box-office takings will top pounds 7m.A spokesman for the promoters, Hoffmann Concerts, said: “Tickets remain unsold in covered and uncovered areas The forecast is good and people should not worry. In the end, the Prime Minister scored a rather striking victory and the three mountains came to Mohammed.Meanwhile, other VIPs – those able to pay pounds 995 for a best ticket and after-concert “dine with the stars” package tonight – could face a shock when they arrive at the stadium.Most of the best seats are in the open air, and with a forecast of scattered showers tonight the pounds 1,000 bottoms may be wet ones by the time they get to eat with the Three Tenors in the Wembley Banqueting Hall.Although this is alleged to be the last time the Three Tenors will perform together anywhere in the world, 4,000 of the 58,000 seats remain unsold. But shortly before they were due to set off from their Wembley rehearsals their management asked that the Majors come to them.
With both sides mindful of the photo opportunity in prospect, delicate behind-the-scenes negotiations were set up.”The level of security around Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras is too high to allow them to come into central London,” a surprised civil servant in Mr Major’s private office was told.The two sides debated who were the bigger VIPs and who had the more involved security requirements. Messrs Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras – in Britain for a special concert tonight – had been scheduled to visit Mr and Mrs Major in Downing Street. In the end it came down to pulling power. John Major is unlikely ever to fill Wembley Stadium, but when push came to shove he proved himself a bigger draw than the Three Tenors.

any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind” – John Donne”The ballot is stronger than the bullet” -Abraham Lincoln”Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country” – John Fitzgerald Kennedy”He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it” – Martin Luther King”The world has enough to meet everyone’s need; not everyone’s greed” – Mahatma Gandhi”A degree of austerity is not only desirable but essential” – Lord Nolan’s committee on standards in public life”To thine own self be true” – William Shakespeare”Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom” – Hannah Arendt”Always let your conscience be your guide” – Jiminy CricketCarey’s crusade, pages 4-5. These days, the sins of the child are often, rightly, blamed upon the father.Greed – covetousness – condemned in the commandments, became the business ethic of the Eighties, renamed as the virtue of “enterprise”.So what are the modern moral precepts, the guy-ropes of public and private behaviour that sustain us in our search for certainties? Independent writers have collected some that seem to resonate as wise statements of our common beliefs, in a post-religious world.”All men are created equal” – Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence”Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” – Jesus Christ”I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” – Voltaire”The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” – Edmund Burke”No man is an Island … So does the idea of an inalienable right to pursue happiness – a word notably missing from the Ten Commandments.Some of our new commandments are born of modern moral history Nuremberg showed the danger of following national orders. After Freud other aspects of the old morality came crashing down. Honouring your father and mother has been replaced by a duty to cherish the child above all else, thereby focusing less on duty than on self-fulfilment: selfishness is no longer unequivocally bad.Freud made simple blame more difficult, for once we understood the catastrophic effect of a damaged childhood, it took the edge off good, old-fashioned responsibility for sin.The causes of wickedness became clouded by psychology. The language of rights and democracy sits uncomfortably with ancient beliefs in the virtue of obedience.Tolerance and understanding are modern, post-Enlightenment virtues that jar with Old Testament moral damnation.

We may still live by many of the fundamentals of the Judaeo- Christian tradition, but other modern values clash with the old world of the Bible.In particular, the Enlightenment introduced ideas that struck at the very heart of the biblical world of fixed moral certainties, attacking the moral universe of the dark ages – feudal, deferential, superstitious. Each generation tends to believe that children are worse than their parents. The myth of some golden age 50 years or so ago, when society was much better, has always been with us.Yet a recent survey found that most people could remember only four of the Ten Commandments. Today’s church speaks little of hellfire and is more at ease with the gentler doctrines of forgiveness and turning the other cheek.Even so, the Archbishop’s words may touch a national chord. A Gallup poll published yesterday offers a snapshot of collective moral anxiety. Three-quarters of the population believe that too much moral choice is left to individuals, and that society is less moral than it was 50 years ago.What this poll could not reveal, but social historians have shown time and again, is that it is a part of the natural human condition to imagine we are in a perpetual moral decline.