As the sainted editor of this paper points out in Word from the Cloisters, there was a choice gathering at Farm Street Church for the premiere of Sir James MacMillan’s reflections on Cardinal Newman’s meditation, “God has created me to do Him some definite service”, and another by Will Todd. I was gratified to find an entire party on the pavement outside afterwards: not just one former Evening Standard editor, but two – Veronica Wadley, now a peer, and Sarah Sands, who was about to lecture G7 leaders about women’s issues. Then there was Cardinal Nichols, and John Studzinski, the philanthropist who paid for the commission and who is perhaps more likely to get through the eye of the needle than most men of means, plus my distinguished fellow columnist, Christopher Howse. All we needed out on the pavement in Mayfair were drinks and canapes for a proper party.

Sir James’ piece was not so much a setting of the words to music – though it was that – but a piece where the words were infused with the music, some of it what the composer calls “smudgy polytonality”. Only some phrases were discernible, most strikingly, Newman’s conclusion that “God does nothing in vain”, his take on Aristotle’s dictum that Nature does nothing in vain. But the piece was preceded by a reading of the original passage by Alexander Armstrong, so the music was a kind of exposition of the words.