The Spectator's Notes

11 October 2008

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

A friend’s son has just gone to university. He telephoned: ‘Dad,’ he asked, ‘how do you pay a bill?’ I had not quite taken in until I heard this that nowadays, although you can drive a car, have homosexual intercourse and get killed fighting for your country in Afghanistan before you are 18, you cannot have a cheque-book or a credit card. My friend explained how to write a cheque (mentioning the Geoffrey Wheatcroft technique of sending it promptly but omitting the date). If the banks’ fierceness towards child borrowing had been extended up the age range, many of our current global troubles could have been avoided. Rather like tabloid papers which excoriate paedophiles but publish drooling, soft-porn pictures of girls as soon as they turn 16, modern banks switch (or, I suppose I should now say, switched) from absolute strictness about debt to pushing the stuff on to people on their 18th birthdays. It was not ever thus. When I got my first job (on the Daily Telegraph) after leaving university in 1979, I had £14 left in the bank, so I wrote to the manager and asked for an overdraft of £400 to have a couple of suits made. He telephoned me, very concerned: ‘If you will excuse me being humorous, Mr Moore, I think you should cut your coat according to your cloth. You can buy a perfectly acceptable suit from Burton’s for a fraction of the price.’ Conscious that he had never met me, I put on a hurt tone of voice, and said that I was ‘a very strange shape’, and therefore could not get a suit off the peg. Embarrassed, he granted me the loan. But I feel that the poor man was doing his job, and that it is partly because his sort were stamped out by more thrusting, business-grabbing types that the banks now have no money left.

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Ross Burns

October 11th, 2008 4:05pm Report this comment

He's in the top three best journalists in the country. The words are always perfectly placed and he often combines his gentle manner with great biting wit, for example: saying the minister's name, Dawn Primarola, sounds like a new brand of margarine. But sadly he spoils it all for me, by reminding us of his thirst for blood from animals that don't even raise their heads above a knee cap. Not that size should matter anyways.

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