The Spectator's Notes

7 March 2009

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

There is talk once again of Tony Blair becoming ‘President of Europe’. This grand title is unofficial. The job in question is formally called President of the European Council, and it will be created if the Lisbon Treaty ever comes into force. More Europhiles now see Mr Blair as having the fame and political clout to make the collective EU presence on the world stage a greater reality. The fact that they are thinking this way indicates something which we Eurosceptics are too slow to understand, which is that crisis in the EU tends to be used to strengthen integration. To us, it is obvious that a country like, say, Spain, which now has 3.5 million unemployed in a country of 40.5 million, would be in a much better economic condition if it had its own currency and therefore its own competitive exchange rate. We tend to think, like Marxists about capitalism, that the euro will ‘collapse under the weight of its own contradictions’. And we may eventually turn out to be right that angry European citizens will sweep the existing institutions away. But for the powers that be, the credit crunch cries out for a stronger European central authority to direct economic policy and prevent member countries running up their own huge debts. In the current panic, the eurozone exercises a centripetal pull for those already in it, or linked to it. ‘Europe’ will get worse before it gets better.

As George Galloway said to Saddam Hussein, I say to Sir Fred Goodwin: ‘Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability’. Most of us, when caught out in receipt of a pension specially increased to gargantuan size in response to us leading our company to the greatest loss in British corporate history, would be embarrassed. Finding that we had failed to escape unnoticed, we would try some feint, like giving some of it to charity for a bit, or offering to pay a proportion back. But, so far at least, Sir Fred stands firm. Confident of his contractual rights, aware that, after a few days, the press always turns its anger on to somebody else, conscious that this government does not have much longer to live, he coolly calculates that he would rather be very rich and very unpopular than less rich and slightly less unpopular. One can see the steel which made him, until recent events, the darling of Scottish business.

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David Short

March 5th, 2009 8:45am Report this comment

I do find it bizarre that Oxford and Cambridge can enter teams from each college, but it is not true to say 'other universities can field only one team'.

The separate colleges - such as University College, Bedford College, King's College - of London University enter separate teams.

Alas, I was unable even to attempt to appear with my undergraduate college, the London School of Economics.

The LSE was banned for a number of years in the 1970s after its team made weak joke answers to Bamber Gascoigne's questions. Its team leader, John something, had a walking stick and used it to crude effect by waving it in the air. The crude effect was gained because LSE was broadcast below a girls' Oxbridge college on University Challenge's famous split screen. The girls were on top, if you see what I mean.

I was in my final year at school and had been accepted at LSE. My mother, watching it with me, declared: 'you're not going there!'.

As I was on a means-tested full grant (those were the days!), the lack of any parental contribution meant her threat lacked any power of enforcement.

But I always felt it was very unfair for Granada to ban me from something I'd aspired to for years when I was an inky swot in South Shields when the offences were committed.

At my school in those days, we could not apply to Oxbridge unless we stayed on for a seventh sixth-form term to prepare for Common Entrance.

Eating my mother out of house and home for another year was not financially practical, so I couldn't swerve to avoid the LSE ban by opting for Oxbridge and a (vastly increased) chance of getting on the split screen.

Every time I saw that John character when I arrived at LSE, I always felt like kicking his walking stick from underneath him.

Wormwood

March 7th, 2009 4:28am Report this comment

Why has Satan been excised? Were you expecting him to appear spouting fire, threatening, enslaving in any obvious way? He was always more likely to turn up as a smiling Blairite figure, offering little compromises, easy derelictions, each time conducting us a little further on our journey... And that is what has happened to the hymn book.

Michael Prendergast

March 10th, 2009 10:12am Report this comment

Perhaps the bowdlerizer who changed "faint" to "swerve" is a rugby playing man who confused it with "feint" -in the sense of an attempt to confuse an opponent ie "swerve"?

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