The Spectator's Notes

27 June 2009

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

It is rather a brutal point to make, but I find it interesting that there is no great outpouring of public outrage about the British hostages in Iraq whose decomposed bodies have recently been dumped by their murderers. People seem to feel that when private contractors go to nasty places to work for large sums of money, they know what they are letting themselves in for. Shocking though the killings are, they are not thought to raise any big question of public policy. This goes to confirm my hunch that the way ahead for governments which decide to intervene in difficult countries is to use mercenaries. Nowadays the degree of public sensitivity to danger, injury and death among our regular military is so high — unreasonably high, I would argue, when one considers that ours is a professional not a conscript army — that other means of achieving the same effect will be preferred. In thus privatising tricky operations, we would be returning to a more mediaeval, less national approach to fighting and its associated work, such as security. But it might be a more effective one.

Brooding on Mr Bercow’s victory on Tuesday, I turned the corner into Jermyn Street and bumped into another diminutive and bumptious man, but one who always cheers me up. The great historian Andrew Roberts was pink with excitement and talking loudly to a gradually growing knot of admirers. ‘Guess what I’ve been doing!’ he said. ‘I’ve just been having lunch in the private room at Wilton’s making a speech to ten of the 24 remaining non-royal dukes, and I was the only person in the room apart from them. Bliss! Thinking of their strawberry leaves, I told them that the collective noun to describe them was a punnet.’ We were joined, for some reason, by the Cameronite Tory MP Ed Vaizey. ‘I was telling the dukes how we must restore them to their pre-1997 glory,’ said Andrew. Suddenly, Mr Vaizey had vanished.