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Charles Moore

Wednesday, 19th September 2007

For ten years, it has been said that Gordon Brown gave independence to the Bank of England.

The letters end up as a collective work of art in which the authors collaborate and also — for there is a gripping rivalry for the right to tell their story — conflict. I had expected high gossip, rumours of war, love and comedy. I was less prepared for the extraordinary contemplation of death which dominates the second half of the book. Here is Debo, now the only one living: ‘I suggest NO CREMATION, just an ordinary common or garden FUNERAL, I mean you have “All Things Bright and Beautiful” & “Holy Holy Holy” and then the stalwarts shoulder you and heave you to the graveyard (where, side by side, lie many a long low grave) & everyone is in floods as you are lowered & and a handful of earth is thrown on & the fellow says Dust to Dust and Ashes to Ashes, more floods and bowed heads & then all start screaming with laughter before they’re out of the churchyard. That’s what I’m after.’

The book also has the best footnote I have seen: ‘Louise de Vilmorin had the teeth of an aged nanny goat.’

Something about British culture tends to spoil the good by making it prohibitive. Thus Jamie Oliver’s admirable attempt to improve school meals has somehow become, in the minds of the quarter of a million children who have given up school meals since his plan was introduced, a way of banning what they most like. The trick is not so much to forbid as to encourage. So it is lovely to know that the British Food Fortnight, which starts this Saturday, wants to get lessons going in food, nutrition and what used to be called ‘home economics’. It offers schools a network of 9,000 chefs (www.britishfoodfortnight.co.uk) ready to go into the classroom and teach children why good food is nice and how to make it so.

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From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

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The Spectator's Notes

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‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.