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Charles Moore

Wednesday, 31st October 2007

Charles Moore's thoughts on the week

The excitement about the royal blackmail case this week turns on the word ‘royal’. It is a word — like Pope, sex, split, gun and cancer — treasured by the media. As a result, it gets stretched. The ‘royal’ who is the subject of this alleged blackmail attempt is not someone with the title of HRH and he/she performs no royal duties and is not paid from the Civil List. Even less royal, then, is the ‘aide’ who, according to the alleged blackmailers, as reported in the press, ‘allegedly claims in a video to have engaged in a sex act with the royal’. So even if the blackmail did take place and if the aide did make this claim, and even if his claim is true, it is a very, very small story indeed. An even more useful word than ‘royal’ in my great trade of newspapers is ‘alleged’.

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A child of our time

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

Charles Moore

‘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.