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The Spectator’s Notes

Charles Moore

Wednesday, 7th November 2007

Charles Moore's thoughts on the week

There is a vivid bit in Duff Cooper’s memoirs when he describes the boredom he felt when he had, as an MP, to visit factories. Being very unmechanically minded, I feel the same way — going into what old novels call a ‘brown study’ when people start explaining processes to me. So I was surprised to find myself really moved last week by a visit to the JCB headquarters at Rocester in Staffordshire. I am not very interested in the famous backhoe loaders which the company produces, but I was overwhelmingly impressed by the spirit of the place. There, in 1945, young Joe Bamford, cast out of the family firm by his father, converted an old dairy, and started a factory of his own. JCB today employs 6,000 people in Britain. It has the characteristics of an old-fashioned business, being family-run, private, and staffed mainly by men. And yet it now has three factories in India, more than 10 per cent of the world market share and a name so famous that it appears as a noun in the dictionary. It is not true that only businesses which make things are real businesses, but I do think there is a special dignity and pride, particularly for the male sex, in such work. We approached Rocester from the air. You see the village church, the outline, traceable in the grass, of the old Roman fort beside it, and then, across the main road, the lakes and football pitches and enormous plant of JCB. Soon the company will sponsor an academy to be opened in the village. Eliot has that famous line, in ‘Little Gidding’, about history being ‘now and England’. He was speaking of a winter’s afternoon in an old chapel. I found myself applying it to JCB.

James Michie, who has just died, was a distinguished poet and publisher, but his main contribution to The Spectator was pseudonymous and anonymous. The pseudonym was Jaspistos, the nickname given him by his elder brother, meaning ‘Faithful James’. In this guise, for 30 years, James set The Spectator’s weekly competitions. The anonymous bit was his weekly work in correcting proofs. When I was editor, sitting with James every Wednesday, I was puzzled that a man of such originality should bother with this apparently minor activity. But in fact it, and the competitions, fitted with James’s approach. Like many excellent writers in English who are also good classicists, James loved linguistic precision, accuracy, nuance. He was not pedantic, but he was exact. Enoch Powell said of A.E. Housman that ‘It was a big mind that chose to live in a small room’ — there was something of that in James. The small room that is The Spectator benefited hugely.

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J. Grieve

November 8th, 2007 8:35pm

Was Mr Moore at Sandringham when two shots were fired and the hen harriers fell out of the sky? If not, what makes him think that there was no crime? Is he suggesting that it was all a figment of the witness's imagination or that they were not hen harriers? If the Police are right and there was a crime is Mr Moore suggesting that the suspects must be one or more unidentified armed men who happened to be roaming around Sandringham very near Harry and his friends?

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.

Diary

Anne Robinson

The daughter and I spent the last few days before the American election in Arizona.

Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

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.