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The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

Wednesday, 28th November 2007

Charles Moore's thoughts on the events of the week

Mention of the Lords leads me to quote the following from Snowmail, the email which previews each day’s Channel 4 News. Last Friday, the day after five ex-service chiefs had condemned the government’s treatment of the armed forces in a Lords debate, Snowmail ran the headline ‘Five Lords a-hiding’, and said: ‘Curiously the five men so eloquent in the House of Lords yesterday (when they were not closely questioned about what they had to say) have become terribly reticent today. You’d have thought that people used to running our armed forces would be prepared to defend publicly what they said so trenchantly in the relative privacy of the House of Lords.’ This attitude by Channel 4 was revealing. First, it assumed an animus against the military. Second, it assumed that television has a right to summon anyone to appear before it. Third, it regarded a House of Parliament, all of whose debates are fully recorded (and could, if the media chose, be fully reported) as ‘private’. Finally, the Snowmail was mistaken: Admiral Lord Boyce appeared on the Today programme and General Lord Guthrie wrote an article in the Daily Telegraph.

There is to be a new right of appeal to the BBC Trust for complaints about the collection of the television licence. (At present, the BBC sloughs off responsibility to the collectors, TV Licensing.) An email about this coincided with a new threat to me (for other threats, see previous Notes) over my television-free London flat. ‘Sophisticated’ equipment and inspectors, says the menacing letter, will soon come and seek me out. It made no allowance for the possibility that the recipient did not possess a television. Even if, unlike me, you think the licence fee is right in principle, surely it is against the general rule of English law that you are guilty until proved innocent. I am not going to write and tell the authorities that I do not have a television in the flat because I don’t see why I should. I very much doubt that the BBC Trust will vindicate my rights, however.

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