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The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

Hunting last week over sodden marshes, we welcomed a delegation of visitors so splendid that it was almost a replay of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. We were joined by 14 Frenchmen from Poitiers where they have, unusually for France, a fox-hunt (deer and boar are more common). They wore green corduroy breeches and green lapelled waistcoats with gold buttons and braid. They were led by Guy, the only mounted member of the party. He is a retired general with a magnificently shaped moustache and a long, unlined coat which looks like a camel-hair dressing-gown. Everything is different about French hunting. They don’t jump; they rarely canter or gallop. In the case of the Poitiers hunt, there is no field under the control of a master, but just a spread of anyone who wants chasing after the fox as each pleases, most of them on foot. Their glory is their horn-playing, and they blew for us as we moved off from the meet. It was beautiful, but they apologised for having only two horns, saying that they normally perform with ten. Apparently, horn-blowing is such an art that it is pursued by thousands who have very little interest in hunting, rather as, in England, bell-ringers are not necessarily churchgoers. It would be good for this country’s now curtailed sport if we adopted this art, though it would be dispiriting to blow the elaborate notes with which the French honour the dead quarry without, as it were, habeas corpus.

Which reminds me. On the day after Boxing Day, the press was full of reports and pictures of the Prince of Wales going for a solitary ride (and getting angry with photographers) at Sandringham. The Prince had declined to take part in the family shoot. I think I can account for his ill temper. He was thinking that he would rather be hunting, which he prefers to shooting. He was acutely conscious that he is one of only four people in England who cannot, for reasons of prudence, take part in the sport, even if no law is broken. The other three are his two sons, and David Cameron.

The sad story of the allegedly imitative suicides of young people in Bridgend seems to confirm that self-slaughter can be a fashion. A don I know, who likes to pretend to be heartless, tells me that undergraduates quite often come to him and tell him that they want to kill themselves. He judges that when they say this, they are showing off, and tells them, ‘All right, then, go ahead and do it.’ When they discover that he is not interested, they lose their enthusiasm. None has committed suicide.

Many years ago, The Spectator lost a lot of money in the libel courts when it alleged — truthfully, but unprovably — that the Labour politicians Aneurin Bevan and Morgan Phillips had been drunk in Venice. I therefore shall not endorse the accounts that I keep hearing about Ken Livingstone’s strange behaviour at a party in Davos last week.