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Sunday 7 September 2008

The Spectator’s Notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

Mr Speaker Martin’s failure is partly attributable to his original decision to refuse to wear the traditional wig and knee-breeches. The wig, in particular, gave the Speaker the semi-anonymity necessary to remind people that the role, not the person, matters. Perhaps Mr Martin hoped to be respected on his own merits — always a fatal error.

This week, ten existing or former MI6 officers are giving evidence at the Diana inquest. The reason they have to do so is almost incredibly thin. Mohammed Fayed imagines that MI6 murdered the Princess of Wales in Paris and that the probable method was flashing lights into the eyes of her driver. According to Richard Tomlinson, the long-running renegade from the service, a plot was hatched by MI6 in the early 1990s to kill Slobodan Milosevic thus. Mr Fayed thinks this proves that he is right. On this basis, the ten officers have to come and explain, as Sir Richard Dearlove has already done, what actually happened: one officer proposed the assassination of a leading Serb (not Milosevic, in fact), possibly by such a method, and his proposal was rejected immediately, as all assassination ideas have been for many years. Possibly this waste of time and public money does not matter much, but the fact is that a secret service is being made to appear in court on a complete wild goose chase. This means that it will be cross-questioned about its methods in ways that could be unhelpful to its work. And it will also tend to make a suspicious minority think that there must be something in Mr Fayed’s allegations for the spooks to have been forced out of the shadows. I know you cannot be a litigant in an inquest, but surely Mr Fayed is a walking definition of what it means to be ‘vexatious’.

Mr H, a correspondent who, like me, has recently received yet another threat from TV Licensing (see previous Notes) for not having a television licence, draws my attention to the claim in his threatening letter that ‘last month alone we caught 32,336 evaders’. I notice that my latest nasty letter (‘Official warning’) lays claim to 24,531 evaders caught in a month. Mr H, like me, is not an evader: he lacks a licence because he lacks a television, but he asks what this huge figure can mean. Does the authority really have 4 million ‘cheats’ in ten years on its files and, if so, what has it done with them? Mr H quotes from a letter he received two years ago in which TV Licensing claimed that ‘last month alone we prosecuted 75 people’, a weirdly small proportion of the allegedly large numbers of criminals. Because Mr H has kept 43 TV Licensing letters over the past four years, he can compare the statistics quoted in different letters. Some letters give the monthly figure for evaders; others give annual ones, and here the numbers are far lower — roughly 50,000 per annum. So is TV Licensing simply making its figures up? Mr H’s latest letter also contains a refinement which mine does not. Stating that Enforcement Officers have been authorised to visit his property ‘in order to determine whether equipment such as the following is being used illegally’, it then lists not only a television, but also ‘a computer’. Presumably this is because some computers can receive television, but it raises the question — what is the TV licence for? Is it for the possession of a television, which is what most people believe, or is it for the right to watch the service which the BBC provides? If the latter, will the licence fee go on forever, whatever the technology? Does TV Licensing have the power to snoop on every computer in the land as well as every television? If so, the bureaucratic logic will be that TV Licensing will demand and be given new powers to hack into the computer of any suspected ‘evader’.

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