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The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

Wednesday, 26th March 2008

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

For some weeks, I was thinking of writing against the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, but despair crept over me. What is the point, I asked myself, when opinion seems to have moved so decisively against the idea that a human being is an inviolable entity? Nothing will stop this Bill, I thought. Now it turns out that I may be wrong. In the funny way British opinion has of noticing something only when it is almost too late, people are suddenly worried that the human and animal could be commingled, created and then destroyed by scientists. And their worry has coincided with the political weakness of the government. Hence Gordon Brown’s ‘climb-down’ about whipping the vote. But is it, in fact, a climb-down? The new edict is that Labour MPs may have a free vote on three clauses in the Bill, but must then vote for the Bill in its final form. Because the amendments to these three clauses will probably fail, this means that they will still be forced to vote against their consciences in the end. It is like the farce by which ministers have opposed post office closures but then voted for them — a very New Labour ethical solution in which appearance trumps reality.

Reviewing Stephen Robinson’s new biography of Bill Deedes in these pages last week, Peregrine Worsthorne was fierce against his old colleague. Worsthorne said that Deedes lacked the ‘willingness to tell the truth to power’ which is ‘indispensable’ to journalism. Bill did indeed hate confrontation, to a fault, but there is something arrogant about the assumption, always made by journalists about ourselves, that we know so clearly what the truth is. Besides, if we do know it, surely our first duty is to tell the truth not to power — that is our second duty, flowing from the first — but to the readers. It amazes me how little consideration the readers get in the memoirs and conversations of journalists. If they appear at all, it is as an offstage comic army of bores who write foolish letters which we rarely bother to answer. Too many of us write for our friends or our enemies, for a few experts in the Foreign Office or the City (or whatever), or for self-aggrandisement. Part of the reason that Bill Deedes really was a genius of journalism was that he never forgot that he was writing for the readers. It was to them, not to proprietors, that he ultimately deferred. He struck up a kindly conversation with them, on their terms. This was not a lack of moral courage, but a form of good manners, and it is why the readers loved him more than any other writer.

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