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The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

Wednesday, 7th May 2008

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

It would be nice if the interest in electoral contests, renewed by last week’s events, would revive the reporting of by-elections. By-election campaigns were well reported by newspapers in the past. They would send star journalists to the constituency for two or three weeks before polling. Their dispatches were a readable way of interleaving national concerns with local issues, which is how voters think about things. They taught the reader a great deal about the texture of the nation. In recent years, these reports have died away, partly because, thanks to better medicine, there are far fewer by-elections than in the past, and partly because the results had become much more predictable than in the days of the great upsets of the Sixties and Seventies. Two by-elections are now pending. One result — in Boris Johnson’s Henley — is almost a foregone conclusion, but the other, and more imminent — in the late Gwyneth Dunwoody’s Crewe and Nantwich — will be exciting. Please let us read the story as it unfolds.

In a recent conversation with Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, our talk turned to great central bankers of history. Mr King reminded me that the best known, though probably the least suitable, was Che Guevara, who was President of the National Bank of Cuba while maintaining his rank as a general. The famous picture of Guevara in his beret was taken when he worked for the Old Lady of Avenida Libertad o Muerte (or whatever they call it in Havana). It shows the natural bad taste of the human race that we scorned the dozens of distinguished central bankers whom we could have put on T-shirts and chose the one who was a financial incompetent (he declared that he wanted to do away with ‘material incentives’ altogether) and a murderer. In a rightly ordered society, young people would queue to buy T-shirts of the admirable Mr King smiling benignly through his thick gold-rimmed spectacles.

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Glasgow East symbolises — as few other places in Britain can — the fact that the problem Labour faces is not just lack of leadership but lack of mission. What is to be seen in this constituency encapsulates and dramatises Labour’s abject failures to comprehend, let alone tackle, the nature of the poverty which grips our council estates.
For all the latest on the Glasgow East by-election, visit Coffee House