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Sunday 7 September 2008

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

At the Conservatives’ Spring Lunch last week, I bumped into a crestfallen Stanley Johnson. Stanley wants to succeed his son Boris as Conservative candidate for Henley, but he told me he had just raised the matter with David Cameron (also at the lunch) who had said: ‘I think we need a local candidate.’ I felt sorry for Stanley and sympathetic with his gallant water-flowing-uphill version of the hereditary principle, but afterwards I reflected on Cameron’s courage. Almost anyone else, faced with Stanley’s bouncy enthusiasm, would at least have played along. But Cameron was determined not to let sentiment overcome hard politics. He has the coldness necessary to command.

My wife was born in Markham Square, Chelsea, in a house her parents bought for £7,800 in 1955. So I felt a melancholy interest in the story last week of the police killing of the young barrister, Mark Saunders, who was said to be drunk and depressed, and started firing a shotgun out of his window in the square. We do not yet know why Mr Saunders behaved as he did, but I wonder if absurd house prices — the explanation for almost everything that is wrong with this country — had something to do with it. He and Mrs Saunders lived in a flat in Markham Square said to be worth £2.25 million. I am trying to imagine what the police would have done in the same situation in 1955, when there was almost no gun crime in London and no control of any kind on the ownership of shotguns. I cannot help thinking that, instead of putting on silly balaclavas and shooting Mr Saunders dead, they would have found a way of calming the situation. One knows that policemen usually do not like barristers, but this was going too far. Obviously, Mr Saunders was dangerous, but did he really have to die? It is noticeable that as the civilian population is more restricted in its legal use of guns, the police seem to get more trigger-happy.

This column finds itself almost alone (see last week’s Notes) in defending Wendy Alexander, the Labour leader in the Scottish Parliament, for changing her mind and calling for a referendum on Scottish independence. She is said to have annoyed Gordon Brown and to have made a political gaffe, as if these were the same thing. But the referendum logic is ineluctable. In the 1990s, many Scots wanted a referendum on devolution. Labour gave them one, and they voted for it, and they got what they voted for. Now many Scots want a referendum on independence. Scottish politics cannot be resolved until this is granted. When it is, we shall know, one way or the other, where we stand. It is stupid of Labour to try to resist the referendum tide it created, and allow the Scottish Nationalists to make the cause of the popular will their own. Surely the wisest thing is for Labour, nationally, to take the matter upon itself. Since the result will ultimately affect the whole country, the House of Commons, not the Scottish Parliament, should legislate for it (as happened, of course, with devolution itself), making rules for its proper conduct. The most likely result of a referendum is that it would go against independence, thus strengthening the Union. But if it goes decisively the other way, it must be accepted. Why the Tories, who have only one seat to lose in Scotland, do not promise a referendum, I do not understand.

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