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Thursday 20 November 2008

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

Or don’t change. One of those in the audience at the Oratory was the Revd Nicky Gumbel, from Holy Trinity, Brompton, across the way. In the old days, the idea that an evangelical would darken a Catholic door would have been unthinkable, but now there is a lot of common ground between the two. I was at school and Cambridge with Nicky Gumbel. At the time, I thought he was very nice, but it did not occur to me that he would walk with destiny. When we were at Trinity, he told me that he had written ‘reading’ as his hobby on his CV for university entrance because he could not think of anything else. When, at interview, the dons asked him what he had read recently, he blurted out ‘The Day of the Jackal’, which was not what they meant by reading. Today, Nicky has claims to be the most successful of my fellow schoolboys, a man to whom hedge-fund kings, SAS generals and Cabinet ministers should defer. He is the chief begetter of Alpha, the course in basic Christianity which is now conquering the entire world and has been studied by literally millions of people. His mission has probably reached more people than that of any Englishman in history except for John Wesley. Yet he seems exactly the same as 30 years ago — the jolly young man who used to toast me crumpets while explaining why I should pay more attention to St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.

TV Licensing (continued). Mr P, who runs a care home in West Sussex, tells me that he frequently receives whole batches of threatening letters from TV Licensing, one for each resident, accusing each of evading a television licence. They are usually addressed to ‘Occupant, Room 1’ and so on. All but one of his residents are over 75, and therefore get their licences free, and the authorities have been informed of this. The sole resident who is under 75 benefits from the group licence for the entire home and therefore has to pay only £5 (a cost which the home bears), so every single letter from TV Licensing is inapplicable. The letters still have the power to confuse and frighten old people, though. Mr P therefore ‘stores’ most of the letters without passing them on. No doubt this is a crime.

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