Charles Moore’s Notes: Diane the Posh Goddess and Osborne’s mania

When I arrived at Cambridge in 1975, a nervous freshman, I remember walking with a friend past Newnham and being introduced to a third-year undergraduate. She was attractive, witty, confident, well-connected, at home in the world of the ‘glittering prizes’ (the irritating phrase which gave its name to Frederick Raphael’s novel of that time). I envied her poise. Her name was Diane Abbott. Later, making many sacrifices for her career, she changed her accent, became ‘working-class’, and had a relationship with Jeremy Corbyn, but for me she will always be Diane, the posh goddess. So perhaps I am biased, but hearing her on the Today programme on Tuesday attacking George Osborne’s ‘charter’ which will force all future governments to maintain a budget surplus, I reckoned she was right. What is this mania for making laws about what should be matters of policy? We are committed by law, for example, to make international development spending correspond with a particular percentage of GDP. Now Mr Osborne wants to make it illegal to run a deficit under certain conditions. No government should be bound in this way. As so often, the Chancellor is just playing political games to embarrass his opponents and, thanks to a lazy and sycophantic media, succeeding.

My search (see previous Notes) for whether or not Sir Keith Joseph could possibly, in 1964, have told the future Professor Sir Geoff Palmer to go home to Trinidad and grow bananas, is encountering almost hysterical resistance. When the Centre for Policy Studies, the think-tank which Joseph founded, took up his cause and arranged to speak to Sir Geoff on the telephone, he had an ‘Equality officer’ present. In a subsequent email to the CPS, Sir Geoff heads his letter ‘Palmer vs Moore and Sir Keith Joseph’ as if this were a legal case, and describes what I am saying as ‘untenable evidence against me’.