Charles Moore vs David Hare: a one-act play

Charles Moore and David Hare sit in the editor’s office at The Spectator, Hare on a brown leather chesterfield, Moore opposite him on the striped sofa once favoured by the former editor Boris Johnson for naps. Hare and Moore disagree on everything from God to Thatcher; capitalism to the Iraq war. But as Moore has recently noted in his column, both men grew up in the same place, near Bexhill on the East Sussex coast. They’re here for tea and to see if there’s anything on which they can agree.…

Act I, Scene I

CHARLES MOORE: In your book [The Blue Touch Paper] you describe the Bexhill I knew, but my feeling about it was completely different. I thought Bexhill was romantic. I liked the sort of thing that people criticise, like privet hedges and net curtains.

DAVID HARE: Yes, well, you were not brought up among them in that case! I can’t tell you the emotional damage of that style of life, of always being made to feel, if you were a child, that you were in the wrong.

MOORE: It’s better than being brought up as if you were a child that was in the right.

HARE: Well that is now the fashion isn’t it?

MOORE: But the old one is better isn’t it? The old one is better because it’s more true.

HARE: I do find the worship of children now excessive, whereby children are told that they are completely wonderful all the time. But on the other hand, that life was so repressed. No one talked about anything.

MOORE: No, that’s right. It’s hard to remember, isn’t it, the things that you didn’t speak about? Some are obvious, people didn’t speak about sexual things. But some are perhaps less obvious. There was a great sense, which I quite respect actually, of privacy about everything. So for example my family would never, ever talk about money.