Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 15 November 2018

‘It’s time for Bond — Basildon Bond,’ is the joke among pro-Leave MPs as Theresa May serves up her mess of pottage as Brexit. Market research, however, shows the joke does not work on MPs under 40 because they do not know what Basildon Bond is. So perhaps I should explain to the hip Spectator crowd that Basildon Bond remains the commonest brand of quality paper on which to write letters. There need to be 48 such letters sent to Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee, to provoke a vote of confidence in Mrs May among Conservative MPs. There are certainly far more than 48 who do not, in fact, have confidence in her. It does not automatically follow, needless to say, that they will say so when asked. The weapon can be used only once in 12 months and could recoil upon those who wield it. Or it might provoke what Tories call ‘the catastrophe of a Corbyn government’. But what to do about the catastrophe of the May one?

I feel a proprietorial interest in Labour leaders’ attire at the Cenotaph, because Michael Foot’s famous donkey jacket in 1981 caused me to write almost the first article in my career to attract any public notice. It was a leader for the Daily Telegraph, headlined ‘Dressed to Wound’, and it attacked Mr Foot for his jacket, flapping trousers, Cornish-pasty shoes and his laying of his party’s wreath ‘with all the reverent dignity of a tramp bending down to inspect a cigarette end’. It seemed to crest a wave of reader indignation at Mr Foot. Hundreds wrote or telephoned in support. For years afterwards, I felt I had been unfair to the dear old boy, but when I subsequently learnt that he had taken money from the KGB, I reverted to my original indignation.

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