Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 23 July 2005

Islamist websites make use of white liberal commentators to support their position.

The late Sir Edward Heath was notoriously uneasy with women, but there was one, Sara Morrison, who was a good friend and an important political confidante. She was with him when he died on Sunday. Sara was robust enough to be able to withstand the strange manners and see through to the vulnerable and honourable man within. Which was just as well, because the manners were strange indeed. At one dinner party, Sara noticed that it was still at the soup stage and Heath had already fallen silent. She wrote a note, delivered by the butler, which said, ‘Talk to the women next to you.’ Heath wrote back, ‘I have.’ During one of the 1974 election campaigns, Sara was at the back of the campaign bus, sitting on a table. The bus braked suddenly and she was thrown right to the front, where Heath was sitting. She protested that the bus should continue its journey, but she was clearly hurt, and Heath would have none of it. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘We must get some brandy.’ The bus stopped at the nearest pub, and a glass of brandy was brought on board. Heath drank all of it, and then the bus drove on.

In an article about Sir Edward’s death this week, Max Hastings referred, in passing, to Heath’s chancellor of the exchequer, ‘Anthony Barbour’. Max must be the only journalist whose first instinct is to spell that surname that way.

This is the story of two trainees. The first is called Dilpazier Aslam, and he is a trainee journalist on the Guardian. Shortly after the London bomb attacks he wrote a piece in his paper. He began by conceding (in what he called ‘an out-clause’) that ‘what happened in London was a sad day and not the way to express your political anger’.

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