The Spectator’s notes | 25 May 2017

In most parts of the world, we have now supped so full of terrorist horrors that the death of 22 people in such a terrible way does not feel decisively worse than what has gone before. You can tell this by the rather pro forma things that politicians say to condemn the attacks. Yet again, the attack is described as ‘cowardly’. This is simply untrue: it must require immense, though repellent, courage to blow yourself up. The other word to avoid is ‘innocent’. It is a word naturally, and rightly, applied to children, but it carries the dangerous implication that some terror attacks might be aimed at the ‘guilty’, and therefore be more forgivable. The word ‘innocent’ is never applied to our police and armed forces, but they are innocent, and killing those who keep the peace is, if anything, worse for all of us than killing ‘innocent’ civilians.

Alexander Chancellor ended up living between a couple of Inigo Jones pavilions, so it was fitting that his memorial service on Tuesday took place in Inigo Jones’s church, St Paul’s Covent Garden. The architecture fitted his open, easy manner: he wasn’t a Gothic sort of person. Because Alexander was upper-class and seemingly shambolic, much written, when he died, about his editorship of The Spectator played up the ‘gentleman amateur’ picture. The speakers in the service rightly corrected this. Ferdinand Mount, in particular, emphasised how exactingly professional Alexander was as editor. He almost never made rulings about ‘taste or doctrine’, said Mount, but he could always spot shortcomings in ‘style, grace or logic’. This is quite right. I would add ‘clarity’ too. Alexander’s own style was a model of clarity — never waffling, overelaborate or obfuscatory. So he could make other people’s prose pellucid, rather as a good physiotherapist uses a gentle touch to right something that is out of joint.