Charles Moore | The Spectator columnists & writers

According to the new Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the Russians wish to ‘put at risk and potentially exploit the world’s real information system, which is undersea cables that go all around the world’. Apparently, these carry 99 per cent of international communications. The cables which serve Britain are in the Atlantic, where Russian submarines are increasingly probing. This revelation resembles the plot of a book I loved as a child, The Pirates in the Deep Green Sea, by Eric Linklater, published in 1959. Timothy and Hew are two boys living, temporarily without their parents, on Popinsay, a Scottish island. Through the good offices of Gunner Boles, a 172-year-old sailor who manages mysteriously to live beneath the waves, they discover that the parallels of longitude and latitude are not just marks on a globe but ‘great big strong cables lying at the bottom of the sea’.

Why is Microsoft offended by ‘Mrs Thatcher’?

The interregnum between incumbents is a well-known and often elongated process in the Church of England. I have recently witnessed this one because my wife is churchwarden of one of the three churches (we Catholics operate under a different system) in the benefice. Interregnums are arduous for all church volunteers and tend to erode parish life. It is remarkable how much there is for churchwardens to do. Dioceses tend to demand and obstruct rather than ease and encourage. Luckily, we are blessed with an excellent archdeacon who cherishes parish life and has declared there will be no more closures of churches in the district; but the bureaucratic flow of dos and don’ts (mainly don’ts) is considerable. For example, there are exemptions from the general need for a parish church to get a ‘faculty’ from the diocese to make some small change (to down a branch, say, or install a lightning conductor), but even these require permission in their own right and the spending of a three-figure sum on the formalities.

Lockdown has made poachers bolder – and more dangerous

One midnight last month, Jon Wiltshire, who lives in a cottage just outside our Sussex village, was woken by a loud bang. Sleepily, he wondered if an intruder had slammed the farm gate shut. He peered out, could see and hear nothing, and so went back to bed. The next day, he had to go to London. When he returned, his wife Anja said: ‘Come and look at this.’ The whole of their sitting room was covered with a fine powder of glass and some bigger shards. Inspecting the double-glazed window, they found a 10mm hole in the outer glass and a much wider break in the inner one. Further searching, a couple of days later, uncovered a rifle round lying on the far side of the room. The house is in a dip below a quiet lane. What seems likely is that poachers in search of deer had entered the field from the lane and fired downhill in the dark — not knowing, or perhaps not caring — that a house was there.

Who will be the Democrats’ Gorbachev?

As this paper has argued since the time of the Tiananmen Square massacres, this country should offer Hong Kong people a way out via immigration. We made the 1984 Hong Kong agreement with China: we owe some protection to the victims when it goes wrong which, thanks to Xi Jinping, it has. He has torn up the famous ‘One Country: Two Systems’ rule upon which the agreement was founded. Our government has now commendably acted on this principle of protection, allowing holders of British National Overseas (BNO) passports a ‘pathway to citizenship’ via a visa scheme. The problem, however, is that the current proposals exclude a small but significant part of those affected. You have BNO status only if you were born by 1997, the year of the handover.

Why are editors sharing a platform with Miqdaad Versi?

Next week, the Centre for Media Monitoring publishes its report on ‘British Media Coverage of Muslims and Islam 2018-2020’. Its launch webinar will be addressed by, among others, Mark Easton of the BBC, Alison Phillips, editor-in-chief of the Mirror, and Emma Tucker, editor of the Sunday Times. The CfMM, run by Miqdaad Versi, is a project of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) which, though arguing there is no one Islam, tries to insist that all media coverage of the subject must have its approval. The MCB’s stance is much more Islamist (i.e. advocating political Islam) than that of most Muslims, but it tries to act as gatekeeper for all media access to Islam. Miqdaad devotes the CfMM’s energies to relentless complaints to the regulator Ipso and others about stories which expose iniquities involving Muslims.

Peppa Pig’s conservative values

I like to think that Boris Johnson’s rambling performance at the CBI this week was a satire against the organisation which he (rightly) dislikes. But I may well be wrong: it is equally likely to have been a Johnsonian cock-up. Either way, he did well to get memorably on the right side of Peppa Pig, whom he turned into an emblem of unlikely British export success. Peppa and her family speak politely in the traditional English accent which foreigners much prefer to Estuary, and do amiable things like making Daddy Pig bicycle to work to avoid disturbing a spider’s web on his car. Peppa is particularly influential in our own household because she has a younger brother called George whom she forces to play along with her fantasies.

National Trust members fight back

At the National Trust’s annual general meeting last week, the voting was much more unusual than the public will have learnt from media reports. In most resolutions, the numbers voting exceeded 100,000. In past years, the figures have been lower than 40,000. The reason for this high turnout was the controversies of the past 18 months. Motions about the erosion of curatorial expertise and the ill treatment of Trust volunteers would have won easily had not the chairman exercised the right to use the discretionary proxy votes which the Trust’s curious governance permits. Without these, the rebel resolutions would have been more than 15,000 votes ahead. In achieving these results, the member organisation, Restore Trust, was important because it managed, via its website, to air the wide range of anxieties about current NT management which many members feel.

The cold hard truth about heat pumps

When I went to Poland not long before Covid, I found a country more bitterly divided by a culture war even than we are. So I would not rule out EU leaders being right that the current government there has intruded on the independence of the judiciary for its own political ends. This is the background to recent Brussels fury that the Polish Constitutional Tribunal (supreme court) asserted the primacy of Polish law over that of the EU earlier this month. The problem never arises in the EU, of course, because there the European Court of Justice has never had an independent judiciary to be tampered with. It has aways been the purpose of the ECJ to make sure that its judges use European law to advance the European Union, which democracy tends not to.

Why the baby doomers are wrong

Rarely does a piece of journalism bring a tear to my normally cynical eye, but I did find this happening when I read Tom Woodman’s piece (‘You must be kidding’) in last week’s edition. He and his wife would not have children, he wrote, because climate collapse means that ‘I can’t give them a future’. What made me weepy was his combination of obvious decency and utter mistakenness. How tragic that what he called ‘the facts and figures’ — in reality, contentious projections — have persuaded this couple that no little Woodman must come into the world. ‘Tree,’ I felt like shouting, in reversal of the Green order of priorities, ‘spare that Woodman!’ Tom, the non-father, complains ‘Humans are swiftly making the planet uninhabitable’, yet goes on to quote figures of population increase which prove that it has become more habitable than ever (5.

In defence of Angela Rayner

On the one occasion when I spent any time with Angela Rayner, she was funny, direct and friendly. We were both on the BBC’s Any Questions? in Alan Partridge territory and dined together beforehand with Sir Vince Cable. She got through a whole evening without identifying me, either privately or on air, as one of ‘a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute pile of banana republic, Etonian piece of scum’ (her chosen words at this week’s party conference fringe meeting). True, I am neither a government minister nor a Conservative (in the Lords I sit as ‘non-affiliated’), but she probably felt I was that sort of person. So, now I know how she sometimes talks, I feel grateful for her restraint. It is interesting she feels the need to speak as she did among the party faithful in order to improve her political chances.

The legacy of Stephen Toope

Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, has begun this academic year by announcing it will be his last in the post. Professor Toope says, no doubt truthfully, that he wants to see more of his Canadian family, dissevered from him by Covid. But I think it reasonable to relate his departure to wider issues. When he arrived in 2017, the ‘Golden Era’ of UK/Chinese relations still, in theory, existed. Cambridge uncritically welcomed Chinese government and business participation. In 2019, speaking in China, Professor Toope hailed the China Development Forum’s ‘Greater Opening Up for Win-Win Cooperation’ and praised President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. A preface composed in his name for a document praising Huawei — and paid for by Huawei — was published by Jesus College’s China/UK Global Issues Dialogue Centre.

Is the world we value falling apart?

From time to time, people get worried and ask one another: ‘Is the world falling apart?’ I imagine this is a universal phenomenon, but my experience of it is largely confined to the West (here meant more as a cultural than a geographical expression). It happened in the 1930s, when the broadly correct answer to the question was ‘Yes’, and in the 1970s, of which more later. It happened more recently, after 11 September 2001 and during the financial crash of 2008/09. Some asked the question after Brexit. I have heard it asked again by many highly disparate people in the few days since the American-led Nato scuttle from Afghanistan. What is the answer? My own first encounter with these gloomy discussions was in the 1970s.

The BBC exaggerates Britain’s importance in Afghanistan

This week, the media pressure was on the British government to extend the deadline for the evacuations from Kabul airport. The government had no power to do this unilaterally: it duly asked the United States, and was duly turned down. The issue was almost beside the point. It is doubtful, given the burning desire of so many to leave the country, whether a few more days of rescue flights would have done much to shorten the suffering queue of hopefuls. Each day is dangerous, so more days are more dangerous. Preoccupation with extension deflected attention from the key point, which is that all evacuation planning assumed that Kabul and its airport would be controlled by the (now former) Afghan government, thereby ensuring an orderly exit.

The failed assumption of Biden’s withdrawal

It is shabby of Biden to blame the Afghans

Q. Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable? The President: No, it is not. Q. Why? The President: Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable… Q. Do you trust handing over the country to the Taliban? The President: No, I do not trust the Taliban. Q. So why are you handing the country over…? The President: It’s a — it’s a silly question. Do I trust the Taliban? No. But I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re — more competent in terms of conducting war. I take those verbatim words from the White House transcript of Joe Biden’s press conference following his statement there on 9 August.

Margaret Thatcher vs everyone else: the making of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement

Joe Biden’s shabby treatment of the Afghan army

Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?The President: No, it is not. Q. Why? The President: Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable… Q. Do you trust handing over the country to the Taliban? The President: No, I do not trust the Taliban. Q. So why are you handing the country over…? The President: It’s a — it’s a silly question. Do I trust the Taliban? No. But I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- — more competent in terms of conducting war. I take those verbatim words from the White House transcript of Joe Biden’s press conference following his statement there on 9 August.

What ministers won’t admit about A-levels

The tale of A-levels shows how ministers can sometimes find themselves in a position when it is simply too dangerous to admit something that is true. To the exterior eye, it is obvious that the temporary abolition of exams and its replacement by teacher assessment has produced grade inflation. This year’s A-level cohort has not suddenly got a third better than its pre-Covid equivalent. You or I can point that out, but if Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, says it, he thereby implies that he has presided over a change which devalues the exam, seriously weakening the basis of admissions to university. He will also be accused of disparaging pupils who, we all know, have had a very rough time. So Mr Williamson, and Ofqual & co, have to find forms of words about how pupils ‘deserve’ good results and how all these A and A* grades ‘recognise their achievement’; and then hurriedly go on to emphasise that this sort of thing won’t happen again.

Chris Packham’s suggestions to save the world

On Monday 2 August, the BBC Today programme offered its ‘Countdown to COP26’. For the rest of the month, Amol Rajan announced, Chris Packham would give us ‘a different suggestion’ about climate change EVERY DAY. I make that 26 Packham slots — Sunday being Today-free — on the main national news magazine programme. Chris’s Day One suggestion to address the ‘colossal, planet-threatening mess that we find ourselves in’ was that everyone should buy an alarm clock (second-hand if possible to save on emissions), set it to wake up 15 minutes earlier and devote that quarter of an hour to doing something helpful, rather as we did, he said, when we abolished slavery. This would amount, if everyone obeyed Chris, to ‘258 million days of people power’ emitted per year.

The West’s moralising over climate change will cost India

On Tuesday, I chaired a session at Policy Exchange addressed by Tony Abbott, the eloquent former prime minister of Australia, now an adviser to the British Board of Trade. Although he acknowledged severe recent difficulties, he declared himself optimistic that free-trading democracies, such as his country and ours, can combine to strengthen rules-based, transparent trade (i.e. the sort of trade China dislikes) across the world. I truly hope he is right. One problem, though, which we barely touched on, is climate change. In the West, this is considered the great global challenge of our time. In developing countries, however, it is often seen as the West’s way of denying them the advantages which made us rich. This week, India did not show up for the 51-country meeting in London to prepare for COP26 in Glasgow, a deliberate snub.

Let’s hope the Third World prevails at COP26

What Dominic Cummings gets wrong

Anyone who thinks Boris Johnson lacks statecraft should pay attention to Dominic Cummings’s attacks on him. They often to seem to show the opposite of what Dom intends. Cummings now reveals that, in January 2020, he and his allies were saying: ‘By the summer, either we’ll all have gone from here or we’ll be in the process of trying to get rid of [Johnson] and get someone else in as prime minister.’ In fact, neither happened. By November, however, Cummings was (to use Mr Pooter’s joke) going; Boris stayed. The winner of the then still recent landslide election victory presumably discovered about his adviser’s seditious conversations and, reasonably, did not like them. He thought he should be more powerful than his adviser and so, when the moment was right, he got rid of him, proving that he was.

Why Dominic Cummings’s attacks on Boris Johnson backfire

Anyone who thinks Boris Johnson lacks statecraft should pay attention to Dominic Cummings’s attacks on him. They often to seem to show the opposite of what Dom intends. Cummings now reveals that, in January 2020, he and his allies were saying: ‘By the summer, either we’ll all have gone from here or we’ll be in the process of trying to get rid of [Johnson] and get someone else in as prime minister.’ In fact, neither happened. By November, however, Cummings was (to use Mr Pooter’s joke) going; Boris stayed. The winner of the then still recent landslide election victory presumably discovered his adviser’s seditious conversations and, reasonably, did not like them. He thought he should be more powerful than his adviser and so, when the moment was right, he got rid of him, proving that he was.

The real reason Priti Patel is targeted

A special animus is aimed at Priti Patel, perhaps because the combination of being Indian, female and firmly Tory is unbearable to the left. The BBC’s Chris Mason, though paid to report, not pass judgment, speaks of the Home Secretary’s ‘at best equivocal stance’ about racist insults in football. The particular anger against her is that earlier on in the Euros, she described taking the knee as ‘gesture politics’, declining to condemn fans who booed it. Yet taking the knee is a gesture and is political. In its current form, taking the knee was invented by Black Lives Matter. Last summer, after the murder of George Floyd, there was a sort of ambush by BLM activists trying to force the West to kneel. It was wrong to succumb to this pressure: BLM is a Marxist movement with an extreme agenda.

Should trains have mask and non-mask carriages?

In deciding whether or not to wear a mask after 19 July, I am sure Boris Johnson is right that one must consider the feelings of others. But I notice this consideration is argued only one way: those not wearing masks are asked to consult the sensitivities of those wearing them. Should not people who insist on continuing to wear masks also be invited to reflect on whether their behaviour might upset the unmasked? After all, in a culture long committed to showing your face as a mark of trust, covering it is depressing and even intimidating for others. It makes people almost inaudible. Or perhaps the simpler answer on trains is to have mask and non-mask carriages, like the smoking and no-smoking ones of old. In his cover piece this week, Ian Williams rightly mentions Professor Peter Nolan, the intensely pro-Xi Jinping director of the China Centre at Jesus College, Cambridge.

‘Fear and bullying’ at the National Trust

Is Winston Marshall — guitarist, banjo player, composer of Mumford & Sons, and father of the west London ‘Nu-Folk’ music that eventually conquered the world — a martyr to the Twitter mob? I find his story more interesting than that. He was trolled earlier this year for tweeting in favour of a book by Andy Ngo about the power of the far-left in the United States. (I haven’t read the book; I gather it is polemical, but in no way fascist.) Because of the difficulties this created for the band, he apologised, but later felt uneasy since he believed he had said nothing wrong. After consulting his fellow band members, he decided he wanted to be able to speak out. The best way to respect the mutual accountability by which they operate was to leave the band altogether.

Why the BBC believed Martin Bashir

If it is true, as Lords Hall and Birt told a Commons committee this week, that Martin Bashir succeeded in duping all the five top BBC executives involved about the forged invoices by which he convinced Diana, Princess of Wales of the establishment’s conspiracy against her, then those executives must be very, very unworldly people. I am reluctant to believe that of them. There must be a different explanation, one with which, as an ex-editor, I have some sneaking sympathy. The interview got the BBC a wonderful story, so when trouble started shortly afterwards, that trouble had to be smoothed away. The problem was not only the BBC’s reputation, but also the careers of the five executives. How could Tony Hall ever have become director-general if the true story had come out at the time? How could John Birt have stayed director-general? It was important to believe a liar then, and becomes important to identify him as a liar now, for the same reason in both cases.

Would you pay £80 for a video from John Bercow?

There is much to be said for meritocracy, and Adrian Wooldridge, in his new book, The Aristocracy of Talent, says it very well. He is right: a society organised on anti-meritocratic principles will decay, making life worse for all, not just for the naturally successful. And yet I feel that meritocracy is inadequate. Most of us, sensing our lack of merit, feel left out. It takes small account of things that matter in real life — love of family and friends, relationships across generations, enduring ill health and bereavement, beauty, landscapes, animals, flowers, kindness, joy, pleasing idleness, traditions, prayer, being silly, jokes, song, meals, bed. Meritocracy rightly seeks results. But life is better understood as a predicament, not a race.

The Edition

Broken Trust: the crisis at the heart of the National Trust

33 min listen

The Edition

Broken Trust: the crisis at the heart of the National Trust

33 min listen

On this week’s podcast, we start with Charles Moore’s cover story on the failings of the National Trust. Why is the Trust getting involved in culture wars, and can it be fixed? Lara speaks to Charles, a Spectator columnist and former editor of the magazine, and Simon Jenkins, who was chair of the Trust between 2008 and 2014. Simon says that it’s ‘very odd’ for the organisation to become embroiled in controversy over Britain’s colonial past and contested history. ‘The National Trust’s relationship with the British Empire, let alone with slavery, is pretty tenuous. I don’t take this accusation against the Trust terribly seriously. This is just currently what I regard as a sort of cult’, he adds. We then turn to ‘fake meat’: is lab-grown food the future? Anthony Browne, a Conservative MP and chair of the Environment APPG makes the case in this week’s magazine, and is joined on the episode by Olivia Potts, The Spectator’s vintage chef and co-host of our Table Talk podcast.

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