Charles Moore

Charles Moore

Sunday

31 May 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

Will Lady Hale stand against China’s dictatorship?

If China imposes its proposed new draconian security law for Hong Kong on the territory, where would that leave the independent judiciary? So far, genuine independence has been maintained, and Geoffrey Ma, the Chief Justice of the Court of Final Appeal (CFA), has spoken up for proper legal values. But he retires soon, and Beijing, which has not previously interfered, has the power of appointment.  The CFA has on it, at any one time, one ‘nonpermanent’ overseas judge out of an active body of ten, on a monthly annual rotation. These judges are mainly British, and always include the President of our Supreme Court (currently Lord Reed), as well as several retired Supreme Court judges. The most famous is Lady Hale, of the spider brooch.

Will Lady Hale stand against China’s dictatorship?

Thursday

28 May 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

The ferocious bias against Dominic Cummings

At Dominic Cummings’s press conference on Monday, reporters tried two lines of attack. One was to behave like local detectives, fixating on exact details of the Cummings family journey to Barnard Castle, such as why the car had stopped en route (answer: so that the Cummingses’ son, aged four, could have a pee). The other was to invoke viewers, readers, members of the public blind with fury that there was ‘one law’ for government bigwigs, and ‘another’ for everyone else. Yet Mr Cummings’s statement and answers made a good case that there had not been ‘one law’ for him, but that he had the ‘reasonable excuse’ that the law permits for everyone, given the needs of his son. His central case held up, yet most of the media would not accept this.

The ferocious bias against Dominic Cummings

Thursday

21 May 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

Cambridge University is kowtowing to China

Last month, writing elsewhere, I quoted the website of the China Centre at Jesus College, Cambridge: ‘Under the leadership of the Communist party of China since 1978, [China] has experienced an extraordinary transformation… China’s national rejuvenation is returning the country to the position within the global political economy that it occupied before the 19th century.’ The tone sounded propagandist not academic. This month, all mention of the Chinese Communist party disappeared from the China Centre home page. Now the Centre says it concentrates on ‘mutual understanding between China and the West’, contributing to ‘harmonious global governance’, which should be ‘non-ideological and pragmatic’. We must meet ‘global challenges’ together, says Jesus (the college, not the religious leader), such as ‘health pandemics, species extinction, global warming, inequality of income and wealth’ etc.

Cambridge University is kowtowing to China

Thursday

14 May 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

Mixed messaging is good for us

A friend, a senior retired mandarin, emails. He complains that rural lockdown means that he and his wife have ‘got out of the habit of making even the simplest decisions’. I know exactly what he means, and I suspect the problem is more widespread than the shires. The capacity to decide is like a muscle: if it is not exercised, it quickly atrophies. This may explain why some people are so querulous at the suggestion of Boris Johnson that they should now, given the declining rate of infection and death from Covid-19, decide whether to go back to work. They complain of ‘mixed messaging’, instead of the clear earlier instruction to stay at home. But the messages of normal life are mixed, and rightly so. One has to decide whether to spend more or less time with one’s family, whether to borrow a lot or a little to buy a house, whether to do something dangerous, such as motorcycle racing, or safer, such as crochet, and so on.

Mixed messaging is good for us

Sunday

10 May 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

We should heed the world’s warnings about China

Mathias Döpfner is that still rare thing — an outspoken German. I have known him slightly for many years and admire his brain and boldness: a long time ago he even came close to buying the Telegraph Group. The 6ft 7in CEO of Axel Springer has just issued a challenge to Europe and particularly to his own country. In an article published on Sunday, he told Germany that it must stop dithering and choose. The coronavirus, he says, has brought out the great danger the Chinese Communist party presents to the West. If Germany does not lead the EU to side with the United States (and with post-Brexit Britain, Australia etc) European businesses will be snapped up by post-Covid China and Europe could ‘suffer a similar fate to Africa, on a gradual descent towards becoming a Chinese colony’.

We should heed the world’s warnings about China

Saturday

9 May 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

Spare a thought for undertakers during this pandemic

Our neighbour, the much-respected local undertaker, conducted twice as many funerals in April as in the same month last year. One might be tempted to say ‘It’s an ill wind…’, but in fact it has been grim, both from a professional and a human point of view. ‘We have had,’ he says — with a double meaning he notices only after he has said it — ‘to think outside the box.’ Coffins are in short supply, ‘unless people want the willow or bamboo’. With no new traditional wooden ones available until early June, he has had to get in cardboard versions as a back-up. The firm is not allowed to provide many of the aspects in which it takes pride — the embalming, the viewing, the limousines, the dignified bearing of the coffin in and out of a crowded church, all of which help comfort families.

Spare a thought for undertakers during this pandemic

Thursday

7 May 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

Sweden and Britain are not the same

Mathias Döpfner is that still rare thing — an outspoken German. I have known him slightly for many years and admire his brain and boldness: a long time ago he even came close to buying the Telegraph Group. The 6ft 7in CEO of Axel Springer has just issued a challenge to Europe and particularly to his own country. In an article published on Sunday, he told Germany that it must stop dithering and choose. The coronavirus, he says, has brought out the great danger the Chinese Communist party presents to the West. If Germany does not lead the EU to side with the United States (and with post-Brexit Britain, Australia etc) European businesses will be snapped up by post-Covid China and Europe could ‘suffer a similar fate to Africa, on a gradual descent towards becoming a Chinese colony’.

Sweden and Britain are not the same

Saturday

2 May 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

Four questions we should be asking about coronavirus

The coronavirus came to Britain a little later than to many comparable European countries. We are emerging from the worst of it correspondingly later. I am told that ministers and officials do not yet have a systematic way of studying the successes and failures of those chronologically ahead of us. Surely there should be one. How is Denmark’s school opening going? Is the low-key Swedish approach to the virus working, or New Zealand’s sudden reopening? Is Italy, from whose disaster we tried to learn on the way in, making the right moves to head out? Which states in the USA are doing the right thing? This article is an extract from Charles Moore’s Spectator Notes, available in this week’s magazine.

Four questions we should be asking about coronavirus

Friday

1 May 2020

Thursday

30 Apr 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

Good news for the Jewish Chronicle

During the second world war, the collection of the National Gallery had to be hidden in a mountain in Wales to prevent bomb damage. Its director, Kenneth Clark, eventually realised, however, that this was bad for morale, and so made a single but striking exception. Starting with Rembrandt’s ‘Portrait of Margaretha Trip’, which the gallery had just acquired, he ensured that each month one famous painting would be on display in an alcove at the top of the main staircase. ‘Picture of the Month’ proved tremendously popular, almost a pilgrimage site. In the time of Covid-19, the gallery is closed once more, but now the danger is not to paintings but to people. Obviously this has been partly remedied by the virtual tours offered by the gallery (and by many other collections), but wouldn’t it be nice to find a way of achieving some direct human contact? How about selling lottery tickets in which the winners — up to, say, six people who do not have to distance from one another — would be given a guided tour of the gallery by its learned director, Gabriele Finaldi? This could be live-streamed, so that watching millions could enjoy it.

Good news for the Jewish Chronicle

Thursday

23 Apr 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

The secrets of The Spectator’s success

Although I once edited this paper, and have written for it for almost 40 years, I did not know that it is the oldest magazine in the world. I learn this from 10,000 Not Out, David Butterfield’s short but scholarly new history of the paper from its foundation in 1828 to today. I wonder why it has survived. Here, more or less at random, are aspects emerging from the past 10,000 issues. • The paper began with ‘News of the Week’ and continues — in much crisper form — with ‘Portrait of the Week’ to this day. From time to time, this has been dropped, but the paper has mysteriously suffered as a result. The same applies to the leading article. Neither feature is among the best-read of the paper, yet both somehow guarantee it: news and comment first; book reviews after.

The secrets of The Spectator’s success

Sunday

19 Apr 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

Should medics be hassling old people with ‘do not resuscitate’ forms?

A neighbour of ours, self-isolating and with poor lung function, has twice been telephoned recently by the medical authorities. After pleasant preliminaries about her health, both callers muttered something about ‘If the worst happened and you did become ill’. So she cut through: ‘Are we getting round to DNR [Do Not Resuscitate]?’ They admitted as much. My neighbour told them she did want to be resuscitated. Yes, medics might want to know these preferences, but is it right to chase old people living compulsorily alone? It casts a chill, as does the waiter who stands over you and says: ‘Have you finished yet?’ This article is an extract from Charles Moore's Spectator Notes, available in this week's magazine

Should medics be hassling old people with ‘do not resuscitate’ forms?

Thursday

16 Apr 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

Covid-19 is giving me hyper-focus on the beauty of spring

We know, because of the lack of widespread testing, that incidences of Covid-19 are under-reported. What is less well known is that they may be over-reported as a cause of death. In hospices and in care homes, I gather, where tests are not available, doctors are encouraged, if in doubt, to write ‘suspected Covid‑19’ on 1A of the death certificate, as the ‘primary cause’ of death. They do not wish to be accused of underplaying it. But they do not know they are right, because there have been no tests. A cough and a temperature can be enough to secure a Covid diagnosis, yet the cough could have many causes and the temperature could have come from sepsis. At the time of writing, our daily death figures are only hospital deaths.

Covid-19 is giving me hyper-focus on the beauty of spring

Sunday

12 Apr 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

How the Queen helped my friend with coronavirus

I now have several friends who have caught the virus. Some barely noticed; some nearly died. In the latter category is Nicholas Coleridge, doyen of the world of glossy magazines. He was taken to hospital in Worcester delirious (‘I got loonier and loonier’) and stayed for 12 days. A doctor gravely warned his wife Georgia, who also had it, of ‘the possibility of his demise’. The worst aspects, he tells me, are its speed, feeling very hot or very cold, and that ‘something invasive and dirty is finding its way into all parts of your body’. There is also the fear that it lingers. Nick received excellent medical treatment, and a lovely letter from the Prince of Wales. His oddest hospital experience was that when he asked nurses for a jigsaw puzzle, no one knew what that was.

How the Queen helped my friend with coronavirus

Thursday

9 Apr 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

The problems of a sick prime minister

It is good of President Trump to offer Boris Johnson his best wishes and the best American pharmaceuticals (though no doubt Jeremy Corbyn would see this as a prelude to American takeover of the National Health Service). During the second world war, on Boxing Day 1941, Churchill had a minor heart attack after trying too hard to force open a window while staying at the White House. He had addressed the joint Houses of Congress earlier that day. Churchill’s doctor, Moran, did not inform President Roosevelt. In February 1943, however, when he knew Churchill had pneumonia, Roosevelt wrote to him: ‘Please, please, for the sake of the world, don’t overdo these days. You must remember that it takes about a month of occasional let-ups to get back your full strength.

The problems of a sick prime minister

Sunday

5 Apr 2020

Saturday

4 Apr 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

Perhaps we are all communists now

‘I am a columnist for the Daily Telegraph,’ I began a text message to an NHS executive last week. Due to predictive text, the word ‘columnist’ was replaced by ‘communist’. Luckily, I spotted it just in time to delete. But perhaps the error was accurate. Some say we have all come to see the virtue of massive state control. Perhaps we are all communists now, even on the Daily Telegraph, accepting Jeremy Corbyn’s self-assessment that he has been proved right. For a heady moment, it might seem to be the case, but the more one ponders Mr Corbyn’s claim, the odder it sounds. He seems to think that the policies now introduced because of Covid-19 would have been the right ones even if there had been no emergency at all.

Perhaps we are all communists now

Sunday

29 Mar 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

Police must be flexible when enforcing social distancing rules

One recognises the need for firm rules about social distancing and other measures to control the coronavirus spread; but one should also recognise the need to keep things going. We rightly hail the NHS workers. We should also applaud the tremendously efficient businesses which continue to supply grocers’ shops and pharmacies. Given the difficulties and sudden demands, I am amazed by how well these markets are holding up. What on earth would Covid-19 have been like if it had arrived in pre-internet days? The authorities should themselves recognise difference of circumstances and adjust the rules accordingly as things change over the coming weeks.  Take the construction industry. It is obvious that large numbers of workers congregating for major building projects in cities will not be able to work without breaking the rules of social distancing.

Police must be flexible when enforcing social distancing rules

Saturday

28 Mar 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

The psychological and economic dangers of enforced idleness

‘Lourdes shrine closes healing pools as precaution against coronavirus,’ says a discouraging headline in the Catholic Herald. Jesus ‘made the lame to run’ and ‘gave the blind their sight’, but Christians are not like Jesus, however much they may try to imitate him. We lack miraculous powers; and so, in matters of life and death (though not of the afterlife), we must defer to the civil power. On Tuesday, our neighbour rang for my wife, who is a churchwarden, and asked: ‘Shall I open the church as usual this morning?’ After some rummaging on the diocesan website, she found that the answer, following Boris Johnson’s broadcast the night before, was ‘No’. The same applies to the Catholic church I attend. Once the virus was spreading and until the Prime Minister’s broadcast, there were no services of any kind, but a chapel had been open for prayer in front of the Tabernacle.

The psychological and economic dangers of enforced idleness

Sunday

22 Mar 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

Blitz spirit won’t work against coronavirus

Boris Johnson gave a sort of permission for Mr Sunak’s policy when he said that he and the Chancellor were acting ‘like any wartime government’. Economically, that is surely right. Socially, however, the Blitz spirit won’t work this time.  In 1940, men were happy to gather in their clubs and pubs, as the bombs fell, to drink, gossip and enjoy one another’s company. Church congregations rose substantially. The war brought people together. The fight against the coronavirus unavoidably drives us apart.  This week, Boris effectively closed most drinking and eating places and the Archbishops of Canterbury and York suspended all services. Boarding and state schools have closed. Many families will spend more time together, but most friends and colleagues much less.

Blitz spirit won’t work against coronavirus

Saturday

21 Mar 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

Coronavirus has even kept the sex-strikers at home

When we left this Britain on Thursday last week, life was almost as usual. Shops and restaurants were open. The Battle Observer was reporting that environmentalists, angry that East Sussex County Council’s pension funds are invested in fossil fuels, were organising a one-day protest demanding a ‘sex strike’. No one, they insisted, must have sexual intercourse with any of the county’s 50 elected councillors ‘until they agree to stop funding climate change’. As a campaign, this latter-day reworking of Lysistrata had the merit that most people would probably agree to its conditions, whatever their views on climate change. We returned home on Monday, however, to read that the protest had collapsed. Faced with the onrush of Covid-19, even the zealous green sex-strikers were daunted, and did not turn up outside Lewes town hall.

Coronavirus has even kept the sex-strikers at home

Sunday

15 Mar 2020

Saturday

14 Mar 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

Coronavirus is a metaphor for our vulnerability over Huawei

Monday night’s Commons rebellion over Huawei was on a surprisingly serious scale for a new government with a big mandate. The problem for the government is not just the actual danger of our security being breached by Huawei, real though that is. It is also strategic. The government is not treating the subject this way, but sees it as merely a matter for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. This is a bad mistake. We have achieved Brexit. We are making our own way in the world. Our closest allies in terms of trust, language, cultural links, democratic values and shared interests are our four partner nations in the ‘Five Eyes’ deep intelligence partnership — the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Coronavirus is a metaphor for our vulnerability over Huawei

Sunday

8 Mar 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

The ugliness of carbon zero

The government is trying to get onshore windfarms going again, defying the damage they do to unique environments. I am perplexed by how its zero-carbon policies can be reconciled with its wider economic aims of ‘levelling up’ or of fostering a beautiful environment. It is an odd fact that Greens can be extremely hostile to the natural world when it gets in their way. Announcing the above story, the BBC’s environment analyst, Roger Harrabin, informed listeners that the wind turbines could go on ‘empty moorland’ in Scotland and Ireland. Empty? A friend points out that such moors contain ‘snipe, golden plover, red grouse, merlin, pippits, skylarks, short-eared owls, wheatears, stonechat, wrens and curlew’ and there will be ‘several varieties of heather, honeydew, tormentil, rowan, eyebright, many moths and dragonflies, bees, common lizard, mountain hare, red deer and much more’.

The ugliness of carbon zero

Saturday

7 Mar 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

The ugliness of zero-carbon

The government is trying to get onshore windfarms going again, defying the damage they do to unique environments. I am perplexed by how its zero-carbon policies can be reconciled with its wider economic aims of ‘levelling up’ or of fostering a beautiful environment. It is an odd fact that Greens can be extremely hostile to the natural world when it gets in their way. Announcing the above story, the BBC’s environment analyst, Roger Harrabin, informed listeners that the wind turbines could go on ‘empty moorland’ in Scotland and Ireland. Empty? A friend points out that such moors contain ‘snipe, golden plover, red grouse, merlin, pippits, skylarks, short-eared owls, wheatears, stonechat, wrens and curlew’ and there will be ‘several varieties of heather, honeydew, tormentil, rowan, eyebright, many moths and dragonflies, bees, common lizard, mountain hare, red deer and much more’.

The ugliness of zero-carbon

Saturday

29 Feb 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

Jean Vanier’s sad fall from grace

The fall from grace of Jean Vanier is truly a sad story. The founder of the L’Arche communities did extraordinary work, practical, intellectual and spiritual, to advance the idea that those suffering mental handicap had much to teach the rest of us. His was a radical idea about what community can be. Now, however, L’Arche has accepted a report that Vanier, who died last year, had sexual contact with six women from the 1970s onwards. There is no suggestion of any exploitation of the handicapped. Unlike so many claims in abuse cases, these ones seem to have been carefully investigated. The women (all adults) were his devoted followers. Vanier appears to have told them that by getting close to him they would also get closer to God.

Jean Vanier’s sad fall from grace

Saturday

22 Feb 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

The perils of owning an erotic Nazi toy

My parents told me that their wartime childhoods were punctuated by the expression: ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ It was used as an excuse for not attending to something urgent. The modern equivalent is the phrase ‘climate emergency’ (leading to ‘extreme weather events’). This emergency is supposedly so great that billions have to be spent on it annually, leaving little time and money for actual emergencies, e.g. floods. The stupidity of XR digging up the lawn outside the gate of Trinity College, Cambridge, needs no further comment. The event does bring home our cultural change. Shortly before I went up to Trinity in the mid-1970s, a few young bloods drove some ducks up from the Backs at dawn. Then they put them up and shot them as they flew above the roofs of Great Court.

The perils of owning an erotic Nazi toy

Saturday

15 Feb 2020
Charles Moore
Charles Moore

Does anyone really think HS2 will be good for the country?

How depressed should one be about the HS2 go-ahead? The cost is stupefying. The offering to the north — considered so important politically — seems to be unappealing to plenty of northerners and, like a parody of British railway late arrivals, won’t reach its destination until the mid-2030s. Worse, perhaps, is the sense, especially when seen in conjunction with the Huawei go-ahead, that the government is already trapped by the past. It reminds me of Theresa May’s decision to review the Hinkley Point C programme and then let it go ahead after all. In that case, as in that of Huawei, the government reluctantly concluded it could not get out of a troubling China deal sealed in the Cameron/Osborne era. In the case both of HS2 and Hinkley Point, the radical views of the most important political advisers — Dominic Cummings today and Nick Timothy then — were overruled by entrenched interests.

Does anyone really think HS2 will be good for the country?
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