Charles Moore is The Spectator’s chairman.
He is a former editor of the magazine, as well as the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Telegraph. He became a non-affiliated peer in July 2020.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
When Tim Parker announced his resignation as chairman of the National Trust last week, it was a first. Since it was founded in 1895, the Trust has endured many controversies, but until now the shared acceptance of its founding purposes has seen it through. The very first meeting proposed a body ‘for the holding of
It is poetically fitting that the resignation of the chairman of the National Trust, Tim Parker, was announced on the first anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. The collective mistakes that have so damaged the Trust’s reputation were bound up in the rush of many institutions to ‘take the knee’, metaphorically and literally. Immensely
We are being urged — and, in some cases, paid — by the government to plant more trees. Actually, this happens most years. I can even remember ‘Plant a tree in ’73. Plant one more in ’74’. It is a bit like saying ‘Have more babies’, without any provision for their care once born. It
This week, the Church of England issued its document ‘Contested Heritage in Cathedrals and Churches’. It is guidance for what those locally running more than 12,000 churches should do about their monuments ‘to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and pursue peace and reconciliation’ and address ‘the Church’s own complicity
There should be more ‘religious literacy’. So says the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Religion in the Media, chaired by Yasmin Qureshi MP. Amen to that. Religious ignorance is now virtually universal, so errors appear in news stories every day. But the APPG report seems less concerned with facts, more with attitudes. It wants news to
Like almost everyone else writing on the subject, I have no idea whether Boris Johnson told colleagues in October that he would rather ‘let the bodies pile high in their thousands’ than have another lockdown. When such words are reported, they are given to journalists ‘on lobby terms’ and are therefore unattributable. But surely the
Like almost everyone else writing on the subject, I have no idea whether Boris Johnson told colleagues in October that he would rather ‘let the bodies pile high in their thousands’ than have another lockdown. When such words are reported, they are given to journalists ‘on lobby terms’ and are therefore unattributable. But surely the
The conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd makes last summer’s Black Lives Matter mania in British institutions look even stranger. The British Museum, Oxbridge colleges, Sir Keir Starmer, football teams, government departments, Kew Gardens, the National Trust and numerous corporations indulged in various forms of self-abasement. Some ‘took the knee’. At
