Charles Moore

Charles Moore

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.

For millennials, pre-Thatcher Britain must seem another — quite mystifying — country

Lymeswold; Hi-de-Hi!; nuclear-free zones; Walkmans; the Metro; Red Robbo; the SDP; Michael Foot’s Cenotaph donkey-jacket; Protest and Survive; Steve Davis and Hurricane Higgins; Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett; hunger strikes; Red Ken and Fare’s Fair; ‘On your bike’; Lady Diana; ‘hog-whimpering drunk’; Chariots of Fire; Beefy Botham; ‘The lady’s not for turning’; the Peterborough Effect;

There’s nothing wrong with Rees-Mogg lying down in the Commons

In the debate on Tuesday, the standard of speaking was high. As well as Jacob Rees-Mogg, Ken Clarke, Anna Soubry, Nick Boles, Liam Fox and David Cameron’s replacement in Witney, Robert Courts, were all excellent. On the whole, the rebels were the more eloquent, as rebels usually are. Their one false note, however, was that of

It makes sense for the over-75s to pay the licence fee

Dorothy Byrne, Channel 4’s head of news, last week told the Edinburgh television festival: ‘Here is what we all need to decide: what do we do when a known liar becomes our prime minister?’ Yet she is surprised when Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn — both of whom she calls ‘cowards’ — do not come

What would George Orwell make of Brexit?

In the London Review of Books this month, James Meek wrote a long article about Jacob Rees-Mogg and his ‘curious duality’ in being both a high Catholic, fogey Brexiteer and a founder of Somerset Capital Management, which the author sees as globalist and ruthless. The piece is elegantly done, but entirely sneery. It makes not the slightest

The royals should embody virtue – not signal it

ONE should not be censorious if the Duke and Duchess of Sussex fly in private jets to their holidays, though one cannot help laughing when they combine this with exhortations to save the planet. There is, sadly, no royal yacht nowadays (a new one would be a good make-work scheme post-Brexit), and we are not

Give Hong Kongers real security: a British passport

We seem to be building up to a second Tiananmen Square, 30 years after the first. This time the venue is Hong Kong. As then, the Chinese government longs to kill protestors, but it hesitates because it fears global reaction. It therefore matters greatly that the ‘rules-based international order’ strongly assert that breaking the 1984

The Spectator’s Notes | 15 August 2019

We seem to be building up to a second Tiananmen Square, 30 years after the first. This time the venue is Hong Kong. As then, the Chinese government longs to kill protestors, but it hesitates because it fears global reaction. It therefore matters greatly that the ‘rules-based international order’ strongly assert that breaking the 1984

Dominic Grieve’s Cummings-induced delirium

It is a good tactic of Dominic Cummings to make fearful but off-the-record noises about how a Johnson government might handle parliament in the next few weeks. He smokes out the ever more extreme notions of the other side without actually committing the government to any course other than leaving on 31 October. A tendency

The Spectator’s Notes | 8 August 2019

Who wrote ‘Our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country … creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly over-harvesting resources … the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people,

The inconvenient truth about the El Paso shooter

Who wrote ‘Our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country… creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly over-harvesting resources… the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our

The ambiguity of the woke businessman

The woke businessman, like the woke prince and princess, is an ambiguous figure. Being woke, after all, involves a contempt for profits and big business, as for social hierarchy. I first noticed this uneasy phenomenon many years ago when I attended a lunch in the City at which Paul Polman, the then chief executive of Unilever,

The Spectator’s Notes | 1 August 2019

In his very long letter to Jeremy Corbyn about why, after all, he will stay out of the Labour party instead of fighting his expulsion, Alastair Campbell complains that Britain has been the victim of a ‘right-wing coup’. Boris Johnson’s government has no ‘real democratic mandate’, he says, and Mr Corbyn should be fighting it

Who are the real swivel-eyed loons in the Tory party?

‘No great surprise’ headlined the BBC television news on Tuesday lunchtime. The BBC does not admit it now, but it has been extremely surprised by Boris’s success, as have most senior Conservatives. They wrote him off at least twice — first when Michael Gove stabbed him after the referendum; second, when he resigned from Mrs May’s

The Spectator’s notes | 25 July 2019

‘No great surprise’ headlined the BBC television news on Tuesday lunchtime. The BBC does not admit it now, but it has been extremely surprised by Boris’s success, as have most senior Conservatives. They wrote him off at least twice — first when Michael Gove stabbed him after the referendum; second, when he resigned from Mrs May’s

The Spectator’s Notes | 18 July 2019

Seventy-five years ago on Saturday, the July plot failed. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg placed a bomb in a briefcase next to Hitler in the conference room of the Wolf’s Lair, but someone moved the briefcase a little. When the bomb detonated, the heavy conference table shielded Hitler from the blast. Stauffenberg and many other

The Spectator’s Notes | 11 July 2019

When I last talked to Sir Kim Darroch, he was a slim young private secretary, so it was a long time ago; but I can categorically state that President Trump is wrong to call him ‘wacky and a very stupid guy’. His particular sort of mandarin ‘Rolls-Royce mind’ intelligence does, however, amount to a form