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.
‘Paul Johnson has killed Gordon Brown.’ This news was brought recently to Tessa Jowell, Anji Hunter, Margaret Jay and other Labour luminaries gathered in the Sabine hills near Rome. Shocked, they reached for their BlackBerries to find out more and make arrangements to fly home. Luckily, matters were quickly explained. After Mr Brown’s failure to
How strange that Gordon Brown’s suggestion this week that MPs should have no say in setting their own pay is being welcomed as a curb on sleaze. If their pay is to be set, as is proposed, by a government-funded agency instead of by their own votes, MPs will cease to be independent legislators and
It would be a lie to say that I feel sorry for the Tory MEPs who have been attacked for paying their staff allowances to companies of which they or members of their family are members, but they are not the most at fault. Giles Chichester, for example, and Den Dover, did at least follow
Never having watched Jonathan Ross, I have no opinion as to whether he is worth £18 million over three years, which is what the BBC is said to pay him. But the news that the BBC Trust had just reported that the BBC was not distorting the market with its huge payments to such stars
Outside the Joint Support Unit HQ here stands a cross rising from a mound of cobbles. On each of the four sides of the mound is set a brass plate for the names of those British soldiers who have died in Afghanistan. The second of the four plates is almost full. At the precise moment
When it was announced in 1999 that Cherie Blair was pregnant, the controversy about the proposed hunting ban was at its height. I discussed the pregnancy at a hunt tea with the terrier-man. ‘It won’t be a baby,’ he predicted sullenly, ‘It’ll be a two-headed calf.’ Actually, it was dear little Leo. Now, in the
The growing power of Islam in Britain has forced the British public to learn more about its component parts — Sunnis and Shiites, Deobandis and Barelwis, and so on. By the same token, I feel it is time for a more thorough understanding of Etonians as they start their reconquista of our country. They divide
If, when you read this, Boris Johnson is the Mayor of London, it will, I have just discovered, be thanks to me. When the idea of Boris’s candidacy was first suggested, I spoke on the telephone to Mary Wakefield, who is now the deputy editor of The Spectator. What did I think of Boris for
Charles Moore’s reflections on the week Actually, there never was much sense in a ten pence rate of income tax. It added complication, and Gordon Brown is right to get rid of it, though wrong to charge income tax on people so low on the income scale. But you cannot help laughing when you look at
Charles Moore’s reflections on the week When informed that this was to be The Spectator’s English Special Issue, I happened to be reading a novel by John Buchan called Midwinter. It concerns an unsuccessful attempt by a young Highland laird, Alastair Maclean, to raise English Jacobites for Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745. Like most Buchan novels,
The opinions of the Sun newspaper are not noted for nuance, so it has been interesting to follow its unusually careful choice of words about the Olympic torch on its way to China. On Monday, under the headline ‘Freedom Wins’, the leading article called the fact that the torch managed, though with difficulty, to continue
The opinions of the Sun newspaper are not noted for nuance, so it has been interesting to follow its unusually careful choice of words about the Olympic torch on its way to China. On Monday, under the headline ‘Freedom Wins’, the leading article called the fact that the torch managed, though with difficulty, to continue
If Boris Johnson wins the contest to become Mayor of London on 1 May, he will not inherit an impartial civil service of the sort to which British national politicians are accustomed. There has only been one Mayor of London so far and he, Ken Livingstone, has made sure that London officials reflect his views.
For some weeks, I was thinking of writing against the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, but despair crept over me. What is the point, I asked myself, when opinion seems to have moved so decisively against the idea that a human being is an inviolable entity? Nothing will stop this Bill, I thought. Now it
The huge defeat of the Conservative party in the election of 1997 drove the party back into its rural and suburban redoubts and so cut it off from many things which were happening in Britain. It did not want to think about the rise of political Islam. This opting out was part of a wider
In the cut and thrust of debate, David Cameron won easily against the Chancellor in the Budget battle. In the cut and thrust of debate, David Cameron won easily against the Chancellor in the Budget battle. He was crisp and effective. But Alistair Darling did not attempt thrust and certainly will not cut. The fact
The battle over the evaded referendum on the Lisbon treaty seems to be following the pattern of all European arguments in this country. The pro-integrationists have used the favourite tactic of claiming that it is all a fuss about nothing. The treaty, they say, is technical, too boring to be worth discussing (although also, mysteriously,
This is what Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England says: ‘That individual members should not be called to account for their behaviour in Parliament, or for words there spoken, by any authority external to the house in which the offence was given, seems to be the essential safeguard of freedom of debate. It was the boon
The United Nations declared last week that, for the first time in human history, more people in the world live in the town than in the country. If true, this feels momentous, though it is not, obviously, sudden. The imagination of mankind has been shaped by rural life more than by anything else, but this
Entering my name in the visitors’ book at the British Embassy in Paris last week, I saw, a couple of lines above, the signature ‘Tony Blair’. The ex-leader is in France a lot just now. Tony is very fond of President Nicolas Sarkozy, and vice versa. Tony is making it increasingly clear that he would