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 current row about how Oxford University should be governed illustrates two problems of our culture. The first is about how institutions work. The modernisers want organisations to work more purposefully, and they are right. But the traditionalists are suspicious of reforms which separate the people who know about the content of their institution from
‘It’s a milestone round his neck’, I heard a football manager saying on the Today programme. ‘It’s a milestone round his neck’, I heard a football manager saying on the Today programme. It was not what he meant to say, but it seems apposite to my own case, since I am writing this on my
There is a yet another plan to reform the House of Lords, getting rid of lots of life peers, proposing partial direct election and, as always with these ideas, the fuller representation of ethnic minorities. Commentators and politicians may be tempted to look at these plans ‘on their merits’ and go through them minutely. This
These notes are being written on 17 October, the day when, at the invitation of the History Matters campaign, we are all supposed to keep a diary for a day. Like Tom Lehrer on National Brotherhood Week, ‘Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year.’ We are overwhelmed with diaries. The politicians’ ones are the
From time to time, the parliamentary lobby journalists invite us to admire a particular politician. Minister X or shadow minister Y is suddenly presented as quite intensely able etc. For some time, Hilary Benn, the International Development Secretary, has occupied this enviable position. Has anyone any idea why? Obviously he is less mad and vain
Bournemouth The current Tory position on tax cuts is rather like the doctrine of the Trinity. It makes no sense unless you know the questions that lie behind it. It is not really a position about tax cuts, but a position about how to go into an election campaign. In 2001, Oliver Letwin was chased
Richard Dawkins is an evangelical. The cover of this book, with its red explosion and large writing, reminds one of those popular volumes by Protestant pastors which purport to prove that JESUS IS ALIVE. Dawkins has all the fervour and anger of such persons, and their well-meaning puzzlement that so many cannot see what to
Juba, Southern Sudan A columnist in the English-language Khartoum Monitor has it right. Under the headline ‘Blair; prove to us this is yogurt, not hot soup’, Mohamed Osman Adam reflects on the Egyptian saying that ‘he who has been burned by a hot soup, will blow at a bowl of yogurt’. His argument is about
Because of what John Prescott calls the ‘dustbin of last week’, we now know that a new leader of the Labour party will be elected this year or next. This will be only the second time in history that a Labour leader will have been chosen while the party has been in office. The first
Last week I discovered that I have to have two separate checks made on me by the Criminal Records Bureau. One is because I am a trustee of a charity which works with children. The other is because I sometimes serve at the altar at Mass and therefore come into contact with children who do
Perhaps it will take allegations of ball-tampering to focus on the role of Pakistan in modern British life. There is a certain sort of upholder of national sovereignty who thinks that ethnic and religious problems can be solved if only the national borders are shaped to reflect the divisions. The British partition of India surely
As the conflict deepens in the Lebanon, the word on many lips is ‘proportionality’. Israel keeps being told that her actions are ‘disproportionate’. Proportionality is, indeed, a key moral concept in wars, but how is it to be calculated? The question becomes more complicated in an age in which opponents often prefer terrorism to formal
Writing this column in 90˚F heat on the edge of a normally bleak and chill Yorkshire moor, I reflect on the relationship between political culture and weather. Montesquieu, who attributed great importance to climate and geography in the political spirit of nations, thought that heat contributed to despotism, suppressing the active disposition of a people.
Because everyone can see that the government can no longer do anything worth doing, there is a widespread assumption that its days are numbered. But this is a non sequitur. In the past, Labour governments could do things only in the short gap between their election victory and their sterling crisis. Conservative governments had a
This week, an alliance of bodies concerned about ‘heritage’, led by the National Trust and including English Heritage and the National Heritage Memorial Fund, launched a campaign called History Matters. It is designed to ‘raise awareness of the importance of history in our lives’, with the strong implication that our public culture — and our
A listener to the BBC on Tuesday might have concluded that the Palestinians were about to recognise the state of Israel. This was because, as I heard on the PM programme, it said so. But then it was over to Jeremy Bowen in Jerusalem. He spoke excitedly of ‘movement’ but explained that he had not
As a parent of GCSE children, I now see clearly that modern education has abolished the summer term. In all the teenage years except the first, there are public exams to be done. These are spread out, beginning in May, and are pretty much finished this week. The run-up to them is dominated by the
Major Bruce Shand, father of the Duchess of Cornwall, who died at the weekend, was a man of great charm. He had a very attractive combination of enough confidence to put you at your ease and enough diffidence not to seem arrogant. In old age he had a lovely, interesting, funny face — creased, like
Isn’t it time now that the Conservatives fulfilled their new leader’s pledge. Although we send 250 police in search of possible terrorists in east London, our government takes a completely opposite attitude to the subject whenever it’s Irish. After the IRA was involved in the murder of Robert McCartney and the robbery of the Northern
As a political scandal rolls on, people always seem to fasten on the wrong reason why the minister concerned should resign. It is surely good news that John Prescott and his team were playing croquet at Dorneywood on a Thursday afternoon. What has happened to our traditional admiration for finishing the game and beating the