The Spectator's Notes

Everyone seems to agree that it is better for royal personages to be open if they have cancer. It helps thousands of other sufferers and their families. But nowadays sheer necessity is part of it: the omnipresent video evidence of the monarch’s daily life makes it unavoidable that people will notice physical changes. This applies to our present King. In her recent biography, George VI and Elizabeth, Sally Bedell Smith gives an excellent account of the illness of George VI, which probably began in 1949 and killed him in February 1952. Even in those days, people did begin to notice. She quotes Harold Nicolson, as early as March 1950, hearing from Paddy Leigh Fermor that the King, at an investiture, had to be ‘heavily made up with sun tan and rouge’ to conceal the pallor of the invalid.

Sitting in the Chamber late on Monday afternoon for the Lords debate on the UK-Rwanda treaty, I was impressed by the standard of oratory. Most of the best speeches came from those – Lords Goldsmith (the Labour one), Kerr of Kinlochard, Anderson of Ipswich – who argued that the treaty was not, in itself, proof of the government’s contention, which the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill seeks to turn into law, that Rwanda is now a safe country. Not for the first time, I felt an unease about how the government has got itself into this tight corner. But then up popped the Bishop of Gloucester: ‘I will just say,’ she just said, ‘that as Lord Bishops we take no party position… based on tribal loyalty and we are not whipped.

In June 2022, I interviewed Nikki Haley on stage for JW3, a Jewish organisation in north London. She was personable, clear, well-briefed and pleasingly normal, with the interesting exception of her Sikh background growing up in small-town South Carolina (she later became a Christian by conversion). Her conservatism seemed strongly felt, coherent and not extreme. I also liked her way – now highly unusual in US politics – of addressing foreign policy and setting it in the context of her general political beliefs. At that time, she was mulling the presidential bid she launched the following year. Today, after Iowa, she remains in the race, but only just. Why would such a presentable and decent person not be preferred to Donald Trump?

Obviously, one’s first instinct is to agree that parliament should step in and decree that all the hundreds of sub-postmasters convicted in the Post Office scandal should be exonerated without their appeals needing to be heard. But I suspect that instinct is wrong, for at least two reasons. The first is the precedent. These are individual criminal cases (though with strong common characteristics). If parliament feels it can interfere with such cases, it is usurping the process of law. Once MPs feel they can decide questions of individual guilt, where’s the end to it? Politicians cannot judge evidence to a legal standard. Justice will become politicised. The political proclamation of unproved innocence could be almost as noxious as that of unproved guilt.

In writing about the RedBird IMI bid for the Telegraph Group and The Spectator, its opponents – your columnist very much included – emphasise the danger that the real buyers, the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, could use their purchase to put political or commercial pressure on the British government. But there is also a danger the other way round. If Abu Dhabi owned the titles, I would not put it past any British government (of any party) to put pressure on the Arabs. ‘Look here,’ I can imagine some prime minister saying: ‘Of course, we’d like to sell you a stake in our power stations/electric vehicles/5G networks [or whatever], but it’s very difficult for us to help while you let your titles criticise us so unfairly.

Now that the government has triggered a public-interest intervention (PIIN), who will end up owning the Telegraph group, and this paper, after deliberations finish in late January? If it dismisses objections to the sale to the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, that family’s vehicle, RedBird IMI, takes control. A leading national newspaper and our most venerable British magazine are thus nationalised by an authoritarian Arab state. If the government rejects the Redbird IMI bid, in law the titles stay with the Barclay family (as they do right now, since the Barclays’ debt to Lloyds bank has been discharged, though under a ‘hold separate’ order which deprives the Barclays of executive power for the course of the investigation) with the consequent right to sell them.

At the end of last week, the Holodomor was commemorated in Britain. There was a service at Westminster Abbey. But the chief point to notice is that no important British government or opposition representatives appeared. Nor, with the honourable exception of Stephen Fry, did any of the celebrities who infest causes such as ‘Free Palestine’. Almost everyone knows, thank goodness, what the Holocaust was. But even now, although Vladimir Putin is trying a small-scale repeat, have most people heard of the Holodomor? (If you haven’t, read Anne Applebaum’s astonishing Red Famine.) It was the largely deliberate starvation of about four million Ukrainians by Stalin in 1932-33, bringing death at a rate rivalling even that of the Final Solution.

UK-China Transparency (UKCT) was formally launched this week (see Notes, 16 September). Its aim is in its name. There is sadly little transparency about UK-China dealings, especially in our universities. I first reported this problem early in 2020 when I investigated the behaviour of Jesus College, Cambridge, and its China Centre, run by the CCP apologist Professor Peter Nolan. It is probably not a coincidence that the three founders of UKCT – Sir Bernard Silverman, Martin Village and the young freelance reporter Sam Dunning – are all Jesus alumni. The more they looked, the more uncomfortable they became about their college’s advancement of CCP networking and propaganda and its role as the ramp for the courting of the Chinese regime by the whole of Cambridge University.

It was a story that Rishi Sunak was not saying what he would decide about the future of HS2. But was it the story? The BBC thought so. On Tuesday, Today’s reporting of the Conservative party conference consisted chiefly of Nick Robinson and Chris Mason gleefully commenting on how the Prime Minister was avoiding their HS2 questions. The explanation, which they chose not to recognise, was that he would have been idiotic to pre-empt his own conference speech on Wednesday. There he did announce his big HS2 change. The only other thing that interested Today, especially Robinson, who specialises in this theme, was that ‘the Tory right’ were being supported at the conference by GB News, partly in the form of its presenter Nigel Farage.

In March last year, when the bosses of Jesus College, Cambridge, lost their legal battle for a ‘faculty’ to take down the 17th-century memorial of the college’s benefactor, Tobias Rustat, because of slavery connections, from their college chapel, they did not appeal against the verdict of the ecclesiastical court. They knew they would not have won. But, as I mentioned at the time (26 March 2022), the Church of England high-ups, angry at their own heritage law, are not giving up. The latest biannual report of the Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice backs attempts to change the church’s faculty jurisdiction rules and promotes the 47 recommendations of From Lament to Action, by the commission’s anti-racism taskforce.

In 2014, Rolf Harris was convicted of sexual offences against girls. I wrote in this space that this would have represented more of a cultural change in the treatment of celebrities if he had been unmasked at the height of his fame. Current stars, I suggested, are much more rarely denounced: ‘I would not dream of suggesting that Russell Brand is a sex criminal, but we know, from his own account, that he has slept with a great many women.’ He had even, on his infamous Radio 2 show, boasted of sleeping with Andrew Sachs’s grand-daughter, yet ‘the BBC broadcast this as comedy’. ‘If the celebrity wheel of fortune ever went against Brand,’ I went on, ‘would it be surprising if some of the women decided to accuse him of “inappropriate” acts?

China is so obviously a ‘potential risk to UK safety or interests’ that if there is an ‘enhanced’ tier under our Foreign Influence Registration Scheme, China should be on it. We keep re-learning, but then forgetting, that China is always using covert means to extend its power over western countries, thereby undermining trust. Our government still cannot find the right words to express the problem because it is itself conflicted. This week, following the announcement of a possible infiltration of parliament, ministers tied themselves in knots over the difference between a ‘threat’ and a ‘challenge’. The truth is that China is both, and this should be officially said. Why, for example, does the government not tell us how Beijing’s United Front Work Department operates?

My long-standing theory of British general election results is that they are all deserved. This is true not just of big victories e.g. Labour in 1945 and 1997, the Conservatives in 1979 and 2019, but also of no-score draws, such as the two elections of 1974. In our system (though first-past-the-past sometimes exaggerates) the voters are, collectively, always right. Dare I turn this retrospective rule into a prediction? If I did, I would say that the Tories now deserve to lose, but that Labour does not deserve to win. Logic therefore demands a Labour lead but no overall majority. Small British charities and voluntary groups are doing such good work in Ukraine, but being discouraged, and sometimes refused charitable status, by the Charity Commission.

‘We must never hide anything,’ declared the director of the British Museum, Hartwig Fischer, three years ago, when criticised for disrespecting its greatest founding genius, Sir Hans Sloane, because, through marriage, he had profited from slave labour. Sloane’s Rysbrack bust was now to be presented, he said, ‘in the exploitative context of the British Empire’. So it would take a heart of stone not to laugh now that Dr Fischer has been forced to resign for failing to raise the alarm – even with his chairman, George Osborne – that hundreds of objects have disappeared from the museum’s collections through a long-standing inside job. He disparaged the exterior expert who had warned him of the thefts.

As is now well-known, Ulez (the ultra-low emission zone) will expand from 29 August, taking in suburban parts of Kent, Surrey, Essex, Herts. This fact gave Richard Lofthouse, an editor and motoring journalist, an idea. He has done much to help car4Ukraine.com, a volunteer group within Ukraine which seeks gifts of 4x4 pickups abroad and repurposes them to help the war effort. Some are armour-plated, for instance, and fitted with a gun turret at the back. Others can be turned into field ambulances, and so on. There is an endless need for wheels in Ukraine, the life of each pick-up ‘in theatre’ being a matter of weeks. As I write, nearly 300 such vehicles have been contributed, well over half from British donors.