Charles Moore

The organised hard left has moved fast after the fall of Jason Arday at Cambridge. They are furious with the Good Law Project for its open letter which still proclaims that ‘entirely false allegations of plagiarism were made against Professor Arday’. Instead of this absurd position, they are trying to control the narrative by quietly dumping those who appointed Arday. They want to save DEI by rebadging it. Hence their letter from 90 dons, publicly spoken for by Professors Nicholas Guyatt and Priyamvada Gopal. They know the Vice-Chancellor, Deborah Prentice, is vulnerable because an employment tribunal has just rejected her ‘ghosted’ evidence against a whistleblower in a university bullying case.

In my belated quest to develop a faint sense of what AI is doing, I have just read Sebastian Mallaby’s book The Infinity Machine, about the greatest British AI wizard, Demis Hassabis, boss of DeepMind. The numerous passages I did not understand are my fault, not Mallaby’s. The book is admirably lucid. All I can record, which may slightly help others dipping their toes in the shallow end, is two contradictory impressions. The first is of foreboding. When thinking about AI, we are talking as much about its human creators as about the machines themselves. These creators are almost all men (there are only four women in the book’s entire index), and a certain type of man at that. They resemble clever boys – especially American clever boys, even when they are not actually American.

Andy Burnham is right. The cost of living is foremost in people’s minds just now. Naturally his electricity bill VAT holiday and freeze of bus fares find agreement in television news vox pops and focus groups. But he offers no explanation for the causes and concentrates only on the symptoms. Obviously, the removal of the 5 per cent VAT will be nice for consumers. But underlying inflation today relates to government debauchery of money and disruptions of supply caused by Trump’s tariffs and his short war, by Putin’s long war and Ed Miliband’s net-zero trap, which makes us pay expensive green levies and bans new domestic fossil fuel production. The remedy does not lie in the 1970s-style pretence that things can be made cheaper by fiat.

The horrible murder of Ann Widdecombe is being used both by Reform and its critics as a means of fighting about everything they want to fight about. One example is discussion of the security of MPs, despite the fact that Miss Widdecombe left parliament 16 years ago. Is it impossible to wait until charge and trial, as used to be the rule? I suppose the simple answer is ‘Yes’. So much the worse for our country. A virtue-signalling Labour government worried by its own unpopularity also deploys something else, a toughness-signalling intended to placate the insurgent right. Take the case of the 73-year-old Shabir Ahmed, the Rochdale grooming gang leader, recently released from prison. Ministers loudly demand his deportation.

At about 2 p.m. on Tuesday, two cases with a common characteristic coincided. One was Nigel Farage’s long statement about why he would resign his seat to fight a by-election. The other was the defeat of the privacy action against the Daily Mail brought by Prince Harry and others. The link is not in content, but in attitude. In both cases, the main actors in the drama are paranoid and solipsistic. Mr Farage, trying to deflect questions about the men who give him money, spoke for about 20 minutes of the wrongs done him by the ‘Establishment’ and the media. He was particularly worked up about his security. The Prince’s case was that he had been intruded upon by dark and powerful media forces. It was all mixed up with his resentments against his father the King and his courtiers.

The British constitution is an admirably flexible thing, so I would not claim that Andy Burnham’s leadership campaign, and the coverage thereof, is unconstitutional, but it is certainly unseemly. Why did a BBC helicopter follow his train from Manchester to London (which arrived, of course, late) as if he were Lenin heading for the Finland Station? And why was he allowed to pre-empt his result with a mass selfie with about 200 of his supporting MPs in Westminster Hall? He is merely a new Member of Parliament, until he isn’t. Turning the place into his stage set is a way of intimidating possible challengers. If he is challenged, he will surely still become leader, but the point of a challenge is to force him to say what he means to do.

It is now retrospectively acknowledged that great harm was done by the refusal to investigate serious crimes and dangerous mental illness for fear of being branded racist – the grooming gangs, the Southport and Nottingham killings. No similar acknowledgment has been made about the handling of cases involving homosexuals. This week, Jamie Varley was convicted of murder, sexual assault, child cruelty and making and distributing indecent images. His victim was his own adopted baby son, Preston Davey. Varley’s partner, John McGowan-Fazakerley, was convicted of lesser crimes against the boy. The details of Preston’s short life and bestial death are abominable.

Mark Nowak, father of the murdered Henry Nowak, spoke powerfully in public after Vickrum Digwa was convicted of the crime. He said there was ‘no moment when the pain stops’ and he thought there never would be. This prompted a comparison in my mind. Last month, Daphne Hamilton-Fairley died, aged 95. Our families were neighbours and friends in Bayswater in the late 1950s, and kept in touch after we moved to the country. Daphne’s husband, Gordon, was a most distinguished oncologist at Bart’s. One morning in 1975, he was walking in Campden Hill Square. His dogs sniffed under a car. A bomb planted there exploded, killing Gordon (and the dogs). The IRA had intended to blow up the MP Sir Hugh Fraser, husband of the famous Lady Antonia, who lived next door.

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, stands explicitly in the tradition of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum 135 years ago. Both seek to uphold the dignity of human work in the age of the machine. The present Leo warns eloquently against building the Tower of Babel rather than, like Nehemiah, rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem by cooperation. He does not, however, engage fully with the discussion of what AI – and particularly AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) – might be. The Pope proposes his ‘civilisation of love’, but the promoters of AGI themselves claim to be conducting ‘a civilisation experiment’. If AGI can discern patterns in an infinity of data which the human mind cannot, will it produce a new understanding of nature, a theory of everything?

I bought my first pint of bitter, in a pub in Slough, in 1972. It cost 12 pence. The Bank of England inflation calculator tells me that is the equivalent of £1.45 today. Yet a pint now sells for £10 in London. What went wrong? Many factors, of which the first was Britain’s entry into the EEC on 1 January 1973. We were eventually made to ‘harmonise’ our alcohol duties with our partners, leading to a drop in the duty on wine and a rise in that on beer, to reflect French cultural preferences. The most recent shock has been Rachel Reeves’s attack on small businesses with employer NI rises, punitive workers’ rights, ever-higher minimum wage etc. In the 1970s, the price of a pint, like the cost of a packet of cigarettes, was a major issue of concern in each year’s Budget.

People laugh at Sir Keir Starmer for failing to acknowledge that he has almost no hope of survival. This is unfair. Until you absolutely know you will resign, you must not give the slightest indication that you might. By doing so, you encompass your own destruction. ‘I shall fight on. I fight to win,’ said Margaret Thatcher. She announced her resignation the next day. Sir Keir is not nearly at that stage. His position is stronger than hers. There has been no Geoffrey Howe-style resignation followed by a denunciation of the Prime Minister in the Commons. Indeed, there has been no formal challenge to Starmer’s leadership so far, let alone a leadership vote like that which undermined Mrs T.

At Tuesday’s anti-Semitism ‘summit’ in Downing Street, Sir Keir Starmer achieved a personal first. He used the word ‘Islamists’. But in order to utter a word he had previously avoided in relation to the subject, Sir Keir had to approach it crabwise. Instead of identifying Islamists as the main ideological and physical threat to British Jews, he said: ‘We’re clear-eyed about the fact that anti-Semitism does not have one source alone: Islamists, far-left, far-right extremism, all target Jewish communities.’ Islamists were thus inserted into the conversation but also downplayed. It is obsolete not to recognise that the far right in Britain – for the moment at least – more or less leave Jews alone.

‘Modernity’ is often behind the times. On Wednesday, parliament pushed out all remaining hereditary peers, although we live in an age when scientific discovery is making us understand ever better how much heredity governs the life of each person and therefore of society. Just as the hereditary pinnacle of our constitution displays his role’s unique value in Washington DC, we stamp out the monarch’s traditional political bodyguard. The Lord Speaker, Lord Forsyth, paid generous tribute to the hereditaries at a jolly private party he gave, but his brief words of farewell at prorogation were all that were permitted in the Chamber of the Lords, although its composition was chiefly hereditary from the 14th century until 1999.

On Tuesday, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport approved the sale of my employers, the Telegraph Group, to Axel Springer. Three years of hiatus are almost at an end. Numerous candidates – some good, most bad – came forward but, until now, none succeeded in navigating the pitfalls. We escaped the toils of the Barclays’ debts, the threat of foreign state ownership and private equity, the danger of Chinese influence and much more. As a semi-spectator of proceedings, I have been profoundly impressed by the sangfroid of our editor, Chris Evans, and his team as they have ridden storm after storm. And now we are to be owned by Germans. If that possibility had even been raised in the last century, there would have been outcry (imagine the reaction of Margaret Thatcher).

If, as Donald Trump had threatened, ‘a whole civilisation’ had died on Tuesday night, the whole civilisation concerned would have been that of the United States, not of Iran. If an American president had deliberately ordered the death of a civilisation – whether or not such a thing is achievable – America’s claim to world leadership would have collapsed. Like, I suspect, many, however, I did not go to bed that night thinking that Trump would carry out his threat. I remember my parents telling me that, during the Cuban missile crisis, people truly believed there might be nuclear conflagration at any moment. It did not feel like that this time.

Sharp-eyed readers will notice that Peter Brookes’s fox, who normally tops this column, is absent. They can be reassured. He has gone to ground but will be (in hunting parlance) ‘bolted’ in time to return for future issues. I decided to remove the fox for Holy Week because the replacement drawing tells a story. It is by Jimmy Lai, the billionaire former boss of Apple Daily in Hong Kong. He drew it in solitary confinement in Stanley prison. He has now been incarcerated for nearly 2,000 days. This February, he was sentenced to a further 20 years for ‘conspiracy to collude with foreign forces’ and ‘to publish seditious materials’.

The Prince of Wales seeks to assure us that, as a friend puts into his mouth, ‘I might not be at church every day, but I believe in it.’ That formulation does not necessarily mean he believes in God or the doctrines of the Church of England. All it means is that he believes in the efficacy of the C of E and will dutifully fulfil his future role as its Supreme Governor. Actually, that is all we need to know. His great Tudor predecessor said she did not want to ‘make windows into men’s souls’; even kings are only men. The important thing, from a constitutional as opposed to a spiritual point of view, is that he acts the part with good grace, which he surely will. Whether he does so by divine grace poured into his heart is a question above all our pay grades.