Charles Moore

The Times is changing its style of describing people. ‘We will no longer be according people courtesy titles at the second mention on Times news pages,’ say the paper’s new rules. Thus Lord Adonis would become, on second mention, ‘Adonis’, and ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Justin Welby’ would dwindle to ‘Welby’. Until now, the first would have remained ‘Lord Adonis’ throughout and the second would have been ‘Mr Welby’. In the old style, Severus Snape would have appeared thus at first mention, but become ‘Professor Snape’ at second. Now he has his professorship at first mention and afterwards becomes merely ‘Snape’.

A seemingly obscure battle in an ecclesiastical court could threaten the security of every historic monument in the care of the Church of England. As reported in this column last year, Jesus College, Cambridge, is trying to extirpate the memorials (while keeping the money) of its greatest historic benefactor, Tobias Rustat. Rustat was a loyal servant of King Charles II who helped him escape from the battle of Worcester, looked after him in exile, and became his Yeoman of the Robes after the Restoration. He also gave huge sums to Jesus (as to St John’s, Oxford, the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, St Paul’s Cathedral and the University of Cambridge). His sin was investing in the Royal African Company, one of whose activities was trading in slaves.

‘Postcode lottery!’ people scream when one area feels less well treated than another in a public service — in this case, the rollout of the Covid vaccines. It is a silly phrase, if you believe in the devolution of power and the importance of locality. The point of local health trusts, councils and so on is to let local people run most of the things that matter to them. The logical result is that — even within a national set-up like the NHS — there will be differences. If there were no differences, it would not follow that everyone was getting the same high-quality service. It would much more likely show that the service was uniformly bad, because all convoys, to remain in convoy, must go at the speed of the slowest. Visible difference is a spur to improvement.

Domenica Lawson, daughter of Rosa and Dominic, the former editor of this paper, has Down’s syndrome. She is classified as ‘extremely clinically vulnerable’ to Covid and has therefore been living with her parents since October. When Rosa was briefly not around to interpret last week, Domenica opened a letter to herself from the NHS: ‘You are considered to be at highest risk of becoming very unwell… you are someone with Down’s syndrome, and so the government now considers you to be in the highest risk category.’ This shocked Domenica. ‘I have spent the last year trying to protect her from the worst of the news and now she is more scared than ever,’ Rosa tells me.

Have you heard about John Price destroying a stretch of the river Lugg? If not, you have led a sheltered existence.  This month, Mr Price, who lives in the Luggside farm he was born in 66 years ago, in Kingsland, Herefordshire, has been attacked by the BBC (who ran denunciations of him unnamed), the Wildlife Trust (‘extreme vandalism’), Monty Don (‘it breaks my heart’), the Daily Mirror etc. He is said to have destroyed habitats by dredging, and by laying waste the bank on one side.  Something about the media unanimity aroused my suspicions, so I followed up. Mr Price, clearly a determined man, has spoken out in the Herefordshire Times.

Many ingenious ways of evading Covid-19 have been devised to assist commerce, fewer to assist worship. In our next-door village, however, is Darvell, a large, longstanding Bruderhof community, part of a worldwide Anabaptist movement. Always welcoming to neighbours, they normally hold a carol concert in Advent. This year, such a thing is forbidden. Instead, the brotherhood devised a ‘Christmas Drive Through Darvell’. I slightly feared a gigantesque version of the dropsical Father Christmases and reindeer which people stick on their roofs, but I was wrong. At dusk on Saturday, we arrived with three generations of our family. The drive stretches well over a mile before exiting into another lane.

My inbox is crowded with messages from Old Etonians attacking Simon Henderson, the headmaster of Eton. They are furious that he sacked a master, Will Knowland, for putting on YouTube his talk to boys about masculinity, and then refusing to take it down. As one complainant puts it: ‘Eton and Woke are both four-letter words, but they should have nothing in common beyond that.’ I agree, but the case is more complicated. In disciplinary questions, one must ask: ‘What else could the boss have done?’ Suppose I, when a newspaper editor, had told a staff journalist that he could not publish an article he had submitted, yet he went ahead and did so. I think I have would have been right to punish him severely, even if I had been wrong about the merits of his piece.

Last week, I wrote about ‘Frost & Lewis’ (David and Oliver), leaders of our country’s team at the Brexit negotiations, guarantors of our Brexit intentions. It is they who have throughout maintained the essential position — that we are becoming an independent state and therefore will not trade sovereignty for market access. It is them, therefore, whom the EU wishes to neutralise. Hopes have risen in Brussels after the Downing Street ‘Carrie coup’ against Dominic Cummings. Frost & Lewis now lack a close friend at the court of King Boris except, possibly, the King himself. So it may be a good thing that Covid isolation forced them to return to London at the end of last week. They are negotiating from their base, close to their leader.

Monday night’s murderous gunman in Vienna is officially described as ‘Islamist’. Brahim Aioussaoi, the man accused of murdering worshippers in a Nice cathedral last week, arrived (reported the BBC) with ‘three knives, two phones and one Quran’. These would seem to be the basic toolkit required. A friend who lives in southern France tells me that although the latest lockdown measures prevent church services being held, so serious is the terrorist threat to churches that many are guarded by police. So it seems natural that President Macron of France warns of the danger to French Catholics and speaks of ‘Islamist terrorist folly’. Each of his three chosen words rings true, and the link between them cannot be avoided.

As time passes, there is — blessedly — ever less need to pay attention to ‘untold’ stories about Diana, Princess of Wales; but the Channel 4 documentary Diana: The Truth behind the Interview did make me sit up a bit. It revealed, and the BBC does not deny, that Martin Bashir and Panorama colleagues caused fake invoices to be created purporting to show that a rogue employee of Charles Spencer, the Princess’s brother, had sold stories about her to newspapers. It seems this forgery — and Panorama’s assurances about Bashir’s good character — persuaded Lord Spencer to meet Bashir and to urge his sister to do the same.

In the National Trust’s recent interim report, ‘Addressing our histories of colonialism and historic slavery’, nothing caused more controversy than its unfavourable mention of Winston Churchill, whose country house, Chartwell, it owns. The entry said that the British government’s response to the Bengal famine when he was prime minister was ‘heavily criticised’. It failed to mention that he was fighting Hitler at the time. It also said that he wrote to his successor, Clement Attlee, in 1947, to oppose the independence of India.

You have to give it to Donald Trump: he never stops trying. In a letter dated 25 September, he wrote to our daughter-in-law, who is an American citizen living in Britain (‘United Kingdom Englan’, it said on the envelope) to tell her he was giving her $1,700 under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act ‘which I proudly signed into law’. It is a pretty impressive bribe, and it pays out, I believe, to every American who earns less than $50,000 a year. In Hannah’s case, however, it might not work for the President at the coming poll.

In this column (26 September), I pointed out that the National Trust’s new ‘Gazetteer’ of its 93 properties linked with slavery and ‘colonialism’ was not so much a scholarly documentation as ‘a charge sheet and a hit list’. Once the organisation entrusted with the care of a building denigrates that building’s most famous occupants, logic suggests it will care for the building less well than for that of an occupant it admires. This logic is already starting to work through. The National Trust owns Thomas Carlyle’s house in Chelsea, but now it has closed it ‘until further notice’, whereas all the other small houses of the Trust in London will reopen in March.

The National Trust has brought out its ‘Interim Report’, with the clumsy title ‘Addressing our histories of colonialism and historic slavery’. Such use of the word ‘histories’, as opposed to ‘history’, is an alert that a woke view is coming your way. Like ‘diversity’ and ‘multiple narratives’ (also deployed in the report), it suggests plurality but imposes uniformity. The aim is to be ‘historically accurate and academically robust’. According to John Orna-Ornstein, the Trust’s director of culture and engagement, ‘We’re not here to pass judgment on the past’.

One of the most extraordinary features of the ‘cancel culture’ is how well it works. All decent people hate it, but it happens. Why? The key is speed. The bosses of big businesses, universities, quangoes, museums etc. are absurdly frightened by the sudden ambush. Some once-exalted alumnus or benefactor is ‘revealed’ on Twitter as having got money from slavery or worked for the British Empire or used a rude word in 1895. Out comes a petition against him, accompanied by a bit of spray-painting and a shouty demo, and he’s done for. In 99 per cent of the cases, the ‘revelation’ is not new, the alleged evil has been known and publicly discussed for years, sometimes for centuries. Almost every single time, the authorities are not ready, so they give in.

Totalitarian powers mostly want foreign journalists to go, but sometimes they want them to stay. China recently detained Michael Smith and Bill Birtles, of the Australian Financial Review and ABC respectively. The men were held in the country so they could be questioned about Cheng Lei, an Australian-born anchor for the state broadcaster, CCTV, who is now being investigated by the authorities. Seven police arrived at Smith’s Shanghai flat late on Thursday night last week and interrogated him, pointing a spotlight in his face. Australian consular officials, who had sensed danger even before this, then gave the two men shelter and got them back to Sydney.  There are now no journalists working for Australian media in China, it is said.