Charles Moore

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.

This Middle East conflict ought to be much easier than the oil embargo which followed the Yom Kippur war of 1973. The Arabs came quite close to winning, whereas Iran has no chance. The embargo, imposed on all countries, including Britain, which had supported Israel in the war, was backed by almost all Arab states, few of which were fanatically Islamist, and by the Soviet Union. It lasted for six months. America depended on Saudi Arabia alone for 25 per cent of its oil (only a bit over 5 per cent of imports today). The price rose by 400 per cent. The economic disruption was massive. In 2026, by contrast, almost all Middle Eastern states detest Iran and want their oil to flow without let or hindrance. There is plenty of money and power in the world to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

I am glad that Radio 4 is producing a series called How Reading Made Us, presented by the subtle, super-literate Times columnist James Marriott. I must declare an interest. Roughly 98 per cent of my earnings over 45 years have depended on the fact that plenty of people like reading. Now we are thinking harder, however, about the fact that form affects substance. The idea of an encyclopaedia, for example, as developed (from classical roots) in the 18th century, was that all needful knowledge on a particular subject could be assembled and consulted in a book or series of books. With AI, there is little need for this form. The form of a book, which often seemed so compendious, can now seem cumbersome. Fiction, too, is affected by form.

Sir Keir Starmer’s position on the US bombing of Iran is inglorious, but one should suspend disapproval to understand how he must have been thinking politically. His party had just lost the Gorton and Denton by-election to the Greens (backed by a strong Muslim vote). His leadership had never seemed weaker. So he calculated that he could not unequivocally back the actions of Israel and Donald Trump. He will have had the Iraq war in mind, particularly the role of the attorney general. Over Iraq, the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, was criticised for seeming to change his legal advice to Tony Blair in order to legitimise British participation in the invasion. Sir Keir’s Attorney General, Lord Hermer, is much more central to the administration than an AG ever should be.

The death of Quentin Deranque is strangely under-reported here. He was a 23-year-old beaten up in Lyon on 12 February by supporters of the main party of the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise (FI). He had been part of a group escorting what the BBC website calls ‘far-right feminists’, helping them protest against the visit to a university by a far-left politician. There was a fracas in the street with masked opponents connected with the Young Guard, a leftist FI-related group declared illegal last year. Deranque died of his injuries two days later. One of those arrested is a special adviser to an FI deputy.

How to report Iran? It is a huge story. Perhaps as many as 30,000 people were recently murdered there by the tottering regime, but it won’t let western media in. The BBC’s solution is a deal: their correspondent can enter and report, but the report cannot appear on their Persian service. This agreement is rightly explained on air, unlike the BBC’s iniquitous deal with Hamas over Gaza. Do the terms of the deal benefit journalism, however? We are always told that BBC foreign language services are the lifeblood of truth for citizens of dictatorships. Why are Farsi speakers to be deprived of this? Also, what do we learn from Lyse Doucet walking the Tehran streets in a headscarf? (Is it compulsory or voluntary? Either way, she should explain.

A government minister and I dined just after the fiasco of the 2017 general election, with Theresa May clinging to office. We agreed our feelings: ‘Well, she’s utterly useless, but she’s got to stay.’ Similar emotions arise today. Nobody – and I genuinely mean nobody – can truthfully say that Sir Keir Starmer is doing a good job, but politics is not, thank goodness, a logical occupation, so it does not necessarily follow that he should resign. If you lead your party to a victory fair and square in a general election, it is your duty to try to go on governing until the next one. You owe it to voters and colleagues. It could even be said that you owe it to the office itself. The British premiership must not decline into a ‘King for a day’ stunt.

Last Saturday, a friend in Washington emailed to say he had been studying some of the latest 3.5 million pages of Epstein files. A few months ago, I had pointed out here (Notes, 11 October 2025) that much of Epstein’s famous ‘black book’ was just the contacts book of Oxford friends of Ghislaine Maxwell. As their contemporary, I congratulated myself on having been at Cambridge, thus avoiding meeting Ghislaine. So my friend’s message came as a bit of a blow. He rubbed it in: ‘You may be interested to hear that you, yourself, feature no fewer than 40 times.’ His second paragraph, however, kindly explained: the 40 references to me were repetitions or duplicates of one reference, in an email from Peter Mandelson to Epstein on 29 November 2009.

In our online edition, Danny Kruger, who is a dear man and my former employee, attacks our editor, Daniel Finkelstein and me for not joining Reform when ‘their party [he means the Conservatives] faces total extinction’. Lords Gove and Finkelstein are indeed Conservatives, but I am not a member of ‘their party’. I sit in the Lords as a ‘non-affiliated’ peer. My approach to life is definitely Tory, but not in a party sense. I would vote – if I had the vote – for any party that showed convincingly how it would govern in the light of conservative views. According to Danny, we should ‘stand barefoot in the snow’ in penitence and receive ‘absolution’ from Nigel Farage – whom he compares to Pope Gregory VII at Canossa.

Donald Trump’s long-standing and ever more ardent desire to own Greenland helps explain his attitude to Putin. Putin used cod history of imperial Russia to justify aggression against Ukraine and was allowed by a feeble West to turn that aggression into actual invasion. Trump avoids condemning that invasion and has supported Putin’s version of Russia’s rights. In relation to Greenland, he produces a sketchy historical account about how American boats got there first and an overdramatised theory, akin to Putin’s Ukraine one, about how a Greenland not owned by the United States threatens his country’s security. Frustrated by what he sees as the prissy pygmies of Nato, he envies the freedom of action of his friend and fellow imperialist, Vladimir.

On Advent Sunday, our grandson Christian became a Christian. He was baptised, sleeping, in the font of our parish church. On the whiteboard in the maternity ward, the newborn’s name beneath his was Mohamed. As is usual (and, in my view, preferable) nowadays, he was christened in the middle of the communion rather than separately. As is less usual, the rite was that of the Book of Common Prayer, ‘The Ministration of Publick Baptism of Infants’. It is tougher than the modern version. The godparents, in the name of the child, had to ‘renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh’, but managed with perfect equanimity to drink champagne afterwards.

Sir Tom Stoppard, who died last week, never wrote a memoir, but he did sort of speak one. Just over ten years ago, he told me that he and his new wife, Sabrina Guinness, had become tenants of an old rectory in Dorset. I asked him if he would therefore speak as guest of honour at the AGM of the Rectory Society, a fan club for existing and former clergy houses which I invented in 2005. The AGM always takes place in a central London church, and in 2015, the year I invited Tom, it was held in the Queen’s Chapel beside St James’s Palace. Beyond expressing a tepid wish that speakers make some small reference to the society and its purposes, I never specify their subject.

About seven years ago, I bought two pairs of pyjamas, one British, the other Chinese. At the time, they seemed of roughly similar quality, the important difference being that the Chinese ones were half the price of the British. Given that they have the same ‘lived experience’, I can make a direct comparison. The British ones, by Peter Christian (‘gentlemen’s outfitters’ accompanied by an image of two hares boxing), show few signs of the passing years. Their reddish colour with green and yellow stripes holds fast. There is very little wear and no tear at all. The Chinese pair (labelled ‘sleepwear’) tells a different story – the drawstring disappeared, the elasticated waist (which the British one wisely eschews) decayed, the blue checks faded, the cotton thinned.

When the BBC denies ‘systemic bias’, it denies the main, the crucial thing exposed by Michael Prescott’s now-famous leaked internal memo. Prescott was not presenting a ragbag of mistakes, but examples from many different areas of subjects where an institutional view prevailed – against Donald Trump, pro-trans, pro-immigration etc, all of them defensible views but none of them following rules of impartiality or accuracy. For this reason, the Prescott material about Israel/Gaza coverage is the most important by a long way, though less expensive for the BBC than its doctoring of Trump’s words.