Charles Moore

How can the nature sector respond to the genocide in Gaza? These are not my words. They appear in the subject box of an email which has been sent to members of the Wildlife and Countryside Link (WCL), though not, I think, by the WCL itself. It invites recipients to an ‘open forum for discussion and support’ on Zoom on 30 September. It seems that the Mammal Society, which supports pine martens, dormice etc, is involved. A sane answer to the subject box question would be a) that there is no genocide in Gaza and b) that the ‘nature sector’ has other duties. But the email tries to answer its own question: ‘At first glance the actions of Israel… are issues far outside the purview of any conservation or climate-focused organisation.

Daniel Kruger is a good and thoughtful man, whom I used to employ as a leader writer before he left for the higher calling of improving prisons. His choices in life have always been influenced by his sense of Christian purpose. That is what will have driven him to defect from the Tories to Reform. The trouble is that this sort of pilgrimage can lead to political misjudgments. There was a time, for instance, when Danny supported the leadership bid of Suella Braverman – a woman of blazing sincerity but not a good political navigator. Commentators are saying that Danny’s defection will make career-minded Tory MPs think they have a better future with Reform than with the Conservatives. That may be their calculation, but they should not base it on Danny’s example.

The current ‘Britain is on a knife edge’ mood is understandable. Our discontents are great and Sir Keir Starmer’s government is even more incompetent and divided than we critics expected. But do not forget how the British system works. We are not like France, paralysed because its executive president can, constitutionally, hold out until 2027, even though his governments last only for months. The tired phrase ‘overwhelming majority’ has meaning. Labour can overwhelm all parliamentary opposition. It may find it harder to overwhelm internal opposition, but an early general election remains most unlikely, since MPs do not demand an election if they think they will lose their seats.

A currently fashionable conservatism is militantly against Ukraine and, by more cautious implication, pro-Russia. We who disagree are, I quote Matthew Parris in these pages last week, ‘prey to the illusion that the second world war was a template for future conflict, and Hitler a template for Putin’. Others put it more unkindly, speaking of ‘Ukraine brain’ as a mental affliction among the Cold War generations. One should not project the entire second world war on to now, but some similarities with the 1930s are undeniable.

Successful political leaders hold in their minds some idea of what Mrs Thatcher called ‘Our People’. In this context, I do not mean the whole population of the country they seek to lead, or the core of the party they belong to. I mean that group of people with whose aspirations they most wish to identify. In making that identification, they combine direct self-interest – getting their floating vote – with a wider view about who are most important for the nation’s future prosperity and good order. In the Thatcher era, such people were the famous C2s, first-generation home-buyers, millions who could expect not only to earn but also to own. In Tony Blair’s time, the group was not so different, but a bit softer, as one expects when growth has seemed secure for many years.

Danny Kruger’s brave defence of Christianity in the history of this country, which he recently delivered to an empty House of Commons, has won much praise. His words reminded me of when the same thing happened the other way round. As fourth-century Rome was Christianised by imperial decree, the distinguished senator Symmachus spoke up for the old pagan religion which had been degraded by the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Senate. He expressed his thoughts in the voice of the city herself, thus (Gibbon’s translation): ‘Pity and respect my age, which has hitherto flowed in an uninterrupted course of piety. Since I do not repent, permit me to continue in the practice of my ancient rites. Since I am born free, allow me to enjoy my domestic institutions.

Behind the latest push for recognition of a Palestinian state – even though there is no agreement of what it is that might be recognised – is a sort of impersonation of the story of Israel. Palestinian activists want their own Balfour Declaration. President Macron wants France and Britain to come up with their own Sykes-Picot agreement, but pro-Palestinian. You might think that the clamour would have been shamed into silence by the massacres and hostage-taking committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023. On the contrary, these have somehow empowered the mimicry in wilder and more horrible ways. The genocide, we are now told, is being committed not by Hamas, but by Israel’s response. The ‘concentration camps’ are being set up by Israel in Gaza.

This column comes to you from Auckland Castle, former palace and hunting lodge of the Prince Bishops of Durham. We, the Rectory Society, are here by kind permission of its saviour, Jonathan Ruffer, celebrating our 20th anniversary. Jonathan rescued the castle not from the heathen but from the Church of England. The last Anglican bishop to inhabit it was Justin Welby, in his brief year at Durham before being translated to Canterbury, but it had been run down for many years before that. Bishop Auckland is in one of the poorest parts of England but it did not occur to the Church authorities to use the heritage of this astonishing place to minister to the poor.

There probably never has been a time when a governing party much liked its MPs. If you are on a mission, as governments imagine they are, you are always impatient when your own side raises objections. But it is only recently that governments have seemed positively affronted by the idea that their MPs should have a say. This was encapsulated by Sir Keir Starmer when he dismissed Labour’s backbench revolt over welfare cuts as ‘noises off’. Off what, exactly? Legislators have the sole right to legislate and that includes the right to refuse legislation. Those, like Rachael Maskell, who parade their consciences may be tiresome, but there is no way of governing this country except through parliament (though people like Lord Hermer are striving mightily to alter this).

It was airily pleasant to walk round Parliament Square on Monday morning. I had come up to London to go to parliament and to interview Kemi Badenoch at a Policy Exchange event across the square. Palestine Action had announced a protest march against Donald Trump’s and Israel’s ‘genocide’ for that time. Although the Met had banned it from the area, I had recently witnessed so many ill-contained and threatening protests there – almost all for Palestinian causes – that I fully expected delay, disruption and occasional harassment. This time, however, it turned out that the Met meant business. The protest was well-contained in the designated streets round Trafalgar Square. May this mark the permanent change many of us have long been calling for.

Cardinals elected the new Pope within a fortnight but it will take almost a year to choose our next Archbishop of Canterbury. The beloved Anglican interregnum is intended to ‘take soundings’. These are unproductive if held in an echo chamber. The chairman of the Crown Nominations Commission for the successor to Justin Welby, Lord Evans of Weardale, is an efficient and discreet public servant. But most of the large group of voting members, including both its C of E bishops (York, Norwich), come from the fastest-declining part of the Church, its liberal wing. Thanks to Welby’s reforms, the commission now has no fewer than five members from the wider Anglican communion, only one of whom is from the burgeoning, usually traditionalist African churches (total membership c. 43 million).

Intrepidly, the BBC dared recently to visit Dover, Delaware – source, it implied, of starvation in Gaza. I listened carefully as its State Department correspondent, Tom Bateman, hunted down the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in the state which, he explained, is ‘a corporate haven for those who like privacy’. Brave Tom did not find much, but that only proved to him that ‘The main ingredients of this aid are its politics’. The foundation’s chairman says he is a Christian Zionist which, for the BBC, is almost as bad as saying you are a neo-Nazi. The portentousness aside, it is reasonable to ask tricky questions of the American/Israeli organisation which claims it can solve aid in Gaza.

Yes, it was right of the police to announce quickly that they did not think terrorism was the motive in Monday’s Liverpool horror, thus heading off potential riots. The police also said the person arrested was a white man. If he had been a black man, would they have said that? If not, why not? Watching film of the incident, I felt uneasily reminded of the scene in Belfast in 1988 when two British soldiers in civvies drove out of a side road and found themselves in the middle of a Republican funeral cortege. The suspicious crowd began to threaten the car. The soldiers lost their nerve, one drawing his pistol, and the two men were dragged out and foully murdered.

In travelling to Bishkek, I was heading for the hills. I had not expected to be marking the 80th anniversary of victory in Europe there. But thanks to our leader, Alexandra Tolstoy, who has high standing with the authorities in Kyrgyzstan, we found ourselves in honoured places beside the presidential podium for the parade. Being a former Soviet republic, Kyrgyzstan speaks not of the second world war but of the Great Patriotic one. The Russian link remains so strong that the president had advanced the date of the parade so he could join President Putin for his great march past in Moscow on 9 May. Standing near us were bemedalled Kyrgyz veterans, wearing their tall, four-cornered Ak-kalpak hats.

Congratulations to Donald Trump. It is almost solely thanks to his exertions that Mark Carney, the incarnation of Davos man, is now victorious in Canada’s general election. The Euro fanatic now wins on a ‘sovereignty’ ticket. If Trump had not intervened to lay claim to Canada, almost as if America were Russia and Canada were Ukraine, it would have gone Conservative. The President may be only hazily aware that the King, of whom, he says, he has the ‘honour to be a friend’, is also King of Canada. If, as seems likely, the King follows his mother’s twice-used precedent and opens the new Canadian parliament in person, Trump may come to see that his next-door neighbour is part of a long-standing, legitimate order which Canadian voters are happy to endorse. P.S.