Charles Moore

The Daily Telegraph revealed on Tuesday that Michael Spencer, the chief executive of Icap, has been blocked for a peerage by the House of Lords Appointments Commission (Holac). All the indignation just now is against David Cameron’s resignation honours list, packed with his ‘cronies’, who allegedly include Mr Spencer. It is misdirected. The real anger should go against the pharisaical bureaucracy which has been imposed upon patronage. No one is allowed to know why Mr Spencer has been blocked, yet the world knows that he has been because, supposedly, he has ‘the wrong sniff’ about him.

If the SNP ever succeeds, it will be because of the failure of the English to understand its game. English people with no goodwill towards Scottish nationalism keep saying that ‘Scotland voted to remain in the EU’. It is not true. The Scots, like all other voters, answered the question which was put to them, which was whether theUnited Kingdom should leave or remain in the EU. They were not asked about what Scotland should do, any more than London, Liverpool or Bristol — three cities which voted Remain — were asked whether they sought secessionist EU membership. To say that Scotland must have another referendum on anything because a majority there voted Remain is to say, in effect, that it has acquired independence already.

On Tuesday night in London, I spoke to Women2Win, a Conservative organisation dedicated to recruiting more women candidates. My title, suggested long ago, was ‘The Woman Who Won’. It referred to Margaret Thatcher. The day before my speech was delivered, another woman (and former chairman of Women2Win) won, so now there are two. Everyone seized the moment to compare and contrast them. There is a clear difference between Theresa May’s situation today and Mrs Thatcher’s in 1975. Mrs May, like Ted Heath in 1975, represents the side that just lost, Mrs Thatcher the side with a new idea about how to win. Mrs May is the establishment candidate: Mrs Thatcher was the insurgent.

Critics say the Bank of England put itself under suspicion by entering the referendum fray. Now Mark Carney says its warnings are being borne out by the post-referendum economic reaction. He misses the point. By having made those warnings himself, even if he sincerely believed them, he became like a politician trying to win, rather than a public servant trying honestly to manage either outcome. The more loudly he tries to vindicate himself and attack the motives of his accusers, the more clearly this is proved. It would damage confidence if Mr Carney were to leave his job suddenly, particularly if the government pushed him; but surely he should quietly be booking a flight home to Canada by Christmas. This is an extract from Charles Moore's Notes.

Shocked Remainers want a new political party — pro-European, ‘pro-business’ and free of any viscerally right- or left-wing taint. They anxiously insist that it will not be like the SDP in the early 1980s, but it is hard to see why not. Both then and now, the appeal is to a particular idea of virtue in politics. Then as now, the new party defines itself by its distaste for people it sees as unvirtuous and lower-class. Then as now, it therefore lacks roots outside bits of London, university towns, and the well-off and well-educated. Above all — then as now — the new party underestimates the capacity of the Tory party to resist its appeal and of the Labour party, however useless its leader, somehow to survive.

Before she was murdered, Jo Cox MP had written most of a report. She worked on it jointly it with the Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat for the Britain in the World project at the think-tank Policy Exchange. Its publication had been intended to coincide with that of the Chilcot report this week. Because of her shocking death, it is now delayed. But the project wants to continue her work, and the report’s bipartisanship. The essential point on which Mrs Cox (who opposed the Iraq war) and Mr Tugendhat (who served in it) agreed is that total non-intervention is not a foreign policy strategy. If Iraq shows the horrors of ill-planned intervention, Syria shows how non-intervention can cause worse suffering and instability.

It sounds logical that Vote Leave should now disband, since the people have obligingly voted Leave, but is it wise? Who else can try to ensure that the Leave cause is not forgotten in internal Tory struggles, or in a war between Ukip and the rest? If it is right — which I think it is — that the Leave vote is the biggest shock ever administered to the main parties and the ruling elites since the collapse of the Munich agreement, then it follows that those parties and those elites will try to reverse or at least neuter the decision. There needs to be an organised resistance to them, run by people who know what they are talking about. I know that Dominic Cummings is longing to return to the wife and new-born baby whom he has hardly seen for eight weeks, but I fear that duty calls.

This is an extract from Charles Moore's Notes in the new issue of The Spectator, out tomorrow. George Osborne says he can stay in the government in some capacity (‘a decision for the next prime minister’). Monday’s Financial Times reported ‘Friends say a move to the Foreign Office would be the only other job that would appeal.’ No doubt they are right, but have Mr Osborne and his friends not noticed that what ‘appeals’ to him has nothing whatever to do with what the country needs? Unlike David Cameron, who said immediately and firmly that he will go, the Chancellor does not seem to understand that he has got it all wrong. His sense of entitlement is completely unfounded.

The Remain campaign takes as its model the ‘No’ one in the 2014 Scottish referendum. First and last — hence the Osborne/Darling fantasy horror Budget on Wednesday — inspire fear. Second, late in the day, leave it all to Labour and get Gordon Brown to make a passionate speech (Mr Brown took this too literally and made almost exactly the same passionate speech). Finally, shortly before polling, get leaders of all stripes to make a solemn ‘vow’ to win over the doubters. I am trying to work out what that vow could be. All 27 other member states promising some guarantee of Britain’s independence within the EU?