Charles Moore

There should be a short booklet with a list of points for those about to take up public sector appointments — not the formal rules, which already exist, but certain informal tips for survival. One would be ‘Do not own — or at least visit in the winter — any house in a hot place abroad.’ The case of Sir Philip Dilley, the chairman of the Environment Agency, is in point. No doubt it would not have made the slightest practical difference if he had been around after Christmas to come and peer sympathetically at the victims of Cumbrian floods, but the idea that he was thousands of miles away — warm, rich, suntanned and wet only when he jumped into the Caribbean or his pool — was intolerable.

At the end of next week, a judge will decide whether the ‘trial of the facts’ can proceed now that its subject, Lord Janner, is dead. Janner was accused, on various occasions, of child abuse, though the Crown Prosecution Service, on three occasions, over more than 20 years, decided that there was no case to prosecute. The amazing Simon Danczuk, now himself accused of rape, used parliamentary privilege to accuse Janner of the same crime (plus torture). Last year, Janner was forced to appear in court, though senile. When his senility was upheld, his accusers resorted to a trial of the facts to get their day in court. They were pursuing this aim when Janner died last month. This procedure exists under the Insanity Act.

In his column last week, Rod Liddle suggested that an alleged fatwa by a Saudi Arabian cleric had said it was permissible to eat one’s wife when suffering from ‘severe hunger’ gave him (Rod) the go-ahead to eat his own wife. Not so, surely. In the Christian religion and, indeed, the secular law of the United Kingdom, one can have only one wife at a time. If one has only one wife, it would be quite wrong to eat her. Under Islam, one can have up to four. Obviously this generous provision creates ‘spares’. Until recently, British marriage law was hidebound by tradition, but, before the last election, Parliament voted to abolish the previously general understanding that marriage has to be between a man and a woman.

Speaking on the Today programme on Monday, Sir David Attenborough, who wants a global agreement to control carbon emissions, pointed out that ‘Never in the history of humanity have all the people of the world got together to deal with a particular problem and agreed what the solution could be. Never, ever, ever.’ He is right. But he seemed to defy the logic of his own observation. They never have. Probably, since the truth is best arrived at through disagreement, they never should. The key point is that they never will. So it is a waste of time to try. When someone commits suicide, those close to that person naturally reproach themselves. In politics, and similarly contested areas of life, people reproach others too.

Because, it says, of its ‘liberal values and respect for human dignity’, the Economist has put out a film about Emily, a 24-year-old Belgian woman, who wants assisted dying. She is physically healthy, and comes, the film assures us, from a happy family. She has suffered from severe depression since childhood, however. By her own account, her self-made video (two years ago), in which she says ‘I don’t want to live a lie’ and ‘It keeps feeling empty whatever I do’, made her feel empowered. It inspired her to seek death at the hands of doctors. Belgium is one of two countries in the world which permits assisted dying for psychiatric reasons.

On Saturday morning, I watched BBC rolling news about the Paris atrocities. Then I spent the day hunting and switched on again at about half-past five. It was extraordinary how little the Corporation had advanced its coverage in the course of seven hours. It suffered from the curse of ‘big-footing’ — the custom of flying news ‘anchors’ from London to broadcast on the spot without knowing anything. No one needs Huw Edwards looking very serious in some boulevard and telling us again and again that ‘Paris is today a city in shock.

The other day, a friend told me, he had been chatting to an old friend of his who has spent his life in diplomacy and international relations. The man, who will quite soon retire, has had a successful career, but he was full of gloom. Essentially, he said, the entire system of international relations has now been working very badly for 20 years, having worked much better in the previous 50 or so. No one — particularly no one in the West — can see a way through this, but the chancelleries and ministers are reluctant to confront this sad truth, and so a pointless merry-go-round of international conferences, bodies and negotiations consumes the energies of those foolish enough to stay in the game.

In this week's issue of The Spectator, Peter Hitchens defends the once-famous, once-sainted Bishop Bell of Chichester from the Church of England’s claim that he was guilty of child abuse. I do not know the facts of this case, but if Hitchens is right, the Bell case is yet another example of people’s readiness to say untrue things about the dead, secure in the knowledge that the libel law cannot go after them. Naturally, I am not arguing for the law to extend to the dead (think of the furious suits in support of the prophet Mohammed which would ensue), but all the more reason for the living to defend the reputation of the departed.