Charles Moore

Mr Corbyn’s hobby is manhole covers, on which he is an expert. I was about thoughtlessly to mock this leisure activity when I was prevented by the learned Christopher Howse. He speaks as a connoisseur of a distinct, but related genre — coal plates, which cover coalholes, and are often neglected. In the 19th century, a man called Shephard Taylor sketched 150 coal plates, and these were published as a book called Opercula: London Coal Plates, in 1929. Christopher has now photographed 1,019 coal plates on his mobile phone and tweeted them (#opercula). Despite his preference for coal plates, Christopher is generous about students of manhole covers or (with which they must not be confused) drain covers.

When the Labour party began, its purpose was the representation of labour (i.e. workers) in the House of Commons. Indeed, its name was the Labour Representation Committee. Its goal was gradually achieved, and then, from the 1980s, gradually annihilated. With the victory of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader is supported by only 10 per cent of the party’s MPs, and yet it is imagined, at least by his backers, that he will eventually be able to get into government with them. It is an impossible situation. What is needed today is the opposite of how it all started — a Parliamentary Representation Committee in the Labour party. When the history of Corbynism comes to be written, many will assume that his form of leftism arose as a protest against the Thatcher era. This is not so.

Presumably Britain has some sort of policy on immigration, asylum and refugees, but instead of struggling to understand it, you can save time by following its media presentation, since that is what seems to concern the government most. Essentially, the line is that Labour lets them all in and the Tories don’t and won’t (‘No ifs, no buts’). When, as at the last election, it turns out that net immigration has been rising under David Cameron, he apologises shyly and sounds tough again. He was sounding very tough until last week, when the photograph of the dead boy on the Turkish beach suddenly turned him all soft.

Was there ever a more unilluminating political idea — for voters rather than practitioners — than triangulation? For those readers so pure and high-minded that they have not followed politics for 20 years, I should explain that triangulation came from Bill Clinton, was imported by Tony Blair, and is now practised by David Cameron. Clinton’s adviser, Dick Morris, put it thus: ‘The President needed to take a position that not only blended the best of each party’s views but also transcended them to constitute a third force in the debate.’ The Tories’ adoption of the Living Wage is the latest example.

A hidden reason for Mrs Thatcher’s victory in 1975 was that lots of older Tory backbenchers fancied her. She was 49 and made the best of it without obvious strain. She was not disturbingly sexy, and she behaved with absolute propriety throughout, thus preventing any filthy old wretch from taking liberties, but she appealed to the chivalrous instincts of the knights of the shires. If today’s Labour selectorate knows the meaning of the word chivalry at all, it is only to denounce it. On the other hand, there is an understanding that no leader — especially, despite the age of equality, a woman — can look grotesque on television and win a general election. So what are the right looks?

If the man with the dull beard does win, where will Labour stand in the European Union referendum? Jeremy Corbyn, being a hard leftist, is theoretically against the EU, but eurosceptic Labour friends tell me that he is not to be relied on when the going gets tough. I expect he will adopt the conventional ‘anti-austerity’ position, which is to assail the European elites while not doing anything which might risk the loss of the subsidies they provide and the regulations they pour forth. If so, that will, on balance, be good for the ‘get out’ side. A Corbyn-led campaign for a No vote would drive lots of Tory waverers right back to David Cameron. This is an extract from Charles Moore's notes. The full article can be read here.

Watching the very pleasant Liz Kendall on television this week, I was struck by how extraordinary it is that more than 40 years have now passed since the Conservatives selected a woman leader and still the Labour party cannot bring itself to do so. (Although, come to think of it, it took Labour 142 years to catch up with the Conservatives in selecting a Jew, so perhaps we have another century to wait.) I am not necessarily saying that Ms Kendall is the answer — she seems able, but inexperienced — but there does appear to be a serious barrier to women at the very top of the Labour party. I suspect this is due less to old-fashioned misogyny than to the sexual politics which feature so largely in the ideology of the left.

Mr Corbyn has a beard. If he becomes leader, he will be the first bearded leader of any main party since Keir Hardie. The beard as a fashion item is now back, generally in shaped and even waxed form. But Mr Corbyn’s one owes nothing to fashion. It is a 1960s political beard, already obsolete when he first brought it into the House of Commons in 1983. Like Lord Hailsham who, as Mrs Thatcher’s Lord Chancellor, continued to wear a bowler hat long after it had disappeared from everything but hunt puppy shows, Orange parades and A Clockwork Orange, Mr Corbyn is undaunted by the passage of time. I must try not to get sentimental about him. This is an extract from this week's Spectator. Subscribe here.

Obviously when one attends what the papers call ‘cocaine-fuelled orgies’, one expects to find several members of the peerage present, but I must confess that until all this trouble, I had not heard of Lord Sewel, beyond a vague apprehension that he was a misprint rather than a person. I now discover that he is a Blair peer — a specially ignominious category, rather like Lloyd George’s creations. But I still worry that he has ‘resigned’ from the House of Lords. If we continue to think that our second chamber should be unelected, it should be all but impossible to get rid of a peer once appointed.

Virginia Utley, my secretary when I edited this paper, has written to Prime Minister and Chancellor, jointly. She asks, ‘Please could you tell me what a family is?’ Nowadays, she goes on, you teach us that a family can be made up of men who love men or women who love women, who must therefore be equally entitled to marry one another. ‘Now,’ she continues, her sister and she ‘both think boys are very nice but neither of us met one we quite liked enough to marry… So my sister and I have bought a house together and have lived happily there for years and years and years.’ So, ‘Please can my sister and I get married?

Even if everything goes wronger still, the Greek No vote is a great victory for the left. Until now, the left has not mounted a serious challenge to the claims of the EU. It is extraordinary how it has been cowed. The single currency, especially a single currency without a ‘social dimension’ and political union, is the classic ‘bankers’ ramp’ against which the left always used to inveigh. It is a huge collective device to put banks before workers, if necessary reducing the latter to poverty. Greece is an almost perfect example of this, with the rescue designed to save European banks, not Greek people.