Charles Moore

Charles Moore

Charles Moore is The Spectator’s chairman.

He is a former editor of the magazine, as well as the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Telegraph. He became a non-affiliated peer in July 2020.

Thursday

Charles Moore

Boris Johnson’s party conference performance showed how formidable the Mayor is

It has been left to Boris Johnson to identify the most significant future opportunity in this country — population increase. I was very impressed by his speech on Tuesday because he did a dangerous thing: he tried to reason his party audience out of its instinctive position. London has had more live births in 2012, he told us, than at any time since the 1966 World Cup. He attributed it to time spent on the sofa during the Olympics. Conservative supporters always favour economic growth but usually balk at any linkage with having more babies. Being predominantly old, they find large numbers of the young irritating.

Wednesday

Charles Moore

Why didn’t the Daily Mail stick to the ‘red angle’ when it came to Ralph Miliband?

For those of us of a certain age, Ed Miliband’s speech last week was exhilaratingly nostalgic. His promise to freeze energy prices reminded us of happy times when Labour policies were patently, shamelessly idiotic. At last, after a generation of loss, we began to hope to find reds under the bed again. In its understandable excitement, the Daily Mail made the mistake of finding only a dead red — Mr Miliband’s late father, Ralph. It then compounded its error by saying that Miliband senior ‘hated Britain’, on the basis of some angry remarks he made when aged 17.

Thursday

Charles Moore

Sixteen-year-olds don’t pay tax. Why should they vote?

No doubt it will happen, because the Tories will not dare oppose it, but is there any conceivable good reason why 16-year-olds should have the vote, as first Alex Salmond, then the Liberals, and this week Ed Miliband have promised? The argument is that giving people the vote makes them feel empowered. But the sad fact about human nature is that once you have won a right, you quickly take it for granted. I am part of the first generation to have had the vote at 18 rather than 21. We were quite pleased by this, but less interested than our parents’ generation. Our children’s generation is astonishingly uninterested.

Charles Moore

Why should 16 year olds get the vote? They don’t pay tax.

No doubt it will happen, because the Tories will not dare oppose it, but is there any conceivable good reason why 16-year-olds should have the vote, as first Alex Salmond, then the Liberals, and this week Ed Miliband have promised? The argument is that giving people the vote makes them feel empowered. But the sad fact about human nature is that once you have won a right, you quickly take it for granted. I am part of the first generation to have had the vote at 18 rather than 21. We were quite pleased by this, but less interested than our parents’ generation. Our children’s generation is astonishingly uninterested.

Thursday

Charles Moore

Charles Moore’s notes: Liberal-leaning Muslims are the people most opposed to the niqab

We are not allowed to know any details about the Muslim woman, charged with intimidating a witness, who has been ordered to take off her full-face veil to give evidence in court. But when it is all over, it will not be surprising if she turns out to be a convert. All mainstream religions have some sort of teaching about what to wear. Within living memory, for example, it was all but compulsory for women to have their heads covered in church. But general teachings in favour of modesty have different cultural applications, and it is usually false to claim that a religion absolutely insists upon a particular garment. What happens is that zealots, often manipulating ignorant converts, decide to make dress into a shibboleth.

Friday

Charles Moore

Why the BBC couldn’t see any serious problem with its huge pay-offs

‘Corruption’ is a subtle word, because it describes a process rather than an event. It does not merely mean bad behaviour: it means behaviour that becomes rotten out of something which was once good. That is why it often afflicts high-minded organisations more than ordinary businesses. People who think they are collectively moral are more self-deceiving than the average market trader. Hence the current embarrassments of the BBC about huge pay-offs.

Thursday

Charles Moore

Charles Moore’s notes: The corruption of the BBC – and what was in my GQ goodie bag

‘Corruption’ is a subtle word, because it describes a process rather than an event. It does not merely mean bad behaviour: it means behaviour that becomes rotten out of something which was once good. That is why it often afflicts high-minded organisations more than ordinary businesses. People who think they are collectively moral are more self-deceiving than the average market trader. Hence the current embarrassments of the BBC about huge pay-offs.

Charles Moore

Andrew Mitchell is still waiting for justice

A week ago next Thursday marks the first anniversary of the Curious Incident of the Chief Whip in the Night-time. The chief whip, Andrew Mitchell, did nothing — or very little — in the night-time. That was the curious incident. There is not the slightest evidence that he called the policemen on the gates of Downing Street ‘plebs’; and this has now been admitted. It is clear, with plenty of evidence on Channel 4 News, that some police, with some accomplices, spread a story against Mr Mitchell, possibly to protect themselves against an expected complaint from him after they refused to let him through the gates on his bicycle. As a result of what he did not say, Mr Mitchell was forced to resign.

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 5 September 2013

David Cameron says that he will not come back to the House of Commons again about the question of Syria because Parliament has spoken. Obviously, having sought its opinion, he cannot now try to override it. But no one can know how the issue will now play out, and it may well be that new circumstances (major foreign interventions, for example) will change everything. Parliament cannot make foreign policy decisions in advance of facts, and therefore should not try. Foreign policy is not like legislation: it is protean. The House of Commons should support the government when it gets it right and arraign it when it gets it wrong. It should not pre-empt it. What actually happened last week was that no motion about Syria passed. There is therefore a policy vacuum.

Friday

Charles Moore

Jeremy Hunt’s letter a day to keep NHS myths away

Attending the funeral of Margaret Thatcher in April, the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was much impressed by the bit in the sermon by the Bishop of London about how Mrs Thatcher had replied personally to so many letters. He went back to his department, and asked it to give him each day one letter from a member of the public which recounted particularly shocking problems in the Health Service. He now uses these letters to dive into the problems that patients experience. It is a good idea, but how alarming that it is a novel one. The Department of Health receives more letters than any other part of government except 10 Downing Street. Is it really the case that up till now, officials have never troubled the Secretary of State with the woes of the public?

Thursday

Charles Moore

Charles Moore’s notes: While Justin Welby was finding God, I was eating baked beans

Attending the funeral of Margaret Thatcher in April, the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was much impressed by the bit in the sermon by the Bishop of London about how Mrs Thatcher had replied personally to so many letters. He went back to his department, and asked it to give him each day one letter from a member of the public which recounted particularly shocking problems in the Health Service. He now uses these letters to dive into the problems that patients experience. It is a good idea, but how alarming that it is a novel one. The Department of Health receives more letters than any other part of government except 10 Downing Street. Is it really the case that up till now, officials have never troubled the Secretary of State with the woes of the public?

Friday

Charles Moore

We know Andrew Mitchell was framed. Now, give him his old job back

Andrew Mitchell was forced to resign as the Tory Chief Whip last autumn because he called policemen at the Downing Street gates ‘plebs’. Then it turned out, as I suggested at the time, that he had not done so. It emerged that there was a conspiracy — quite how deep has not yet been made public — by police and accomplices to attribute to Mr Mitchell words which he did not speak. People pretending to be by-standing members of the public said how shocked they were by Mr Mitchell’s remarks, and then it turned out that no bystanders had been within earshot of whatever it was that Mr Mitchell had said. Eventually, there was an investigation.

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 11 July 2013

Andrew Mitchell was forced to resign as the Tory Chief Whip last autumn because he called policemen at the Downing Street gates ‘plebs’. Then it turned out, as this column suggested at the time, that he had not done so. It emerged that there was a conspiracy — quite how deep has not yet been made public — by police and accomplices to attribute to Mr Mitchell words which he did not speak. People pretending to be by-standing members of the public said how shocked they were by Mr Mitchell’s remarks, and then it turned out that no bystanders had been within earshot of whatever it was that Mr Mitchell had said. Eventually, there was an investigation.

Charles Moore

The unpleasant truth about shale gas: it’s in my back yard

One great advance for the environment is shale gas, though for some reason Greens do not see it that way. It will make us — and has already made America — far less dependent on high carbon-emitting sources of energy. It is lucky for those trying to extract it in this country that it is in places like Ellesmere Port and Blackpool where there are not many spoilt, rich people to complain about damage to the landscape. The problem is that successful extraction requires quite a lot of ‘frack pads’ each covering an area larger than a football pitch. These attract little attention in enormous, dull, empty areas of the United States, and will probably be accepted in our impoverished north-west.

Sunday

Charles Moore

Why not marry your dog?

Looking forward, as one always must, I wonder if the law will eventually be changed to allow one to marry one’s dog. Until now, this would have been considered disgusting, since marriage has been a law revolving around sexual behaviour, and sexual acts with animals are still, I believe, illegal. But, as this column has pointed out, the unintended consequence of the same-sex marriage legislation has been to take sex out of marriage law. Civil servants, unable to define same-sex consummation, omitted it. So marriage, from now on, can mean no more than the legally registered decision of two people to live together while not being married to anyone else. The justification for this is ‘equality’, buttressed by the idea that love must carry all before it.

Saturday

Charles Moore

The system for MPs’ pay is an undemocratic absurdity

MPs are incomparable. This may seem an odd thing to say in the current climate of opinion, but I mean it exactly: they cannot be compared with others. Now that a big rise is being suggested by Ipsa, the ‘independent’ body which sets their pay, people say they should be compared with local authority chief executives or head teachers, or that they are a profession. They cannot, and they aren’t. They are our elected representatives. We elect them to make our laws and to vote ‘supply’, i.e. to decide how much of our money government may spend. They therefore constitutionally must decide, in public, on their own pay (if any) and vote on it.

Thursday

Charles Moore

Charles Moore: Why not marry a dog?

MPs are incomparable. This may seem an odd thing to say in the current climate of opinion, but I mean it exactly: they cannot be compared with others. Now that a big rise is being suggested by Ipsa, the ‘independent’ body which sets their pay, people say they should be compared with local authority chief executives or head teachers, or that they are a profession. They cannot, and they aren’t. They are our elected representatives. We elect them to make our laws and to vote ‘supply’, i.e. to decide how much of our money government may spend. They therefore constitutionally must decide, in public, on their own pay (if any) and vote on it. Anything else is an evasion, and Ipsa or anything like it is a power above Parliament, and therefore unanswerable to voters.

Sunday

Charles Moore

Why do we assume that ‘whistleblowers’ like Edward Snowden are always in the right?

Although virtually everyone, including me, is against the dreadful people who ran the Care Quality Commission, I do notice that something ridiculous has crept into all reporting of such rows. This is the unquestioned assumption that the ‘whistleblower’ is in the right. Other recent examples include the mysterious anti-CIA and anti-GCHQ man, Edward Snowden, the police who appear to have invented what Andrew Mitchell told them at the Downing Street gates, and anyone who ever accuses anyone in any position of authority of having performed acts of paedophilia. We know that many people in big organisations have base motives for covering things up, and we excoriate them for doing so.

Friday

Charles Moore

Gay divorce

It has already been announced that there will be no provision for adultery as grounds for single-sex divorce, for the obvious reason (though it was only belatedly obvious to the legislators) that same-sex intercourse, having no procreative purpose, cannot have any definition of consummation, and therefore cannot be adulterated. Now it turns out, however, that if someone in a single-sex marriage has intercourse with a member of the opposite sex, this will be grounds for divorce. Since such intercourse will presumably be unwelcome to most homosexuals, and yet useful in divorce proceedings, one can foresee a return to the pre-war system, satirised by A.P. Herbert in Holy Deadlock.

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 27 June 2013

Jane Austen is a ‘contingency character’, we have just learnt. In his last appearance as Governor of the Bank of England before the Treasury Select Committee of the House of Commons, Sir Mervyn King explained that the great novelist rather slightingly so described stands in reserve to feature on any of our bank notes if too many people succeed in counterfeiting the current occupants. She is also in the running for the ten-pound note when Charles Darwin relinquishes it. This is a hot issue, because the notes do not feature enough women, we are told — despite the fact that since 1952, 100 per cent of them have featured a woman (the Queen).