Charles Moore

People are quite often pilloried for saying the opposite of what they actually said. I have read Hilary Mantel’s London Review of Books lecture, and she is quite clearly not attacking the Duchess of Cambridge, but criticising what it is that people try to turn royal women into. When she speaks of the Duchess as ‘a jointed doll on which certain rags were hung’, or ‘the spindles of her limbs’ being ‘hand-turned and gloss-varnished’, she is talking about what the media and public opinion want of her. She discusses appearance, and offers no opinion about the young woman’s reality. She is sympathising with a female predicament, and she does the same about Diana, Princess of Wales, the present Queen, Anne Boleyn and Marie Antoinette.

Pope Benedict is stepping down for conscientious reasons about which he will have thought deeply. But I still fear that his decision is a mistake. First, its manner was unfortunate. An institution like the Catholic Church should avoid unnecessary shocks. It seems that the main people involved were told only on Sunday, and presented with a fait accompli. The news was announced the following day. Obviously, secrecy was important, but in a monarchical system, such a change is momentous and its consequences need to be thought through by the closest counsellors. The orthodoxy has grown up that the long physical decline of Pope John Paul II was a disaster which should not be repeated. This is not so (though it certainly created difficulties).

‘The rain is ever falling, drip, drip, drip, by day and night… The weather is so very bad, down in Lincolnshire, that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend its ever being fine again.’ That is Dickens in the 1850s (Bleak House). It is a similar story here in Sussex as the year 2013 comes in. I usually have no objection to ‘bad’ weather, but the worst of this is that the land is so saturated that man, motorised vehicle and mounted beast is effectively banned from the fields, as if there were an outbreak of foot-and-mouth. So perhaps I am sitting and brooding too much; but it does seem to me that David Cameron is losing rural support at quite a rate and not realising. In this, the failure to repeal the hunting ban is significant.

You will have read in every news outlet that the baby whom the Duchess of Cambridge is bearing will be third in line to the throne if she is a girl, because of a new law which equalises the succession of the firstborn between males and females. This is untrue — first because, as the child of the heir to the heir, she will be third in line to the throne under existing law (unless a brother comes along), and secondly because this new law does not exist. All that has happened is that the Commonwealth prime ministers of the 16 countries of which our Queen is Queen agreed in Perth in 2011 that they wanted this change. Under the Statute of Westminster, no change can happen without the legislative agreement of all. They therefore set in train a means of co-ordinating this.

There is excitement that a foreigner could have been made Governor of the Bank of England. But the truth is that Canadians (and Australians and New Zealanders) are not really foreigners. The common history and kinship are so strong that there is pre-existing trust. (Mark Carney, indeed, is married to an Englishwoman.) This is an unusual thing in the history of the world. You cannot imagine any non-Frenchman governing the Banque de France, or any non-German (except an Austrian?) running the Bundesbank, or a British citizen running the Fed. You cannot even imagine a US citizen being the Governor of the Bank of England. When times are hard — money troubles, war, terrorism — the ‘Old Empire’ links always prove their strength.

David Dimbleby is right that the BBC is bedevilled by managerialism. He makes an apt comparison with the National Health Service, where his wife, who works in mental health, reports similar horrors. But no one goes on to ask why this is so. It is assumed that the answer is to appoint robust journalists (or, in the case of the NHS, doctors) instead of ‘suits’. Unfortunately, this is not so, dismal though the suits are. The BBC is hopelessly managed because, as George Entwistle himself put it while being waterboarded by John Humphrys on Saturday, ‘The organisation is too big. There is too much journalism going on.’ This is absolutely inevitable if the BBC continues to be an organisation trying to offer all types of broadcasting.

‘England shall bide till Judgment Tide, By Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! says Kipling. Possibly we shall have to bide with just oak and thorn now (and oak, too, is threatened). People have already attacked the government for being slow to intervene against ash dieback. But it is also interesting to note the tardy feebleness of the various bodies who are supposed to love and know about trees. I cannot identify anything from the Woodland Trust before its press release of 29 September, because if I type ‘ash dieback’ or ‘chalara’ into its website it says ‘no results matching your search were found’.

Instead of looking at the BBC’s behaviour over the Jimmy Savile programme through the red mist of self-righteous hindsight, consider the editorial problem it presented at the time. You have already planned Christmas tribute programmes to one of your most popular contributors of the past 40 years (God knows why he was so popular, but that is the symptom of a wider cultural sickness). Then you hear that part of your empire is investigating child abuse allegations against him. You inquire, and find that, though highly alarming, the allegations do not constitute proof and are not clearly supported by other inquiries e.g. by the police. Obviously you cannot run both the tribute programmes and the child abuse programme. Which do you spike?