Charles Moore

Probably it will all be all right. Probably the Scots, rightly offered an either/or rather than a third way, will vote to stay in the Union in 2014. But there is something unhappy about the choreography of this week’s announcement of a referendum agreement. It is not clear why David Cameron had to negotiate this with Alex Salmond. Votes on the future of the United Kingdom are not a devolved matter. They should be settled by all MPs with, in this case, a decisive role for Scottish MPs. Obviously it was prudent to seek Mr Salmond’s views, but the process has contrived to make him look like the leader of his nation’s liberation struggle.

It is such a mistake for senior Tory politicians and journalists — Ken Clarke and Max Hastings are the latest — to complain that Boris Johnson ‘isn’t serious’. It is because he isn’t serious that people like him. And since we live in postmodern politics, his lack of seriousness is seen by his fans to qualify him for the highest office. After all, those politicians who consider themselves serious — the great majority — are not saying anything seriously interesting, and Mr Unserious Johnson remains the only Conservative to win an important electoral contest (twice) since 1992. It is unwise of them to draw attention to Boris’s greatest asset. It would be more cunning to say that he isn’t funny.

Ed Miliband, in Manchester, invoked a speech by Disraeli 140 years ago, in the same city. Prudently, he did not quote it: you won’t find much ‘One Nation’ stuff there. In it, Disraeli devoted his energies to attacking the radical forces which ‘were determined to destroy the Church and the House of Lords’ and were threatening even the Crown. No matter, what Mr Miliband is doing is, to employ another Disraeli phrase, ‘stealing the Whigs’ clothes while they were bathing’. (For this purpose, and possibly for others, we can call the coalition Whigs.) He has noticed that David Cameron’s great selling-point — ‘We are all in this together’ — has weakened in office, and so he has mounted an audacious raid and grabbed it.

Andrew Mitchell, accused of being a bully, was bullied in turn. There was tremendous journalistic laziness in the reporting of his alleged remarks to police officers at the Downing Street gates. A few months ago it was considered a national scandal that the police were always slipping information to the Murdoch press. Now they planted a story in the Sun and no one minded. Yet what they did was a breach of trust for which they should be sacked. How can people who work in Downing Street now be confident that the men and women at the gate really are protecting them? It is a well-known tradition for police to concoct evidence against the accused.

Departing as Conservative MP for Corby, Louise Mensch writes a ‘letter of resignation’ to the Prime Minister. Why? Being an MP is not a government post: she is not a minister. An MP should write to his or her constituents and/or the chairman of the constituency association. It is constitutionally wrong for Mrs Mensch to write to Mr Cameron, except perhaps a private note of apology for inflicting a by-election on his party.  But the fact that she did write such a letter accurately reflects why she is an MP. David Cameron made her one, through his A-list system of imposing preferred candidates. Her departure exposes the dangers of this type of intervention by the party leader. The A-list is a form of patronage, and patronage arouses expectations of more favours.

‘Make hay while the sun shines’ is advice to be taken literally as well as metaphorically, and so, as I walked up from the station after a particularly Olympics-cursed visit to London, I was soothed by the sound and smell of mowing coming from our little fields. Haymaking should have taken place almost two months ago, but the wet made it truly impossible until this week. Should the sudden kindness of the weather and the excitement of the approaching opening ceremony make one get all nice about the Olympics? Well, yes, as far as the hopes of the athletes and the pleasure of the spectators go, it should. It is only when I read that it is ‘easy to carp’ that I get cross. Actually, it is not all that easy. There is considerable moral pressure to talk up the Olympics.

A big reason for opposing these Lords reforms is that they would threaten the power of the Commons. If the Commons passed them, however, it would deserve to be threatened. It would display — like No. 10 Downing Street — an ignorance of the constitution and an arrogance about process which undermines the point of Parliament. So the forced withdrawal of the ‘programme motion’ — the guillotine — which probably looked to the outside world like a weird device made more incomprehensible by the fact that the second reading then won a large majority, was actually a classic assertion of the rights of Parliament against the executive. ••• One consequence of the reform fiasco is the pivotal power it gives to Labour.

The Governor of the Bank of England raised his legendary eyebrow and Barclays tried to singe it. If there was any doubt about the badness of Barclays’ behaviour in the Libor-rigging scandal, it is surely removed by the way Barclays has dealt with its denouement. Bob Diamond and co claimed they had no part in rigging, and yet they released the October 2008 letter written by Mr Diamond purporting to show that Paul Tucker, the deputy governor of the Bank, was giving them permission to rig. If it does show that, they are liars. If it does not — as three official investigations have already concluded — then they are just throwing mud.

For too long, out of a high-minded desire not to spoil anyone’s pleasure, this column has avoided the subject of the Olympics. But when I came to London this week, after an absence of ten days, I found I could remain silent no longer. My walks through St James’s Park, so good for body and soul, and so much more efficient for getting where I wish to go than other means of transport, have been banned. The park is closed. This is partly to allow Olympic beach volleyball to spoil Horse Guards, but also, apparently, for ‘security reasons’, the great tyrant’s excuse of our times. According to the Royal Parks, the park will not ‘return to its pre-Games condition’ until the spring of 2013.

In the Tintin books, there are Thompson and Thomson (‘without a p, as in Venezuela’). So it is with the BBC. Mark Thompson is the Director-General, and Caroline Thomson is the Chief Operating Officer. The latter now seeks the former’s job. It is impossible not to laugh at the perfection of Miss Thomson’s BBC pedigree. Her father, Lord Thomson of Monifeith, was a Labour minister, a European Commissioner and a television duopoly mogul. Her husband, Lord (Roger) Liddle, was a special adviser to the Labour minister and founder of the SDP, Bill Rodgers, and was later a special adviser on European Affairs to Tony Blair, and then a member of Peter Mandelson’s cabinet at the European Commission.

Is the hour of socialism upon us? Thanks to the exhausted financial orthodoxies of those who rule the eurozone, austerity is producing slump. No electorate, it seems, is yet ready to elect leaders who go to the root of the problem and reject the European currency, but almost all have lost faith in the Frankfurt solutions. So if François Hollande becomes the next President of France on Sunday, the cry will be that ‘growth’ (which, in this context, means more government spending and borrowing) is the answer, and the centre-right will be cast in the role history has allotted to Herbert Hoover. If Hollande can pull this one, how long before the two Eds proclaim their New deal here? What will David Cameron’s answer be?

Like everyone, especially his old friends and colleagues, I can think of unkind things to say about Boris Johnson. He is a lazy workaholic — too busy doing things to do them thoroughly. He can be exasperating. But as the mayoral election campaign reaches its climax, I must dispute the central current criticism of Boris — that he does not really stand for anything. He may not have yards of clear policies, but his essential message is important and genuine. He believes in freedom, and has a strong preference for letting people get on with their lives without official molestation. He is equally genuine in seeing his voters as Londoners, rather than blacks, whites, Muslims, gays etc.

On Monday, via the BBC, the Treasury put out the line that ‘10 per cent of those earning more than £10 million a year pay less than 20 per cent in income tax.’ It was not explained, or asked by the BBC, how this could be, or how many people were involved. Even in the era of preposterous bonuses, the number of people registered as earning more than £10 million p.a. is, I discover, only 200. So 10 per cent of them is 20 people: the total sums involved cannot amount to much more than £100 million, probably less. In the context — the decision to cap the amount of tax relief on charitable donations — the line was irrelevant.  The government, represented by the unfortunate Treasury minister David Gawke, is trying to shift its ground.