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.
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This column is written from St Andrews, where our son is in his last year as an undergraduate. It is the most perfect university town I know. Held in on two sides by the Firth of Tay and the sea, and by the famed golf course on the third, it can scarcely expand at all.
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At the weekend, we stayed in Hillsborough Castle, official residence of the secretaries of state for Northern Ireland. There, in the 1770s, came Benjamin Franklin. He was said to have got on so badly with Lord Hillsborough, then acting Secretary of State for the Colonies, that he went home and declared the independence of the
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Last week, I went to a party in No. 10 Downing Street to relaunch its official website. In his speech of welcome, the Prime Minister said something quite bold. Because of Freedom of Information (FoI), he explained, officials and ministers are increasingly reluctant to put on paper what they actually think. He is right. If you
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The present Queen succeeded to the throne 60 years ago this coming Tuesday. Her father, King George VI, had died at Sandringham in the night. Pursuing a ‘Where were you when…?’ line of inquiry, I asked my father what he remembered. An undergraduate at Trinity, he was walking down Sydney Street, Cambridge, when he saw
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As the Labour party wrestles with self-definition in hard times, I wonder if it was wise to ditch Clause 4. In 1994-95, it was important for Tony Blair to win a symbolic victory over the left. This undoubtedly helped get him into Downing Street. Clause 4 of the party’s constitution was considered a doctrinaire text
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In Thought for the Day, of all places, the weird bitterness behind much Scottish nationalism was revealed. On Wednesday, John Bell of the Iona Community complained of the suffering of the Scots and asked people in the south-east of England how they would like it if their history books had been ‘written in Aberdeen’. We
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Wafic Said is an exotic import, but a friend of Britain for 50 years. He has given roughly £100 million to philanthropic causes in this country, including founding and funding the Said Business School at Oxford. He also helped Britain secure with Saudi Arabia, Al-Yamamah, the biggest defence agreement in our history, which was signed
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Alan Titchmarsh says that ‘Gardening is more important than politics. It has a consistent point of view. And that is: that a piece of ground should be cherished.’ He is right, but he may not be fully aware that, in speaking as he does, he is expressing a political opinion. He is saying something conservative.
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It’s not easy seeing the Masai Mara on horseback, says Charles Moore – but it’s also impossible to forget On the third day, we left our original camp to ride 30 miles to the next. There were 15 of us, including our leader Tristan Voorspuy and two Masai grooms. We had all gathered for a
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A Spectator footnote on David Cameron’s adventure in Brussels last week. In 1990, Nick Ridley gave a famous, prescient, ill-tempered interview to the paper in which he condemned the single currency as a ‘German racket’. He had to resign, and Mrs Thatcher’s fall was not long in coming. Last week, Ridley’s nephew, the Northern Ireland
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The last week has been bracing for me, because I have had many interesting encounters with Europhiles. Visiting Spain, I met the former prime minister, José María Aznar. In Paris, I interviewed Jacques Delors, the grand architect of the single currency. Back home, I studied the speech in Berlin by my old friend Radek Sikorski,
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On Tuesday morning, I was sitting reading Jessica Douglas-Home’s vivid new book about the great Delhi Durbar in 1911 (A Glimpse of Empire, Michael Russell). In the background, the Today programme was burbling. I had just got to the bit about the Maharajas paying homage to the King-Emperor. The author describes how the Maharaja of
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Not a lot of people know that Douglas Alexander is the shadow foreign secretary, but his speech this week about the euro shows that Labour is at last thinking like an effective opposition. Mr Alexander has noticed the danger of being the status quo party. He wants Labour to hand that honour to the Conservatives.
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Charles Moore’s column in tomorrow’s issue of the magazine contains a wickedly funny literary item. Here it is, a day early, for readers of this blog: The Duchess of Cornwall also strikes a blow for cultural subversion this month. For Give A Book, the excellent charity set up in memory of the playwright Simon Gray,
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As the eurozone totters, David Cameron risks imitating those western politicians in the late Eighties so worried about instability that they wanted to prop up the Soviet Union. He ought to recognise that Europe’s difficulty is Britain’s opportunity. He should not be investing money or political capital in the survival of the eurozone. Since everything
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It being All Saints’ Day on Tuesday, we sang ‘For all the saints’ in church: ‘Oh, may thy soldiers, faithful, true and bold,/ Fight as the saints, who nobly fought of old/ And win with them the victor’s crown of gold.’ Meanwhile, the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral were falling apart because most
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When, roughly 60 years ago, Aneurin Bevan described the Conservatives as ‘lower than vermin’, Tory supporters all over the country formed a Vermin Club in proud response. Now it is time to form a Graffiti Club. On the Today programme on Monday, the day of the referendum vote in Parliament, William Hague foolishly compared his
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• Lord Wolfson the Younger (both father and son are life peers) is public-spiritedly offering £250,000 for anyone who, in 25,000 words, can answer the question ‘If it becomes necessary for one or more member states to leave the euro, what is the best way for this to be arranged?’ At dinner with Simon Wolfson
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Fox-hunting, as Lord Burns famously put it, ‘seriously compromises the welfare of the fox’. Everyone agrees that the welfare of Dr Fox, the Defence Secretary, has been seriously compromised, so I suppose everyone is right. But amid all the aerating about standards in public life and ministerial codes, no one seems to worry who now
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Manchester ‘Beer-battered sustainable fish’, said the menu in the Palace Hotel: this great city tries to combine its incontestable northernness with its growing, but still insecure modernity. Everything has to be ‘sustainable’ now of course, which will prove difficult if the present European banking system cannot be sustained. The government’s new ideas about planning are