Charles Moore

‘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.

It is interesting that David Cameron sends out an Easter message each year. Such a thing is a symptom of the decline of Christianity. When Britain was a Christian country, no prime minister would have thought it necessary (or proper) to speak urbi et orbi. Today, Easter takes its place alongside Eid, Diwali, Rosh Hashanah, Gay Pride etc as a day for which No. 10 issues public blessing. Mr Cameron is at pains, however, to speak of Christians as ‘we’ and to remind everyone that the nation has ‘an established faith [the more accurate word ‘Church’ is avoided] that together is most content when we are defined by what we are for, rather than defined by what we are against.

As one who has had the pleasure of meeting Peter Cruddas, without being an undercover reporter, I see the latest scandal about party funding rather differently from most. Mr Cruddas has the curious, attractive unworldliness which often goes with being a very successful self-made businessman. He is the son of an alcoholic taxi-driver from Hackney, and he left school with no qualifications. He took a menial job in a bank and found that he was clever with the tickertape machines of that time (the 1970s). This was the germ of something big. In the internet era, he worked out how to capture, convey and help people bet on market information. When he had made a really enormous sum of money — a value of about £1.

It is almost 30 years since Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. I must admit that those few strange weeks were incredible fun for us journalists. At the Daily Telegraph, where I was working as a leader writer, there was an interesting generational split. All the older men, with the notable exception of the blind sage T.E. Utley, were extremely pessimistic. People like Bill Deedes, the editor, who had fought in the second world war, thought the military task was impossible. It was a rare example of where relevant experience puts one at a disadvantage. To us young ones, it seemed obvious that Britain should recapture the islands — they were British in the eyes of their inhabitants, and they had been grabbed by force.

 With gay marriage will come gay divorce. If you look at civil partnership dissolutions, the numbers have multiplied more than ten times in four years, though this rate of increase will presumably level off. (The level is still much lower than that of heterosexual marriage.) What will be the grounds for gay divorce? The only legal ground for the dissolution of a civil partnership is that it has ‘broken down irretrievably’. You cannot, as in heterosexual marriage, cite non-consummation or adultery, although ‘unfaithfulness may be recognised as a form of unreasonable behaviour’.