Charles Moore

There is a school of thought which argues that President Obama’s reluctance to lead over Libya is a brilliant piece of presentation. There is a school of thought which argues that President Obama’s reluctance to lead over Libya is a brilliant piece of presentation. He wisely does not wish to be seen to attack yet another Muslim nation, the argument goes, but he will, in fact, do what is necessary. There is certainly sense in an American president being asked by others to help, rather than the other way round. But there are two problems. The first is that the ‘backwards into bed’ theory is not true.

‘You can be young, optimistic and oppose AV’, says the magazine spiked. ‘You can be young, optimistic and oppose AV’, says the magazine spiked. I am sorry to hear it, because we anti-AV people were hoping not to be pestered by any young, optimistic people, but to oppose change in an elderly, unthinking and sullen manner. ‘Non tali auxilio!’, we cry, confident that young, optimistic people will not know what we mean. But one might feel more optimistic if one could have referendums on subjects for which there is real popular demand. The AV vote is so obviously and solely the result of a treaty between politicians that it just isn’t reasonable to ask the rest of us to interest ourselves in the details of the matter.

In common with, I suspect, many of those writing most censoriously about it all, I have no idea whether the Duke of York has done anything wrong. So far, the charges against him are that he is friendly with a convicted sex offender, and that he has met Saif Gaddafi and given lunch to the son-in-law of the then president of Tunisia. The first accusation proves nothing against him, but the newspapers are trying to hint, without stating evidence, that the Prince himself may have committed sexual offences. The other accusations prove even less: the Duke is this country’s informal trade ambassador, and he met people with whom the British government happily did business, so he was performing his official role.

In Jerusalem last week to interview the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, I noticed several changes since my last visit 15 years ago. The first is that Israel is now quite rich. It even has its own gas and shale oil, prompting Netanyahu to tell me that he is being forced to revise his view that Moses, for all his heroic virtues, had been a ‘bad navigator’ in finding the only place in the Middle East with no natural resources. Israel used to be socialist — democratic, of course, but almost Soviet in its collectivist austerity. Today, the annual growth rate is nearly 8 per cent, even the West Bank looks smarter, and the wine, which used to be undrinkable and served in thimbles, is delicious. But the precariousness never goes away for long.

The National Health Service has now lived almost long enough to test its claim of full treatment ‘from cradle to grave’. The National Health Service has now lived almost long enough to test its claim of full treatment ‘from cradle to grave’. Certainly most of those now dying under its care have paid taxes for it throughout their working lives, in the name of this proposition. Now we hear from the Health Service Ombudsman, Ann Abraham, that it frequently neglects old people, often to the extent of killing them. Why does this surprise anyone? It is in the nature of a service which forbids genuine choice to patients that it will end up suiting the convenience of those who work in it rather than meeting the needs of the sick.

To interview people for my biography of Lady Thatcher, I often go the House of Lords, where many of the best witnesses lurk. Recently, the place has become so crowded that queues form at the Peers’ Entrance and mobs of petitioners are kettled beside the coat-racks. The reason is that New Labour created more peers than any government since Lloyd George, so the coalition felt it had to balance the numbers. As controversial legislation, such as the Alternative Vote referendum, is debated, three-line whips have become frequent. This week, we had the great sleep-in. The place is an ermine slum. Now reformers are saying that it is disgraceful that some peers do not attend the House much. But why should they?

Last year, we stopped sending Christmas cards. We are not sending them this year either. I still feel guilty about it: friends take the trouble to send such nice ones. Part of the problem — as well as laziness — is technology. Emails make one extremely conscious of the number of separate operations required by ‘snail mail’. You need the card (whose choice is also a complicated matter), the envelope, the addresses, the stamp, the pen, the post box, and the energy to write your name hundreds of times. This all seemed worthwhile when one had confidence in the postal system.

Kenneth Clarke’s reform of prisons is an example of the target culture which the coalition says it wants to stop. Kenneth Clarke’s reform of prisons is an example of the target culture which the coalition says it wants to stop. His target is to reduce the prison population by 3,000 by 2015. Since the projected increase in the population (absent the new policy) is somewhere between 2,000 and 7,000, this will be a very hard target to hit. It is therefore almost inevitable that people will be kept out of or released from prison for bad reasons. As soon as the public sense this, they will lose confidence in the policy.

Quite possibly the government is right. Perhaps it is impossible to win a case against the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights that prisoners must be given the vote. Perhaps it was impossible last week to prevent an increase in the EU budget. Perhaps one can never get what one wants from the European institutions. But if so, isn’t it — I speak in the mild tone of one schooled not to ‘bang on about Europe’ — a bit of a problem? Television reports of the service of blessing for a tourist couple in the Maldives, which was actually, unknown to the couple, a stream of insults, deliberately avoided the nub of the story.

Sometimes certain words become morally compulsory. Current examples include ‘sustainable’ and ‘transparent’. A new phrase coming up the track is ‘energy security’. It is stated that we risk the energy security of the United Kingdom by being so dependent on foreign oil, gas or nuclear-generated energy. How much better, it is also stated, to have our own sources of energy like wind-power and tide-power. I wonder if this is right, even if — which is highly improbable — such alternative sources could suffice. It is true, in principle, that suppliers can decide to cut off their customers, but the natural tendency of an international energy market is the opposite. It is in the interest of everyone involved to keep the thing flowing.

There was dismay in Whitehall at the way decisions on the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) were left until the very last moment. But those who were at Oxford with David Cameron explain that this is his preferred method. He collects information and views for as long as he possibly can, or a bit longer. Then he decides. They call it ‘government by essay crisis’. The result looks awful, because there seems to be so little relation between the National Security Strategy, which sets out and calibrates the threats, and the Review, which cuts. We are in the weird position of buying aircraft carriers because of the last government’s crazy contracts, while not really intending to buy the aircraft which they are supposed to carry.

The idea that those who can should pay for their university education has taken more than a quarter of a century to become full government policy. Even now, in the week in which Lord Browne reports, people hate it. It is the first issue that I can remember where I came up against the ability of the well-off to defend themselves. In 1984, Sir Keith Joseph, then Secretary of State for Education, sprang the idea that parental contributions to their children’s university fees should increase, with the better-off paying more than the poorer. I was in my first few months of editing The Spectator, and the paper argued that this was a reasonable idea which should lead, in time, to universities being more independent of government.

Once upon a time, it was the easiest thing on earth to read what the press calls ‘the mood of conference’. Birmingham Once upon a time, it was the easiest thing on earth to read what the press calls ‘the mood of conference’. The Conservative party was a great tribe, authentically representing large swaths of British life. It was not very political, so on the rare occasions when it expressed real anxiety about something, you could tell it was serious. Political parties of this sort no longer exist and cannot be revived. Most people have better things to do. Party politics has undergone ‘producer capture’.