Charles Moore

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’.

It is a convention of modern politics that cuts in public spending must be made sorrowfully. Etiquette seems to demand that phrases like ‘unpleasant task’ and ‘sharing the pain’ be used. Just before writing this, I heard Francis Maude on the Today programme deploying such terms with studious moderation. But one notices that most top-quality politicians, including Mr Maude, actually take some professional pleasure in the work. They are right to do so. It should be an absolute condition of taking money from the public through taxation that the person taking it minds wasting it. It is an absolute certainty, given the amounts of money taken, that huge amounts will be wasted. In the Gordon Brown years, it was wasted more than ever before.

When I asked him whether we needed any waterproofs for our visit to Afghanistan, our leader, Sandy Gall, was firm. No need whatever, he said. But when we reach Bamiyan on a UN plane early in the morning, we look down from the cliff above the town and see our hotel cut off by flood. A lorry has capsized in the torrents, and men with their salwars hoisted high are wading ineffectually about. Sandy’s solution is to book ten donkeys to carry us across later, and meanwhile breakfast in the rather broken-down hotel where, pro tem, we find ourselves. From where we sit, we can survey the niches in which, until the Taleban bombarded them to smithereens, stood the two colossal Buddhas — one from the fifth and the other from the third century — which were wonders of the world.

This column may not, I admit, have praised the Foreign Office at all times, so it is pleased to reveal an admirable FCO operation which has been going on, quietly and successfully, since early last year. In 2008, it became clear — many would say it was clear much, much earlier — that the plight of British citizens in Zimbabwe was desperate. Hyperinflation, and the refusal of Robert Mugabe’s government to honour their pensions, had made many destitute. In February 2009, the British government set up a resettlement scheme for British citizens over 70 who had right of abode here. If they agreed to settle permanently in the United Kingdom, they were flown to Gatwick and then placed in care homes and sheltered accommodation across the country.

People have often said that George Osborne is ‘very political’ and have not meant it as a compliment. People have often said that George Osborne is ‘very political’ and have not meant it as a compliment. But it is, in principle, a good thing that politicians should be political (see what happens when they’re not). To understand the Cameron/Osborne political success, you need to see how quickly they have changed. A year ago, think-tanks like my own dear Policy Exchange were saying that the deficit should be cut, over the parliament now begun, by £100 billion in real terms. This was considered intolerable in polite society.

As a would-be historian (engaged on the biography of Margaret Thatcher), I feel envious of Lord Saville. I could do with having all my hotel bills paid for 12 years, a full legal team to assist, the right to demand the presence of witnesses and £191 million. His 5,000 pages are the most expensive history book ever written. But however judicious Lord Saville has tried to be, his report cannot escape its ultimate political purpose — to please Sinn Fein. In that sense, its author is not Lord Saville, but Tony Blair, who set up the inquiry as part of a political deal. As people call for the soldiers who shot people on that day 38 years ago to be prosecuted, a running commentary is kept up by Martin McGuinness.