Charles Moore

Last Thursday, I got a rush-hour train out of London and sat down in a second-class carriage. Soon I found myself sitting opposite a minister in the new coalition. I was surprised by how much pleasure it gave me that, following the new guidance, he was not travelling first-class, or by official car. I let him doze, and when he woke up, I asked him a few questions in pursuit, as we like to say, of journalistic inquiries. Having drivers on hand at all times is, of course, a huge convenience for ministers, but that is why it is also a bad thing. They quickly forget that one of the main features of life for most people who pay their salaries is its sheer inconvenience.

The most moving thing was the photograph of the handshake between the Queen and her new Prime Minister. It is an excellent innovation to allow the ceremony to be seen, because it reminds people how the constitution works. After the days of uncertainty, we needed this more than usual. There is also something touching in seeing this beautiful old lady confer authority on a man who was minus 15 years old when she came to the throne. If it were not slightly unconstitutional to suggest it, I would add that the Queen looked very pleased. No doubt the mood will pass, but the fact of coalition actually feels more appropriate and satisfying than a small Tory majority would have done.

Since I so much agree with the Big Society which David Cameron wants to create rather than the big state which we have got, I should like to enthuse about the Tory manifesto which makes this the central theme. But there is a problem. The document does not really speak to us, the voters. True, it offers us on its front page an ‘invitation to join the government of Britain’. But haven’t we got enough on our plates without having to do politicians’ job for them? We pay them half our income, and still they want more from us! The manifesto does not start from the viewpoint of particular people — first-time voters, pensioners, parents, taxpayers or whoever — and look at the world as they do.

One of the weirdest articles I have ever read appeared in the Times last week. It was by Ken Macdonald, and it was about child abuse in the Catholic Church. It was clear that the author has a ferocious hatred of the Church in which, he said, he was brought up. He described Catholic parents as being ‘sold at birth’ into believing in the rightness of the Church. He pronounced that the Church is not repentant about child abuse and thus ‘mocks the sacrament’ of confession.

The Dispatches programme which entrapped Messrs Hoon and Byers, Patricia Hewitt et al wanted to set them up as villains (which, indeed, they seemed). So it failed to notice the rather sad undertow of what they were saying. Geoff Hoon put it most clearly: ‘There’s nothing in my diary for April.’ Stephen Byers confirmed it when he said, when caught, that he had been ‘exaggerating’. The simple point is that these people are desperate, and virtually unemployed. They are largely pretending that companies beat a path to their door. What Mr Hoon described as ‘Hoon work’ — as opposed to the work for which the taxpayer pays him — is not coming his way in big enough quantities.

Much was made, in advance, of the fact that Samantha Cameron was at last speaking in public. She did it on Sunday night, interviewed by Trevor Mcdonald — very well, and in a surprisingly old-fashioned way. She looked lovely when she said that she was proud of her husband and that it would be ‘an honour’ to be married to a Prime Minister. But what the pre-released publicity did not prepare viewers for was Mrs Cameron’s accent. It was perfect estuarial. The words ‘really, really’, for example, came out as ‘reelly, reelly’. I could not detect a hint of the tones of her father, Sir Reginald Sheffield, 8th baronet. Sam could have passed herself off as a call-centre worker from Essex, or a weather forecaster, without exciting suspicion.

At last, the BBC has caught up with me. Readers may remember that I have been keeping and watching my television, but refusing to pay my television licence, for as long as the BBC continues to employ Jonathan Ross. (I sent the sum to Help the Aged instead.) The anti-Ross campaign has had some effect and Ross’s contract will not be renewed, but he continues to collect his £6 million a year from the Corporation until July, so I won’t contribute until he is off the books. I have just received a Summons, which begins ‘Brenda Curry TV LICENSING of TV Licensing, PO Box 88, Darwen, BBS 1YX says that you committed the offences listed on the following pages’, and tells me to appear at Hastings Magistrates’ Court on 1 March.

Part of the purpose of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war is what has become known, post the end of apartheid, as ‘truth and reconciliation’. Part of the purpose of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war is what has become known, post the end of apartheid, as ‘truth and reconciliation’. That is why it does not matter much that material already studied closely in the Hutton and Butler reports is being gone over again: this time, the hearings are public. The trouble is that truth and reconciliation are rarely compatible with general elections. In a classic example of the lack of courage for which he is known, Gordon Brown neither refused to have the inquiry at all, nor agreed to have it as soon as he became Prime Minister.

It was half an hour before the Spectator’s Christmas carol service, at which I was to read a lesson, and I was just putting on a tie in my London flat. It was half an hour before the Spectator’s Christmas carol service, at which I was to read a lesson, and I was just putting on a tie in my London flat. The intercom bell rang and a man said that he had come to see me. Then the receiver started squeaking with feedback and I could hear nothing more. The porter of our mansion block then rang me. Two men, he said, were on their way up in the lift. Since I had no idea who they were, I asked him to take them back into the hall and find out. He did so, and rang back. They were called, I think they said, Roger Spriddell and Denis Clayden, and they were from Capita.