Charles Moore

What would happen if you or I or telephoned an old man we did not know and left a message on his answering machine saying that one of us had ‘f—–ed’ his grand-daughter? What would happen if we then left three more messages, joking about her menstruation and imitating his voice as, in our imagination, he said he would kill himself because of the shame? What if our messages pointed out that most grandparents have pictures of their nine-year-old grandchildren by the telephone on a swing and then went on to say that one of us had ‘enjoyed’ his grand-daughter in that position? What would happen if we also shouted into the answering machine ‘I’ll kill you!

Nearly 20 years ago, after the Tiananmen Square massacres, The Spectator campaigned for all Hong Kong people to be given British passports. Part of our argument was that, if they all had the passports, very few of them would want to come here: they would have the confidence to stay. That, in essence, is the same reasoning that the governments of the Western world are using when they prop up the banks. Banks only lend because they can get their money back, yet if they all try to get their money back, they cannot lend. When they are all terrified, therefore, some external agency has to remove the fear. That external agency has to be government, or governments. I do not see anything very ideological in this.

We all know that everything about money comes down to confidence, but normally, because we have that confidence, we do not think about what this means. Now we must. We have learnt that mighty banks are nothing if customers — and other banks — have no confidence in their assets. Panicked, we turn to governments. Only governments, we believe, can ultimately overcome monetary crises, because only they have control of the printing press. If they ‘stand behind’ our banks, our confidence can be restored. That is why Gordon Brown acted as he did on Wednesday morning. But is this necessarily so?

It is a fascinating feature of this great financial disaster that everyone — or at least everyone sensible — is confused. It is a fascinating feature of this great financial disaster that everyone — or at least everyone sensible — is confused. I do not mean the basic, widespread confusion about terms and processes — about what is short-selling or a derivative, what are monolines, HELOCS, etc. I mean confusion about what is good news and what is bad. Has America nationalised its banks, and if it has, is that good or bad? Was it good to allow Lloyds to swallow HBOS, because it saved the latter, or bad, because it overthrew competition requirements and created moral hazard?

We are in a financial crisis which has been going on for more than a year. It is remarkable that, in all that time, no political leader has had anything much to say about it. In the United States, neither John McCain nor Barack Obama appears to have any understanding of what is going on. Over here, Gordon Brown’s supposed gift for economic analysis seems to have deserted him. One hears phrases like ‘the fundamentals are sound’, and trembles. David Cameron, pursuing the favourite strategy of keeping his party away from bad news, acknowledges the gravity of the situation without proposing remedies.

This column and its readers have just won our first battle in our long war. The BBC Trust has announced that it will investigate the way in which the television licence fee is collected. It wants to know, for example, whether the public think that the methods of enforcement are ‘reasonable and appropriate’. This column has been highlighting the predicament of those (including myself, in my London flat) who do not possess a television. We receive unreasonable and inappropriate letters from TV Licensing, often by the dozen, which assume our guilt for evasion without any evidence and threaten us with inspection and a criminal record.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been rather belittled on his death. Not knowing any Russian, I cannot judge his prose style, but when people complain that he was unrelentingly serious, they are applying the wrong criteria. Solzhenitsyn was prophetic, and obsessed with truth-telling in a world of lies. His mission led him to believe that no time must be wasted, no compromises made. This made him difficult in some ways, in literature and in life, but what of it? His compassion consisted of what the word really means — a suffering with others — rather than an easy friendliness. No doubt Isaiah and Ezekiel were potentially tricky dinner companions, but then they were not put on this earth to behave like Sydney Smith.

The news that the government is to fund a board of Islamic theologians to try to advance more moderate interpretations of Islam has been attacked as an unprecedented attempt by the state to shape the doctrine of a religion. It may well be a bad idea, but unprecedented it is not. The establishment of the Church of England meant that, until the 1970s, Parliament had the ultimate authority to determine doctrine and worship. It still has a residual role. Parliament empowered the courts in such matters. In 1850, for example, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council supported a clergyman called Gorham after his bishop had refused to institute him because of his heretical views on baptismal regeneration.

John Howard, four times Prime Minister of Australia, is one of the great men of our time — direct, amusing, patriotic, moderate but tough-minded. He finally lost an election this year, which had the good effect of giving him some time in London recently. One of the Howard lessons is that when you get into office for the first time you must have a very nasty budget straightaway. Only at the start will you have the moral authority to tackle the vast public spending you have inherited. Mr Howard has been telling this to our own Conservatives. They know he is right, but they do not altogether like hearing it.

‘Paul Johnson has killed Gordon Brown.’ This news was brought recently to Tessa Jowell, Anji Hunter, Margaret Jay and other Labour luminaries gathered in the Sabine hills near Rome. Shocked, they reached for their BlackBerries to find out more and make arrangements to fly home. Luckily, matters were quickly explained. After Mr Brown’s failure to call an election last October, Carla Powell, host of the above, named her pet rabbit after him. She possesses eight dogs, including a large, amiable stray called Tony Blair. Tony Blair never dared molest Gordon Brown. But six of Carla’s dogs are dachshunds, and the fiercest she named Paul Johnson, after this magazine’s distinguished columnist.

Outside the Joint Support Unit HQ here stands a cross rising from a mound of cobbles. On each of the four sides of the mound is set a brass plate for the names of those British soldiers who have died in Afghanistan. The second of the four plates is almost full. At the precise moment that we walk past it, the Union flag is being adjusted to half-mast — the 96th man has just died, killed by a mine. The CO has told us that the camp will take from seven to ten years to complete. So, at the present rate of death, by then the memorial will need at least eight plates — for which there is no room. Although the camp is well organised and neat, the place is unutterably bleak. The landscape has almost no features at all. ‘The lone and level sands stretch far away.

When it was announced in 1999 that Cherie Blair was pregnant, the controversy about the proposed hunting ban was at its height. I discussed the pregnancy at a hunt tea with the terrier-man. ‘It won’t be a baby,’ he predicted sullenly, ‘It’ll be a two-headed calf.’ Actually, it was dear little Leo. Now, in the extracts from her forthcoming memoirs, Mrs Blair explains the circumstances of his conception. In the previous year, when she and Tony had stayed at Balmoral, ‘I had been extremely disconcerted to discover that everything of mine had been unpacked. Not only my clothes, but the entire contents of my distinctly ancient toilet bag with its range of unmentionables.