Charles Moore

It is probably just as well that the Ray Lewis fiasco happened to Boris Johnson as Mayor, because otherwise it might have happened to David Cameron as Prime Minister. As soon as he became Conservative leader, Mr Cameron went round to see Mr Lewis’s Eastside Young Leaders Academy. It was a token of his seriousness about healing the ‘broken society’. If Mr Lewis had been made captain of the flagship special programme of a new Cameron administration, it would have been embarrassing. It is obviously true that more ‘due diligence’ (not a phrase once associates with Boris) should have been done on Mr Lewis. But there are some less obvious points as well.

As the new Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans challenges the current running of the Church of England, where does this leave Gordon Brown? I ask because one of Mr Brown’s first acts as Prime Minister was to get rid of his office’s traditional role in the appointment of bishops. In that distant period a year ago when he announced ‘the work of change’, Mr Brown decided unilaterally to hand over all power of appointment to the Church itself. Very modern, very correct, you might think, to separate Church and state. But in fact he created an anomaly. So long as we have an Established Church, it has privileged legal status and parliamentary oversight.

How strange that Gordon Brown’s suggestion this week that MPs should have no say in setting their own pay is being welcomed as a curb on sleaze. If their pay is to be set, as is proposed, by a government-funded agency instead of by their own votes, MPs will cease to be independent legislators and become government employees. Most of British constitutional history (‘I see the birds have flown’) has sought to avoid government control of those we elect, and control of a person’s pay is perhaps the most effective curb of all. We are so disillusioned by our MPs that we now welcome anything they do which discards their usual functions.

It would be a lie to say that I feel sorry for the Tory MEPs who have been attacked for paying their staff allowances to companies of which they or members of their family are members, but they are not the most at fault. Giles Chichester, for example, and Den Dover, did at least follow the instruction which came from David Cameron after the Derek Conway affair: they disclosed. The information being used against them is information they have published. More interesting are those who are refusing to disclose. Roughly, the way the European Parliament’s system for staff allowances works is that an MEP can have the full amount (£15,000 per month) sent to his designated paying agent. But the parliament runs no check on whether all the money is in fact dispersed.

If, when you read this, Boris Johnson is the Mayor of London, it will, I have just discovered, be thanks to me. When the idea of Boris’s candidacy was first suggested, I spoke on the telephone to Mary Wakefield, who is now the deputy editor of The Spectator. What did I think of Boris for Mayor, she asked. I snorted. ‘Mayor of Henley more like!’ I said, satirically. I cannot now remember why I took this line, but Mary Wakefield relayed it to Boris, who mentioned it, ruefully, to me. Now I read in the newspapers that my words stung him so much that he made up his mind to prove me wrong. So my cheap shot had the effect on Boris that the bells of London had on poor, young Dick Whittington as he hesitated, about to turn back from the walls of the City.

Charles Moore's reflections on the week Actually, there never was much sense in a ten pence rate of income tax. It added complication, and Gordon Brown is right to get rid of it, though wrong to charge income tax on people so low on the income scale. But you cannot help laughing when you look at the history. Chancellor Brown himself introduced the ten pence rate in 1999. In a coup de théâtre, he said then that it was such a pressing thing that he would ensure that it came in at once, rather than waiting a year, as would have been normal: ‘nearly two million people will see their income tax bills cut in half’. It was, he said later, one of his ‘major changes to reward work’.

If Boris Johnson wins the contest to become Mayor of London on 1 May, he will not inherit an impartial civil service of the sort to which British national politicians are accustomed. There has only been one Mayor of London so far and he, Ken Livingstone, has made sure that London officials reflect his views. So if Boris wins, he will immediately be confronted by the politically motivated hostility of the bureaucracy. It is good to know that he promises to deal with this, less good to hear that he proposes to keep on leading figures like the commissioner of Transport for London, Peter Hendy. The left-wing Mr Hendy is the author of the unloved ‘bendy’ buses, and fires off splenetic letters if anyone dares to criticise the abolition of the much-loved Routemaster.

The huge defeat of the Conservative party in the election of 1997 drove the party back into its rural and suburban redoubts and so cut it off from many things which were happening in Britain. It did not want to think about the rise of political Islam. This opting out was part of a wider demoralisation in conservative culture in recent years. In the time of the Millennium, the death of Diana and all that, many conservative-minded people started to say things like, ‘I don’t recognise my own country.’ They felt so alienated, particularly from their own cities, that they wanted to avoid thinking about problems of multiculturalism, and of terrorism.

In the cut and thrust of debate, David Cameron won easily against the Chancellor in the Budget battle. In the cut and thrust of debate, David Cameron won easily against the Chancellor in the Budget battle. He was crisp and effective. But Alistair Darling did not attempt thrust and certainly will not cut. The fact that his Budget had nothing in it and could barely be spun out for 50 minutes was wholly intentional, and was, in fact, the right thing to do. Mr Cameron said that Mr Darling and Gordon Brown were in a hole and were digging. That might be true of the government more broadly, but it was not true of this Budget. The Chancellor is not digging, nor, on the other hand, is he trying to climb out. He is sitting perfectly still, hoping to emerge when the storm has passed.