Charles Moore

Every winter morning I take a scuttle down to the cellar, fill it with coal and carry it up to light the fire in my study. The coal-dust clings to my shoes and so, as the carpets testify, I have a carbon footprint. David Cameron wants to make it — and everyone else’s — smaller. He is now reaching the dangerous point when his generalised, benevolent sentiments about the planet start to translate into policies which would load new cost on to individuals. His suggested tax on flying is a political mistake because it will be seen, rightly, as hurting poorer people and those who have to pay with their own money.

When I employed him at the Daily Telegraph, I found John Kampfner, now the editor of the New Statesman, a pleasant and able man. But his recent conduct towards one of his writers deserves a passage in the annals of editorial eccentricity. Nick Cohen, who is a leftwing columnist in the New Statesman, has written a brilliant book called What’s Left (4th Estate). Its essential argument is that large parts of the Left are so disoriented by the death of traditional socialism and so crazed with hatred of Bush and Blair that they ignore the fascism of the Islamists and the sufferings of their comrades on the Left — feminists, gay rights activists, trade unionists, secularists — at their hands.

One must keep repeating that the bicentenary being celebrated this year is of the abolition of the slave trade by Britain. From the amount of breast-beating, you would think that it was 200 years since the trade got going. There is huge concentration on the Atlantic slave trade, which is not surprising since this was the one chiefly pursued by our white British ancestors. I am an interested party in the great reparations debate since some of my maternal ancestors had fortunes dependent on slavery (my sense of guilt is mitigated by the total disappearance of those fortunes), while one of my paternal ancestors, William Smith, was a lieutenant of Wilberforce in the House of Commons. Will these two strands cancel each other out and leave me having to pay nothing?

The Anglican Communion, trying to hold itself together in Dar-es-Salaam, is like the Commonwealth. Indeed, it exists for the same reason — the inheritance of the British Empire. Like the Commonwealth, it began as a white-dominated organisation, and has gradually ceased to be so. The Episcopal Church of the United States stands in relation to the Communion as white South Africa stood to the Commonwealth 50 years ago. Its insistence on pursuing its own obsessive doctrine — in this case, the ordination and marriage of practising homosexuals, in South Africa’s case, apartheid — isolates it from its fellows, particularly its black fellows.

Was it really an ‘own goal’ for 10 Downing Street to invite people to petition it on subjects of interest to them, and then find more than a million people saying that they opposed road pricing? It was information worth knowing. Politicians should not be frightened to look at new ways of getting people to participate in democracy. One reason that fewer people vote now is that voting has become, compared with other forms of choice, so ‘clunking’. A single decision on who should be your MP for four or five years does not feel very empowering.

Will we look back on the last quarter of the 20th century as the only time since the Reformation when Roman Catholics have really been tolerated in Britain? During the long period in which Cardinal Basil Hume was Archbishop of Westminster, the Catholic Church came out of the ghetto. The row about gay adoption shows that this process is now going into reverse. The New Labour enthusiasm for homosexuality is so great that anyone who does not share it is to be prevented by law from full participation in the life of society. Both Tony Blair and David Cameron accept this public doctrine, though they pull long faces about the effect on children, as if it were not in their power to prevent it.

How can a single state school defend itself in court? The question arises because of the 14-year-old Muslim pupil at Wycombe High School who has been forbidden by the headmistress from wearing the niqab, a veil which leaves only her eyes visible. The girl’s father is seeking judicial review. The father gets government money, in the form of legal aid, but the school does not necessarily get anything. The local education authority of the Conservative-controlled Buckinghamshire County Council indicates that it will not put its money behind its school. This is cowardly and against its own interest.

Obviously Ruth Kelly is a ‘hypocrite’, but the hypocrites in her party are more admirable than the consistent ones. At least the former show some human feeling. There must be Labour ministers who know that their children would be better off in a private school, can afford to send them there, and still don’t, because of their careers and their opinions. That really is disgusting. It will be interesting to see whether young Leo Blair finds his way into a private school once his father leaves office. Miss Kelly pleads her son’s ‘special needs’. In this area, Labour is truly hoist with its own petard.

Charles Moore pays tribute to his friend Frank Johnson, editor of The Spectator 1995–99, who died on 15 December: a man of awesome learning — and light touch ‘In the Fifties, job advertisements used to read “smart boy wanted”. That’s me,’ Frank Johnson would say. The joke tells you a good deal about Frank. First, it places him in his social milieu. He was an upper-working-class East End boy born during the war. He remembered the present Queen’s Coronation, with everyone crowding into his parents’ front-room to join in the first mass televisual occasion in British history. This was the last age of working-class respectability: Frank had such a fear of debt that, he told me, he had never had a mortgage.

For most of my life I have disliked the run-up to the British Christmas, on religious grounds. Advent is intended to be like Lent, a time of abstinence. Your thoughts are directed to the Four Last Things — Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. The Twelve Days which begin on 25 December are the time for feasting, and the fun lessens if it is pre-empted. Advent is expressed in the great Sentences (‘Drop down dew, ye heavens from above...’ etc.), and in rather mystical hymns like ‘Come, O come Emmanuel’, not in God-rest-ye-merry-figgy-pudding stuff. And even Christmas itself, though certainly joyful, has never been and should not be the most important feast of the Church.

The current row about how Oxford University should be governed illustrates two problems of our culture. The first is about how institutions work. The modernisers want organisations to work more purposefully, and they are right. But the traditionalists are suspicious of reforms which separate the people who know about the content of their institution from those who run it, and they are right too. Thus, it may well be true that hospitals should be more efficient, but they have not become more so now that doctors can be ordered around by non-medical managers.

These notes are being written on 17 October, the day when, at the invitation of the History Matters campaign, we are all supposed to keep a diary for a day. Like Tom Lehrer on National Brotherhood Week, ‘Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year.’ We are overwhelmed with diaries. The politicians’ ones are the least satisfactory of the lot. Ex-ministers rush out their diaries (and memoirs) in the brief period when people can remember who they are and the colleagues they dislike are still in office. The authors play a double game — encouraging the publishers and television companies to pay big money with promises of revelations, and then suddenly getting pompous about confidentiality when it starts to look too awkward for them.