Charles Moore

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.

Juba, Southern Sudan A columnist in the English-language Khartoum Monitor has it right. Under the headline ‘Blair; prove to us this is yogurt, not hot soup’, Mohamed Osman Adam reflects on the Egyptian saying that ‘he who has been burned by a hot soup, will blow at a bowl of yogurt’. His argument is about why the Khartoum government does not want UN intervention in Darfur, even if encouraged by Tony Blair’s suggestion of ‘incentives’, but I feel it applies to the Labour party’s attitude to Mr Blair back home. The columnist speculates that Mr Blair ‘could infiltrate the hearts and minds in Khartoum, by proving that this is yogurt. Amen.’ But, for all Tuesday’s tears, that infiltration is even harder work in Manchester.

Last week I discovered that I have to have two separate checks made on me by the Criminal Records Bureau. One is because I am a trustee of a charity which works with children. The other is because I sometimes serve at the altar at Mass and therefore come into contact with children who do the same. In both cases, I have to produce documentary evidence of who I am and where I live to people who know these facts already, and I have to fill in forms in black ink with my National Insurance number and my unspent criminal convictions (none) on them. I have to do two forms for the same check because the Criminal Records Bureau ‘does not endorse portability’. The people in the charity and the church then have to process the forms.

Perhaps it will take allegations of ball-tampering to focus on the role of Pakistan in modern British life. There is a certain sort of upholder of national sovereignty who thinks that ethnic and religious problems can be solved if only the national borders are shaped to reflect the divisions. The British partition of India surely proves that life is not so simple, and we are now paying for our mistake. Partition created a confessional state, and gave that state a motive for acquiring a nuclear bomb, the only Muslim Bomb until we allow Iran to get there. Thus armed with righteousness and with actual kit, the state persecutes its small remaining minorities (mainly Christians) and helps foment trouble elsewhere.

As the conflict deepens in the Lebanon, the word on many lips is ‘proportionality’. Israel keeps being told that her actions are ‘disproportionate’. Proportionality is, indeed, a key moral concept in wars, but how is it to be calculated? The question becomes more complicated in an age in which opponents often prefer terrorism to formal military engagement. The regular army fighting the irregulars can almost always be made to look like a sledgehammer taken to crack a nut. In this case, it is probably right to argue that Hezbollah does not, as a fighting machine, pose a threat to the territorial integrity of Israel. But it can and does train lethal rockets on a great many Israelis.

Writing this column in 90˚F heat on the edge of a normally bleak and chill Yorkshire moor, I reflect on the relationship between political culture and weather. Montesquieu, who attributed great importance to climate and geography in the political spirit of nations, thought that heat contributed to despotism, suppressing the active disposition of a people. But might it not, by the same token, make despots idle? The bureaucrats of oppression are no more likely than ordinary citizens to bestir themselves in the dog days, indeed rather less so. Certainly in Britain the effect of heatwaves is to remove people’s already slight interest in public affairs and in most forms of work entirely. I have often wondered why it does not have a similar effect in hot countries everywhere.

Because everyone can see that the government can no longer do anything worth doing, there is a widespread assumption that its days are numbered. But this is a non sequitur. In the past, Labour governments could do things only in the short gap between their election victory and their sterling crisis. Conservative governments had a slightly longer effective life, but the Heath administration was pretty much disabled after the failure of its industrial relations legislation in 1972. The period between 1979 and, roughly, 1989 was quite exceptional in having a government that had ideas about what it wanted to do and the political ability to do them. Implosion does not necessarily produce defeat.

This week, an alliance of bodies concerned about ‘heritage’, led by the National Trust and including English Heritage and the National Heritage Memorial Fund, launched a campaign called History Matters. It is designed to ‘raise awareness of the importance of history in our lives’, with the strong implication that our public culture — and our current government — ignores this. As if to confirm their view that history is pushed to the sidelines, the media preferred to concentrate on football and Wimbledon, and gave the star-studded (Boris Johnson, David Starkey, Tony Benn, Stephen Fry) opening presentation little attention. I have a local story which confirms the problem.

A listener to the BBC on Tuesday might have concluded that the Palestinians were about to recognise the state of Israel. This was because, as I heard on the PM programme, it said so. But then it was over to Jeremy Bowen in Jerusalem. He spoke excitedly of ‘movement’ but explained that he had not seen the document in question and that it would not make any mention of the recognition of Israel. The point was that Hamas, or rather a part of Hamas, was talking of accepting a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and therefore, by implication, of recognising Israel in its pre-1967 borders. It is like the claim that the Palestinian Covenant was rescinded by the Oslo Accords — when you looked, you couldn’t really find that it had been.

As a parent of GCSE children, I now see clearly that modern education has abolished the summer term. In all the teenage years except the first, there are public exams to be done. These are spread out, beginning in May, and are pretty much finished this week. The run-up to them is dominated by the ever-growing burden of coursework and, naturally, by revision. As soon as the pupils finish their exams they are sent home, since no power on earth can make them stay. For those of us who pay boarding fees, this early departure means that the cost per child of time actually spent on the premises is now £1,000 per week.

Major Bruce Shand, father of the Duchess of Cornwall, who died at the weekend, was a man of great charm. He had a very attractive combination of enough confidence to put you at your ease and enough diffidence not to seem arrogant. In old age he had a lovely, interesting, funny face — creased, like a more military, bucolic version of W.H. Auden. Although he did not seem in the least bitter, it hurt him a great deal that the press persecuted his daughter — bringing grief also to his wife — for so long. But he stuck to the old principle, which he referred to as ‘FHB’ (‘Family Hold Back’), and never said anything in public.

Isn’t it time now that the Conservatives fulfilled their new leader’s pledge. Although we send 250 police in search of possible terrorists in east London, our government takes a completely opposite attitude to the subject whenever it’s Irish. After the IRA was involved in the murder of Robert McCartney and the robbery of the Northern Bank, the US government last year reimposed the ban on Sinn Fein fundraising in the United States. At the time Mr Blair supported this, but now we are in the extraordinary situation in which the Americans, who since 9/11 have tried to be consistent in their attitudes to terrorism, object more strongly to the IRA than does the nation in which they have done most of their killing.

As a political scandal rolls on, people always seem to fasten on the wrong reason why the minister concerned should resign. It is surely good news that John Prescott and his team were playing croquet at Dorneywood on a Thursday afternoon. What has happened to our traditional admiration for finishing the game and beating the Spaniards too? Admittedly, Mr Prescott is not taking on any latter-day Spaniards, and his aides made everything worse by saying that their game was constantly broken into by mobile telephone calls, important emails and other rubbish. But the fact that he can be relatively out of mischief for an hour or two is to be applauded. Trouble only starts with John Prescott when he tries to do anything.