Charles Moore

The Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill, currently before Parliament, is often discussed in terms of absolute morality. It can never be right to take a life, says one side. The right to choose extends to the right to choose to die, says the other. I wish more attention focused on a prudential argument about an underlying tendency of human nature. People have a very strong desire for the old to hurry up and die. Sometimes this is straightforward greed for their money and possessions; sometimes the Darwinian impatience of the young to get more power and destroy what is unproductive; sometimes our selfish, though natural, dislike of caring for the decrepit.

Blackpool ‘With his designer wife, his two children (there is a third on the way) and his Notting Hill home, Mr Cameron does not look like a traditional Tory,’ I read in the papers. In what sense is this not a traditional Tory set of attributes? True, most Tories do not have designer wives — either in the sense of ‘designer t-shirt’ or in the sense meant here, that Mrs Cameron is a designer (of handbags) — but it is perfectly normal for them to have two children with a third on the way and, if they are rich, to have a house in Notting Hill. The thought behind sentences such as that quoted is that Mr Cameron is the candidate for change and therefore, as night follows day, cannot be a traditional Tory.

Even in successful parliamentary democracies there comes a time when no political party is confronting the questions which matter most, and so the voter feels cheated. The worst time for this in Britain was the 1930s. Conservative appeasement seemed more and more inadequate, but the Labour party, then in pacifist mood, did not offer a convincing alternative. It is similar today, only the other way round in party terms. The biggest problem facing the country is Islamist terrorism, not so much because of the security threat (grave though that is), but because of the cultural and political war that is behind it. An effort is being made, like the effort once made by communists, to undermine our Western, plural, free, semi-Christian way of life.

When a disaster or a war happens, very large estimates of the number of dead quickly emerge in the media. These tend to be propagated by two groups — those seeking money to deal with the problem, and those wanting to blame somebody for it. Thus, on 11 September 2001, some early estimates spoke of up to 40,000 dead, and even the more serious ones referred to 5,000. The actual figure was about 2,800. In Iraq a report in the Lancet, using an extraordinary method of extrapolation from a tiny sample, came up with the figure of 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians; yet it seems that the true figure, though bad enough, is a small fraction of that. Now we have the effects of Katrina. As soon as I read last week’s press figure of 10,000 dead, I did not believe it.

At the weekend, I was in Frederick the Great’s palace at Potsdam, attending a conference inspired by the indefatigable George Weidenfeld. As the elections approach, excitement is beginning to mount that Germany might be run by a woman for the first time. Angela Merkel must be irritated by the comparisons with Mrs Thatcher, because they disadvantage her both with people who hate the Iron Lady and with those who love her. Mrs Merkel is divorced, consensual, down-played, not very smartly dressed. But the coming of a woman on the public scene is always interesting because it still provokes reactions which are odder than the people who have them realise.

Our children recently went to the stage version of Billy Elliot and, like most, loved it. I am sure it is an inspiring tale about aspiration, disadvantage and dancing. But the politics.... The miners, striking for a year in 1984–85, sing ‘Solidarity solidarity/ Solidarity forever’ while their police antagonists sing: ‘Keep it up till Christmas, lads,/ It means a lot to us/ We send our kids to private school. On a private bus.’ Were there really many rank-and-file policemen at that time who could afford to send their children to private school, even with the overtime? And where was the solidarity in a strike which was imposed on members of the union without a ballot?

The late Sir Edward Heath was notoriously uneasy with women, but there was one, Sara Morrison, who was a good friend and an important political confidante. She was with him when he died on Sunday. Sara was robust enough to be able to withstand the strange manners and see through to the vulnerable and honourable man within. Which was just as well, because the manners were strange indeed. At one dinner party, Sara noticed that it was still at the soup stage and Heath had already fallen silent. She wrote a note, delivered by the butler, which said, ‘Talk to the women next to you.’ Heath wrote back, ‘I have.’ During one of the 1974 election campaigns, Sara was at the back of the campaign bus, sitting on a table.

Last week I went to hear Jung Chang and Jon Halliday talk about their new biography of Mao Tse-tung at a lecture in memory of the Great Helmsman of Moderation, Roy Jenkins. Almost every claim made in favour of Mao, they argued, is untrue — that peasant villages rose up in support of the Communists (not a single one did, say the authors), that the Communists bravely fought and defeated the Japanese, that the Chinese Communist party was a popular mass movement in China (in fact it was the creature of Stalin). When I was at boarding school in the early Seventies, almost the only free literature readily available was propaganda from the Chinese chargé d’affaires in London.

What do we think of children? Boarding schools are out of fashion because they represent ‘delegated parenthood’ and we are taught to believe that we should be very ‘hands on’ with our children, and that everyone else’s hands are suspect. We are horribly mistrustful of Michael Jackson where our grandparents loved the equally strange J.M. Barrie. But probably never before in history have so many children seen so little of their parents. This is partly because so many (mainly fathers) are absent through divorce or separation, and partly because parents are now encouraged by public policy, social pressure, house prices and the tax system to work so hard.

It is proverbial that the British press is disgusting and contemptible, but would we ever have got ourselves into the extraordinary situation of our Continental counterparts? In France, no national newspaper, except for the Communist L’Humanité, called for a ‘No’ vote in the referendum on the European constitution. The nearest any major Dutch paper came was the Telegraaf (no relation), which asked its readers what they thought and featured their strong ‘No’ on its front page. All the others said ‘Yes’. We hear a great deal about political parties getting out of touch with voters, but doesn’t the same apply to newspapers and their readers? Is no penalty ever paid?

I wish I could share the widespread joy at the great European ‘No’. Yes, the word ‘No’ is good. Yes, I feel the normal human pleasure at the discomfiture of the politicians. I have enjoyed seeing Peter Mandelson trying to worm round the result and Neil Kinnock raging against his former friends on the French Left and Jean-Luc Dehaene telling France that it, not the EU, now has the problem, and the outside broadcast team sabotaging John Major, sounding like a Dalek on Valium, as he tries to tell us all over again about his wonderful ‘opt-out’ and the importance of ‘variable geometry’. But I fear there is very little chance of any serious break with the European ideal that has dominated Continental politics since the Fifties.