Charles Moore

This year the Daily Telegraph has decided not to produce its annual Christmas cards by Matt. I complained when I heard this, because we usually send them and I feel that it must always be a pleasure for the recipients to get a joke from the world’s greatest pocket cartoonist. The reason is interesting, though. Apparently Christmas cards from businesses are now considered ‘old-fashioned’. I bridled at this at first. To my shame, the phrase ‘political correctness gone mad’ may even have floated into my head. On reflection, though, I think it may be a good thing. There is something dispiriting about a big business sending out Christmas cards.

So now conservatives, and particularly Conservatives, must all change ‘the way we look, the way we feel, the way we think and the way we behave’. It is a tribute to David Cameron’s persuasive charm that he makes people want to do these things. He has a knack of appealing to one’s better nature rather than rebuking one for one’s worse. When I took over as chairman of the centre-Right think-tank Policy Exchange after the general election, I encountered a group of mostly young people excited by policies for just such change, but exasperated at the lack of vehicles for them. New Labour had ceased to think, Charles Kennedy’s Liberal Democrats didn’t much go in for that sort of thing, and the Tories were effectively leaderless.

It is generally agreed that David Cameron, this magazine’s candidate for the Conservative leadership, did a good job against Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight last week. His skill was to bring out something which is more and more striking about national television political interviewing, particularly on the BBC — its sheer weirdness. I notice this myself when I broadcast for a foreign company — Irish radio, say, or an American channel — compared with doing it for the BBC big beasts. The underlying, courteous assumption behind the foreign interviews is that you are relatively truthful and the purpose is to elicit your views clearly on behalf of the listeners/viewers.

On the face of it, the government would seem to be hypocritical in its attacks on Sir Christopher Meyer’s memoirs. After all, it is said, the Cabinet Office saw the text of DC Confidential and approved it. How can ministers now complain? It turns out not to be quite like that. In the first place, I gather, Sir Christopher could only be persuaded to submit his manuscript when faced with the threat of injunctions. In the second, he ignored all suggestions for changes made by the authorities, and went ahead. Why, then, was no further attempt made to stop him? Really because the government has very little power in these matters. The experience with Lance Price’s The Spin Doctor’s Diary taught that if you try to take bits out you only increase the value of the book.

Does the failure of the Daily Mail to stop David Cameron’s leadership bid in its tracks mark a significant moment in the relationship between press and politics? Fear of the effect of ‘dirt’ on a leadership candidate is always very potent, and there has long been a belief among some Tories that the hostility of the Mail is fatal to a candidate’s chances of success (this despite the fact that the Mail promoted Michael Heseltine in the late 1980s and supported Ken Clarke not only this time but in 2001). So when the Mail decided to get agitated about whether David Cameron had taken drugs at university, and then started bawling the why-can’t-he-give-us-a-straight-answer routine, things looked black for the youngest entrant in the race.

If you are not part of the ‘selectorate’, you feel annoyed at the suggestion that Gordon Brown can become prime minister by acclamation and without a general election. It is not so much that another candidate might be better — though I rather like the look of Alan Johnson, the Trade and Industry Secretary — it is just that a party’s choice of leader is a very different thing from running the country. The country should decide on the latter. Of party leaders since the war chosen while in government only Harold Macmillan could be accounted any sort of success. The others were Anthony Eden, Alec Douglas-Home, Jim Callaghan and John Major. The ones who kept winning elections — Wilson, Thatcher and Blair — were all chosen in opposition.

What was amazing about John Ware’s ‘A Question of Leadership’ on Panorama last Sunday was that it has taken nearly four years since 11 September for such a programme to be made. It simply and successfully did the basic journalistic job of asking difficult questions. The chief object of the questions was Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain. Sir Iqbal was juxtaposed with moderate Muslims who unequivocally repudiate the doctrines of Islamist extremism and various apologists for them. What did he think of a group of people affiliated to the MCB who say that those who mark Christmas ‘will find a permanent abode in hellfire’? ‘It’s a view that they hold,’ said Sir Iqbal. The MCB had ‘no control’.

There are certain political moves which have now become regular, almost ceremonial features of our national life. One is the IRA’s announcement that the conflict is over. This is repeated once a year or so, flagged by the BBC and No. 10 as ‘historic’, and used as a reason for further concessions to Sinn Fein. Another summer visitor, though only every four years, is a bid for the leadership of the Conservative party by Kenneth Clarke. The form goes like this. Friendly journalists write that Mr Clarke is ‘a fully paid-up member of the human race’ and polls are published showing that many voters have heard of him and some like him.

On the whole, I believe in what politicians like to call ‘the innate good sense of the British people’, but the reactions of so many friends to last week’s bombings depress me. There is a funny mixture of complacency — ‘We will always be stronger than they are’ — with fatalism — ‘There’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.’ Both are wrong. Islamist extremists could not beat us in a direct war, but they will undermine our way of life if they can exercise a hold over a growing Muslim population.

What a scramble for Africa. A full-page advertisement in Monday’s Guardian, rather cautiously worded, said that its signatories ‘supported the overall aims’ of those lobbying the G8 leaders and recognised ‘the complexities of the challenge in hand, but commit ourselves to asking our leaders to make positive and practical steps forward to help lift millions out of extreme poverty’. They were leading business people, and their names were splashed across the map of Africa, in varying sizes. Thus the important words ‘Niall FitzGerald KBE’ were so large that they stretched almost from coast to coast, cutting through what look to me like Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi.