Charles Moore

Last week, en route to Oxford, I dropped in on Boris Johnson at his rural retreat, where he is writing his ‘not exactly memoirs’. Unlike Cincinnatus, he has no plough, but he does possess one of those squat, computer-driven lawnmowers which move silently about the lawn, grazing. Boris is impulsive. At lunch, he suddenly said: ‘Let’s play tennis.’ So we did. At another point, he said: ‘Why don’t you come to Ukraine on Friday?’ So I thought I would. The journey involved 24 hours of train against 19 hours in Kyiv, but there is something romantic about reaching a foreign country by train. Besides, Ukrainian trains are more efficient than British ones even though (or because?) there’s a war on.

In a statement, the Prince of Wales says he ‘refuses to give up’ on ‘a brighter future for the Middle East’. Nobody thought he had given up, so why did he feel the need to say it? His Churchillian reference to ‘the darkest hour’ does not work. In 1940 the darkest hour was for Britain against Nazi Germany. Now it is for Israel, attacked by fanatical anti-Semites. Churchill did not call for ‘permanent peace’ but to fight back. Although Prince William mentions the plight of the hostages as well as Gazans’ need for aid, the objective effect of his intervention (if any) is to make life harder for Israel. Israel, not Hamas will attract more pursed lips of western disapproval.

Everyone seems to agree that it is better for royal personages to be open if they have cancer. It helps thousands of other sufferers and their families. But nowadays sheer necessity is part of it: the omnipresent video evidence of the monarch’s daily life makes it unavoidable that people will notice physical changes. This applies to our present King. In her recent biography, George VI and Elizabeth, Sally Bedell Smith gives an excellent account of the illness of George VI, which probably began in 1949 and killed him in February 1952. Even in those days, people did begin to notice. She quotes Harold Nicolson, as early as March 1950, hearing from Paddy Leigh Fermor that the King, at an investiture, had to be ‘heavily made up with sun tan and rouge’ to conceal the pallor of the invalid.

Sitting in the Chamber late on Monday afternoon for the Lords debate on the UK-Rwanda treaty, I was impressed by the standard of oratory. Most of the best speeches came from those – Lords Goldsmith (the Labour one), Kerr of Kinlochard, Anderson of Ipswich – who argued that the treaty was not, in itself, proof of the government’s contention, which the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill seeks to turn into law, that Rwanda is now a safe country. Not for the first time, I felt an unease about how the government has got itself into this tight corner. But then up popped the Bishop of Gloucester: ‘I will just say,’ she just said, ‘that as Lord Bishops we take no party position… based on tribal loyalty and we are not whipped.

In June 2022, I interviewed Nikki Haley on stage for JW3, a Jewish organisation in north London. She was personable, clear, well-briefed and pleasingly normal, with the interesting exception of her Sikh background growing up in small-town South Carolina (she later became a Christian by conversion). Her conservatism seemed strongly felt, coherent and not extreme. I also liked her way – now highly unusual in US politics – of addressing foreign policy and setting it in the context of her general political beliefs. At that time, she was mulling the presidential bid she launched the following year. Today, after Iowa, she remains in the race, but only just. Why would such a presentable and decent person not be preferred to Donald Trump?

Obviously, one’s first instinct is to agree that parliament should step in and decree that all the hundreds of sub-postmasters convicted in the Post Office scandal should be exonerated without their appeals needing to be heard. But I suspect that instinct is wrong, for at least two reasons. The first is the precedent. These are individual criminal cases (though with strong common characteristics). If parliament feels it can interfere with such cases, it is usurping the process of law. Once MPs feel they can decide questions of individual guilt, where’s the end to it? Politicians cannot judge evidence to a legal standard. Justice will become politicised. The political proclamation of unproved innocence could be almost as noxious as that of unproved guilt.

Now that the government has triggered a public-interest intervention (PIIN), who will end up owning the Telegraph group, and this paper, after deliberations finish in late January? If it dismisses objections to the sale to the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, that family’s vehicle, RedBird IMI, takes control. A leading national newspaper and our most venerable British magazine are thus nationalised by an authoritarian Arab state. If the government rejects the Redbird IMI bid, in law the titles stay with the Barclay family (as they do right now, since the Barclays’ debt to Lloyds bank has been discharged, though under a ‘hold separate’ order which deprives the Barclays of executive power for the course of the investigation) with the consequent right to sell them.

At the end of last week, the Holodomor was commemorated in Britain. There was a service at Westminster Abbey. But the chief point to notice is that no important British government or opposition representatives appeared. Nor, with the honourable exception of Stephen Fry, did any of the celebrities who infest causes such as ‘Free Palestine’. Almost everyone knows, thank goodness, what the Holocaust was. But even now, although Vladimir Putin is trying a small-scale repeat, have most people heard of the Holodomor? (If you haven’t, read Anne Applebaum’s astonishing Red Famine.) It was the largely deliberate starvation of about four million Ukrainians by Stalin in 1932-33, bringing death at a rate rivalling even that of the Final Solution.

UK-China Transparency (UKCT) was formally launched this week (see Notes, 16 September). Its aim is in its name. There is sadly little transparency about UK-China dealings, especially in our universities. I first reported this problem early in 2020 when I investigated the behaviour of Jesus College, Cambridge, and its China Centre, run by the CCP apologist Professor Peter Nolan. It is probably not a coincidence that the three founders of UKCT – Sir Bernard Silverman, Martin Village and the young freelance reporter Sam Dunning – are all Jesus alumni. The more they looked, the more uncomfortable they became about their college’s advancement of CCP networking and propaganda and its role as the ramp for the courting of the Chinese regime by the whole of Cambridge University.

It was a story that Rishi Sunak was not saying what he would decide about the future of HS2. But was it the story? The BBC thought so. On Tuesday, Today’s reporting of the Conservative party conference consisted chiefly of Nick Robinson and Chris Mason gleefully commenting on how the Prime Minister was avoiding their HS2 questions. The explanation, which they chose not to recognise, was that he would have been idiotic to pre-empt his own conference speech on Wednesday. There he did announce his big HS2 change. The only other thing that interested Today, especially Robinson, who specialises in this theme, was that ‘the Tory right’ were being supported at the conference by GB News, partly in the form of its presenter Nigel Farage.