Charles Moore

Right-minded people are fighting to retain habeas corpus. We would have more popular success, I feel, if the public knew what habeas corpus meant. The trouble is that, even translated into English, it is still obscure. Habeas corpus means, of course, ‘you may have the body’. The IRA seem to have their own interpretation of the phrase. First, their men murder Robert McCartney, splitting his abdomen from his navel to his breastbone, severing his jugular vein and gouging out one of his eyes. Next, they deny involvement. Then, when protests grow too loud, they say that witnesses should come forward, though without talking to the police. Finally, when that won’t do, they have a brilliant idea.

If you are a monarchist, this does not automatically make you an admirer of the royal family. But it does lead you to give members of that family the benefit of the doubt, particularly when so many others so viciously do the opposite. In general, too, our monarch has shown shrewdness in preserving the institution and so one trusts her judgment more than that of her more emotional, wilful heir. But, try as I might, I cannot see that her refusal to attend the marriage ceremony of Prince Charles and Mrs Parker Bowles does anything but harm. It is easy to understand why, over the years, the Queen has opposed her son’s remarriage, but now that it is happening, matters can only be made worse by foot-dragging.

Like thousands who met in the hunting field last Saturday, I was half-delighted, half-bewildered. Delighted because it was a gigantic show of defiance and the large number of foxes killed proved the absurdity of the ban. Bewildered because we seem to have moved into an era in which legislators happily pass laws which they know won’t work. Among our mounted field of 150 and the much larger crowd of foot supporters, two policemen wandered with a camera. Although one of them had the identification code ‘KGB’ on his back, both were thoroughly amiable but completely pointless. We presented them with the drag — a fox shot earlier — for them to snap, and that was that. One must ask the question, if the law is not made to be enforced, is it supposed to be obeyed?

Tony Blair (who has introduced the most divisive law in modern times) thinks that George Bush ‘owes him one’ for his support over the Iraq war. But what form could the payment of the debt take? Bush’s backing, after all, might make Blair even more unpopular among those thinking of voting Labour. I think I know the answer and, not surprisingly, one detects the hand of Peter Mandelson in it. Bush is coming to Europe next week and will visit the institutions of the European Union in Brussels, the first American President to do so. I gather that early drafts of his speech for this occasion get him to endorse the European constitution.

Immigration is an issue like new housing in the Green Belt — governments have to permit it and they have to try to restrict it. This is because the interest of those already present — the indigenous population, the nimby houseowner — is damaged by the arrival of many more people and yet, at the same time, it is also helped. People may say that they want a ban on immigration, but if that happened, they would quickly discover that they could not find enough building workers, waiters, cleaners, plumbers to satisfy their wants.

Having been brought up in a family of active Liberals, I am well acquainted with the category of ‘civilised Tory’. He was easily recognised. He was anti-hanging, pro-Europe, anti-Enoch, anti-Rhodesia. At his zenith (roughly 1972), he tended to wear his hair quite long and swept back, curling over the collar of a shirt which had very wide blue stripes. He was usually fond of good food and wine and preferred the company of non-Tories, attracting friendly profiles in the Observer. He liked it to be known that he read books. He was very public-schooly, though quite often he had not been to a public school. He had charm, but his main vice was vanity, both physical and intellectual.

When Tony told Gordon, while they were having dinner with John on 6 November 2003, that he (Tony) was going to relinquish the Labour leadership in 2004, he (Tony) said, ‘I know I must leave, but I need your help to get through the next year.’ According to Robert Peston, the author who reports these words, Tony then spent that period plotting how to go back on this promise. What Peston does not note is the similarity of Tony’s phrasing to the famous message that the IRA, allegedly through Martin McGuinness, gave to British intelligence in 1993: ‘The conflict is over, but we need your advice on how to bring it to a close.’ It is an interesting echo, whether conscious or not, because the IRA’s message, like Tony’s to Gordon, remains murky.

Hearing about the tsunami on Boxing Day, I remembered Keith and Nicki. Keith Lake used to be my driver when I was editor of the Daily Telegraph and remains a great friend. He and his wife Nicki were on holiday in the Maldives. I felt certain, knowing Keith, that a) he would have got into trouble and b) he would have got out of it. Keith rang when he reached home, in response to our messages. He told me that he had been snorkelling in two feet of water when suddenly the sea level rose to his chest. He and his party heard a great roar. They ran, and reached the shore, but the wave sucked him out to sea, to the bottom. The force of the water pulled even the wedding ring from his finger.

People won’t put it in Books of the Year, but there is no more entertaining Christmas present than The Lord Chamberlain Regrets by Dominic Shellard and Steve Nicholson (British Library). It is a history of British theatre censorship, and describes the strange system by which, until 1968, the chief courtier, the Lord Chamberlain, pre-censored all plays that were to be publicly performed. The system was always mistaken, and became increasingly absurd, as, well into the Fifties, the Lord Chamberlain tried unhappily to maintain the policy that there could be no jocular portrayal of Queen Victoria or even her son (‘the play shows up King Edward VII in a tiresome light as regards girls’).

Muriel Cullen, who died last week, aged 83, was the elder and only sister of Margaret Thatcher. Living happily with her husband on his well-run farm in Essex, she showed not the slightest desire to be famous. I found her fascinating, though. In the course of my work on the life of Lady Thatcher, I visited Mrs Cullen and interviewed her. Although by then in poor health, she was every inch the daughter of Alderman Roberts, grocer and Mayor of Grantham. Like her sister, she would listen half-intently, half-impatiently to any question with her head held high and slightly on one side, in the fashion of a bird. She had good bones and was carefully dressed, a very strong woman and, I should think, a brave one. Her answers were, to put it mildly, crisp.

On the whole, one sympathises with those sections of the media that do not rush to reveal the sex lives of public figures, rather than the tabloids which bellow about the public’s ‘right to know’. But there does come a point when those of us who say things like, ‘A politician’s private life is just that — private’, and jut our jaws righteously, do look a bit silly. It happened, for example, when it turned out that Diana had passed her secrets to Andrew Morton. A similar point has surely been reached in the case of David Blunkett. Even if it is proved that Mr Blunkett did no wrong in the business of Kimberly Quinn’s nanny’s visa, there are other questions.

There is no shortage of people who say that they are willing to break the hunting ban. Particularly the young, who have no responsibilities, and the old, who feel they have nothing to lose, declare themselves ready for prison, even for suicide. But supporters of rural liberty should beware of the great curse of English romantics — the love of the futile gesture. And those hunting people on the other side of the argument who fear that they can now be arrested for absolutely anything should also calm down. It is time to study the ‘best practice’ (good New Labour term, that) of non-violent conflict.

Although hunt supporters are right to point out that people of all classes hunt, Labour MPs are equally right to see their ban on hunting, now at last being enacted, as a great blow against the upper classes. Very occasionally, you meet an upper-class person who is against hunting, but this is usually because of being made to do it by disliked parents, practically never because he or she considers it cruel. As for actually banning it, that way of thinking — passing laws just because you don’t like something — is foreign to the upper-class mind (perhaps instinct would be a better word).

The Prince of Wales will be 56 on Sunday. So will Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail. It is interesting that these two men were born on the same day, since observing their parallel careers tells you quite a lot about modern Britain. There are superficial similarities between them. Both men are very rich and have large country houses and desirable residences in central London. Both have two sons, and both sent both their boys to Eton. At first glance, Prince Charles would appear to have the better deal. He has more and larger houses (as far as I know) than Mr Dacre, since there is also Birkhall in Scotland, and he is a Knight of the Garter and of the Thistle, a Grand Commander of the Bath and a member of the Order of Merit, which Mr Dacre, so far, is not.

There isn’t enough dialogue between Islam and other faiths, so when invited to address the admirable Three Faiths Forum, chaired by Sir Sigmund Sternberg, I happily agreed, and went to the mosque in the Whitechapel Road last week. I had been asked to raise worries I had expressed in an article about some aspects of Islam today. One was whether Islam has enough of a separation of Church and State (as Christians put it) in its teaching. Another was to ask how clearly Muslim teachers distinguished between conversion by preaching and by conquest, and how absolute they were in their condemnation of religiously motivated violence. One example I cited was Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the Imam of al-Azhar in Cairo, the world centre of ‘moderate’ Sunni learning.

Blackpool People sometimes compare the Daily Telegraph and the Conservative party. Watching the heaving sea from the Imperial Hotel in my last week as editor of the above, I do the same. In 1993, two years before I took the job, Rupert Murdoch began a price war. He cut the price of the Times from 45p to 30p. His principal aim was to knock the Daily Telegraph off its perch as market leader. In September this year, exactly ten years after it began, the war effectively ended. Mr Murdoch put up the price of the Times on Saturday to that of the Telegraph. Although the cost of war to the Telegraph was high, we won. The circulation gap between the two titles has long stuck at 300,000 in our favour. The Daily Telegraph stays well on top and the Times has had to retreat.

Since the editor is filling this page with its former occupants, I naturally responded to his invitation by looking back to the days 20 years ago when I filled this hole. In most respects, the subject matter was the same – why doesn't the health service work, how to make peace in Northern Ireland, how the government is ignoring Parliament, why can't children read and write, the problems of tax, crime, roads, housing, defence and, of course, Europe. In the last column that I wrote for this paper before becoming its editor (24 March 1984) I was in Brussels for a summit in which Mrs Thatcher was fighting for 'our money'.