Charles Moore

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'.

Long before there was any public outcry that Tony Blair had 'lied' about weapons of mass destruction, intelligence sources were worried and some, privately, said so. Perhaps these are the people that John Reid calls 'rogue elements', but their complaints were very sober and unrogueish. They were worried about both the dossiers on WMD, but for different reasons. The first dossier, drafted by John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was, in their view, respectable, but Mr Blair was unwise to have tried to publish such a thing and the Foreign Office should have stopped him. Publication inevitably politicised the intelligence and bowdlerised it in order to avoid compromising sources, and so made it seem weak.