Charles Moore’s notes: It’s great there’s a World Islamic Economic Forum — now can we have a Jewish one?

As I write, the World Islamic Economic Forum is opening in London, the first time it has been held in a non-Muslim country. David Cameron boasts that investors will now be able to buy sharia-compliant British gilts. If the forum helps Muslim countries share their commercial expertise with one another and the rest of us, well and good. But should modes of global commerce be defined by religious allegiance? What would the conspiracy theorists say about a World Jewish Economic Forum? How would Saudi Arabia — or even Dubai — react to the suggestion of a World Christian Economic Forum taking place within its borders?  And once it is officially proclaimed a good thing for a non-Muslim country to offer sharia-compliant products, it will not be long before rich and powerful people will start arguing that other sharia-compliant customs — marriage, for example, and criminal punishments — should also be accommodated in our law. Our great western economic and financial institutions seem unaware that the battle for sharia-compliance is highly controversial in the Muslim world itself. Extremists push it, moderates resist it. The British government and the City of London are lining up with the former.

This column has noted before that the Prince of Wales has the honour of sharing his birthday with Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail. Mr Dacre is irreverently known in Clarence House as ‘the Twin’. Both men were born on 14 November 1948. In a recent interview, one of them — see if you can guess which — said: ‘I’ve had this extraordinary feeling, for years and years, ever since I can remember really, of wanting to heal and make things better.’ Their very differing but parallel lives tell one a good deal about post-war British history. Both had two sons and sent them to Eton, but only one of them — Mr Dacre — owns his own estate in Scotland.