Charles Moore

Visiting Northern Ireland last autumn, I met a very prosperous man who enthused to me about the Renewable Heat Incentive in the province. It paid him to install wood-pellet boilers and heat his rural business. After the political scandal broke, I understood why he was so happy. The RHI, as managed in Northern Ireland, had no upper limit, so there was no cheating involved in getting as many non-domestic boilers as you could manage. If you installed the boiler you got paid £1.60 for every £1 of pellets you burned, without limit. I gather there was particularly massive take-up by members of the Democratic Unionist Party, and their Free Presbyterian churches glow red day and night in consequence.

The English tradition of dissenting judgments in important civil cases is a good one. They are often better than the majority view, because they tend to be advanced by judges who resist the self-aggrandisement of their profession. In the Miller case on triggering Article 50, before the Supreme Court, Lords Reed, Carnwath and Hughes dissented from the other eight. This is what Lord Reed says: ‘…the argument that withdrawal from the EU would alter domestic law and destroy statutory rights, and therefore cannot be undertaken without a further Act of Parliament, has to be rejected even if one accepts that the 1972 Act creates statutory rights and that withdrawal will alter the law of the land.

It is hard to be shocked by anything in these tumultuous times, but I was brought up short by the ‘attic’ headline of Tuesday’s Times, advertising the paper’s T2 section: ‘Up close and personal with Donald Trump — Michael Gove’ , it said, and continued, ‘Sex after 50: it’s fabulous’.. The earliest members of Alcoholics Anonymous offered their famous Twelve Steps, which the drunkard must take in order to recover, born of their own experience. The Twelve Steps are still the foundation of AA. They work because they are taken by people who have hit rock bottom and realise it. The first step says, ‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.

The earliest members of Alcoholics Anonymous offered their famous Twelve Steps, which the drunkard must take in order to recover, born of their own experience. The Twelve Steps are still the foundation of AA. They work because they are taken by people who have hit rock bottom and realise it. The first step says, ‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.’ Theresa May’s Twelve Objectives, announced in her outstanding speech at Lancaster House of Tuesday, play a similar role for national recovery, substituting the words ‘European Union’ for ‘alcohol’. Until the June referendum, Mrs May, like millions of others, barely even admitted there was a problem.

Kind readers sometimes ask what has happened to the case against me for electoral fraud. In these Notes on 20 August, I revealed that I had drawn attention in the EU referendum to the ease with which one could vote twice. Legitimately registered to vote in Sussex and in London, I had voted Leave in Sussex, and then gone to London, collected my ballot paper unchallenged, and spoilt it by writing on it that it was ‘my protest at how lax the voting rules are’. The Electoral Commission then publicly announced that it was referring my case to the police. Just before Christmas, I was dismayed to receive a letter from the Met’s Special Inquiry Team of Homicide and Major Crime Command. Last week, I met an officer in a London hotel.

As a former student of English at Cambridge, I am sent the faculty magazine, 9 West Road. Its latest issue leads with a long article by Peter de Bolla, chair of the faculty, headlined — with intentionally bitter irony — ‘Now we are in control’. On and on he goes — the shocked perplexity of ‘French locals’ in ‘our holiday village’ that we could be Brexiting, the putative loss of the EU exchange students who ‘amaze and challenge’ him, how you cannot study for the tripos’ famous Tragedy paper ‘from the perspective of a monocultural and inwardly facing society or polis’. Prof. de Bolla himself is so monocultural and inward-facing that he cannot imagine any way of running international exchanges without the EU.

It seems perplexing that François Fillon, now the Republican candidate for the French presidency, should be a declared admirer of Margaret Thatcher. Although she certainly has her fans in France, it is an absolutely standard political line — even on the right — that her ‘Anglo-Saxon’ economic liberalism is un-French. Yet M. Fillon, dismissed by Nicholas Sarkozy, whose prime minister he was, as no more than ‘my collaborator’, has invoked her and won through, while Sarko is gone. In this time of populism, M. Fillon has moved the opposite way to other politicians. He says his failures under Sarkozy taught him that France needs the Iron Lady economic reforms which it has never really tried.

An independence problem afflicts the aftermath of the Hillsborough inquiry. I have just read a new book by Norman Bettison, Hillsborough Untold. Sir Norman, who much later became chief constable of Merseyside, was at Hillsborough, but only off-duty, as a football fan. He was later accused, notably by the Labour MP Maria Eagle, exploiting parliamentary privilege, of orchestrating black propaganda for the police against the Hillsborough fans. He denies this. I have no idea of the truth, but Sir Norman’s point is that nor does any public authority. Trevor Hicks of the Family Support Group said that Bettison should ‘scurry up a drainpipe’ and refused to meet him.