Charles Moore

This week’s issue is dated 2 August. On that date 100 years ago, my great-grandfather, Norman Moore (always known as ‘NM’), went to Sunday Mass. ‘Father Ryan,’ he noted in his diary, ‘seemed hardly to have thought of the war... I told [him] I felt uncertain whether August would be a good time for a mission to Protestants but I gave him the £5 I had promised.’ Later, he and his wife Milicent went to tea with their Sussex neighbours, Lord and Lady Ashton, who ‘seemed very little informed of the gravity of the situation’. Back at home, a telegram arrived from NM’s friend, Ethel Portal: ‘Germany occupied Luxembourg Reported repulse of Germans by French near Nancy unofficial.

Peter Clarke’s powerful report on the Trojan Horse affair in Birmingham schools is confirmation of the weakness of David Cameron in demoting Michael Gove. When Mr Gove appointed Mr Clarke to conduct the inquiry, there was execration — even from the local police chief — about how wickedly provocative it was to put a policeman with counter-terrorism experience into the role. But Mr Clarke was just the man and his inquiry has swiftly and efficiently uncovered serious problems of Islamist bullying and infiltration. Too late to reap a political reward, Mr Gove is vindicated. The next time this problem arises — and there undoubtedly will be a next time in another British city — what minister will have the courage to do what he did?

By the time most readers see this, the House of Lords will have formed a view about Assisted Dying. Some Anglican bishops have got wonderfully on-the-one-hand/on-the-other about it. They seem to want dying assisted, but only a little bit. The Bishop of Carlisle feels that judges, rather than doctors, should decide whether someone has the right to be helped to take his or her own life. Thus do the most enlightened persons inadvertently advocate the return of the death penalty. I hope that when the bishop’s judges perform this task, they will be made to wear the traditional black cap. If I were in the House of Lords, I would bring in an Assisted Living Bill.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_17_July_2014_v4.mp3" title="Charles Moore and Fraser Nelson discuss the reshuffle" startat=851] Listen [/audioplayer]This must be the worst reshuffle since Mrs Thatcher demoted Geoffrey Howe in 1989. Unlike that one, its errors are unforced. This year, David Cameron had established a surprisingly strong position as the leader whose unpopular but necessary policies were starting to work. He and his team seemed steadier and more able than their opponents. Now he has thrown that away with changes so large that he looks as if he disrespects what he has achieved.

Like almost everyone else, I have no idea whether the accusations about paedophilia in Parliament in the 1980s are true. One thing I do feel quite confident about, though, is the business of the lost ‘dossiers’. The suggestion is that the disappearance of the file containing Geoffrey Dickens’s accusations of about 30 years ago and of 114 other files proves a cover-up. It does not. Literally tens of thousands of government files are destroyed every year, without much inspection. I believe, for example, that the overwhelming majority of the files from the offices of Chief Whip, the Leader of the House and Lord President of the Council from the 1980s were thrown out. And it is commonplace for departments to destroy files from the private offices of ministers.

‘A culture changes by example and a licentious old man being found guilty will help do that,’ says a leader in the Times. Perhaps, but I would be much more impressed if it were a licentious younger man. We can all moralise away in retrospect about what the BBC and others allowed Rolf Harris CBE or Sir James Savile to get away with. It is easy to attack them when they are old or dead. You still very rarely hear of sex charges against current performers. I would not dream of suggesting that Russell Brand is a sex criminal, but we know, from his own account, that he has slept with a great many women.

‘A culture changes by example and a licentious old man being found guilty will help do that,’ says a leader in the Times. Perhaps, but I would be much more impressed if it were a licentious younger man. We can all moralise away in retrospect about what the BBC and others allowed Rolf Harris CBE or Sir James Savile to get away with. It is easy to attack them when they are old or dead. You still very rarely hear of sex charges against current performers. I would not dream of suggesting that Russell Brand is a sex criminal, but we know, from his own account, that he has slept with a great many women. He even, with Jonathan Ross, telephoned the elderly actor Andrew Sachs, and they left a message on his answering machine boasting of how Brand had slept with his granddaughter.

Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, is undoubtedly one of the most dashing figures on the world stage. I first met him in the mid-1980s, possibly when I was a guest of the Oxford Union and Radek who, I seem to remember, was wearing white tie and tails, was on the standing committee. At that time, he was a refugee from communist Poland, having helped organise resistance to martial law, and — though I did not know it then — a member of that nursery of world rulers, the Bullingdon Club. I made him The Spectator’s Afghanistan correspondent and he filed brave and fascinating reports from within the ranks of the mujahedin. In his mind, the Soviets’ retreat from Afghanistan was a dummy run for getting them out of eastern Europe.

On Friday night, I went to Althorp, childhood home of Diana, Princess of Wales, to speak at its literary festival. My first duty was to appear on the panel of the BBC’s Any Questions? in a tent there. It was 30 years to the month that I had first been on the programme. Then it was at Uppingham School, presented by David Jacobs, and the panel included Roy Hattersley and Esther Rantzen. This time, it was presented by Jonathan Dimbleby, and the panel was George Galloway, Nigel Evans (the Tory MP who did not rape any men), and a beautiful woman called Rushanara Ali, the Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow. She was nine years old when I put in my first appearance. In all that time, the show has changed very little.

David Cameron is said to want a woman to be chairman of the BBC Trust, now that Chris Patten has had to retire early because of ill health. Perhaps he has a bad conscience about what happened last time. By far the best candidate then was the runner-up, Patricia Hodgson, a distinguished BBC veteran who is committed to its virtues and has always understood its vices. She would have led a return to the BBC’s core strengths, and saved licence fee money in the process. But the government did not know what it wanted, so it chose the nearest chum, Lord Patten, who accepted in that casual and complacent spirit and found himself plunged into crisis.