Charles Moore is a former editor of The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph. He became a non-affiliated peer in July 2020.
Poor Nick Clegg keeps trying to change the constitution and keeps being balked (the Alternative Vote, Lords reform). At last, he believes, he will be able to fulfil his ambition to force the first-born child, of either sex, to ascend to the throne, and to be able to marry a Roman Catholic (though not, oddly,
‘The rain is ever falling, drip, drip, drip, by day and night… The weather is so very bad, down in Lincolnshire, that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend its ever being fine again.’ That is Dickens in the 1850s (Bleak House). It is a similar story here in Sussex as the year 2013 comes in.
Here is a point about the coalition which is so obvious that I have not seen it expressed. When a single party is in power, the approach of a general election is the key discipline: almost however much colleagues disagree, they unite. When there is a coalition, the opposite applies. Each partner needs to disown
You will have read in every news outlet that the baby whom the Duchess of Cambridge is bearing will be third in line to the throne if she is a girl, because of a new law which equalises the succession of the firstborn between males and females. This is untrue — first because, as the
There is excitement that a foreigner could have been made Governor of the Bank of England. But the truth is that Canadians (and Australians and New Zealanders) are not really foreigners. The common history and kinship are so strong that there is pre-existing trust. (Mark Carney, indeed, is married to an Englishwoman.) This is an
Lynton Crosby will soon be appointed to run the Conservative strategy for the next election, say reports. Unnamed sources accuse him of saying rude things about Muslims; people mutter about the ‘dog whistle’ campaign of 2005. Such stories involve two great subterranean passions — the desire of rival polling groups to make money and the
David Dimbleby is right that the BBC is bedevilled by managerialism. He makes an apt comparison with the National Health Service, where his wife, who works in mental health, reports similar horrors. But no one goes on to ask why this is so. It is assumed that the answer is to appoint robust journalists (or,
President Obama’s victory is the first major victory for incumbency in the West since the credit crunch began. It was to help achieve such a victory that the eurozone leaders listened to Mr Obama and Tim Geithner and postponed their own day of reckoning. All excellent news for the status quo, but possibly not for
‘England shall bide till Judgment Tide, By Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! says Kipling. Possibly we shall have to bide with just oak and thorn now (and oak, too, is threatened). People have already attacked the government for being slow to intervene against ash dieback. But it is also interesting to note the tardy feebleness
Instead of looking at the BBC’s behaviour over the Jimmy Savile programme through the red mist of self-righteous hindsight, consider the editorial problem it presented at the time. You have already planned Christmas tribute programmes to one of your most popular contributors of the past 40 years (God knows why he was so popular, but
As you read this, the Conservatives seem to be edging towards some promise, to be contested at the next general election, of a referendum in the next parliament over Britain’s membership of the EU. You can see how far opinion has moved by the fact that government ministers — Michael Gove only last week —
Probably it will all be all right. Probably the Scots, rightly offered an either/or rather than a third way, will vote to stay in the Union in 2014. But there is something unhappy about the choreography of this week’s announcement of a referendum agreement. It is not clear why David Cameron had to negotiate this
It is such a mistake for senior Tory politicians and journalists — Ken Clarke and Max Hastings are the latest — to complain that Boris Johnson ‘isn’t serious’. It is because he isn’t serious that people like him. And since we live in postmodern politics, his lack of seriousness is seen by his fans to
Ed Miliband, in Manchester, invoked a speech by Disraeli 140 years ago, in the same city. Prudently, he did not quote it: you won’t find much ‘One Nation’ stuff there. In it, Disraeli devoted his energies to attacking the radical forces which ‘were determined to destroy the Church and the House of Lords’ and were
Andrew Mitchell, accused of being a bully, was bullied in turn. There was tremendous journalistic laziness in the reporting of his alleged remarks to police officers at the Downing Street gates. A few months ago it was considered a national scandal that the police were always slipping information to the Murdoch press. Now they planted
Departing as Conservative MP for Corby, Louise Mensch writes a ‘letter of resignation’ to the Prime Minister. Why? Being an MP is not a government post: she is not a minister. An MP should write to his or her constituents and/or the chairman of the constituency association. It is constitutionally wrong for Mrs Mensch to
Have you been following Mitt Romney’s ‘gaffes’? In Britain, he said that there were some concerns about security before the Olympics. In Israel, he said that the ‘economic vitality’ of Israel compared favourably with its neighbours and attributed this in part to ‘the power of culture’. He said that Iran should be confronted, not appeased.
‘Make hay while the sun shines’ is advice to be taken literally as well as metaphorically, and so, as I walked up from the station after a particularly Olympics-cursed visit to London, I was soothed by the sound and smell of mowing coming from our little fields. Haymaking should have taken place almost two months
Having asked around, I can fairly confidently report that the government’s efforts to push ahead with some even slightly elected House of Lords will not work. The rebels are quite rightly holding their ground. Only if the Labour party comes to the government’s rescue can the plans get through, and why should it? People are
A big reason for opposing these Lords reforms is that they would threaten the power of the Commons. If the Commons passed them, however, it would deserve to be threatened. It would display — like No. 10 Downing Street — an ignorance of the constitution and an arrogance about process which undermines the point of