Charles Moore is a former editor of The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph. He became a non-affiliated peer in July 2020.
Politicians find it impossible to say they are against Freedom of Information because it sounds as though they must be hiding something if they do so. But the way FOI is now being used means that government will become more and more secretive. When David Cameron suggested in Parliament last week that Gordon Brown had
Why is it good to make pupils stay on at school until they are 18? Under the Bill promised in the Queen’s Speech this week, state education will be compulsory for two more years unless the pupil is employed under an apprentice or training scheme. The political reason behind this is the government’s anxieties about
Charles Moore’s thoughts on the week This week, Policy Exchange, of which I am the chairman, produced a survey, ‘The Hijacking of British Islam’, of literature found on the premises of more than 100 mosques. In about a quarter of the mosques, often ‘mainstream’ ones, some blessed by a visit from the Prince of Wales, the
This week, my family celebrated a century of continuous occupation of the house in Sussex where my sister now lives. The place came into the family in the 19th century, but was let to the Church of England Temperance Society as a home for 38 ‘adult male inebriates’ until my great-grandfather and his second wife
There is much complaint that ‘ageism’ has toppled Sir Menzies Campbell. In theory, one must deplore prejudice against advancing years. Political leadership should come after accumulating decades of wisdom, rather than being treated, as Tony Blair seems to regard the premiership, as something to put on your CV. But the trouble is that Sir Ming’s
Damocles was the courtier who told Dionysius the tyrant that his happiness was complete. Dionysius ordered Damocles to his banquet and sat him under a sword suspended by a single hair for the whole of dinner. I hope David Cameron is doing the same to any adviser who shows Damoclean tendencies. It is absolutely true
Blackpool Such is the strange rhythm of politics that this turns out to be the most successful Conservative conference for many years. George Osborne, who only a week ago people kept telling me was a disaster, put in a commanding performance. His promise to lift the threshold of inheritance tax to £1 million did not
Its delivery was dull, but don’t puritanically fool yourself that the matter was better than the manner. It offered no new idea and made no attempt to reason with the audience about any of the phenomena in the modern world which might worry us. What is the nature of international Islamist terrorism? What is our
For ten years, it has been said that Gordon Brown gave independence to the Bank of England. He never did, and this week dramatically reminds us of that fact. What he did was to give the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank the freedom to set interest rates. What he also did, however — and
We are paying now for the lack of a single, comprehensive inquiry into the great foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001. We were unprepared. Although foot-and-mouth information notices were first posted on 4 July, there was confusion when the Surrey outbreak was confirmed on Friday afternoon last week. People did not know how to operate the national
Enoch Powell once said to me, ‘I love the humbug of the English. I worship it. But I reserve the right from time to time to point it out.’ Enoch Powell once said to me, ‘I love the humbug of the English. I worship it. But I reserve the right from time to time to
David Cameron was in a tight spot because of the floods. He had arranged to address the Rwandan parliament, and this fitted with his wish to proclaim his welcome interest in development issues and his party’s new document on the subject. David Cameron was in a tight spot because of the floods. He had arranged
It is not possible to speak of a terrorist incident as being a good thing, but if it were, these latest would qualify. First, no innocent person was killed in London or Glasgow. Second, information was immediately collected by the authorities, thanks to the would-be killers’ bungling, and more will follow. Often when terrorists are
Harriet Harman seems to have won the deputy leadership of the Labour party by saying she did not want people to spend £10,000 on a handbag when other people were ‘struggling’. Polly Toynbee tells us that this ‘resonated with public distaste’ at the ‘debauchery of riches at the top’. Did it? If so, why? A
Tyranny is most successful when most extreme. Because we all know that North Korea is absolutely foul, we do remarkably little about it. The new report into mass killings, torture and arbitrary imprisonment there by Christian Solidarity Worldwide (North Korea: A Case to Answer) is amazing not only for the horror of what it reveals,
Anyone who believes British Muslim hostility to the war in Iraq is the big motivator of terrorism should read the fascinating cover piece by Shiv Malik in the latest edition of Prospect. Investigating the background of the 7 July London bombings for a television drama (which the BBC, of course, eventually rejected as ‘anti-Muslim’), Malik
It is highly likely that Tony Blair will become a Roman Catholic after he leaves office. He regularly attends a Catholic Mass rather than Anglican services — nowadays, because of security problems, usually in No. 10 Downing Street or at Chequers. It seems logical to him that he should follow the religion of the rest
The grammar school row is proving not so much a Clause Four moment as a class war moment for the Tories — now it has produced a resignation. It is suggested that David Cameron’s Old Etonians are indifferent to those struggling to better themselves, because they do not know what struggle means. The Cameronites imply
A question unasked in all this row about the Conservatives and grammar schools is, ‘Why did the Tories, in power for 22 of the 42 years since Labour first tried to make comprehensives compulsory, never bring grammar schools back?’ The answer is numerical, and it explains the problem with which poor David Willetts is wrestling.
The attempt to get rid of ancient history A-Level, which Monday’s appearance by Boris Johnson in a toga was intended to stop, is a little saga of how ‘dumbing down’ works. No one involved set out to undermine the subject, yet that will be the effect. Instructed to squeeze down A-Levels into four units instead