Charles Moore
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Isn’t it time now that the Conservatives fulfilled their new leader’s pledge, and broke away from the European People’s Party in the European Parliament? Mr Cameron’s commitment to do so is almost the only definite promise that he made in his leadership campaign, and it did much to secure him the support of those in Parliament and party who might otherwise have considered him too left-wing. Rather like Tony Blair’s promise to his own troops in 1997 to abolish hunting, it appeased people who could have made a great deal of trouble. If it is delayed much longer, that trouble will start all over again. William Hague, whom Mr Cameron put in charge of the matter, has made the mistake of allowing the final decision to wait upon events in Europe. This gives endless pretext for blowing the change off course, the latest being a dispute between the Czech Civic Alliance and the Polish Law and Justice Party, which are supposed to be large components of the Tories’ hoped-for new grouping in Strasbourg. Actually, there is no need to try to have everything in place before leaving the EPP, since there is a vacancy for democratic euroscepticism in the Parliament which will fill gradually once a grouping exists. The reason for leaving the EPP is that it is committed to ever-greater European integration and the Conservatives are against this. Therefore every Tory European election campaign (and, to a lesser extent, every Tory policy on Europe) is based on a lie. If Mr Cameron doesn’t push Mr Hague on quickly, many Tory MEPs will leave the EPP anyway. It is hard to see how they could be disciplined for doing so; they would only be doing what their leader said earlier that he wanted.
So much is written about Gordon Brown becoming the next Labour leader that I am reluctant to add to it. But this column has to keep up its once-lonely position (which included tipping Alan Johnson on 1 October last year) that Mr Brown will not necessarily get the job, and so I will add a point so simple that it is often missed. Although Mr Brown is impressive — not falling, in Churchill’s phrase, below the level of events — he is also, as a public performer and broadcaster, quite astonishingly boring. It has to do with the fact that he never seems to acknowledge the existence of other feelings, people or points of view (although someone has trained him to say words like ‘Jim’ and ‘John’ a lot and to introduce smiles at random intervals to try to nullify this impression). I defy anyone to listen to one of his interviews in full. We have had about 15 years of this already. I doubt whether the public could endure him for another five, or whatever, at the top of the greasy pole.
My thanks to a South African reader, who reports that the government campaign against smoking there has achieved new rigour. The director of health services, Zanele Mthembu, is quoted by the Sunday Tribune in Durban as saying that her department’s campaign ‘was already paying off because children were calling the Health Department to report on their parents who were smoking at home….’
This week Henry Allingham, the last known survivor of the Battle of Jutland, was interviewed about it on his 109th birthday. Mr Allingham recalled that, with the recklessness of youth, he kept sticking his head up to see more of what was going on. It is that recklessness which makes wars possible — and is therefore bad — but which also makes them psychologically survivable — and is therefore good. My great-uncle, Henry Burrows, was also at the Battle of Jutland, aged 15. His letter home to my grandmother said, in full, ‘We have been in action. It was jolly decent.’
A no less remarkable anniversary this month is celebrated by W.F. Deedes. It will be 75 years since he first became a journalist. Bill joined the Morning Post in June 1931, aged 18, having been forced to leave Harrow the year before when his father ran out of money. To comprehend what a span of time this is, it helps to stretch the mind back 75 years before 1931. Lord Palmerston was Prime Minister, the Crimean War was ending, and the Indian Mutiny had not yet happened. Another 75 years back, and you get to the surrender of the British to the rebel American colonists at Yorktown in 1781. In his unique journalistic career, therefore, Bill has witnessed more than a third of what, if you date them from the French Revolution, can be called modern times. He survived robustly, but the Morning Post did not. In the British Library newspaper exhibition, mentioned in this column last week, I came across a copy of the Daily Telegraph for 30 September 1937, the day it swallowed up the Morning Post. In a long leader, the Telegraph explained the Morning Post’s demise: ‘Its disdain of compromise was magnificent,’ it was ‘the unflinching champion of many causes which had once been in the ascendant but had suffered in the battle with an eager and insistent Democracy.’ It is part of Bill’s amazing skill as a journalist that, although by instinct he probably is not mad keen on eager and insistent Democracy, he has been so successful in reporting its development. He is — and, I suspect, always was — a very old-fashioned man, yet no one is better at noticing what is new, and telling the reader about it.
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