Charles Moore
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Mr Blair’s plight has prompted much talk about when to leave important jobs. Some say that the answer is the American presidential system, which prevents anyone running for a third term, but this is not such a brilliant idea because it means the effective life of each two-term presidency is only six years, as everyone anticipates the end. In the British system, such a rule for a prime minister would be far too inflexible, and would produce exactly the situation which Mr Blair has brought about by saying before the last election that he would not fight the one after. (The corollary of the American eight-year rule is that the president cannot leave early except in the most extreme circumstances: our system, which depends on the will of Parliament, would never put up with that.) But it is probably true that few people can do anything very useful in an important executive job for more than eight years. What they should say, therefore, is that they expect to do their job for about ten years. Then the foreshortening that always happens will reduce it to eight, which is about right.
One memory of 11 September 2001. Late that night I discovered who had won the election for the leadership of the Conservative party, due to be declared the next day (answer: Iain Duncan Smith). This was a scoop. I duly rang the night editor of the Daily Telegraph, of which, at the time, I was the editor, and told him. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘don’t think we have room for it.’ It can never have happened, before or since, that the Tory leadership victor has not found space in the Daily Telegraph. But the night editor was right: I did not overrule him.
David Cameron’s first big foreign policy speech, delivered on Monday, was disappointing. It made no dreadful mistakes, and quite neatly established him as a ‘lib-con’, when everyone hates ‘neocons’ without knowing what they are, but it added little to the sum of public debate. One omission struck me. He rightly highlighted Iran’s iniquity, and its relation to Hezbollah, but he said nothing about Syria’s role in terrorism. The same regime that claims to have foiled an attack on the US embassy in Damascus is busily promoting murder all through the region. Why do our leaders not say this?
Following my suggestion last week that people should send letters, cards and presents to British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have been asked what presents would be welcomed. According to the father of the serving officer who alerted me to this, the answer is paperbacks, sweets (but not chocolates, which melt), biscuits and soap. You can send shaving soap, but not shaving cream, because of its explosive qualities.
The new film The Queen will annihilate all criticism, because it is very powerful. So before it is too late, some of its ‘heavily researched’ facts should be questioned. It is not true, for example, as the film suggests, that it was Tony Blair who urged, against the Queen’s wishes, that the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, be public (the Spencer family had wanted it private). That idea came from the Royal Household and was approved by the Queen as soon as it was put to her, on the Monday morning, just over 24 hours after Diana’s death. Nor is it true that the Household cribbed ‘Tay Bridge’, the plan for the Queen Mother’s funeral (which makes a funny moment in the film). They decided that because Diana’s circumstances were unique, no existing funeral plan should be consulted. It is also impossible that the Queen would have had to tell Prince Philip not to take guns on to the moor in pursuit of a stag on a Sunday. He would not have needed that prompting. On the other hand, many details are exact. The Queen Mother (the only piece of real miscasting) speaks of going ‘up to London’ and Mr Blair of going ‘down to London’, as each would have done.
The film is so strong, though, because it brings out the ambivalence of that astonishing week and dramatises it believably. Tony Blair is seen to be odious in his attempt to make capital for himself out of Diana’s death (a pity, in this respect, that the film did not show his extraordinary, successful tussle to be allowed to read the lesson at the funeral when the Household, wanting to keep party politics right out of it, would have preferred the Speaker). On the other hand, he undoubtedly did do the monarchy a favour both by defending the Queen for staying in Balmoral and by privately urging her to leave it. His hand in her last-minute broadcast also helped. The film illustrates the conundrum about Mr Blair: is he like Stanley Baldwin at the Abdication, surefootedly working for the national interest, or is he a vain opportunist obsessed with his own advantage? The question applies not only to that week, but to every week he has been in office. The answer, which is so fascinating, is ‘both’. By the way, although the film is, in theory, anti-monarchy, it is the Queen, in the end, who wins.
‘Pomposity is something I hate more than anything else in the world’, says Lord Snowdon in the Sunday Times. Isn’t that itself a pompous thing to say?
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