Charles Moore
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As people agonise over the failings of Parliament, they often lament the power of the whips. They are right that control by the executive is too great, but one of the odd features of the Blair/Brown cultural revolution has been a downgrading of the whips. The Chief Whip has been moved out of No. 12 Downing Street, to be replaced by spin doctors, and is now a figure of little account in the corridors of power. It is easy to forget that whips are not there only to suppress dissent, but also to listen to what MPs are saying. Rather like prefects in a well-run school, or serjeant-majors in the army, they find out what the masters/officers cannot. Good whips empower backbenchers, passing worries up the line. As the expenses crisis staggers on, you can see again and again that Gordon Brown simply does not know what his MPs are thinking, and so he cannot get a grip on the situation. Whips take their name from whippers-in on the hunting field. The analogy is exact: it is moderately rare for the whipper-in to whip a hound. His main duty is the welfare of the pack. Without him, the pack will riot.
Journalists are always pleased to be noticed, so I should have been delighted the other day when Jon Snow quoted me on Channel 4 News. I had written that George Osborne looked like ‘a powdered French aristocrat in 1790 staring affrighted from the window of his carriage as the sans-culottes start to try to turn it over’. Snow deployed the phrase with relish. What he didn’t say, though, was that this was my impression of Mr Osborne at last year’s Tory conference. This year (Notes, 12 October), previously posh and pampered George made successful efforts to be the ordinary oppressed commuter, crushed by Mr Brown’s taxes, worried about what the country was coming to. Was this just a muddle in the cuttings by Mr Snow’s researchers, or a deliberate attempt to paint the Tories as having learnt nothing from the past year of economic misery?
This column recently pointed out (18 July) that the Prince of Wales had made a mistake, from his own point of view, by saying exactly how long we have left before ‘irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse’. Early July 2017 was his cut-off date. Now the Prime Minister is at it, in more extreme form. Mr Brown declared this week that unless the right things are agreed at the climate summit in Copenhagen, it will be too late. There are therefore ‘50 days to save the planet’, he says. This is such an obviously preposterous lie that I am surprised even Mr Brown was prepared to utter it. Presumably he is only invoking the Apocalypse because he knows that agreement will, in fact, be reached. At the G20 last year, he claimed to have saved the world from financial catastrophe. So this year he needs to trump that achievement: he is going to save the whole of life on this planet. Vote Labour or die.
On the subject of clean energy, I commend an eloquent article by my former boss, Conrad Black, written from prison in Florida. In the course of a sweeping survey of what President Obama has so far failed to do, Lord Black says: ‘Nothing is forecast to turn America back from a consumption to a production economy, apart from the President’s own fable about huge numbers of people building windmills: a new, enhanced version of quixotry.’
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