THE SPECTATOR’S NOTES
CHARLES MOORE
Next year, there will be an election for the mayoralty of London. The chance to defeat Ken Livingstone is the most important contest for the Conservatives before the next general election, but they still have not got a candidate. This week they seem to be deciding, for a second time, to postpone their selection of one. If so, they will have put the process back by more than a year from their original intention. The hustings for their ‘open primary’ will have to take place in August, when most party members will be away. The reason for the delay is that the Tory equivalent of Tony Blair’s ‘sofa government’ have a candidate up their sleeve, but it is not yet convenient for him to declare himself. He is Greg Dyke, the former director-general of the BBC. Mr Dyke is very exciting to some because he is quite famous, quite unTory in demeanour, and a former Labour supporter. Unfortunately, as any student of the Hutton affair and reader of his lachrymose memoirs, Inside Story, will know, he is also, politically, a moron. He was so busy with his BBC internal boosterism (‘Making It Happen’) that he failed to get a grip of the row about the death of Dr David Kelly, and was comprehensively outmanoeuvred by his former hero, Mr Blair. His politics — sentimental leftism, a tendency to compare himself with Nelson Mandela — are unchanged, but now he is motivated by revenge against the Prime Minister. How does that help the Tories in the post-Blair era? What has it got to do with the wellbeing of London? With Mr Blair gone, Ken Livingstone will be the most accomplished political operator of the age. He would make mincemeat of the unemployed millionaire with a grudge.
As mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the Tory hierarchy is making a mistake if its commitment to openness is merely rhetorical. The attempt to manage Mr Dyke into position goes against that commitment. And on Monday the Board meets to decide whether to remove ordinary party members’ voting rights in the reselection of Conservative MEPs. The modernisation of the party certainly needs to be relentlessly pushed, but it will never work if it is just another word for disfranchisement.
Sce this column has refused to be inshocked by the ‘cash-for-peerages’ affair (on the grounds that a possible relationship between titles and party donations is a far more trivial form of corruption than, say, building new hospitals only in constituencies held by the governing party), it is pleased to report that Lord Levy, the chosen scapegoat, is still active. Last week he had a series of meetings in the Middle East, starting with Ehud Olmert in Israel, and going on to Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank. His photograph, emerging from a meeting in Ramallah, appeared in the Jerusalem Post on Thursday. The Foreign Office would presumably stop such meetings if they did not have the approval of No. 10. So Lord Levy is not, contrary to what one reads, persona non grata. Indeed, speaking to the Labour Friends of Israel this Tuesday, Gordon Brown declared himself ‘deeply grateful’ to him for his Middle East work. The chances of Tony Blair bringing peace to the Middle East are, of course, nonexistent, but you have to have an official mind to believe that his project is less plausible when represented by Lord Levy than by Margaret Beckett.
Do you suffer from ‘sea-blindness’? According to a powerful and angry new article in the RUSI Journal, this affliction is now common. It means failing to notice that Britain’s trade, security and freedom are dependent on the sea just as much as ever in some ways more so because of our growing reliance on others for energy and food. The authors, Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham and Professor Gwyn Prins, identify five fallacies which govern Ministry of Defence policy towards the navy. These include the belief that technology can be a complete substitute for numbers, that strategy can be assessed by scientific means alone, and that the budget round should define the entire ‘tempo’ of the ministry. The paper draws attention to the fact that by the end of 2007 no operational frigate or destroyer will have been less than five years in commission. And it charts our declining commissioning rates to show how they compare with the last time Britain failed to arm herself — 1921–36. The authors say, ‘One must hope that it will not take the defeat of British forces in the field to shake this frame of thinking.’ That is really the point. The fiasco over HMS Cornwall and her not very intrepid boarding party was not a big thing in itself, but it raised the spectre which has been absent for so long that we have forgotten what we should do to avoid it defeat. It was a miscalculation about the decline of British power which provoked General Galtieri to attack the Falklands 25 years ago. Would different enemies be miscalculating if they were to attack in another theatre today? It is quite a big question. For 300 years or so, the navy has been a decisive force across the globe. Without it, other forces will decide, not in our favour.
Iam just old enough to remember a time when for males to call one another by their Christian names was a mark of intimacy. At my prep school everyone was called by his surname or nickname. At public school, friends called one another by their first names, but it was a delicate matter to know exactly when one could do this. I remember someone coming into my room and telling me formally that I was now entitled to call him (I have changed the names) ‘Peter’, instead of ‘Murgatroyd’. It was a proud moment. Now things have gone so far the other way that use of the first name has become almost a mark of not knowing someone. If I ring up an office that I have not rung before, someone says ‘Bear with me, Charles’, and emails from strangers deploy one’s first name with insistent frequency. I have lost track, in fact, of who does know me and who doesn’t, and so live on the edge of embarrassment in case I fail to recognise somebody. I’m not sure that the old rules were better, but it would be less confusing if one had a name which only one’s intimates could use. Perhaps it could be one’s computer password.
Telephone boxes — at least the red ones for whose preservation this paper fought a notable campaign in the 1980s — are lovely things. But the question now, in the era of the mobile phone, is ‘What are they for?’ You hardly ever see anyone inside them. Future historians, puzzling over these objects, may conclude that they were wayside religious shrines in which people stuck pictures of naked fertility goddesses to bring them luck.
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