T here isn't enough dialogue between Islam and other faiths, so
when invited to address the admirable Three Faiths Forum, chaired by Sir Sigmund Sternberg, I happily agreed, and went to the mosque in the Whitechapel Road last week. I had been asked to raise worries Iliad expressed in an article about some aspects of Islam today. One was whether Islam has enough of a separation of Church and State (as Christians put it) in its teaching. Another was to ask how clearly Muslim teachers distinguished between conversion by preaching and by conquest, and how absolute they were in their condemnation of religiously motivated violence. One example I cited was Sheikh Muhammad Sayyicl Tantawi, the Imam of alAzhar in Cairo, the world centre of 'moderate' Sunni learning. Sheikh Tantawi, who is a patron of the Three Faiths Forum, has argued that Muslims are entitled to use violence against non-Muslims who are 'actively condemning or belittling Islam'; he also supports suicide bombing. In my remarks, I made clear my respect for Islam as one of the three great Abrahamic religions, but questioned its adherents' extreme sensitivity to criticism. The reaction was interesting. The Muslims who responded were very angry, and so was one Jew, Richard Stone, who is a big wheel in the race relations industry. I was offensive, prejudiced, phobic, they said, and what I said should not have been permitted. Only one man, a rabbi, spoke up in my support, but afterwards I received numerous emails, messages and quiet words (one from a Muslim) all supporting me. The meeting brought out two things. The first is that even moderate Muslims are immensely prickly about any questioning, no matter how polite. The second is that they, and Jews, and Christians, are frightened.
An interesting juxtaposition on the BBC news: it was announced that Boots was considering selling sex toys. The next item said that efforts were being made to make cigarette packets carry photographs of 'diseased lungs and gangrenous limbs' to warn people of the risks. Public health and education attitudes to smoking and to sex are almost diametrically opposed. On smoking, the belief is that draconian measures and lurid warnings are justified and effective; on sexual dangers, the belief is that such policies would be wrong and wouldn't work: no one would dream of insisting on putting pictures of emaciated Aids victims on the front of pornographic videos. Why are the two pleasures treated
so differently? The different treatments can't both be right. Isn't it better policy not to try to frighten people on either subject?
The word 'hunting', in its American usage meaning shooting, is becoming more and more common here. (A recent example were paparazzi quoted last week as making jokes about Prince Harry carrying a shotgun for hunting'). Is this confusion bad news for the cause of field sports because it makes it easier for Labour to extend its ban to shooting, or good news because it helps to make all country-sports supporters recognise that they are under attack?
Afriend of mine has just bought a horse from Essex called 'Cheers'. He is embarrassed by the breezy vulgarity of the name, and is changing it to Charles. In a late, desperate bid for street-cred, we have agreed a name-swap.
If a newspaper is accused of emptying 'the slop-pails of cowardly falsehoods' and establishing 'lie factories', it normally keeps quiet about it, but in this case the words would do well on the masthead. The newspaper in question was the Daily Telegraph and the accuser was Dr Josef Goebbels. Goebbels's anger was aroused by the Telegraph's report of the Night of the Long Knives, 7 July 1934, when Hitler ordered the murder of members of Ernst Rohm's SA. The paper said that more than 200 had been killed, while the Nazis spoke of 'a dozen deserved deaths'. I learnt this from Christopher Howse's entertaining book, How We Saw It (Ebury Press, £20), which has just appeared to mark the paper's
150th anniversary in 2005. Goebbels's phrases rang a bell: they were extraordinarily similar to a furious letter I received, when editor of the Daily Telegraph, from Alastair Campbell, on the un murderous subject of Mr Blair's part in the Queen Mother's lying-in-state.
To the Churchill Archive Centre in 1 Cambridge last week, for a conference about the years 1975-79 — how Mrs Thatcher won for the first time, and how Labour lost — packed with veterans of the struggle. The best session, as theatre, was the Labour one. Every single member of the panel was a peer, but nobility had not much softened the ancient integrity of their quarrel. The best performance was turned in by one Lord Lea, who had been number two at the TUC at that time. In best Bourbon manner, he had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. British trade unions, he declared, were the envy of German ones in the 1970s. The restraint of trade union leaders over pay had been magnificent; it was 'the City' (by which he turned out to mean the Ford motor company) that had destroyed pay discipline. The other performers poured out their hatred for Tony Benn and the party's National Executive at the time. It was what I think literary critics call 'mimetic'. If you had wondered what the problem with old Labour had been, you had only to watch it being reenacted before your eyes to understand.
Cluff is stepping down as chairman of The Spectator. His must be the longest continuous service to the paper of any non-journalist since the war. Ala bought it from Henry Keswick in 1981 for £100,000 and it was not cheap at the price. When he made me editor in 1984, it was losing £300,000 a year, and [fear it continued to do so for most of the decade, so Algy did well in 1985 to sell it for £815,000 to John Fairfax Ltd plus a clearing of the overdraft. And Fairfax did well to keep him on as chairman. Now, happily, the magazine is not for sale, but when, earlier in the year, it looked as if it might be, people were quoting figures of £15 million or even ,E20 million for its value. This success reflects the fact that people believed in the paper and its quality even when the figures seemed to tell a different story, none more than Algy. He is a great romantic about Britain, Africa, art, business, The Spectator, everything. He is always on the side of risk and flair and high quality, sometimes to his cost. I hope he feels justified pride that the magazine that once gave him and his bank migraines now flourishes.
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