THE SPECTATOR’S NOTES
CHARLES MOORE
So now conservatives, and particularly Conservatives, must all change ‘the way we look, the way we feel, the way we think and the way we behave’. It is a tribute to David Cameron’s persuasive charm that he makes people want to do these things. He has a knack of appealing to one’s better nature rather than rebuking one for one’s worse. When I took over as chairman of the centreRight think-tank Policy Exchange after the general election, I encountered a group of mostly young people excited by policies for just such change, but exasperated at the lack of vehicles for them. New Labour had ceased to think, Charles Kennedy’s Liberal Democrats didn’t much go in for that sort of thing, and the Tories were effectively leaderless. We were talking (and are talking still) about ways of making Britain more competitive, local, free and green. We wanted (and want) more thought about matters Tories haven’t thought enough about, like the life of cities, the mental networks which foster terrorism, the way planning controls make house-building worse. It is heartening to find that Mr Cameron wants policy ideas to arise from big themes like these rather than sticking to departmental subjects, and to hear him say so in his very first speech as leader. Many of the themes he announced are close to ours. To put it in language bankers like, the market is beginning to move. Give us your ideas, your involvement, your money (none of the last goes to me: I am unpaid) info@policyexchange.org.uk.
Until Tuesday it was David versus David. Now it is David versus Goliath. The question, though, is who is Goliath? Is it Tony or Gordon? Bearing in mind this column’s lonely theory that Gordon Brown is not the inevitable successor to Tony Blair, might it not be dangerous for David Cameron to focus too much on Mr Brown? I don’t think so. Labour hopes are now concentrated on the Chancellor, so those hopes must be dashed. People speak of Mr Brown as a man of granite integrity, unlike slippery Tony, and he certainly has his own genuine beliefs. But this week’s pre-Budget statement brought out quite another characteristic which is unattractive, even babyish. The most important point in his speech was when he had to admit that his forecast for growth for this year had been double the real percentage. Instead of confronting this directly, he tried to turn the disappointing truth into a boast about his amazing achievements — that growth ‘even in this toughest year’ was 1.75 per cent. How silly to think this would fool anyone. For all Mr Brown’s Heathcliff looks, there is something about him which is not so big and manly, something quite mean or pettish. Go for it, Mr Cameron. Tony Blair won’t stand in your way.
Now that Sir Elton John is forming a civil partnership with David Furnish, shouldn’t Mr Furnish be known by some title? If Mr Furnish were a woman and Sir Elton’s wife, he would be Lady John, but presumably he would find such a title insulting. On the other hand, someone will surely soon complain that it is discriminatory that the civil partner can have no share in a title of honour. I have read that cards for civil partners sold in shops speak of ‘Mister and Mister’. Could Debrett, or Mary Killen, advise us whether Elton and David should be ‘Sir and Sir’?
The recent Licensing Act has been described — and attacked — as a liberalising measure. It turns out, though, to contain plenty of small print. A friend of mine has a wine business operating from home and delivering wine solely by the case to friends and friends of friends. Until the new Act, he tells me, he did not have to have a licence. Now he does, and he will have to go on a course which will teach him about ‘public order’ lest any of his customers starts binge-drinking on his Châteauneuf du Pape. Critics of the Bill have complained that it was introduced because of lobbying by the big drinks companies. Is this clause another example of the same lobbying? Has the government succumbed to the inveterate tendency of a big business to find ways of making life harder for a small one? On Saturday I shot a woodcock, as I usually do two or three times a year. As always, I felt reproached by the dead bird’s dark and liquid eye. It seems a shame to kill something so beautiful and delicate. Yet there is also a particular pleasure in shooting these birds, partly because they are not reared, partly because their glancing flight makes them quite hard to hit. By tracking that flight with your gun, you observe it more intently. Aesthetic/moral feelings about what is shot are hard to make sense of. There is a sadness at killing something small, though smallness means that wounding is unlikely and death is instant. There is also a case for minding killing something big (I’d hate to shoot an elephant). Such worries are not much to do with cruelty, or rarity. They concern one’s sense of one’s relationship to nature which is neither rational nor unimportant. But I know I shall try to shoot a woodcock again, and a snipe, if it will only let me.
Aminor pleasure of a day’s shooting is the game cart. On this each brace of birds is hung, so that one sees how things are going during the day: how many have been shot and what species — mainly pheasants or partridges, but also what the card calls ‘various’. At the end, the bag is counted. But now an EU directive is on its way. It is dangerous to health, apparently, to allow dead birds to be exposed to the normal air for more than two hours. They must go straight to a chiller kept at a steady 7˚C and stay there until they are sold. So the game cart must chug unenvironmentally back and forth between each drive, and every game larder will have to be registered and install the necessary technology. Expect many more such little moves to make shooting more difficult, rather than a direct attempt at a ban.
By chance one day last week, the obituaries column of the Daily Telegraph was filled by two men, both of whom were from families immigrant to this country. One was Jozef Garlinski, who survived Birkenau and Auschwitz to live in Ealing and become a historian of 20th-century Poland. The other was Victor Crolla, who ran Edinburgh’s best Italian delicatessen, Valvona & Crolla, for 40 years. What was touching was how much both admired the culture of their adopted country, while still bringing something different to it. Crolla was interned as an ‘enemy alien’ during the war, but bore no grudge. The great lesson is that citizenship of a new country should make a big demand of the person granted it. The person who answers that demand feels huge pride.
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