,71 CHARLES MOORE Ive are paying now for the lack
of a single, comprehensive inquiry into the great foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001. We were unprepared. Although foot-and-mouth information notices were first posted on 4 July, there was confusion when the Surrey outbreak was confirmed on Friday afternoon last week. People did not know how to operate the national ban on the movement of livestock. Some environmental health offices, closed for the weekend, did not open. The police had instructions to stop all movements (sensible) and impound all livestock that were moving (impossible). No one seemed to know about the EU directive on immediate ring vaccination. Once upon a time, though, there was a proper inquiry. After the previous big outbreak, which began on a farm at Nantmawr, near Oswestry on 25 October 1967, the Northumberland report identified the source, reviewed the handling and made recommendations. It emphasised the fact that the virus is carried through the air, and therefore a breathing, infected cow is deadly — slaughter should take place straightaway. Footpaths and roads should be closed at once. Because of the risk in the air, burial, Northumberland said, was much safer than burning. The report calculated that it takes four hours to dig a grave big enough for a hundred cattle: slaughter and burial could and should be carried out within 24 hours of diagnosis. In 2001, delay meant that the wind carried the disease, rendering the vast, horrifying contiguous cull largely ineffective since more than a quarter of outbreaks took place more than three kilometres from the source. This time, the slaughter waited a whole day, and burial was not allowed. The carcases were taken off on a lorry to Somerset, risking further spread. Footpaths were not closed. A notable piece of stupidity was the decision by the television channels to fly a helicopter above the infected cattle. The whirring blades will have blown the problem round Surrey — the oxygen of publicity.
The more one learns about the Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright, one of the two suspected causes of the outbreak, the more one wonders why it is where it is. In the United States, the equivalent organisation lives on Plum Island in Long Island Sound, and the security is so tight that even many leading vets are refused clearance to go there.
After the conviction of Chris Langham for .downloading child porn on the internet, Max Clifford, the publicist, said that his career was finished. It would have been easier for Langham to find work again, he said, if he had committed murder. Clifford has a feel, unfortunately, for the temper of our times, and I fear he is right. People really do seem to think that murder is less bad than anything — even lust looking' — connected with paedophilia. The question is, why? Obviously consent in anything sexual is very important, and since children cannot, in a true sense, give consent, the evil is great. But in practice the line between 'normal' pornography and child pornography is often very thin, as is the line between illegal sex and the sort of `romps' (favoured word) with teenage girls which many newspapers and celebrity magazines adulate. My suspicion is that many of the great anti-paedophile crusaders get a thrill by thinking about the subject, and so do many readers of the publications concerned. They expiate their guilt by raging against those who get caught. 'There can be no good reason for looking at these images' pronounce experts who presumably exempt themselves from this statement. It is creepy. It should not need saying that murder is many, many times worse than looking at child porn. In a genuinely decent society, Chris Langham would be duly punished, but then permitted to work normally once more. And people like Martin McGuinness would not be in government.
David Cameron keeps being attacked by his critics as `foppish'. In his memoirs, John Major describes me as 'clever but foppish'. Now Nick Ferrari, the disc jockey who wants to be the Mayor of London, has dismissed Boris Johnson, who also wants the job, as `foppish'. A fop surely is, as the Oxford English Dictionary says, 'One who is foolishly attentive to and vain of his appearance, dress or manners; a dandy, an exquisite'. There may be the faintest whiff of truth about this in relation to the natty Mr Cameron, though people would rightly complain if he looked a mess. I pass over my own possible failings in silence. But to Boris Johnson the word `foppish' is almost grotesquely inapplicable. Boris is not without ego, to put it mildly, but anyone less like 'a dandy, an exquisite' and more like a man who has slept the night in a car, I have never seen. The use of the word `foppish' is code, one realises. Just as people attacking Jews speak of `rootless cosmopolitans', so critics attack fops when what they mean is Etonians T4a st week I mentioned the endless nonappearance of Lord Saville's report on Bloody Sunday. The latest official estimate of the cost so far is £178 million.
The huge Polish immigration to this country is filling Roman Catholic churches and bringing priests over here to help minister to them. Recently in Krakow, where the late Pope John Paul the Great was Archbishop, I noticed that the numerous churches have four, five, even seven masses every day, and that most are packed. Young nuns and seminarians throng the streets. I discover that Poland now produces half of the 2,000 Catholic priests ordained in Europe each year. Jokes about the Polish plumber are now proverbial. I wonder if the same will soon become true of the Polish priest.
Now that the weather is at last quite hot, the effect of recycling becomes even more unpleasant. As this column may well have mentioned before, our formerly excellent weekly rubbish collection from our door has been replaced by a fortnightly one from the road 200 yards away. One week takes paper and cans, the other takes 'residuals', which means virtually everything. What particularly enrages me about this is that we are punished for the fact that our household lives quite greenly: we eat very little packaged food, preferring local produce. As sociologists and parenting experts recommend, we eat two cooked meals a day together at table. Such food decays quickly and produces a large amount of waste, not all of which can be composted. We are permitted only one rubbish bin, and the council is threatening to halve its size. Last week, I struggled up the drive with bags dripping maggots all over me. Metaphorically and literally, the thing stinks.
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