CHARLES MOORE
Thrce years this week after the twin towers fell, one senses people's longing to believe that it is all nothing to do with us — the dreadful, late-1930s illusion that everything will be all right if only some of our leaders were not so 'provocative'. Even with the new horror of Beslan, my own thoughts were far away from terrorism as I went mink-hunting last weekend. The most obviously useful of all forms of hunting (since mink are an unmitigated menace) and the most modest, the sport consists of half a dozen people and six couple of hairy hounds splashing through streams for a few hours. Next week, the full force of the Blairite state will try to stamp it out. The day was perfect late summer, hot suddenly, but with a tinge of autumn, the sunlight dappling the heavily wooded iron streams of Sussex. But there was Vince, the terrierman. Vince works in a foundry in the East End and comes out every weekend with the minkhounds. Three years ago his sister, who ran her own company organising conferences, arrived early in the morning at the World Trade Center in New York to make sure that all was well for the planned meeting. She died in the attack, leaving a husband and small children. Thinking of her fate in such a setting reminded me of the chill cast by the Nazgul as they sniff round the edges of the Shire in search of the ring. Et in Arcadia Ego.
And still the BBC persists in its refusal to call terrorists terrorists. The child murderers in Beslan were 'extremists' or 'militants', apparently, terms which deal inadequately with the fact that terror is a considered purpose — the considered purpose — of such acts of violence. If you look up 'spade' in the dictionary, it says: 'A tool for digging, paring, or cutting ground, turf, etc., now usually consisting of a flattish rectangular iron blade socketed on a wooden handle which has a grip or cross-piece at the upper end, the whole being adapted for grasping with both hands while the blade is pressed into the ground with the foot'. I recommend this usage for BBC gardening programmes.
You may remember the great fuss in 1 July when Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi visited England. He had been described as an extremist, but Ken Livingstone embraced him and the BBC lauded the moderation of his sermon in the Regent's Park Mosque and emphasised how 'hugely
respected' he was. Last week in Cairo, Qaradawi, who is chairman of the Muslim Scholars' Union, issued a fatwa saying that 'Americans in Iraq are all combatants and invaders — there should be no distinction between a civilian and a soldier', though it did add that their bodies should not be mutilated, which perhaps is considered a mark of weak-kneed moderation in Islamist quarters. A fatwa exalts such killing into a wajib, a religious duty. This was barely reported in Britain. The only person brave enough to make much of it — and to point out that Qaradawi has two daughters studying in Britain — was Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, general manager of the al-Arab iya news channel, in his fierce attack on his fellow Muslims' 'history of denial' about Islamic violence. Why do we do so little to help people like Mr al-Rashed, and so much to excuse people like Qaradawi?
One of the many trials of being Archbishop of Canterbury is that you do not get to Canterbury very much. Because the job is national, global indeed, its holder spends most of his time either travelling or in the gloomy grandeur of Lambeth Palace. His suffragan, the Bishop of Dover, administers the diocese. So it is nice to hear that Dr Rowan Williams loves Canterbury and takes every possible opportunity of sneaking back there. He has taken to writing to neighbouring parishes to ask if he can visit them, a thing unheard of in the past. And he sometimes moves incognito in shirtsleeves among visitors in the cathedral (though it's not so easy to be incognito with that beard). Dr
Williams's favourite place to pray is the shrine of St Thomas a Becket and he has been known to slip in there early to pray alone. On one occasion, I gather, a cleaning lady found the Archbishop prostrate on the floor, and immediately assumed that a vagrant had got in and spent the night there. During the miners' strike 20 years ago, I remember Willie Whitelaw rather sweetly defending the latest unhelpful pronouncement from the then incumbent, Dr Runcie. on the grounds that 'the Archbishop is a very religious man'. It hasn't always been true of Cantuars past, but it is of this one.
ost of us experience disappointments in life, but few can be greater for an educated person of my age than a career running television. I remember bright, idealistic young people coming down from university in the 1970s and early 1980s full of exciting thoughts about documentaries, about the way that Channel 4 would open up television to alternative points of view, about 'cutting edge' (though I don't think the phrase existed then) drama. Now they attend endless conferences about
diversity and try to justify the policies of half-witted people like Greg Dyke until he goes off and writes self-pitying memoirs. Or, worse still, they are successful. When I arrived at Cambridge in 1975, someone called Peter Bazalgette was president of the Union, a friendly, light-hearted figure descended, I think, from the man who invented proper sewers for London. When I next met him a few years later he was working on a documentary which. he explained, would reveal the scandal that the police could make people confess to all sorts of crimes once they held them in cells. I thought at the time that his concern was public spirited, but I now suspect that the programme gave him rather different ideas about the uses of captivity. Today he is the proud inventor of Big Brother, and no doubt extremely rich. It's as if the sewers have reversed their flow. Have we ever had a more horrible public culture?
As complaints about the Post Office rise ever louder, we are lucky, at home, to continue to receive a very good service. One innovation, though, is disquieting. In recent weeks the post has been delivered from an unmarked white van, apparently because of a shortage of the liveried red ones. It is amazing how sinister this change feels.
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