The Spectator Notes
CHARLES MOORE politicians find it impossible to say they are against Freedom of Information because it sounds as though they must be hiding something if they do so. But the way FOI is now being used means that government will become more and more secretive. When David Cameron suggested in Parliament last week that Gordon Brown had not been contemplating changing the rules on inheritance tax until the Conservatives proposed doing so, the government used FOI to try to refute this, publishing documentbased accounts of what had happened. This was opposed, I gather, by Treasury officials who could see that if recent government documents get dragged into party political games no one will commit his honest advice to paper. Confidence (meaning confidentiality) is closely allied to confidence in the broader sense of the word. In Washington, where Freedom of Information also causes trouble, a circumvention has been found. Post-it notes, apparently, do not have to be released. Therefore the most important bits of government policy are now written and recorded on tiny, sticky, yellow squares.
Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, the leader of the Muslim Council of Britain, was in the clerical party at the Cenotaph for Remembrance Day. I wonder what he was commemorating. The MCB consistently refuses to condemn the killing and kidnapping of British servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan. The day before, Dr Abdul Bari said that Britain resembled Nazi Germany. In its recent report, 'The Hijacking of British Islam', the think-tank Policy Exchange revealed that among the various publications for sale at Dr Abdul Bari's East London Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre (as well as one called Women Who Deserve To Go To Hell) is a multivolume, Saudi-funded work called Islamic Verdicts. The book includes questions and answers. In one, a man seeks guidance because he lives with 'Christian brothers'. The answer starts by saying that the phrase must be 'a slip of the tongue' because 'there is absolutely no brotherhood between the Muslims and the Christians'. Dr Abdul Bari stood with Christian clergy in apparent fraternity in Whitehall on Sunday, yet when the Daily Telegraph on Saturday invited him to condemn the publications sold under his roof he defended them on the grounds that the bookshops are 'independent businesses'. I rather think that if you could buy a book called, for instance, The Only Good Muslim is a Dead Muslim, in the Westminster Abbey bookshop, Dr Abdul Bari would (rightly) have something to say.
Tast week, a Finnish teenager shot eight people dead in a Finnish school. It was interesting that the coverage of this horror was rather perfunctory. Whenever similar killings take place in the United States, huge stories run for days, with BBC reporters saying things like, 'Just another example of America's love affair with the gun.' Finland's love affair with the gun' doesn't have the same ring. Besides, gun laws are strict in Finland, so there was no cheap point to be made. But the eight people are just as dead.
Sir Ronald Cohen, the plutocrat and Friend of Gordon, now says that he wouldn't mind a Tory government. His most important non-financial contribution to New Labour has been his Commission on Unclaimed Assets. The fruit of its work is in the Queen's Speech. There is a lot to be said for trying to make 'orphan' assets work for good causes, but the scale of what is involved (£5 billion, say some) makes it all too likely that we will have a new National Lottery on our hands, with government unfairly directing the bonanza to its own purposes. It would be much better if such funds could be put in the hands of the admirable and independent Charity Bank. The Tories should take up this idea, and ensure that Sir Ronald does not become, politically, an orphan asset.
Braving the threatened tidal wave, we visited Norfolk last weekend. It was good to find a fight-back against the accusation (see last week's Notes) that two hen harriers had been shot on the Sandringham estate. People are asking the accusers — the quango Natural England — to produce some actual evidence. So far, Natural England will not even name its employee who says that he witnessed the shooting. Its Chair, Sir Martin Doughty, says, sanctimoniously and irrelevantly, that his organisation will 'redouble its efforts to build a future for this rare and beautiful bird of prey'. Since Sir Martin won't come up with any proper evidence for any crime having been committed or for why Prince Harry was a 'suspect', I think one should hit back in kind. I note from Who's Who that Sir Martin spent several years as Labour leader of Derbyshire County Council. Might one suggest that his organisation is more interested in politics than in birds? I also wonder why the police spent so much time on this non-case. In the nearby Norfolk village in which we were staying there is an uninhabited castle. Most weeks, local yobs try to break into it, and recently they tried to set it alight They left a petrol can behind, so there might be fingerprints. The Norfolk police show scarcely a flicker of interest.
you can tell how much you are enjoying a book by your anger when you lose it, unfinished. I was halfway through Robert Harris's new novel, The Ghost, about the ghostwriter of the memoirs of a British prime minister strikingly like Tony Blair, when the book vanished. Next week, it came back from the laundry (unwashed), having been swept up with the sheets. Now I have finished it. It is, among other things, a powerful essay on the horror of modern fame. At the end, whatever you think of the Blain, you cannot help feeling how vile is the world in which we force our public figures to live, with its at-your-feet/atyour-throat media, its heavy security, and the attempt to fight political battles in the courts. Here is the scene when Adam Lang (the Blair figure) walks out of his hotel in New York: 'The bodyguards opened the doors and his broad shoulders were suddenly framed by a halogen glow of light. The shouts of the reporters, the fusillade of camera shutters, the rumble of the Harley Davidsons — it was as if someone had rolled back the doors to hell.'
It is well known that old people have a different attitude to the telephone than the young. This is partly because they were brought up in an era when each call was very expensive and the Bakelite instrument stood, upright and solid, in a cold and public bit of the house. There was no incentive to chat What is less easy to explain is the fact that so many old people put the phone down without saying goodbye. When younger people do this they are being deliberately rude. But I notice that many of the most courteous old people — the late Bill Deedes was an example — have this habit. What is the reason?
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