Charles MooreCharles Moore
silenced themselves. This is no longer
the case. It is entirely possible nowadays
to have a successful political career
without ever entering a Channel 4 or
even a BBC studio for a formal set-
piece interview. There are hundreds of
less unfair outlets. The public service
broadcasters failed, in the current buzz-
phrase, to ‘check their privilege’, so now
they are deservedly losing it.W
hich brings me to the question
of television licences for the
over-75s. Tough though the licence fee
will be on this group when the BBC
re-imposes it, it is (with exceptions that
will be allowed for) perfectly justified.
Old people are the biggest consumers of
terrestrial television, so if we preserve
the iniquitous system of the compulsory
licence, they should pay it. Because they
have been deprived of money-power by
getting free licences, the old are ignored
as an audience by the BBC, which is
desperately — and largely unsuccessfully
— courting the young. Now the old
will be able to assert themselves, and
if they do not get more of what they
want, they can leave. Once most people
over 75 have to pay the £154.50 annual
fee, a great many will learn from their
grandchildren how to avoid this, and
settle down to a contented old age
of Netflix, radio, social media, books,
newspapers and The Spectator.W
hat is true, however, is that the
return of the licence fee will
bring a new terror to old age — the
unpleasant and untruthful threats you
will receive from TV Licensing if you do
not possess a TV licence. Unpleasant,
because these messages assume your
guilt. Untruthful, because they strongly
imply that their officers have the right
to enter and search your home. They
have no such right. I have no television
licence at our flat in London (because
I have no television), and have received
69 threatening letters, many telling me
to expect an inspector’s visit on a certain
date, over the past five years. I have
never answered any of them, and am still
at large. If a licence inspector calls, wave
your zimmer frame menacingly at him
and refuse to open the door.W
e do not yet know which 100
citizens will make it to the
‘Citizens’ Assembly’ to be chaired by
the Archbishop of Canterbury, which
will look at ways of preventing a no-deal
Brexit. So we cannot yet judge whether
the organisers have come up with a
system of selection which improves on
the representative powers of parliament.
But really we do not need to, because
we know already that they will not
be able to bring the ‘reconciliation at
a time of national emergency’ which
the Archbishop seeks. This is because
the idea that a no-deal Brexit must be
prevented is not an irenic proposition
around which people can unite, but
an intensely political one over which
they inevitably divide. This is not a case
of ‘All we are saying is “Give peace a
chance”.’ That is not all they are saying:
the Bishop of Buckingham reacted to
Tory criticism by asking, ‘I wonder what
Iain Duncan Smith is afraid of.’ Those
are not the words of a gentle pastor,
but of a combatant. Early on in the
referendum saga, Archbishop Welby said
that Christians could legitimately differ
over Brexit. He was surely right, yet his
assembly is taking sides on just this point.
T
he fires in the Brazilian rainforest
illustrate the difficulty of
knowing what constitutes an important
environmental story. It sounds appalling
that there have been 75,000 such fires
so far this year. But if you read a little
further, you find it said that many
such fires are started on land which
is already cultivated, in order to keep
pests at bay (rather like the burning
of grouse moors, though no doubt less
carefully controlled). Reporters at
the G7 in Biarritz imply that the fires
are the fault of Brazil’s ill-mannered
new president Jair Bolsonaro, who is
‘populist’ and therefore considered evil.
Yet it turns out that they are much less
extensive than those in the mid-1990s.
The annual percentage increase in
South American fires this year is notably
higher in Bolivia (114 per cent) than in
Brazil (85 per cent), but Bolivia is run
by a socialist and indigenous president,
Evo Morales, so he has not attracted
the wrath hurled at Bolsonaro. This
story is a political/media one, rather than
a careful investigation of environmental
fact. After all, if President Macron truly
believes that ‘the lungs of the world are
burning’, his remedy of $22 million is
absurdly modest. These denunciations
of environmental vandalism in poorer
countries are our equivalent of those
disputes about guardianship of the Holy
Places which offered opportunities for
political adventurism in previous centuries.D
orothy Byrne, Channel 4’s head of
news, last week told the Edinburgh
television festival: ‘Here is what we all
need to decide: what do we do when a
known liar becomes our prime minister?’
Yet she is surprised when Boris Johnson
and Jeremy Corbyn — both of whom
she calls ‘cowards’ — do not come on
her programmes. She regards it as their
democratic duty to be interrogated by her
journalists. If you watch her deliver her
lecture, you can see she is positively proud
of her character assassination of both men.
It does not seem to cross her mind that she
is breaking her public service obligation of
fairness, and therefore has no moral hold
on them. Broadly speaking, it is the duty of
elected politicians to explain themselves
to the public. Therefore they should deal
with the media. It does not follow that they
must appear on shows run and staffed by
people who are trying to destroy them.
Ms Byrne compares Johnson and Corbyn
unfavourably with Mrs Thatcher (‘I never
thought I would hear myself say this’), who
allowed herself to be grilled in long, often
hostile interviews. What she forgets is that,
in the 20th century, British politicians had
little choice. There was a maximum of four
channels, all of which (even Channel 4)
commanded, by modern standards, huge
audiences. Leaders who avoided them