Charles MooreCharles Moore
the spectator | 29 february 2020 | http://www.spectator.co.uk 9T
essa Keswick has just brought
out a book about her travels in
China and her development of Chinese
friendships over 40 years (The Colour
of the Sky after Rain). Tessa has been
my friend for most of that time, as has
her husband Henry, who bought this
paper in the 1970s, appointed Alexander
Chancellor as its editor, and thus set
it on the path to success. So at first I
thought that I shouldn’t comment on
the book. I changed my mind, however,
when I noticed a reluctance to review
it — perhaps because Henry is very
rich (he recently stepped down from
running Jardine Matheson, the Far East
conglomerate, after nearly half a century),
and because Tessa, who made some of her
trips through contacts made as his wife, is
therefore seen as not properly qualified.
In reality, these are not objections,
but advantages. Henry’s money and
connections got Tessa to interesting
places with interesting people. Her
own commitment, and the fact that she
was a woman with leisure in what was
almost wholly a man’s world of business,
gave her the gift of time — living with a
Chinese family to learn Mandarin, for
example — which most visitors lack.
Tessa’s travels begin with a country so
poor that lorry drivers rarely switch on
their lights in the dark, thinking it saved
petrol, and end with the stupefyingly rich
superpower of today. The book is honest.
Tessa loves China, and is persuasive
about the virtues of its people — their
directness and their honesty once trust
is achieved. But she does not shy away
from the grimness of a political order
which remains adamantly opposed to
basic human freedom. One of the most
powerful passages comes when she and
Henry meet Bo Xilai, the rising star of
Chinese politics, on the day before his
public disgrace — his ‘utterly mournful’
eyes, and the ‘exceptionally tall men
in dark suits’ who suddenly surround
him. The book is also Tessa’s gesture of
love for Henry. She wrote it, without
telling him, when both of them were
very ill. Henry was born in Shanghai,
where his father traded, but driven out
by the Japanese and later kept out by
the communists. This book celebrates,
obliquely, how he has won so much back.T
he fall from grace of Jean Vanier is
truly a sad story. The founder of the
L’Arche communities did extraordinary
work, practical, intellectual and spiritual,
to advance the idea that those suffering
mental handicap had much to teach the
rest of us. His was a radical idea about
what community can be. Now, however,
L’Arche has accepted a report that
Vanier, who died last year, had sexual
contact with six women from the 1970s
onwards. There is no suggestion of any
exploitation of the handicapped. Unlike
so many claims in abuse cases, these ones
seem to have been carefully investigated.
The women (all adults) were his devoted
followers. Vanier appears to have told
them that by getting close to him they
would also get closer to God. In this,
he was probably following his friend, a
Catholic priest, Fr Thomas Philippe, who
advanced such ideas and practices, and
was duly disgraced. Archive evidence
shows that Thomas Philippe and Vanier
kept in touch, the latter helping protect
the former. About five years ago, I was
sounded out to write a biography of
Vanier. I had heard him speak a couple
of times and had been deeply impressed.
I did have a tiny worm of doubt about
the man — not about anything he said,
but occasioned by his strong charisma.
His ascetic, craggy good looks and
incantatory voice reminded me of the
somewhat bogus Laurens van der Post,
and I noticed that he attracted ardent
women. Remembering the history of
sexual abuse by those with spiritual
power, I pointed out, though I knew
nothing against him, how dismal it would
be to embark on the tale of a good man
and then discover bad facts. This was
a small factor — lack of time being the
bigger one — in my refusal of the task.T
he abuser’s capacity to persuade
others, and perhaps even himself,
that sexual contact (in Vanier’s case, it
appears not to have been full intercourse)
is what God wants is, obviously, evil. It
is also heresy. It derives from the idea
that some people are specially chosen
by God and therefore exempt from His
rules. The medieval Albigensian heresy
held that some people were ‘parfaits’ —
which gave them a licence for what the1960s would call ‘free love’. As Fr Thomas
Philippe is supposed to have put it to one
of his victims, ‘When one arrives at perfect
love, everything is lawful.’ Can anything of
Vanier’s reputation survive this catastrophe?
I do hope so. The fact that nobody’s ‘parfait’
does not mean that no one does good.
L’Arche survives, and deserves to, and it
would not exist without Vanier. ‘Every saint
has a past, every sinner has a future.’A
ndrew Adonis is an impressive man,
one of the few in the Labour party
who never compromised with the left. Yet
he is also an illustration of this column’s
claim that the Labour pro-European
‘moderates’ are just as adrift from reality
as are the Corbynites. In an article in New
European last month, headlined ‘A Star in
the West’, Lord Adonis praised the Irish
prime minister, Leo Varadkar, ‘as he steers
Ireland towards a unity and confidence
it has never previously known’. In the
Adonis theory, the Varadkar/Boris Johnson
deal over Brexit would crown the ‘lasting
rapprochement’ accomplished by John
Major and Tony Blair in the 1990s and
create a united Ireland: ‘After all, only 11
months separated the fall of the Berlin Wall
and German reunification.’ Since then,
Mr Varadkar has lost the Republic’s general
election, in which Lord Adonis predicted
he would ‘consolidate his position’, and
has resigned. The party with the most votes
is Sinn Fein. There is much to be said for
the ‘modernised’ and ‘secularised’ politics
which Lord Adonis hymns — at least when
contrasted with bigoted and antiquated
politics — but he should recognise that
millions of EU citizens feel cheated by
such politics. The European Union has
become the papacy of secularisation and
modernisation, infallible in its own mind,
harsh to its unruly flock.charles moore_29 Feb 2020_The Spectator 9 26/02/2020 12: