Charles MooreCharles Moore
W
hat is this? ‘2017. It’s 50 years since
the Summer of Love and the same
number since I was born. Perhaps I was
touched by the extraordinary moment
I was born into, because my life has
been coloured by all sorts of love from
the start. My passionate parents set the
tone, dripping in love for each other...
my sister... my loud-laughing friends...
And then there are the lovers... that I
have walked beside and hold tightly in
my heart. Love. I celebrate it, practise
it, mourn it, and fight for it.’ Then the
subject shifts: ‘But my appreciation
and experience of this most delicious
of topics, is dwarfed by Shakespeare’s
understanding of love. My mind spins
when I imagine how his life must have
been: how hard he worked, how far
he travelled, how dark and scary the
landscape he lived in was. If I close my
eyes and propel my imagination back
in time, I hear the tectonic plates of the
planet creak. I see the ground opening
up and Shakespeare clambering out of a
deep crack in the earth’s surface, dusty,
desperate and gasping for air... then, with
the clarity of clear water, he sings from
the earth he was born... Pre Freud, pre
therapy, pre equality or civil rights, he
asked all the big questions. “What a piece
of work is a man?” And my! I love him
for it! And in this light I shout the same
question into the Thames breeze.’T
he above outpouring is by Emma
Rice, artistic director of Shakespeare’s
Globe. It is less than 50 per cent of her
programme notes on a new play at the
Globe — part of her ‘Summer of Love’
season — called Boudica, which she only
mentions in her final paragraph. In dusty,
desperate, gasping Shakespeare’s original,
the line Rice loves him for is not actually
a question. It is Hamlet’s exclamation.
Luckily, she won’t spend much longer
shouting it half-comprehendingly into
the Thames breeze, because the Globe’s
board realised their mistake in appointing
someone who knew Shakespeare so little.
She leaves the job in the spring. The search
for novelty in the arts, from which she
benefited, is undoubtedly necessary, but
it does often produce what Dr Johnson
(speaking, in fact, of Cymbeline) called
‘unresisting imbecility’.S
ir David Norgrove, the chairman of
the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA),
is an honourable man. When he publicly
rebuked Boris Johnson for his use of
the famous £350 million figure about
our weekly EU contribution, I am sure
he was statistically, not party-politically
motivated. But two points occur. The
first is that Sir David was, arguably,
mistaken. He thinks Boris said that, after
Brexit, Britain would have £350 million a
week more to spend. He didn’t. He said
‘we will take back control of roughly
£350 million a week’. This is correct.
So long as we are in the EU, that
£350 million a week is out of our control,
because even our rebate, which forms
part of that figure, is EU-dependent.
When we leave, it will all be under our
control. Sir David’s reaction came too
fast. The UKSA had already attacked
the £350 million figure when first used by
the Leave campaign in the referendum.
Is it in a grudge match with anyone who
answers back?
W
hich leads to my second point.
Never a week goes by without
a senior politician using a statistic
controversially. This is part of the
adversarial character of politics. If a
public official comments on one such
remark, one naturally asks why he
ignores others. Why attack Boris alone?
People begin to doubt his neutrality.
Looking at the authority’s record
since Sir David became its chairman in
March, I see that it has rebuked only
one other politician — complaining to
Amber Rudd about a misleading leak
of immigration figures. Is it credible that
Jeremy Corbyn or John McDonnell or
numerous Remainers have brandished
no figures which do not add up? As
Treasury private secretary to Mrs
Thatcher (and a very helpful witness for
me in my biography of her), Sir David
had painful experience in the ‘shadowing
the Deutschmark’ saga of how hard
it is to disentangle the economic and
statistical aspects of the European
issue from its politics, so it should give
him pause. The schoolmasterly role of
UKSA is part of a bad trend in modern
governance which sets officials in
judgment over our elected rulers. The
intention is to uphold higher standards. The
effect is to impose rule by a bureaucratic
establishment which we, the voters, have
no opportunity to kick out and which —
not coincidentally — is full of Remain
supporters. In an interview with the
magazine Civil Service World in June, Sir
David said, of the £350 million: ‘I thought
it was clear that the Brexiteers didn’t mind
about the number so long as there was
focus on it.’ No doubt this is his sincere
belief, but on this most divisive subject,
such words will not be seen as impartial.O
n Tuesday, for the first — and
undoubtedly last — time in my life,
I found myself mounting the platform at
the Liberal Democrat conference. This was
because my father, Richard Moore, was
receiving a richly deserved award there.
He is 85, so I was assisting him up the steps
in Bournemouth. Part of his distinguished
service to his party consists in the fact —
surely unique in human history — that
he has attended every Liberal annual
conference since 1953: these shows have
taken up a year of his life. He told me that
he spoke at the first one he attended, in
Llandudno, in favour of what was then
referred to as the Schuman Plan, the
embryo of what is now the European
Union. It is sad for him that Britain will
leave the EU more than 65 years later.
No doubt my euroscepticism is partly
attributable to delayed teenage rebellion,
but the funny thing is that my father and
I have extremely similar views about the
importance of European civilisation: we
just disagree about how best to uphold it. It
was touching that the audience recognised
his integrity and commitment. What nice
people — quite unsuitable for politics.