2018-11-03 The Spectator

(Jacob Rumans) #1

Charles MooreCharles Moore


the norm or even, it would seem, the
(often missed) target. Often have I sat
there wondering not at the aggression
of patients, but at their quiet acceptance
of such ill treatment. It is wrong when
patients attack, but not surprising.

F


our years ago, in these Notes,
I mentioned a man who attended
the Prince of Wales when visiting an
unfamiliar hunt. The Prince’s horse
refused at a fence and HRH’s guide
blamed the man, not the horse. ‘Get off
that horse,’ he said, deciding to ride it
over the fence himself. ‘You’re the heir
to the throne. If you sit on the throne like
you sit on that horse, you’ll not stay there
long.’ I can now reveal — because he has,
sadly, just died — that this fearless man
was David Barker, who was, as one might
guess from the story, a Yorkshireman. He
was a legendary show-jumper — many of
my generation will remember his horse
Mister Softee, later ridden by David
Broome. Barker and Mr Softee won
the puissance class at Madison Square
Gardens, clearing a 7ft 2in wall. Later,
he was the equally legendary huntsman
of the Meynell Hunt. It is said that no
huntsman of the modern age has been
a more stylish, collected rider or better
at crossing the biggest country in front
of a hard-riding field. It is the more
remarkable that he could do this, since the
huntsman must concentrate absolutely
on his hounds, yet Baker was also in
charge of Prince Charles on his frequent
visits. To avoid press attention, the Prince
would not attend the meet, but would
emerge from hiding just before the first
draw. Baker and his whipper-in would
then dismount, bare-headed, to greet
the Prince in courtly fashion, and then
remount and lead him on. If only Stubbs
had been alive to paint it. Prince Charles
was, despite Barker’s occasional strictures,
famously brave and loved the whole
thing, including the chance to mix quietly
with the Derbyshire dairy farmers in the
pub at the end of the day. He would thank
them by having them over to Highgrove
once a year. This happy relationship was
accomplished through David Barker. The
Prince joined the mourners at his funeral
in Ellastone last week. Sad that such a
relationship is now, in effect, banned.

A


t the Brexit-related cabinet last
week — as revealed by James
Forsyth in these pages — David
Lidington made an intervention in
support of the Prime Minister’s approach
to the negotiations. He was, he said, the
only person present who had been an
MP at the time of ‘Black Wednesday’,
when the pound fell out of the ERM
on 16 September 1992. It had been so
disastrous and divisive, he went on, that
the government must at all costs avoid a
repeat over Brexit. Many heads nodded
sagely. Mr Lidington, a moderate and
public-spirited man, was quite right about
the pain caused to his party 26 years ago;
but the interests of the Tories and of
the nation are not necessarily the same
thing. It was ERM entry and the attempt
to defend a hopeless exchange rate
for sterling which caused the anguish.
Black Wednesday was the happy release.
It was an almost unmitigated benefit
to Britain. It exposed the folly of trying
to have fixed (or, possibly even worse,
semi-fixed) exchange rates. It ushered
in a long period of prosperity which was
not undermined until Gordon Brown
became prime minister 15 years later.
And it made it politically impossible
for Britain to join the euro. Contrary
to Mr Lidington, the real lesson of
Black Wednesday is that we can never
successfully pursue an economic,
commercial or monetary policy shaped
by the needs of European integration.
Mrs May’s one-third Brexit known as
‘Chequers’ proposes to make the same
mistake, and could well produce the
same pain. A full Brexit would be a
second Black Wednesday. Many senior
Conservatives do not see it this way. They
are on the wrong side of history.


A


pendant to this point is the campaign
called ‘Norway for Now’. The idea,
promoted by Nick Boles, is that Britain,
should join the European Economic
Area and EFTA, until such time as we
can move further out of the EU, for
example with a Canada-style free-trade
deal. This is what Norway and Iceland and
Liechtenstein do. The idea sounds nice
as a friendly and temporary compromise.
But in fact the psychology is wrong.
Such arrangements were devised more


as an entry chamber to full membership
(which is what Norwegian elites still
want) than as part of an exit strategy. The
Norwegian Prime Minister is now making
this point. The point of Leave is to escape
the gravitational pull of Brussels. Why make
self-contradictory efforts to stay in the orbit
and leave it at the same time?

A


ll through Tuesday, the BBC led
with the news that the Institute for
Fiscal Studies — ‘expert’, ‘independent’,
‘respected’ etc etc — thought Philip
Hammond’s Budget was ‘a bit of a gamble’.
One has nothing much against the IFS,
but why is this news? Why is it not treated
the same way as the Institute of Economic
Affairs on the free-market right or of the
Institute for Public Policy Research on the
Blairite left — as a body whose views are
probably worth hearing, but only as one
among many? Behind the IFS’s exaggerated
prominence is a false idea that it is
objective and the others are biased. They
are all biased — or rather, coming from
a particular political point of view — and
there is nothing wrong with that, so long as
it is stated. The IFS is a centrist, anti-Brexit
outfit of the usual Whitehall-ish goody-
goodies. It is not the court of final appeal as
to whether this is a good or bad Budget.

O


bviously it is wrong to attack NHS staff.
But does the government’s new ‘zero
tolerance’ policy consider why such attacks
take place? There are eternal reasons, such
as the inherent nastiness of some people,
and wider social ones, such as drug abuse.
Are there also specific NHS-related ones
too, though? The worst aspects of the NHS
are not usually medical: they are to do with
a bureaucracy which puts patients last. It
is utterly extraordinary, for example, that a
waiting time of four hours in A&E is now
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