Charles MooreCharles Moore
Possibly, but Brexit is not a decision
of a government, but of the people
in a referendum. Pro-Brexit fellow
citizens recognise that the mandarins
are conscientious, but it is simply not
possible to believe that they are doing
their best to get us out. Whitehall
thinks Brexit is dreadful, so it tries
to accomplish it not with maximum
success, but with minimum damage.
Its definition of damage is anything
which separates Britain from the EU.
It is an overwhelmingly negative and
fearful frame of mind, and I am afraid
Mr Robbins exhibits it. Sir Richard
Dearlove, ex-head of MI6, and one of the
very few brave enough to swim against
the Whitehall tide, wrote to the Times
the next day to ram this point home.S
o it may sound contradictory to
agree with Lord Ricketts, former
head of the Foreign Office, when he
complains that the Foreign Office ‘has
had its limbs amputated’ by being shut
out of the Brexit process. Isn’t it good,
after all, to keep that nest of Europhiles
at bay? No, because the Foreign Office
has the knowledge, contacts and skills,
if given proper political leadership, to
negotiate. Excluded, it has an incentive
to weaken the process. One reason life
is so ghastly for Mr Robbins is that
Mrs May made the huge error of ‘taking
personal charge’ of Brexit, which she
is ill qualified to do. Thus she removed
her ability — so valuable for a prime
minister — to keep some distance from
the actions of her own government, and
earned the undying enmity of those who
know most about the subject.T
he funeral took place last week of
my much-loved cousin Alice Cherry,
who lived at Weston Manor, Weston,
Herts. One of the hymns chosen was
‘The Day Thou Gavest’. The penultimate
verse begins, ‘The sun that bids us rest
is waking/ Our brethren ’neath the
western sky’. At Alice’s insistence,
‘western’ was printed as ‘Weston’, which
was pleasing and touching. By the way,
both Alice’s father and her husband
were wounded fighting the Germans
in the second world war. I wonder how
common that honour was.C
an you think of a serious crime
which does not involve hate or, at
the very least, contempt? You must hate
people to murder them, rape them, rob
them, beat them up, post excrement
through their letterbox or even defraud
them. This intense hostility is a good
reason for punishing such actions. The
concept of ‘hate crime’ ignores this. It
fastens on particular hatreds, making
it worse for, say, a black person to call
a white person a ‘white bastard’ than
for him to call a black person a ‘f***ing
bastard’ (or vice versa). Why? Racism,
religious enmity, anti-gay feeling etc
are sources and triggers of hate, so they
are often important factors in a crime,
but once they are specially categorised
they skew the system to downplay all
other forms of hate. People have come
to realise this, so now they want to
invent other categories of hate crime —
misandry, ageism, hostility to sensitive
groups such as goths, and so on. This
process is a dead end because hate crime
is, by law, self-defining. Ever since the
Macpherson report on the Stephen
Lawrence affair, incidents of hate crime
are automatically logged if a ‘victim’,
‘or anyone else’, perceives them to be
such and reports them. Thus hate crime
figures constantly rise (94,098 last year,
apparently, ‘up 17 per cent’), without the
law being able to establish the evidence
— let alone secure a conviction — in all
but a tiny minority of cases.
I
t would not be a better society, for
example, if class prejudice became
a hate crime and we had to lock up
John le Carré. He has just declared that
Etonians are a ‘curse on the earth’, but
I think it would be prudent to let it pass.
He taught there once upon a time, after
all, and so his views deserve respect.
Others have held such opinions. In his
gripping new biography of Churchill,
Andrew Roberts draws attention to a
speech in 1940. ‘Hitler,’ said Churchill, ‘in
one of his recent discourses declared that
the fight was between those who have
been through the Adolf Hitler schools
and those who have been at Eton.’
Churchill was speaking at his old school,
so he continued: ‘Hitler has forgotten
Harrow, and he has overlooked the vast
majority of the youth of this country who
have never had the chance of attending
such schools, but who have by their skill
and prowess won the admiration of the
whole world.’S
ir Mark Sedwill, the acting cabinet
secretary, wrote to the Times on
Tuesday to defend the honour of Olly
Robbins, the Prime Minister’s EU adviser,
who is credited, if that is the mot juste,
with delivering Brexit. He was right to do
so, because Mr Robbins is not allowed, by
the rules, to defend himself, and ministers
have unfortunately become readier than
in the past to brief against civil servants.
(And, it must be said, civil servants to
brief against ministers: look at the torrent
of leaks against Boris Johnson while he
was Foreign Secretary.) But I would ask
Sir Mark to consider the question as it
looks from the outside. I suppose I know
several scores of existing and former civil
servants and diplomats quite well, some
very well. Among them, I have come across
three or four who are pro-Brexit, quite a
large minority whose views are genuinely
unidentifiable, and dozens and dozens who
are anti-Brexit, some passionately so. One
told me, with burning anger and as if this
were the knock-down argument, that if
we Brexited, there would be fewer dinner
invitations in Washington DC for British
diplomats. Pro-EU views are natural
among the senior official classes, because
the EU form of government is bureaucratic
rather than democratic, and therefore
seems more rational to the official mind;
but in such volume they undoubtedly
add up to a bias. Sir Mark writes, ‘Civil
servants have always trusted that our fellow
citizens, whatever their views, know that
we are doing our duty to implement the
decisions of the governments they elect.’