Lord Moore of Etchingham: Lord Speaker's Corner
3 July 2025
‘The demand for journalism is unprecedented in the whole of human history. But what's got much harder is to work out what the best media for it is, and where the money lies and where the future lies.’
Former editor of the Daily Telegraph, Lord Moore of Etchingham, is the latest guest on Lord Speaker’s Corner.
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In this episode
Charles Moore, now Lord Moore of Etchingham, also previously edited the Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph and is the authorised biographer of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
‘For the Conservative Party, Thatcher is the ‘big one’, as Churchill was and still is. It’s been very difficult for women leaders - of whom there have now been three in the Conservative Party. Should you be like Mrs Thatcher or not like Mrs Thatcher, as a woman leader?’
In this episode, Lord Moore talks to the Lord Speaker about Britain’s first female Prime Minister, his career and journalism today. He also reflects on changes in the style of government and former Prime Ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson.
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Transcript
Lord Speaker:
Lord Moore, Charles, welcome to Lord Speaker's podcast. It's a pleasure to have you along.
Lord Moore:
Thank you. I'm honoured to be here.
Lord Speaker:
I usually start with the backstory of members as I know you were born in 1956, East Sussex. And your parents, I think both were of the liberal tradition and your mother was a councillor.
Lord Moore:
Absolutely. And my father was a multiple failed Liberal candidate, so he stood at about 12 elections, I would say.
Lord Speaker:
General elections?
Lord Moore:
General elections and European elections. And always choosing seats, which he couldn't win, but very contented to have the battle. So yes, I was brought up in a Liberal with a big L household strongly so, yeah.
Lord Speaker:
Then you went to Oxford.
Lord Moore:
Cambridge.
Lord Speaker:
Cambridge, and Trinity.
Lord Moore:
Yeah, yeah.
Lord Speaker:
And you did English and history?
Lord Moore:
Correct.
Lord Speaker:
But you seem to shed the Liberal heritage pretty quickly.
Lord Moore:
I would say that in certain respects I'm liberal with a small L and I'm not very party-minded anyway, and I'm a non-affiliated peer. But I am more conservative than my parents with a small c. And it was a time of some sort of political intellectual ferment when I was at university in the 1970s because old Labour was sort of running out of road when we were running up to the period of the Winter of Discontent and so on. And there was a feeling that socialism wasn't going anywhere.
And then Mrs. Thatcher came along, she was made leader, leader but not prime minister, just before I went to university. And that was all interesting. And Keith Joseph and all the rethink. And I wasn't involved in politics at university at all actually, but I was following all that and we were debating all these questions. And my studies also, reading writers like Edmund Burke and so on, made me in that sense conservative. And there, I suppose I've more or less remained.
Lord Speaker:
Edmund Burke, if I remember correctly, said that members of Parliament were not delegates-
Lord Moore:
Indeed.
Lord Speaker:
... but representatives. So I think you'd adhere to that principle?
Lord Moore:
Very much so, yes. And in his famous address to the electors of Bristol rather like Tony Benn being a keen Bristol member. Yes, exactly. So-
Lord Speaker:
I then remember Jonathan Sayeed, he was a Conservative MP, you probably remember him, but he did represent Bristol and I knew Jonathan quite well. And when he was campaigning to oust Tony Benn, he knocked this door and the householder said, "Great, I'm supporting you. Don't worry, Mr. Benn." But he didn't correct her, that he was standing for the Conservative Party. So there you are, but you were a practising Anglican.
Lord Moore:
Mm?
Lord Speaker:
And then... You were a practising Anglican.
Lord Moore:
I was, yes.
Lord Speaker:
And then in 1992 you converted to Catholicism, I believe.
Lord Moore:
Yes, yes.
Lord Speaker:
What led that?
Lord Moore:
Well, I suppose the usual thing in Britain about this, frequent in conversion, is it's often to do with studying the works of John Henry Newman, Cardinal Newman. And some Christians understand they're not interested in what the true church is, they're more directly considering their own relationship with God. But I've always thought that what the church is, is very important in being a Christian, otherwise it's very hard to get guidance and to understand.
And reading Newman and so on, I felt the Church of England, which has many virtues, was not as is sometimes put, the society of which Jesus intended. And I decided that as many have that the Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Church was the true church and therefore it seemed you had to be in it and it had a good effect. I mean apart from the important, most important good effect, it had a secondary good effect, which is I became fonder of the Church of England once I'd left it because I didn't have to get engaged in all these wretched arguments. And I've carefully avoided as a Catholic internal religious arguments, which I think are very destructive.
Lord Speaker:
Has your depth of faith or however we call it, increased over the years since you've become a Catholic? You're really embedded in the Catholic faith you feel now as it's progressed?
Lord Moore:
Well, I'm not a good Catholic, but I'm an observant Catholic.
Lord Speaker:
Ditto, ditto.
Lord Moore:
So it's not easy to be a good Catholic, but I go to mass and I serve at mass and I'm regular and I'm interested and I follow things. And I-
Lord Speaker:
You mentioned Cardinal Newman, his essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine of 1845. He said that, "To live is to change and to change often is to be perfect." Now looking at your background and your excellent journalistic skills and views, it doesn't seem to me that you've changed much. Is that a bit unfair?
Lord Moore:
I think it is a bit unfair, but I think Newman himself, after all the exposition of that book is in certain respects, a conservative one. He's not saying… his idea of change is contained in the word development, which is as you say in the title of the book. And so he has a very, very strong sense of tradition, but tradition is not a rigidity, which you just have to, it's not fixed. Human life is not fixed. That's I think what he means by change, it doesn't make him or me greedy for change. But it's a simple fact of change. Any human being who doesn't try to accommodate that and live with it becomes rigid and actually miserable as well.
Lord Speaker:
With the sad death of Pope Francis, I'll maybe come on to that later on, but you joined the Daily Telegraph 23 years of age and you were doing leader writing at 24 years of age on that, and you've obviously spent a lifetime in journalism. How has journalism changed and how important is it? I mean you spoke last week I think in the House on the issue of the Daily Telegraph and future ownership.
Lord Moore:
Well, it's in a way more important than ever because there's an absolute explosion of media. So the demand for journalism is unprecedented in the whole of human history. But what's got much harder is to work out what the best media for it is, and where the money lies and where the future lies. And of course all newspapers have had that challenge. When I joined, it was very simple. There were three television channels in the country and about 12 national newspapers, and that's about it. Plus strong provincial papers, much stronger than they are now, like The Glasgow Herald or whatever. And that really was about it.
And now it's endless. And so the whole subject has never mattered more. But the complications are very great. But what I did… what was very bad at the time I joined was that we were so unionised and so behind the times technologically that we couldn't do our job and there were more and more strikes and so on. And that did change very much in the 1980s. And so by the 1990s we had a pretty golden period from about late '80s to early 20th century when we and many other papers were making a lot of money and developing.
And now since then it's been more challenging, but we're doing better than we were again now because we are finally mastering the age of the web, the online age. And we understand that the key journalistic values transfer actually quite well to a subscription-based internet world. We wasted years, not just we, but the whole trade doing sort of clickbait things and not really knowing and not knowing how to charge for it and losing our identity actually. And when we realise that our core printed identity can transfer with adaptation online, then I think we start to succeed. And that's been encouraging.
Lord Speaker:
And you have been associated with many influential media titles. For example, The Spectator, you are the chairman of The Spectator and were editor of The Daily Telegraph for a period and the Sunday Telegraph. Given that experience, what resonates with the public? How did you decide which resonates with the public on that so that you get a message across and you've been educational as well as reporting?
Lord Moore:
Yes. Well, first of all, whoever it was said, Lord Beaverbrook or something, "You can't beat news in the newspaper." And that is primarily what people want and they need it to be both arresting and accurate. And the trouble is you can make it arresting by making it less accurate. So there's a danger there. And then of course, but with that, they do want views. Views are secondary, but they do want views and they want to air their views and they want you to help direct or form their views or to challenge their views, and so on.
So there is that element, and I find both of those things very interesting. But the thing I always most enjoyed as editor, though I have quite a big comment background and I am a columnist now, is getting the story that night and deciding what the front page splash is. Because then you feel that it's really new, it's new. Now that word new, it's not accidentally news, it's new all the time. It used to be new every day. Now it's new every moment, which is pretty exhausting but also the key to it.
I think people often attack newspapers and very understandably as there are all sorts of things we do wrong, but it is an important service and the one that the British have done very well. And it does depend, particularly with a quality paper, on trust ultimately. And that's a challenge every day. And I think on the whole right now, trust is under threat as it is with many institutions. And we do have to worry about that a lot.
I remember a little example of this, which is not a news example, but it just shows the trust The Telegraph can inspire at its best. In our personal finance page, we carry or particularly used to carry, it is a bit different now, lots and lots of advertisements for people investing in investment trusts, pensions, that sort of thing, cut out a coupon in those days. And one day somebody cut out a coupon and sent a cheque for a million pounds through the post to one of our readers.
And that showed to me the atmosphere that Telegraph had been able to create of trust. So that, "Here is a thing in The Telegraph financial pages, I trust The Telegraph financial pages, I trust the advertisement that's accompanying. They're not, I hope, influencing the news, and here's a million pounds. I wanted my..." It's an extreme example, but you see what I mean?
Lord Speaker:
Yeah, I understand. This was only anecdotal, but The Telegraph has always been known for real news above all other papers. But that reputation seems to have dropped a bit. Maybe it's the case with all papers, with the media. Take for example, we're having a discussion here near an hour so that we can develop issues. Now what you see, television, programmes and elsewhere, it's sound bites and have the newspapers followed that in a way, I mean?
Lord Moore:
There's some truth in that. I think all papers have got more segmented, so more sort of opinionated including in their news coverage. And that's true right across the political spectrum. But actually, if I were to pull out an old Daily Telegraph of 1980, you would be surprised by how much less thoughtful comment there was than there is now. Because we were so news-based that we didn't have room for anything else really. And we had very small, it was very nuggety news, which is in many ways good.
But typical front page in 1980 would have about 15 stories on it. Now it would've about four or five. And this is to do with more prioritising, sometimes over-dramatising I would say. And again, not just The Telegraph-
Lord Speaker:
Yeah, I know, mm-hmm.
Lord Moore:
... but all papers, but so yes, these are difficult issues. It is an age in all fields where you have to shout more to get attention.
Lord Speaker:
Mm-hmm, and you are the official biographer of Mrs. Thatcher. And I believe that she never approached you for that. There was a list and you were chosen on that and you've gone into that in huge depth of three volumes as a result of that. I think you did say that Mrs. Thatcher, apart from Winston Churchill is one of the most consequential, successful prime ministers. Could you give us a precis of your appreciation of that, how you went about the job?
Lord Moore:
Yeah, well, you are half right on that. She did approach me and I didn't apply for anything. I didn't know it was in the offing, but she did approach me. And of course it was much too much of an honour and interesting opportunity to refuse. Though it created some difficulties for me about, how on earth was I going to manage the time? And the point about it, the reason it's so long is partly because she was a very busy lady in office for a very long time and the hardest working prime minister we've ever had, probably I should think.
But also because being the authorised biographer, I was the first person to have access to all her papers and all the government papers because she went to Robin Butler's successor, Richard Wilson, who's also in this House now. And said, "Could Mr. Moore be allowed to look at all the government paper before it's released to the public?" And this is the key if you, particularly in those days, government was conducted very largely on paper, properly recorded, much less true now. And Mrs. Thatcher governed on paper. So if you want to find out what she thought about something, you just need to look at the paper that she receives, which was all preserved, file after file after file.
And she writes on it, these are the memos about each piece of legislation, or whatever. And she writes in it very much what she says. And so it's very characteristic. So she'll write sort of, "Feeble," or something like that on the... But she'd also write in some detail about-
Lord Speaker:
Or wit.
Lord Moore:
... what she... Yes, yes, and what she wants. And she underlined a straight line underneath me when she approves, a wiggly line means she disapproves. And so you can really get into the actual business of government. Because this was all pre what Tony Blair invented, which is so-called ‘sofa government’, and paper was very much the way you did it back then.
Lord Speaker:
So did she start sofa government, you think?
Lord Moore:
No, I think she didn't. I think she didn't really like that sort of thing. I mean she liked gossip late at night with whisky. But in terms of government, she really wanted to master and read the stuff. And then she wanted to go down the line, and this is the point about why she's writing. She doesn't write her own memos. She writes on other people's memos and then the private secretaries, like Charles Powell, will translate that into memos and that goes down the line to each cabinet minister and so on. And it gets iterated and reiterated and argued and so on.
And it looks very old-fashioned now, but it was extremely effective because, first of all, it was much more honest, I think, than sofa government and clear. And also it was her way of exerting her sort of angry will. And given that government is so difficult to do, one reason that she was successful I think in government, whether you agree with her or not, was that she was the boss.
So all this time, this sense of the angry will was pervasive, almost like an electric current in Whitehall. You know what she wants. Don't necessarily want to give it to her, but you know what she wants and you know you'll be in trouble if you're not trying to do the work. And so that was very characteristic for her and it was very effective. And the only prime minister since then who's been able to exercise some mastery I would say is Tony Blair, which to a lesser extent than her, but nevertheless he was. And he had, also like her, a long time.
Lord Speaker:
Am I correct in that Margaret Thatcher called him Boy Blue?
Lord Moore:
Mm?
Lord Speaker:
Am I correct in asserting that Margaret Thatcher called Tony Blair Boy Blue?
Lord Moore:
I hadn't heard that, but she certainly did say that she was proud of the fact that she had been able to change the Labour Party. That's an odd thing to say in a way, even when expect to change your own party, and indeed she did. But because they realised, and I'm very interested to talk to Tony Blair about this, which I did a lot for the book, is he understood he was the first important one, he and Mandelson the first to understand that it was no good Labour just attacking Mrs. Thatcher while she was prime minister. Because voters are not going to vote just because one party says the other is useless.
You had to understand Mrs. Thatcher in order to counter her, and you had to recognise that she was doing some important and valuable things as well as all the things you disagreed with and you had to learn from her leadership example. And Blair was absolutely clear about that. And he said to me, "I decided that I would realise that I'd really succeeded with the Labour Party when I could convince them to take Thatcher seriously instead of just denouncing her."
And he was absolutely right about that politically. And that of course meant that he could break in electorally into whole new swathes of territory when it all started to go wrong for the Tories because instead of all that millions of people in Britain who would never vote Labour, they sort of disintegrated under the Blair... It didn't work forever. And he learnt so much from her in that respect.
Lord Speaker:
Did she welcome challenge?
Lord Moore:
Yes, but it was quite alarming. So you mean argument?
Lord Speaker:
Yeah, yeah.
Lord Moore:
Yes. And in fact, the first time I met her, actually, it was in this, not in the Lords but in Parliament at a dinner, and it was about 1985. I was editor of the Spectator and I was in my 20s and she'd just done the Anglo-Irish agreement. And I was critical of it because I felt it had betrayed the Unionists, and which of course a sore point with her because she's a Unionist and she felt a bit guilty about it. But-
Lord Speaker:
Did she feel Garret FitzGerald had an undue influence in her about that?
Lord Moore:
Well, she was a bit, the British establishment plus Garret FitzGerald and the Irish establishment worked closely together and she was not really at one with them. I mean, she did agree to the agreement obviously, and once she'd agreed to something, she would defend it like hell. So she was defending it like hell that night.
But it did amuse me because she would try any trick in the book in argument to squash you. But the point was she wasn't being horrible and she wasn't being disdainful. She wasn't saying, "Look, I'm the big cheese, who are you?" She wanted to have the ding-dong and she started attacking me very vigorously. And obviously I got a bit alarmed, but I like the spirit of it, and I always found that with her, not a pompous person.
Lord Speaker:
Yeah, today's domestic environment is getting much more complex and there's a view that Number 10 is not fit for the decisions that are required to be taken and there needs to be more devolution or more consultation. And the international environment is now hugely complex. And how would she tackle that?
Lord Moore:
Well, I think she achieved some very great things in that respect. And she made one important mistake, which others have followed in the footsteps of. What she achieved was particularly through establishing a proper policy unit, a very much clearer idea of how the prime minister can direct the overall purposes of government. So that it goes back to what I was saying earlier about how you know what she wants, and the policy unit would therefore chase progress through different departments.
In foreign policy, she was particularly good at that and it was particularly difficult for the foreign office, but she was extremely successful at that with the Reagan relationship and with the Gorbachev relationship, obviously much scratchy with the EC.
Lord Speaker:
And Yeltsin, was there a case for assisting Russia and Yeltsin at that time...
Lord Moore:
She was friendly to Yeltsin, but that was only pretty much after she'd left office. But where I think she set an example, which is unfortunate, is that it was in her instinct to try to run too much and not to delegate. And since then, and much more nowadays, there's a sort of pseudo presidential aspect to Number 10, which is bad, because it cuts the legs off cabinet ministers and it makes it impossible to... You can't run a government that way. I mean it's too big. You have to have freestanding cabinet ministers who are important in their departments and are respected.
And Number 10 now employs 300 people in the building, when she was prime minister, it employed 70 and it's just ridiculous. And so what you get now is endless combat between, within, Number 10 and indeed with a terrible amount of leaking, people fighting for the position at court. That always happens, but it's-
Lord Speaker:
It does, but I remember Nigel Lawson, for example, when he was Chancellor, he was against the poll tax. And he told me that he wasn't at the first cabinet subcommittee meeting, but the policy had a momentum all of its own. And people knew this was going to be a disaster, but nothing happened with that.
Lord Moore:
Yes, this is true. But what is not true actually of the poll tax is that this was just Mrs. Thatcher. I was surprised by this when I did the work on this, it was very iterated through government. So every department expressed their views. It went round and round, back and forth, the whole thing was sort of sealed and signed in blood.
Except, and it's you've made this point really, the Treasury, Nigel Lawson didn't want it. And for a new tax not to be wanted by the Chancellor is fatal. And somehow this was never dealt with. And Nigel sort of retired from the field. He's made his point and he retired from the field because technically the tax came in under environment.
Lord Speaker:
Yeah, but somebody would say that could have been or was a consequential moment.
Lord Moore:
It was.
Lord Speaker:
And maybe Mrs. Thatcher was on the down slope after that.
Lord Moore:
No, no, I think you're right about that. But it wasn't. Sometimes people think she sort of ran away with it all by herself. Almost all of them bought into it and they were wrong. And it's surprising that she was wrong, because she was normally good at seeing the electoral effect of taxes. But she didn't realise the very simple point that if you invent a new tax and about seven million more people are going to pay it than before, it's not going to be very popular.
Lord Speaker:
Absolutely. Yeah [laughter]. There's issues there still today. I think I can quote you when you said that "if one is in office for a long time, they always start to believe in having more power" and she, Mrs. Thatcher, undoubtedly got that disease.
Lord Moore:
Yes, I think that's true. I think the passage of time means among other things that you tend to end up. If you were in as long as, say, you tend up to end up being the most senior. I mean you are the most senior by your job, but you also, and this is why it went so badly wrong towards the end because the two most important people in her governments apart from her were Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson. And in the last period they fell out with her and once that doesn't work, nothing else works really.
And so I think she had a very, very good impressively successful premiership regardless of whether you approve from really the beginning until after her third victory, '87. And then it quite quickly deteriorated and it got really bad by '89, which was her 10th anniversary.
Lord Speaker:
And you referred quite a bit in your book to Heseltine and that issue. And you-
Lord Moore:
Yes. And there, I mean, Heseltine behaved in a naughty way, but so did she. And it was an interesting example, the Westland crisis, because it was a sort of storm in a teacup. It didn't really matter what happened to a small helicopter factory in Yeovil, but it was a big storm in a teacup and it showed up various things. But she did survive that. She did pull through, she did win the next election, but then after that, and what she always should have done was follow the advice of her husband Denis in such matters.
And on the 10th anniversary of her time in office, May '89, he said, "You should go now. This is a good moment to go." And she agreed with him, but not really. So she sort of played for time and then she said, "Well, actually I don't think the Queen would like it at this point," which was, I'm sure she just said that because she knew nobody would go and ask the Queen whether that was true or not. And she stayed on and everything went wrong, terribly wrong, in the last 18 months.
Lord Speaker:
Regarding her enduring legacy, some people would think her management of the miners' strike has had long-term adverse consequences and also council housing in the sense that it was a hugely popular policy. I know that from my own area when I was a Member of Parliament. But now we have a housing crisis, and if I'm correct, the rental situation with council housing is over 50% is rented now instead of owned as a result of that, what should she have done in both of those cases?
Lord Moore:
I think in the council house case, it was fundamentally a successful policy and right, but what was badly wrong about it was that the Treasury took all the money. So what should have happened, and to be fair to her, she did want this, but she allowed herself to be overruled by the Treasury on this, there should have been a continued housing programme in which the government had a role different from the form before. But anyway, that didn't happen and it produced some of the consequences you describe. I think the actual emancipation of owning your council house was a good thing and very important.
On the miners' strike, this is a controversial view, I think she did extremely well. I think she knew she didn't want the strike, but she knew it would happen. You may remember that it was a threat of a strike three years earlier and she gave into it. Joe Gormley was then the leader, not Arthur Scargill, and she simply wasn't ready. She capitulated, she then prepared, which mainly meant coal stocks building up.
And the thing was she didn't want it, but she knew it would happen and you had to win. Because, first of all, government's will has to prevail in the end. Secondly, the mining situation was ridiculous and there were so many uneconomic pits. And thirdly, Scargill was trying to bring her down explicitly, not just her but the government. It was a highly political extreme strike. And-
Lord Speaker:
By the way, Neil Kinnock has been interviewed by me here just recently, and he's vociferous in that view. He knew it was a failure from day one for Scargill.
Lord Moore:
Absolutely right. And I felt very sorry for him at the time, because of the sort of solidarity idea in Labour, he couldn't really properly say that. And so I think she had to do it. And I think she behaved actually with reasonable restraint and she did the necessary, the stocks increased, what they call endurance, national police coordination so that you could not be outwitted by the pickets and reformed the trade union laws so that the funds of the National Union of Mineworkers could be distrained if they broke the law rather than the criminal path which had been followed by Ted Heath unsuccessfully.
So I think she thought about it, she got it right, and she carried her party in Cabinet with her. I think it's a very impressive achievement. And of course it was wretched what happened in the mining villages, but do remember that Arthur Scargill wouldn't have a ballot. And-
Lord Speaker:
Nottinghamshire
Lord Moore:
And Nottinghamshire and wider Derbyshire and quite a lot and increasingly across they very understandably resented this. Why should they put their working lives on the line for all this? And so it was tragic, but I do really think that Scargill should be blamed.
Lord Speaker:
I'm thinking about it from a modern point of view that the legacy is still there and communities. Perhaps it could have been done differently with a long-term view.
Lord Moore:
Yes, it could. And it would've been if Scargill hadn't struck. Because the interesting trick question is, which prime minister reduced the number of mines the most? And the answer is Harold Wilson, and this is just because of the natural trend of all of this. It wasn't sort of great ideology on the side of either party.
Lord Speaker:
Talking about Harold Wilson, would you reassess his tenure as prime minister given that he closed more mines, wasn't blamed for it. In Europe, he got the referendum, wasn't blamed for it.
Lord Moore:
Yes, well-
Lord Speaker:
Always wanted to be in Europe, but was very deft.
Lord Moore:
He was very deft and that should be recognised. And nobody else, I think, has won election four times. But I think in the end you do ask yourself what did it all amount to? Did it really matter? Did he bring things that we really needed? Did he? I think it's a bit disappointing.
Lord Speaker:
Can I take you on to the Cameron period 2010... you criticised him for embracing, for ceding to the left. You said, whether it be health, whether it be welfare, whether it be environment, whether it be education.
Lord Moore:
Yes. I think David Cameron is an astute politician and a decent man and until the referendum made some successes, but I think in the end two problems. One is that he was a sort of good-time politician when the times weren't very good. So he was hoping to be a Tony Blair that everything's getting better all the time. And actually there was a financial crisis and so on. And another was that you do need to have the courage of your convictions in politics. And I think this is the genius of Mrs. Thatcher is that she knew what she believed and was very good at expressing it. So it didn't make everybody like her or agree, but it's very powerful that.
And Cameron doesn't really have that, didn't really have that. So you end up, he was considered to be a reformer, but I see him as an establishment figure
Lord Moore:
But what I mean is that actually he did the old-fashioned Tory thing of just trying to keep a fairly decent show on the road. Well now, you can do a lot worse than that. And we have. But that I think is not so fascinating and impressive.
Lord Speaker:
The News of the World and phone hacking 2011, and I was quite surprised to read a quote which you were alleged to say, and you said that the hacking, you asked the question, "Had the left been right all along, not only Murdoch's power, Rupert Murdoch's power, but whether, quote, 'The free market is a setup?'"
Lord Moore:
Yes.
Lord Speaker:
There's quite a lot in that...
Lord Moore:
Was that about hacking?
Lord Speaker:
Yeah, that was 2011, yes, around the time of the hacking.
Lord Moore:
What I think I was raising, but I think there might be some eliding two things there. On the point about the free market being a setup, what I think the financial crisis brought out is that capitalism wasn't serving people enough. It was serving capitalists too much. And so the banks that are supposed to be for us were in fact for the banks. And when the banks went wrong, it was we that had to pay for the banks. And-
Lord Speaker:
I chaired the Treasury committee for 10 years-
Lord Moore:
Yes, well, and-
Lord Speaker:
... during that crisis. Also-
Lord Moore:
... you will know much more. But-
Lord Speaker:
... those are the points I was making, so you're reinforcing that.
Lord Moore:
Yes, but actually that doesn't lead me to be against free markets because what I'm against is the sort of protection of illegitimate interests. And I think that we got in hock really because of debt. The whole Western world got in hock to very great banking power. And this was the fall also of central banks, not just of investment banks and of political leaders. And this still goes on.
So this is why there's so much popular discontent is all through the western world, there is a pretty successful class of people who move in and out of government and do quite well out of it. Takes different forms in different countries. But you know what I'm talking about. And that's hence the resentment against sort of Davos man and all that type of thing. And the gradual amelioration of what the Victorians call the condition of the people has weakened. So real wages have not really arisen and so on.
And so people naturally ask themselves, ‘how is this getting better for me?’ Why is my waiting time at A&E increasing? Why am I paying so much tax when I'm not earning more? Why are my electricity bills so high because of net-zero impositions and so on? And when you put it all together and also you add political correctness to that so that indigenous white people feel they're actually being picked on, you are asking for trouble. And that is essentially the rulers of Western countries have been asking for trouble for a long time now. So now they've got it.
Lord Speaker:
So what's the way forward on that? I don't want to get into the present of situation tariffs or whatever else, but US treasuries, a quarter of US treasuries are owned overseas, other than America itself. And therefore, there's an interdependence-
Lord Moore:
There is, yes.
Lord Speaker:
... in the whole system. And that interdependence perhaps means that there is a limit in how much change could be enforced without bringing down the system itself.
Lord Moore:
Yes, and this is a possibly insoluble question and it's why though I think he's done some good things, particularly internally. I think Trump is a menace because the risks are too high without the clear benefits and the tariffs would be a classic example. So it's very understandable because actually the world is constantly full of far more tariffs and non-tariff barriers than is admitted. And Trump says that and he's right about that. But his solution is just to ratchet it up.
And similarly in questions of world peace, he doesn't seem to understand that you do need a rules-based international order. And I think there's a difference between global interdependence, which is in many ways a good thing and globalisation or globalism, which is in many ways a bad thing because of the power it gives to elites.
I remember Mervyn King put this very well to me once he said, "These great international banks is all fine when the things are going well and they're global in life, fine, but it's jolly well not fine because they come home to die. And they come home to Britain or France or America, whatever, and die and they die at our expense." And it's a very great problem, but you don't solve it, but you do need to improve it by greater democratic accountability.
And this is what all these revolts are about, what Brexit was about and probably the popularity of Reform is about and Trump and often the answers produced by the populists are no good, but they're onto something important. And it's no good just the elites rejecting it all the time and looking down on the people who are complaining. And I think that's a long-term problem we're dealing with.
Lord Speaker:
And some would say that Trump spoke to the heartlands, to those left behind, to those whose wages, as you mentioned earlier, hasn't really increased in real terms since the '70s, say the United States is the result of that.
Lord Moore:
He did. He did and he does, but his measures, as we can now see, are already hitting them. So I mean like the difficulties of American farmers over tariffs, for example. And unfortunately, he's a clever man Trump and a brilliant politician in a way, but he is really acting selfishly I would say. So he's not actually really thinking, "What's going to be the best?" He's thinking, "How am I going to dominate everything?"
Lord Speaker:
Labour's constitutional reforms, you're very critical of them, including the establishment of the Supreme Court and the subsequent changes to the role of the House of Lords. And maybe I can say in here, you want me out of a job quick because you don't want the Lord Speaker's job, you-
Lord Moore:
Well, nothing personal.
Lord Speaker:
... want to go back, so I understand.
Lord Moore:
But no, I think that it was a great mistake. We may be getting a bit technical here, but we are the House of Lords after all. But I think it was a great mistake of Tony Blair to abolish the Lord Chancellorship. By the way, you could probably nevertheless have a Lord Speakership that might be, it's not the most key question here. But he in that very sort of casual way that Tony Blair had, he sort of more or less decided over a weekend, "Why do we have to have the Lord Chancellorship?"
Lord Speaker:
By the way, I was involved at that particular time, and you talk about hasty decisions, there was a view it could be done by lunchtime and the Scottish office disappeared, but there was still a constitutional link with the Scottish office. So as far as I know from my information is that they sent workmen up in the morning to take the plate off Dover House, Scottish office, had lunch and realised the constitutional implications and sent the workers back in the afternoon, they put it up again. So-
Lord Moore:
Well, I believe you. And the thing is because the British constitution is historical, which I mean in a good way, not logical, you do have to be careful. And it's the famous Shakespeare line, "Untune that string. And, hark, what discord follows," has been the case.
Lord Speaker:
Peter Hennessey, good chaps theory?
Lord Moore:
Yes, but it's more than good chaps. It's you can be quite a bad chap and still be well governed by conventions. Conventions, as you know better than I, in our House are very important. They're more important than rules actually, because we all consent, well, mostly we consent to the conventions and therefore we behave with a certain restraint.
And that's one reason I'm very against the Supreme Court because I thought it was good under the old system where technically the Law Lords were a judicial committee of the House of Lords. Actually, they were professional lawyers. And therefore, the system acknowledged the fact that government includes the judiciary. Though in operational terms it's completely different from the judiciary, but the whole idea of government includes the judiciary and the judiciary should not be supreme and separate.
I don't mean it should take political orders, but it shouldn't be setting itself up. The paradox of what Labour did, new Labour did, is that by creating an apparently more independent judiciary, they actually created a more political judiciary. And that's what we have now and that's what we have with human rights laws. And this is all anti the common law tradition and it's bad for parliamentary democracy.
Lord Speaker:
When you were editor of the Daily Telegraph, you took a momentous decision by employing a certain young Boris Johnson. So I can't let you off with that before you leave here.
Lord Moore:
Well, I won't make any excuses, but he was already employed. But I did promote him and rightly so, because he was the most brilliant columnist. And he was also, I made him comment editor, which he was less reliable on that, but he was a brilliant columnist and he's a brilliant journalist. So I don't regret that. And a very good example actually of how a journalist can make a difference. And some would say not a hundred percent to the good, but nevertheless, it's a very striking career.
And his particular capacity in journalism is to get... He's very good at picking the moment, he sees something and then he turns it. He has a very good imagination and comic imagination of course, and he can sort of take a moment and turn it. And so suddenly you think about it in a different way and you want to read it and you want to hear what he has to say. And obviously he sails close to the wind, but that in the journalism is not a fault.
Lord Speaker:
No. How would you assess his premiership and known him very well?
Lord Moore:
Well, I think he was an absolutely brilliant performance in winning the referendum, which really was more down to him than anyone else. And even more so in winning the leadership and winning the general election. I mean, that's an astonishing thing to do in those circumstances. And it was based strategically right, because, "Get Brexit done," that's what people thought. And they were entitled to vote for that.
And then, of course, Covid came along. So we'll never know what would've happened if Boris had been a prime minister in ordinary times. But of course, for all sorts of reasons, people turned against him over that. And there's no doubt that he's very sloppy. I thought it was ridiculous to say that he behaved with terrible immorality about these so-called parties and things, but he's so sloppy, so he doesn't do the work properly.
Lord Speaker:
So that was a contrast with Mrs. Thatcher.
Lord Moore:
Very much. He's not lazy. Well, what I call Boris is a lazy workaholic, so he's always working, but he doesn't do it sort of in a consecutive proper way. So he's always desperately grabbing the next piece of paper because he's late for the meeting. And so the level disorganisation then produces internal disagreements and then ultimately mutiny. And that was much more likely to happen under Covid than under normal circumstances. But also there was a simple desire for revenge for a lot of people within the Tory party, which unfortunately always happens in these occasions.
So he made terrible mistakes and he paid for it. I think actually though, that it was wrong to push him out because, and I saw this with Mrs. Thatcher too for very different reasons, when somebody's pushed out bad blood enters the system in a way that does not happen when they lose elections and general elections. And so the ensuing mess in the Conservative government and party was less to do with Boris, though he's certainly not blameless than to do with getting rid of him. And if he got everything wrong, he deserved to lose at a general election, not in a coup. And then it's coup after coup after coup and there may be one soon again. You know what I mean? And-
Lord Speaker:
Has the Tory party got over Thatcher? I think myself, an example, the night that she was deposed, I was in the members' lobby of the House of Commons, and I met a hugely supportive Thatcher supporter. And chatting away and saying, "Well, you'll not want to talk to me tonight, so just let you go." "No, no, no, John," he says, "How about come in for a pint with me?" He says, "Because I'd rather have it with you than some of those..." [laughter] So therefore, that intensity was there, has that lessened and has the Thatcher legacy been overcome or is it still to be addressed?
Lord Moore:
Well, it's good, you put the question very well by framing it in that way, because I do a little drama with a colleague about this, a semi-dramatisation of the fall of Mrs. Thatcher when we act it out. Because it was very, very dramatic and it was a bit of a Who Done It and a bit of a Greek tragedy. And you see this great political beast being brought down by a whole load of plotting. And in many ways she deserved to go and she'd outstayed her welcome and so on.
But it's a horrible thing to see, particularly the only woman being brought down by all these men who owed their positions to her. And it meant that people regarded it as disgraceful, even if they weren't sorry to see the back of her. It was rather disgraceful. And of course on it goes, and it also issued in ideological disagreements too about Europe.
And all that is still there, though I do think it has diminished. But you still have to, Thatcher is still, as Churchill was in my youth, now it's Thatcher that Conservatives have to sort of understand what their relationship with her is. And it's she that gets invoked, sometimes criticised of course, but she's the big one as Churchill was and still is, and therefore all debates sort of work around that. And it's been very difficult for women leaders of whom there have now been three. Because should you be like Mrs. Thatcher or not like Mrs. Thatcher as a woman leader?
Lord Speaker:
All in the Conservative Party, the women.
Lord Moore:
Yes, exactly, exactly. And yes, Labour still hasn't dared have a woman, and it's a real difficulty for them. Trying to be like her is dangerous, not learning from her example is also dangerous.
Lord Speaker:
You've criticised individuals in the House of Commons, largely I think about the politicisation of the civil service, is reform of the civil service, the answer to these issues? It seems that what you say, ca' canny approach, the Scottish phrase, just take it easy.
Lord Moore:
Trouble is, it's so big, isn't it? It's so all consuming. One thing that happened, and this happened under Mrs. Thatcher and developed and has had the dangerous effects, is that there'd been the creation of a whole load of bodies that are called independent who operate things. But in my view, they're not independent. And indeed they shouldn't be because these are things that should be answerable to Parliament.
But they've been shuffled off from government departments so that you can't... the electorate or their representatives can't get a handle on them. So one example would be the Climate Change Committee, which just goes on and on laying down the law without any democratic validation at all. Created by legislation, fair enough, I mean that's entitled to do that, but it's as if MPs had ceased to see that they are the people who matter. And similarly with the civil service, I think both sides behave badly because I think the government has often behaved disgracefully, both parties in condemning officials in public, which is quite wrong.
Lord Speaker:
Ken Clarke was a good example of that. I think where civil servants, a number of occasions, few occasions screwed up. But Ken took the hit when it came to it.
Lord Moore:
He understood the responsibility point. So this has got very bad in government, but it's also got very bad with the civil servants and the sort of reciprocal badness because they frequently denounce policies in a way that they mustn't. And that's partly why I was annoyed about Black Lives Matter. There shouldn't be all these logos and things like that in public service. Absolutely not. None of them. Nobody should wear any lanyards or badges or anything except that of the crown, as it were.
And civil servants move in and out of the jobs and the impartiality is taken much less seriously. I don't really agree with the radical Tory position that you've got to have a very politicised civil service. There's a role, important role for a small number of SpADs or words to that effect. You've got to have some political thrust in the system. But essentially, I actually do believe in the impartial civil service, and I think it's been degraded by both sides.
Also, like everything now, there are un-rigorous admissions. So one of the most striking things I see as a historian is the unbelievably low quality of government internal communication compared with what it was 30 years ago. All those things written by Cabinet Secretary, Robert Armstrong, Robin Butler, private secretaries like Charles Powell, beautiful English, totally clear, very economical. And now there's sort of stuff pouring out, which is almost not English, and you can't sack people if they're no good. And it's all, if you look at the Foreign Office particularly, it's low grade. And diversity and inclusion has done terrible damage to all of this because people are appointed for token reasons, not for real reasons.
Lord Speaker:
Well, when I was the chair of the Treasury Select Committee, I made the point that politicians have franchised the responsibility largely to outside bodies, regulators, and it's difficult to get a handle on that, to get a grip.
Lord Moore:
Yes, absolutely. But the trouble is, it's also very hard, it was very hard before when they didn't do that because they were running all sorts of things they're not qualified to run such as nationalised industries. So it really is difficult. And I've got no ready answer to that. Though I think on the whole privatisation, except for monopolies, was a good thing because of a whole load of things that government couldn't sensibly run but was running.
But yes, so you're right, I mean these regulators are not… It would seem surprising to the outsider, because I don't think most of them are corrupt, but they're quite easy to manipulate in some way. How did we get to the situation with water, for example? And this is another reason as part of this great public disaffection is, "I vote for somebody, but it doesn't make any difference." And-
Lord Speaker:
"They're all the same."
Lord Moore:
"They're all the same." And it's not just-
Lord Speaker:
Yeah, that's what they say.
Lord Moore:
... because you don't think much of them as individuals, it's just that somehow or other, nobody can get a grip. If you get a poll about, what do they think about their local MP? Most people are quite favourable to their local MP. There aren't many who say, "This person's absolutely useless." And they have quite a lot of often good relationship with the constituency work and surgery and things like that. But it's collectively we vote and nothing happens. And I'm afraid, I think that's what's happening now because Labour got this terrifically large majority with a very low vote. And obviously that's unusual and it's a big disconnect. And there's a sort of, "Well, it said change in big letters. What is the change?"
Lord Speaker:
Okay, I mentioned about your Catholic faith and now we've had Pope Francis dying very recently, and I think you have written an article on that, but could you take us further on that? Obviously it's made a huge impression globally as a result. I mean, even at the weekend football matches, there was a minute silence from him. And I've had emails from individuals who don't have any religion, but have recognised him for that.
In many ways, he was ahead of the times, some would say, with his encyclical Laudato Si on the environment. Perhaps you'd disagree with that. But if that, on the economic situation and on AI, where in 2016 he had the tech companies and Nobel laureates looking at these particular issues. But your view of Francis and what you as a Catholic think the church needs for the future?
Lord Moore:
Well, I think in a weird way, the papacy has become much more important in the modern world. Because it used to be enough for people to think, "There is a Pope, but we don't really know who he is. He's some Italian sitting there and he's not going to come out." I mean for many years they were prisoners of the Vatican in the famous phrase. But in the age of mass media, they are really global figures as individuals as well as in the office. And that really took off with Pope John Paul II and who was enormously influential and successful and really, really pivotal in the Cold War, the ending of the Cold War.
Lord Speaker:
And you could see he was responsible for the establishment of solidarity. He's a major force.
Lord Moore:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And of course he also embodied it very well because he's a very powerful speaker and impressive man. And he and Francis, I would say, were the two who've really sort of benefited from that mass attention. I actually would be quite critical of Pope Francis in various ways, because I don't think he was very good at running things. He was quite sort of factional.
Lord Speaker:
Just as Boris.
Lord Moore:
He was quite sort of factional and bad-tempered and that sort of thing. And I think not the most fantastic brain. He was not one of the great intellectuals, but I think he brilliantly understood the importance of the famous image of the bishop, not ultimately, particularly of the Bishop of Rome, is of a shepherd. And he's caring for his flock and he gets his hands dirty with his flock. And I think he was brilliant at that.
And therefore, he was somehow always good at getting to the point that matters to people about who is suffering, who is poor. I'd often think his policy solutions as is often the case with great men are wrong, but it's very important to embody all that all the time. Washing the feet of somebody. This is not new, but it's symbolically tremendous. And I'm glad to say that modern media conveyed that actually.
Lord Speaker:
In the future. What should the Church be looking at? What type of leader does it need now? Does it need a different type of leader?
Lord Moore:
I think if you look inside the engine room of the Catholic Church, you'll find tremendous problems about money, about some doctrinal issues, about manpower, about how to run things. And this is left in a pretty poor state, actually. And so somebody's got to take a grip of that.
But one mustn't forget on the other hand what I've just been talking about, about the pope's unique capacity for as in people now always call it soft power. And so if you don't have, one of the most important things that a religious leader has is what's sometimes called a prophetic gift. And so if you have a bureaucrat in, you won't have a prophetic gift. So it's a real problem. And the only other thing I'd say is that, despite being a Roman Catholic, I'm not a tremendous papist. I don't think we should be too dictated to by a pope. The pope is the loved and respected head, but I don't believe in sort of Pius IX sort of fierce enforcement of everything.
Lord Speaker:
So therefore, you see him as the Bishop of Rome.
Lord Moore:
Yes. And also of a great global father, but not of sort of warfare.
Lord Speaker:
Okay, could I take you on to the geopolitical situation, because you've given us a tremendous amount of time and been very patient.
We have the Middle East and we have Ukraine, and you recently visited Ukraine. What should we be doing in that area and what's the way forward for ourselves, Europe and others?
Lord Moore:
Well, I think President Trump's interventions in Ukraine are disastrous because though I think he's sincere about wanting peace, he doesn't understand that peace must last, and therefore has to be based on justice and on a sense of the world order. And when he says that, "Zelenskyy started the war, Ukraine started the war," it's just stupefyingly untrue. And so it might be true, I don't particularly agree with it, but Russia might have reasonable positions about how its interests are important in the region and need to be considered. And there are some people in Ukraine who want to be with Russia, not many now, but so on.
But Putin's actions ruled him completely out of order, and that has to be recognised and people have to act accordingly. And unfortunately, the allies, Nato allies didn't do nearly enough about it in 2014 and now are therefore paying a very high price.
Lord Speaker:
Crimea.
Lord Moore:
Crimea and other related matters, and now paying a very, very high price. And Trump's challenge to the Europeans is reasonable to step up. But it's only reasonable if America itself is going to perform its role. We're all allies together in this, but Trump is talking about, A., solving the situation, but B., not living with the result. He's sort of talking about just getting out. That's impossible. And so I don't think his mission can succeed and I think a great deal of damage be done. And I think the Europeans do have to work out how to have both a short-term and a long-term defence security strategy.
Lord Speaker:
So European solidarity is essential?
Lord Moore:
Yes, but I don't think that's likely to come through primarily through the EU. I think it's likely to come through a sort of revived more European Nato.
Lord Speaker:
Lastly, you're a fan of real ale.
Lord Moore:
I was, I still am, but I'm a bit too old to drink beer much.
Lord Speaker:
Right. Well, as Lord Speaker, I have been lobbied by members who live in the North and say, "Look, we want beer in the Bishop's Bar to reflect the whole country." And we have introduced real ale. So what I'll do to solidify the solidarity here, Lord Moore, is to invite you for a pint in the Bishop's Bar with me paying.
Lord Moore:
That's very I gratefully accept, particularly on the final point. That's marvellous.
Lord Speaker:
Well, look, thanks for your time.
Lord Moore:
Thank you.