Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher's Downfall and Some Shared Chips

Charles Moore is a titan of British conservatism. A former editor of The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, he is best known across the world as the authorised biographer of Mrs Thatcher. Whilst I’m sure many of us find great joy every week from Moore’s continuing columns in the Speccie and Telegraph, it was in his capacity as Maggie’s interpreter on Earth that he came to speak to OUCA. He did so in the deeply appropriate setting of Lady Margaret Hall. But it was a speech with a difference. The major difference was that it wasn’t really a speech at all. At least, not in a traditional sense.

Instead of delivering us a simple talk on his third volume of Mrs T’s life and times – which, I hasten to add, would have been no bad thing – he decided to do his best impression of Hercule Poirot and take us through what many of us still think of as the Conservative Party’s most unforgivable act of self-immolation: the removal of its three-election winning PM by an assorted motley crew of fed up public school boys and irreconcilable Wets. It’s a tale of back-stabbing and front-stabbing, tears, fears and the ultimate triumph of a man whose most memorable legacy was a cone hotline. Not that it still rankles or anything.

The format for Mr Moore’s statement of the case was quite simple. He was joined by Kate Ehrman, who ably provided the voice for the main participant, and together they pieced together the process by which Mrs T found herself without a house, ministerial office and political purpose. Moore’s John Major was a particularly impressive imitation, but it was just one amongst many in a cast so numerous as to make Murder on the Orient Express seem easy to piece together. Charting the sad tale from Sir Anthony Meyer’s leadership challenge in 1989 onwards, Moore showed how the pressure of events, the conspiracies for power of various Cabinet members and, ultimately, the marvellous stubbornness of Mrs Thatcher herself combined to leave her isolated and defeated. What shone through most was the sheer mendacity of so many MPs. Major and Douglas Hurd’s willingness to simultaneously conspire against their leader in private whilst supporting her in public highlights that Lord Action’s old dictum about poor and corruption still applies. Few come out of the whole narrative well. Except, perhaps, the idiosyncratic backbencher Alan Clark, whose potty-mouth, lascivious feelings for Mrs Thatcher and willingness to fight to the end for a deeply unfashionable lost cause show he really was the ideal former Christ Church student.

After the talk, Moore graciously answered a few questions, including one on what lessons Maggie has for those candidates running for the Democratic nomination across the Atlantic (of which I think the most obvious would be “don’t be Bernie Sanders”) before Kate and he retired with a group of us to a local restaurant. Here he kept us entertained with a string of anecdotes on everything from his Spectator days to his favourite West Indian writers (and happily shared some of my chips). Our evening was cut short, however, when he received a text informing him his new grandson had just been born. With an understatement surprising of one so famous in his field, he excused himself from the meal and he and Kate departed. It was a characteristically charming move by one of Britain’s leading journalists, and on behalf of OUCA I’d like to thank him for a great evening – and wish him and his new grandson all the best.

This account of Charles Moore’s visit has been written by William Atkinson, a second year reading History at Christ Church.