Charles Moore

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Charles Moore is a former editor of the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, and the Spectator.

Contents

History

Charles Moore was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with an MA in History. He began his career in journalism in 1979 on the Daily Telegraph and between 1984 and 1989 was appointed Editor of the Spectator magazine.
In 1992 he became Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph and between 1992 and 1995 was also Editor of the Sunday Telegraph. Between 1995 and 2003 Charles Moore was Editor of the Daily Telegraph. From 2003 he has been Group Consulting Editor and a columnist with the Daily Telegraph, as well as a columnist for the Spectator.
At the present time Charles Moore is working on the authorised biography of Baroness Thatcher.
Charles Moore is married to Caroline Baxter and they have a twin son and daughter. [1]

George Galloway libel action

In April 2003, the Daily Telegraph published a series of allegations about MP George Galloway's links to Saddam Hussein's former regime in Iraq. The story was based on documents, purportedly uncovered in Baghdad by Telegraph reporter David Blair, which Galloway dismissed as forgeries.

"Tuesday's paper alleged official documents found by its reporter in Baghdad suggested that in 1999 Mr Galloway had asked an unnamed Iraqi intelligence officer for more money.
"Wednesday's Telegraph claims to have found a memo purporting to have been written on behalf of Saddam Hussein, in which the Iraqi leader rejects Mr Galloway's alleged request.
"The MP's solicitors have described the Telegraph's allegation that he received £375,000 a year from the United Nations oil for food programme used to feed Iraq as "totally untrue".
"A statement from Davenport Lyons solicitors said the Glasgow Kelvin MP had never received any money from Saddam Hussein's regime." [2]

In December 2004, Galloway won £150,000 in damages from the Daily Telegraph.

Mr Justice Eady said: "It was the defendants' primary case that their coverage was no more than 'neutral reportage' of documents discovered by a reporter in the badly-damaged foreign ministry in Baghdad, but the nature, content and tone of their coverage cannot be so described." [3]

Policy Exchange

In his capacity as chair of Policy Exchange, Moore heavily criticised the BBC after Newsnight broadcast a report in December 2007 questioning the evidence behind the think tank's report, The Hijacking of British Islam.

"Thinking that such a report was a serious public issue that could advance well under the "flagship's" full mast and sail, Policy Exchange had originally offered it to Newsnight exclusively.
"Newsnight's people were enthusiastic, but on the late afternoon of the intended broadcast, they suddenly changed their tune.
"Policy Exchange had offered them many of the receipts it had collected from mosques as evidence of purchase; now they said that they had shown the receipts to mosques and that there were doubts about the authenticity of one or two of them.
"Given that the report was being published that night, the obvious thing for Newsnight to do was to broadcast Policy Exchange's findings at once, allowing the mosques to have their say about the receipts. [4]

Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture

Moore delivered the Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture at the Centre for Policy Studies on 10 March 2008. He used the speech to sketch his view of a Conservative approach to Islam in Britain.[5]

In trying to work out how best to pick one’s way through this minefield, I am grateful to my colleague at Policy Exchange, Dean Godson, for the following comparison which should resonate with a Conservative audience.
Think of the long debate about how best to deal with trade union militancy and with its relationship to Communist infiltration during the Cold War. It was not, in fact, the Conservatives who first tried to tackle this. It began as a conflict within the Labour movement in which a few brave souls like Frank Chapple of the Electricians, would not bow to the extremist tactics.[6]

On the basis of this analogy, Moore offered the following strategy:

Those of us who are not Muslims cannot, ultimately, dethrone the extremists alone. As with the unions and their leaders, that is for Muslims themselves to do. But what we can do is to question their claims, circumvent their campaigns, keep their hands off public money – often distributed, laughably, incredibly, in the name of community cohesion. [7]

Moore criticised the police for working with Islamists such as Azzam Tamimi to oust Abu Hamza from Finsbury Park Mosque.[8] In contrast, he praised Ed Hussain and Shiraz Maher as writers whose work prepared the way for a Muslim leadership "that wants to come to terms with the West."[9]

Question Time

In May 2009, the BBC offered to apologise to the Muslim Council of Britain over comments made by Mr Moore on the TV programme Question Time on the previous 12 March.

No final settlement has been reached but the BBC has accepted that the comments were unfair.
Mr Moore said the Muslim Council of Britain had been reluctant to condemn the killing and kidnapping of Britain soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and claimed the organisation thought such activities were "a good thing".[10]

Views

On Muslims

Leon Wieseltier quotes Moore writing in the Spectator on 19 October 1991:

You can be British without speaking English or being Christian or being white, but nevertheless Britain is basically English-speaking and Christian and white, and if one starts to think that it might become urdu-speaking [sic] and Muslim and brown, one gets frightened and angry.
Next door to me live [sic] a large family of Muslims from the Indian subcontinent. We are friendly enough to one another and they have done us various small acts of kindness. During the Gulf war, however, I heard their morning prayers coming through the wall, and I felt a little uneasy. If such people had outnumbered whites in our square, I should have felt alarmed. Such feelings are not only natural, surely - they are right. You ought to have a sense of your identity, and part of that sense derives from your nation and your race . . .
We want foreigners so long as their foreignness is not overwhelming. Mr David Mellor wants a Russian couple to be allowed to live here because he loves music and they are distinguished composers. This is the right attitude . . .[11]

Affiliations

Notes

  1. ↑ Graduation: Honorary Graduates 2007, The University of Buckingham: AlumNet.
  2. ↑ Galloway faces new Iraq claims, BBC News, 23 April 2003.
  3. ↑ Galloway wins Saddam libel case, BBC News, 2 December 2004.
  4. ↑ Newsnight told a small story over a big one, Daily Telegraph, 15 December, 2007.
  5. ↑ Charles Moore, How to Beat the Scargills of Islam, Centre for Policy Studies, 10 March 2008, via ConservativeHome.
  6. ↑ Charles Moore, How to Beat the Scargills of Islam, Centre for Policy Studies, 10 March 2008, p.8.
  7. ↑ Charles Moore, How to Beat the Scargills of Islam, Centre for Policy Studies, 10 March 2008, p.11.
  8. ↑ Charles Moore, How to Beat the Scargills of Islam, Centre for Policy Studies, 10 March 2008, p.7.
  9. ↑ Charles Moore, How to Beat the Scargills of Islam, Centre for Policy Studies, 10 March 2008, p.13.
  10. ↑ BBC Offers Question Time Apology, BBC News, 30 May 2009.
  11. ↑ quoted in Leon Wieseltier, Witness to Intolerance, The Guardian, 8 January 1992.
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