The Spectator’s Notes / Does Sadiq Khan approve of colonising? |
How to report Iran? It is a huge story. Perhaps as many as 30,000 people were recently murdered there by the tottering regime, but it won’t let western media in. The BBC’s solution is a deal: their correspondent can enter and report, but the report cannot appear on their Persian service. This agreement is rightly explained on air, unlike the BBC’s iniquitous deal with Hamas over Gaza. Do the terms of the deal benefit journalism, however? We are always told that BBC foreign language services are the lifeblood of truth for citizens of dictatorships. Why are Farsi speakers to be deprived of this? Also, what do we learn from Lyse Doucet walking the Tehran streets in a headscarf? (Is it compulsory or voluntary? Either way, she should explain.) Obviously, the people she meets will not dare criticise the regime. She does not just veil her head: she veils the truth.
Of all politicians who mattered in the Thatcher/Major era, none is more self-effacing than Richard Ryder, partly by temperament and partly because he was Major’s chief whip for five years. He has never broken that omertà. So it is typical that his new book has the tremendously uninformative title Ten Essays, with no explanatory blurb, is privately printed, unavailable in shops and already sold out. Of the ten men remembered (the one all-important woman has no essay to herself but bustles in and out of all of them), only three – Geoffrey Howe, Keith Joseph and Cecil Parkinson – were household names. One other, Alan Clark, became a household name........