Some people were born to be lords and ladies
It’s rumoured that Mary Berry is to be made a dame in the postponed Queen’s Birthday Honours list. Surely some mistake. How on earth can she not be a dame already?
The same goes for Charles Moore, my colleague and former editor of this newspaper, who has always seemed like a lord-in-waiting to me. Lord Moore of Etchingham was said to be in the frame for chairman of the BBC but, sadly, family reasons prevent it. What a shame. That wounding rumour had already caused dismay. “This will shatter morale. People will leave, thinking: ‘I won’t stay working here under Thatcher’s vicar on earth’,” moaned someone identified as a former employee of Charles’s.
That tells you precisely why someone like him is needed in that institution. It is the BBC’S sneering metropolitan attitude that
Moore detests, not the idea of a public service broadcaster.
A Latin inscription in the hall of old Broadcasting House reads: “And they pray that good seed sown may bring forth good harvest… and that the people inclining their ear to whatsoever things are lovely and honest, whatsoever things are of good report, may tread the path of virtue and wisdom.”
Sounds right up the street of one Lord Moore of Etchingham, a verray parfit gentil knight.