Rupert Murdoch says Gerald Scarfe got it wrong - but Charles Moore beat him to it

Veterans of the Drip will know that we are admirers of Charles Moore, one of the most thoughtful English conservatives around today. His weekly diary in the The Spectator, "The Spectator's Notes" is a model of clear, cogent, conservative prose. And on this whole business about Gerald Scarfe's recent cartoon in the Sunday Times, for which Rupert Murdoch has apologised - do take our poll - it seems he was ahead of the curve too.

As Coffee House notes, Moore wrote the following before this whole imbroglio: "Idly flicking through the latest Sunday Times, I notice the cartoon by Gerald Scarfe. It shows President Assad of Syria, covered with blood, picking the severed head of a child from a mound of corpses. ‘Syria,’ says the caption, ‘60,000 slaughtered and still counting’. It feels as if one has seen this Scarfe cartoon most weeks since the 1960s... And that is it: no gloss, no wit, no political nuance, no juxtaposition that might tell you something, just an extremely well-paid half century drawing tyrants covered with blood, and a CBE too. We columnists, who have at least to pretend to think of something new each week, can only gasp with envy at the way Scarfe — by being against war, genocide etc — has escaped any editorial attention whatever".

Moore is a class act.