Columns

In January this year Dominic Cummings – once of this parish – warned The Spectator’s editor and assistant editor that Whitehall and the establishment parties would "stop at nothing" to prevent Nigel Farage from becoming prime minister. As Cummings told the Quite right! podcast: "The people around [Keir] Starmer and all through the upper echelons of the Whitehall system are looking at Donald Trump. They’re looking across Europe, and they’re saying to themselves: 'The lesson is to strike early and strike hard and not let these people in… Let’s smash the absolute living shit out of Farage, and make sure that he doesn’t win, by fair means or foul.

You’d think when your country goes to war you’d want it to prevail, but these are topsy-turvy times. Thus the dominant American commentary on Donald Trump’s "excursion" in the Middle East – or should we call it a "special military operation?" – has come from pundits who yearn for Epic Fury to fail. Close-up and personal antipathy for their President far outweighs theoretical distaste for a tyrannical theocracy in another hemisphere. For these critics, the glaring deficiencies of the "Memorandum of Understanding," Trump’s already shaky negotiated peace deal, are gratifying. I’m not one of those people.

Last month’s headline in the New York Times was obfuscating: “In the UK, a Violent Cycle: Hateful Attacks, Right-Wing Agitation and Riots.” Because hatred is now irrevocably associated with the “right-wing,” innocent American newspaper readers will have presumed that these agitating, rioting reactionaries were also the authors of the “hateful attacks.” The New York Times and the PBS News Hour delivered such twisted, incomplete and minimized versions of recent incendiary events in the UK that I was obliged to tell the stories of Henry Nowak and Stephen Ogilvie to more than one ordinarily up-to-date American friend, because the salient details had been omitted from left-leaning reports.

Every so often, a fashionable new concept is born. Witness the arrival of "matrescence," which, for the uninitiated, is a phrase used to describe the physical, psychological, emotional and social transition a woman undergoes when becoming a mother. Or, as my mother and grandmother would have put it, and perhaps yours too: motherhood. "Matrescence" first appeared in the 1970s, coined by the medical anthropologist Dana Raphael, but it seems to be reaching maturity now. Advertisements splashed across the back page of the New York Times make the case for the inclusion of the word in the dictionary. A "global movement" is being launched (by a social networking site for women and a company that sells baby bottles) to put matrescence on the cultural map.

I get the sense that the political and media class badly miss Katie Hopkins. Back when the reality TV star was still a regular on Britain's screens and in our newspapers, she could be relied upon to be the focus of attention whenever the people in charge didn’t want the public’s attention to be focused where it ought to be. So when a British soldier was decapitated on the streets of London, or a suicide bomber went off at a pop concert packed with teenage girls, Ms. Hopkins could be found saying something that a lot of people were thinking – only in a more colorful or unwise way.

On Petersfield station, southbound side, there’s a huge billboard advertising a tropical holiday with a photo of a beautiful couple joyfully splashing each other in the water. I walked past it, stopped, walked back and stared. “Adults-only holiday,” it read. “Entirely child-free.” But this wasn’t “adults only” in the 20th-century sense: getting frisky with strangers after a pink gin and an all-you-can-eat buffet. What was being sold was a holiday guaranteed to contain not a squeak of any disgusting child, and the whole tone of the advert was one of joyful relief: at last! Just what we’ve all always wanted, but never dared to admit! The beautiful couple could spend their days scrolling freely on their expensive phones, undisturbed by the excited shouts of infants.

During last September’s freshers’ fair at Royal Holloway, University of London, two students got into a brief verbal tiff that became subject to the administration’s immediate alarm. Our characters: Brodie Mitchell, a self-described non-Jewish Zionist, and Huda El-Jamal, the female president of the Friends of Palestine Society, who is of Palestinian descent. Mitchell says El-Jamal taunted him – “Here’s the wannabe Jew” – and questioned why he wasn’t wearing a yarmulke. Referring to the keffiyeh El-Jamal was wearing as a headscarf, Mitchell taunted back: “You’re wearing a tea towel over your head.” A monstrous exchange, we can all agree. Naturally, Royal Holloway suspended Mitchell for nine weeks – nine weeks!