Columns

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Let’s set the cops on barbaric fox-hunters

Among those deeply disappointed with the Conservative party’s victory on 7 May was Britain’s diverse and vibrant community of wild animals. They have not yet daubed anti-Tory slogans on war memorials or marched through city centres screaming that they are not going to take it any more — and still less written vacuous and hyperbolic tirades for the Guardian. But they are deeply worried and consider themselves vulnerable to the assaults from a Conservative government untrammelled by the moderating influence of those sentimentalists the Lib Dems. And so badgers are stocking up on gas masks and the foxes are doing their callisthenics, so as to outpace some psychopathic fat toff on a wheezing mare, and bulk--buying aniseed spray to befuddle the hounds.

James Delingpole

Calling all British tourists – Ukraine needs you!

 Kiev ‘What the hell’s going to happen to your poor country?’ I ask the man in the flea market not far from St Sophia cathedral (Delingpole tourist rating: total must-see). ‘What do you think?’ I shrug. ‘Partition, maybe.’ The man shrugs back. We agree that what Putin is doing in the east is appalling. But he’s not terribly enthused by what the Americans are doing either. ‘They want to arm us. But you know where the fighting will take place: here,’ he says, meaning Ukraine in general rather than Kiev in particular. ‘You could leave,’ I suggest. ‘Your English is good.’ (Unusually so. Communication is generally quite hard in Kiev if you don’t speak Russian or Ukrainian.) ‘Where? To Europe?’ He says the word with mild contempt.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Labour must estrange its awful voters

And so now we have to suffer the epic delusions, temper tantrums and hissy fits of the metro-left. They simply cannot believe how you scumbags could have got it so wrong last Thursday, you morons. You vindictive, selfish morons. That has been the general response from all of the people, the liberal middle-class lefties, who have cheerfully contributed towards making the once great Labour party effectively unelectable. You lot voted Tory out of fear — because you are stupid, stupid people. The Conservatives ran a ‘negative’ campaign and, because you are either simply horrible human beings, or just thick, you fell for it.

Bruce Anderson

Cameron’s great secret: he’s not a very good politician

This was a vital election. A Tory failure would have been an act of political treason. Five years ago, the UK was grovelling with the PIGS in the fiscal sty. Our public finances were in a deplorable state, the financial system was in crisis and growth had disappeared over the economic horizon. No one has paid enough tribute to Messrs Cameron and Osborne for the sang-froid they displayed in the face of such adversity, and for their success. Not only that: we have two long-term structural problems in this country, both of which Lady Thatcher sidestepped, both of which David Cameron tackled. The first is welfare. In its corrosion of morale, its sabotage of élan vital, our welfare system creates an underclass.

Hugo Rifkind

Why won’t the lefties show London a little more love?

London is a bad thing. Everybody knows this now. Britain has had enough of London. Ed Miliband failed in part because he was ‘too north London’ (euphemism) and Chuka Umunna would fail just the same because he is too south London (euphemism). According to one commentator, Britain’s capital is now a ‘Guardianista colony’; filled with the ‘petty moralism’ of the ‘cultural’ elite. According to another — in the Guardian no less; no fan of his own colony, this guy — this is a city of glass and steel, so different from northern cities of ‘brick and hard stone’, and it produces in his northern soul a sense of ‘cultural alienation’. This, right now, is Britain’s big story.

Matthew Parris

We columnists have never been more useless

It takes some agility to shoot yourself in the foot and saw off the branch you’re sitting on, while hoisting yourself with your own petard, all at the same time; but that is what I shall now attempt. In this analysis of general election commentary I shall argue that over the last two months Britain has been all but choked by a surfeit of comment and analysis on the general election. Can any reader remember when there was an election that produced so much? Or, in the end, produced it to so little useful purpose?

Thursday

James Forsyth

A voting system that’s past it

The defence of the Westminster first-past-the-post voting system is that while it’s certainly unfair, it delivers decisive results. A relatively small swing in support from one party to another can deliver the kind of parliamentary majority that ensures fully functioning government. This worked well when British politics was a two-party business, and pretty well when it became a three-party affair. But in this new era of multi-party politics, the Westminster voting system is no longer fit for purpose — as the past few months have demonstrated. When Britain was asked about changing electoral systems in the referendum for the alternative vote, we stuck with the devil we knew.

James Delingpole

My part in a masterpiece of political correctness

Damien Hirst, Grayson Perry, James Delingpole: all winners of major art prizes. I was awarded mine last week by Anglia Ruskin University (formerly Anglia Polytechnic) which I think is a bit like Cambridge (it’s in the same town), though bizarrely its excellence has yet to filter through to the official UK uni rankings, where it’s rated 115th out of a list of 123. Anyway, the point is, I won. Sort of. I ‘won’ this extremely important prize in the way that Michael Mann, the shifty climate scientist, has been known to claim he ‘won’ the Nobel prize when it was awarded to the IPCC. That is, the prize wasn’t handed to me personally but I did play my part. What happened was this.

Mary Wakefield

In praise of the pit bull

Last night I saw a woman dancing with a pit bull terrier. It was about 9 p.m. and her curtains were open, lights on. Music must have been playing, though I couldn’t hear it through the glass, because she was singing as she danced the dog about, leaning back to balance his considerable weight. Her arms made a seat for him, as you might carry a child, his paws on her shoulders. The woman gazed down lovingly at the dog, who looked embarrassed but patient, as if this wasn’t his first dance and wouldn’t be his last. I watched them for a while, standing unseen in the street, half-wondering whether to take a photo — not for fun or for Facebook, but to show to all the crosspatch busybodies who support the ban on ‘devil dogs’.

Rod Liddle

Miliband’s tablet of stone may cost him my vote

You have the advantage over me. You know the result of the general election, whereas I do not — a consequence of the moronically linear progression of time. Indeed, you may already have fled to one of those countries with a much lower tax rate and less fantastically irritating politicians — Algeria, for example, or Benin. Or Chad. And you are reading this digitally on some patched-in fibre-optic service, the electricity generated by goats trotting forlornly around a gigantic hamster wheel outside — but you are nonetheless delighted with your new life, despite the flies and the occasional gang of marauding, maniacal jihadis. At least you’re not here to experience Britain being well and truly sturgeoned.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Warning: this column may soon be illegal

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/theelectionwhereeverybodyloses/media.mp3" title="Listen to Douglas Murray discuss Islamophobia" startat=1350] Listen [/audioplayer]A couple of weeks back I wrote an article headed: ‘Call me insane, but I’m voting Labour.’ Among the many hundreds of people who reacted with the rather predictable ‘Yes, you’re insane’ was my wife, Mrs Liddle. She pointed out that Ed Miliband had vowed that upon being elected, Labour would make Islamophobia a crime. ‘So,’ she concluded, with a certain acidity, ‘not only will we be substantially worse off under a Labour government, but at nine o’clock on the morning of 8 May the police will arrive to take you away.

Hugo Rifkind

Russell Brand is the future, like it or not

I write at a difficult time. The balls are in the air, but we know not where they will land. Perhaps, by the time you get to read this, more will be clear. Right now, however, we know only that Ed Miliband has been interviewed by Russell Brand. We do not yet know what he said. Or what Brand said. Probably he said more. ‘That was interesting enough, but Russell Brand was a bit restrained’ is something that nobody has said, after any conversation, ever. Most likely he’ll have quite liked Ed Miliband. They’ll have friends in common. Probably even girlfriends, what with them both having such voracious sexual appetites.

Matthew Parris

The British public is about to make a big mistake

On the weekend of 25 April 2015 I started to believe that the party I supported might not win an impending general election. I’m used to that. But I started to believe, too, that my fellow citizens might be about to make a stupid and unfathomable mistake. I’m not used to that at all. It has come as an awful shock. For the first time in my life I have understood how it must have felt to be a convinced socialist in Britain these past 36 years since 1979: to live in and love a country whose people had got it completely wrong. ‘Well, diddums,’ I can hear left-wing friends reply: ‘Welcome to our world.’ In the general election of 1979, as a parliamentary candidate, I knew the voters would return me and believed they would return a Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Will jailing Katie Hopkins save the lives of migrants? I have my doubts

More than a thousand migrants have died attempting to get into Europe over the past week, including 900 who perished horribly, trapped in the hold of a Tunisian ship near the Libyan coast. Many thousands have died before and many thousands will die in the near future attempting the same venture unless we in Europe change our policies. Everybody is agreed that something has to be done. For the liberal left, the answer is to sack Katie Hopkins, a fellow columnist of mine at the Sun. Not just sack her but also prosecute her and prosecute the editor of the Sun. More than 200,000 people have signed a petition got up by someone called Izzy Saunders demanding her removal from the paper because she wrote something with which they disagreed.

James Delingpole

It really must be a mid-life crisis. I’ve fallen in love with a pony

Because I’m reckless, stupid and irresponsible, I normally get landed with the biggest, most obstreperous hunters. But the other weekend the riding school boss, Jane, decided to allocate me a different horse to ride. It was a smallish grey called Potato. ‘What’s he like?’ I asked one of the regulars. ‘Oh he’s lovely!’ she said. But I didn’t necessarily believe her. One of the things I’m learning about riders is that they lie through their teeth about how nice particular horses are. Something to do with the convention that misbehaviour is always the fault of the rider, never the horse. ‘He’s not very big,’ I complained. ‘How does he jump?’ ‘He doesn’t,’ my friend explained.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Cameron must show he’s not too posh to push

At 5.45 a.m. Lynton Crosby holds the first meeting of the day at Conservative campaign HQ. The aim is to work out what threats need to be neutralised that day and what opportunities should be capitalised upon. The early start isn’t macho posturing but a reflection of the modern media environment. The news now moves at such pace that a lie can go all the way round the worldwide web before the truth even has its boots on. The political weather is rarely more changeable than in a close election campaign. In this environment, the trick is to work out what actually matters: what might determine the election. But after the past week one thing is clear: the Tories have survived a wobble that could have turned into a death spiral.

Rod Liddle

Call me insane, but I’m voting Labour

Quite often when I deliver myself of an opinion to a friend or colleague, the reply will come back: ‘Are you out of your mind? I think that is sectionable under the Mental Health Act.’ In fact, I get that kind of reaction rather more often than, ‘Oh, what a wise and sensible idea, Rod, I commend your acuity.’ There is nothing I say, however, which provokes such fervid and splenetic derision, and the subsequent arrival of pacifying nurses, as when I tell people that I intend to vote Labour at the forthcoming general election. When I tell people that, they look at me the way my dog does when I tell her that it is not right to kill cats. It is something quite beyond the parameters of understanding, of comprehension.

Matthew Parris

The power of collective grievance

When last Sunday Pope Francis took the brave step of acknowledging the Armenian tragedy as the ‘first genocide of the 20th century’, he knew he was entering a minefield. On 24 April Armenians will commemorate the 100th anniversary of their genocide. There can be no single date for a genocide but that was the day the entire leadership of the Armenian people was arrested by the Ottoman government in Constantinople, now Istanbul, whose successors are the modern Turkish state. The Ottomans had never trusted Armenians, who were Christians, and had long suspected them of being a fifth column within the empire. There had already been pogroms. But now began a sustained campaign of massacre, eviction and cultural suppression at the end of which somewhere between 600,000 and 1.

Hugo Rifkind

Warning: you may be about to vote for more than one government

For the last five years, I’ve been trying to get people interested in the Fixed Term Parliaments Act. No, don’t sidle away. Honestly, this is The Spectator. Aren’t you meant to be into this sort of thing? It’s not as though we’re on a date, for God’s sake. It’s not like we’re in a restaurant and the starter has just come, and I’m droning on about the threshold for a vote of no confidence, and you’re draining your third huge glass of red and thinking, ‘This guy looked waaaay more fun on Tinder. Next time I go to the loo I’m climbing out the window.’ That’s not how it is. No it isn’t. Pay attention. The thing is, we’re living in the past.

Thursday

James Forsyth

A Scottish revolution is coming, and everyone’s losing their heads

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/edcouldstillwin/media.mp3" title="James Forsyth and James Forsyth discuss the current state of Scottish politics" startat=866] Listen [/audioplayer]Normally, if a candidate whose party came fourth in a constituency last time tells you they’re going to win, you put it down to election derangement syndrome. But in post-referendum Scotland the normal political rules don’t apply. When Joanna Cherry, the SNP candidate for Edinburgh South West, says she’s headed for Westminster — despite the SNP picking up just 12 per cent of the vote here in 2010 — she is probably right.