Columns

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Why the Trump-Russia story never ends

In June, Tulsi Gabbard found herself in a difficult position. As a dovish Iraq war veteran who happens to be Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, she’d spent weeks trying to stop America launching air strikes against Iran. She’d cited intelligence reports which contradicted Israeli suggestions that Tehran was just days away from having a nuclear bomb. Trump didn’t want to know. ‘I don’t care what she says,’ he told reporters, before ordering the strikes on Iran. Gabbard had been humiliated. Surely she had to resign? Nothing is sure in Trumpworld, however, and humiliation is half the fun. Rather than falling out with the Donald, Gabbard instead redoubled her efforts to please him.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

How to handle the Wagner problem

There are deep ructions across Europe, as in Britain. All come down to the same thing. The societies in question have decided to take in more people than they could ever absorb or integrate, and have done so at a rate that will ruin these societies financially as well as socially. It’s a little late for the occasional minister to talk about the fabric of the country being under ‘strain’, or the need for greater ‘social cohesion’. These things have been shot for years. What is interesting is not just what a mountain Wagner is for modern Germany, but how they deal with it The problem is that every counter to this problem has the same Charybdis. Oppose the migration extremism and even now you will be accused of Hitlerian tendencies.

Mary Wakefield

Could Danny Kruger save the Conservatives?

I’ve seen signs of life in the Conservative party – unlikely I know, but true. I had thought it a dead thing, dripping its life-blood slowly into Reform. But ten days ago I saw on YouTube a speech that a Tory MP gave in the House of Commons and… I don’t know. I felt hope. The MP was Danny Kruger, member for East Wiltshire, and as it happens he’s a friend of mine. I’ll say straight away then that this is absolutely not an attempt to promote him as next leader, though the post-Kemi era does seem to be approaching fast. For one thing, Kruger is a middle-aged white Etonian, cursed by association with the last two Etonian PMs. For another, from what I’ve seen of it, high office acts like high altitude on humans. The rarified air gets to them in the end.

Matthew Parris

What it means to be English

How can you ever put your finger on the comfort, the joy, the absurdity, of being English? Not, perhaps, through some attempt at definition: but in a hundred moments linked by that invisible thread, Englishness. Such a moment occurred for me last Friday. The place was Kidderminster in Worcestershire, the occasion the re-opening of the heritage Severn Valley Railway to Bridgnorth in Shropshire, at the lovely station from which the line, formerly Great Western Railway (GWR) and closed by British Rail in the 1960s, runs. If scripture doesn’t specifically mention steam engines, they are implicit in the psalmist’s rapture Let’s not be sentimental about Kidderminster.

Max Hastings

Britain shouldn’t put up with Donald Trump

History is the march of folly and far too many of my countrymen are hearkening to a drumbeat which would lead us to disaster. On Tuesday several of our newspapers led with variations of the same headline: ‘Trump: cut tax to beat Farage.’ This is idiotic counsel, given the state of Britain’s public finances. I would have thought the way to beat populism was not by emulating its idiocies but by prudent, cautious, sensible management of a nation tired of liars. If Donald Trump teaches us anything, it is how to ruin a great nation. Far more useful than parroting the US President’s delusions would be telling the British people more than they are currently permitted to read about his manic conduct of office.

Rod Liddle

Israel has gone too far

If any other country in the Middle East had behaved as monstrously as Israel has in recent weeks, the jets would be lined up on our runways ready to do a bit of performative bombing. Never mind BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) and diplomatic pressure. I mention this because those of us who support Israel, and have done so largely uncritically since 7 October 2023, need the scales to fall from our eyes a little – for the good of Israel, as well as the good of those starving Palestinians. I have been to Israel many times, as a journalist, as a holidaymaker, as a friend.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

MAGA, Epstein and the paedo files

Bill Clinton published another memoir last year, entitled Citizen, and I take it that everyone read the book the minute it came out. For those who somehow didn’t, there’s a striking passage that can be easily found by standing in a bookshop, going to the index and searching under ‘E’ for ‘Epstein’. This leads to a single page reference in which the 42nd president gives a terse and somewhat legalistic account of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, explaining that he never went to Epstein’s island, borrowed his plane only to support the work of the Clinton Foundation and cut off contact before Epstein’s first arrest in 2005. In a brusque summary Clinton or his ghostwriters conclude: ‘I wish I had never met him.

Lionel Shriver

The High Court’s war on truth

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty-Dumpty tells Alice: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ The assertion is intentionally absurd. If every-one adopted their own idiosyncratic lexical definitions, language wouldn’t function, and we’d all blither unintelligibly in a Tower of Babel. But then, Humpty missed his calling as a British High Court judge. Sitting on the bench rather than a wall, the big egghead might never have had that great fall.

Rod Liddle

Raise the age of suffrage to 25

If I had been given the vote at the age of 16, I would have put my cross beside the name of the Communist party candidate, assuming that he was not a tankie. If he was, I would have had to think long and hard; a left-wing Labour candidate might well have been preferable. I was a moderate within the CP, you see – a fan of the Italian Communist party leader, Enrico Berlinguer – and I had no time for the wretched Stalinists who, swaddled in dystopian nostalgia, comprised a broad rump of the British party. They were nicknamed tankies because they thoroughly approved of Soviet interventions in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). I was what was then called a Eurocommunist. I knew my stuff too.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The pointlessness of ‘smashing the gangs’

‘Smash the gangs’ is the fascinating slogan that Keir Starmer’s government has settled on for tackling illegal migration. What is the government going to do to stop the hundreds – sometimes thousands – of people sailing across the Channel and coming into England each day? ‘We will smash the gangs,’ they say. The slogan is interesting for reasons beyond the tough-guy rhetoric. For it suggests, of course, that it is people-smuggling gangs that are the main problem. Perhaps our government sees them as being like press gangs back in the day, roaming around northern France, waylaying passing migrants and forcing them on to rubber dinghies to begin a new life in Britain.

Matthew Parris

Why you should never trust a travel writer

After one of Jeffrey Archer’s minor tangles with the absolute truth, his friend the late Barry Humphries remarked: ‘We all invent ourselves to some degree. It’s just that Jeffrey has taken it a little further than most.’ The remark came to mind last week as the media storm over the veracity (or otherwise) of the Winns’ account in The Salt Path reached its peak. As Dame Edna might have said, all travel writing is invented to some degree. It’s just that Raynor and Moth may have taken it a little further than most. ‘In Patagonia?’ Bruce Chatwin’s lodger is said to have remarked of the eponymous book. ‘I doubt Bruce even went downstairs.’ That’s unfair. Chatwin undoubtedly visited Patagonia.

Mary Wakefield

The radical vegan ‘Zizians’ are the cult we deserve

Every week brings a new revelation about the Zizians: the craziest, saddest cult in recent American history. Eight deaths have been linked to them so far, including 80-year-old Curtis Lind, stabbed with a samurai sword, US border patrol agent David Maland, shot by the roadside in Vermont, and the elderly parents of another member, shot dead at home in Pennsylvania. What’s gripping the American press is that the young Zizians seem to have been such nice kids once. The leader of the cult, Jack Amadeus LaSota, has a degree in computer science from Alaska University and a father who still teaches there. Another Zizian, Daniel Blank, was a straight-A student, fluent in three languages, whose bewildered father said he was a model son. The Zizian murder trial is set to begin in October.

Rod Liddle

Down with the middle class

I suppose this magazine is probably not the best forum to launch a movement to sweep away the British middle class, much along the lines of Pol Pot’s adventure in Kampuchea in the late 1970s, but one can only play with the cards one has been dealt. The more one reads the newspapers, the more inescapable becomes the conclusion that these are the people who are responsible for almost all that is bad, verging on wicked, in our society. Not the lower-middle class, incidentally (the petit bourgeoisie so despised by Marx they were denied even agency), but the comfortable tranche above them. The middle-middle. The professions, by and large. And, dare I say it, the people at Glasto (frankly, on stage and off).

Tim Shipman

‘Let Keir be Keir’: inside the cabinet’s away day

Labour ministers face a range of terrible political choices, but when the cabinet met for an away day at Chequers last Friday, the first dilemma was what to wear. ‘There was panic beforehand about what “smart-casual” meant,’ one ministerial aide says. Both Hilary Benn and John Healey turned up in dark suits and red ties. ‘To be fair to the Defence Secretary, he hadn’t seen that bit of the invite,’ a No. 10 official explains. ‘Whereas in Hilary’s case, that is what his smart-casual looks like.’ By contrast, Peter Kyle, the Science Secretary, turned up in what one observer describes as a ‘tech bro AI T-shirt’.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

My tips to avoid arrest by the Met

An interesting event occurred in London at the weekend. A young man who goes by the name of Montgomery Toms attended a Pride parade. But he did not attend in order to dress in bondage gear while shouting ‘Love is love’ and ‘Free Palestine’. Instead he went with a sandwich board which had a trans flag on it, followed by an equals sign and then the words ‘mental illness’. This is a tactic pioneered by an American man known as ‘Billboard Chris’, because his name is Chris and he wears a billboard. Chris’s schtick is to walk around with a sign saying things like ‘Children cannot consent to puberty blockers’.

Lionel Shriver

How governments gaslight

The posters now plastered around German public swimming pools are so hilarious that you may have seen them already. Keeping up my entertainment end of things, I’ve forwarded the pictures to multiple correspondents myself. See, news stories have been accumulating – and many similar stories doubtless remain unreported – about Muslim immigrants harassing and sexually assaulting native Germans trying to cool off. In response, some helpful bureaucrat has generated a series of images whose crudely drawn cartoon format makes light of the problem while wilfully, defiantly misrepresenting it. Below ‘Schubsen ist nicht lustig!’ (‘Shoving is not funny!’), a white boy and vaguely brownish boy push a terrified black girl towards the pool. Below ‘Stopp! Grabschen verboten!

Rod Liddle

The unspoken truth about 7/7

Did you take part in any of the mysterious commemorations last weekend? The newspapers were full of it – something called 7/7, apparently. I read a long report on the BBC’s website about this tragedy but remained entirely unclear as to who killed the people on those trains and bus. The report said ‘bombs were detonated’ on the Tube, as if the bombs – anxious to fulfil their purpose in life – had blown themselves up, without the aid of any external agency. Nowhere in the report did it mention who brought the bombs down from Yorkshire and then set them off. Nowhere in the entire article were the words ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamist’ or even ‘Muslim’ mentioned, nor even the names of the murderers.

Tim Shipman

The reign of Rayner

Angela Rayner declined an invitation to a hen do last weekend where the entertainment included axe-throwing. ‘She was worried about photos,’ says one attendee. The Deputy Prime Minister had to see a family member instead, but a close ally admits: ‘She is more careful about attracting that sort of publicity than she used to be.’ Robbed as we are of the sight of Rayner waving an axe around when the Prime Minister is suffering his worst weeks in Downing Street, it is tempting to ask, as Metternich didn’t quite say of Talleyrand: ‘What did she mean by that?’ It’s a far cry from the days when she screamed that the Tories were ‘scum’ at a conference party or was filmed raving in Ibiza.

Thursday

Matthew Parris

How Labour governments always end

Couldn’t we just skip to the end? I’m old enough to have seen this so often: must I sit through each dreary succeeding scene again? Parties in government are animals: they have natures; their natures do not change; they are incapable of being different animals; and what follows, follows. A Labour government finally runs out of money and enters a period of slow-motion disintegration, ending in a chaos of finger-pointing and blame-shifting, still whimpering about social justice as the bailiffs move in. Already the suspense has gone. There will be many twists and turns, probably over years rather than months, before this government pulls apart at the seams; but, honestly, knowing where we’re going, I do ache to fast-forward. I’m 75.

Mary Wakefield

The grooming gang inquiry we really need

It’s disorienting but satisfying that Labour now accepts that Asian grooming gangs exist. Some of my left-identified friends are even beginning to share the outrage – over Qari Abdul Rauf, for instance, one of the nastiest of the Rochdale rapists, who still lives in Rochdale a decade after the first steps to deport him were taken. Rauf simply ripped up his Pakistani passport and couldn’t then be shifted. He’s cost the taxpayer nearly £300,000 in legal fees, but still has enough dosh to throw regular house parties and, it was reported this week, to start building a second home back in Pakistan. Pimping out children pays. It’s nice that the left and right share the impotent anger.