Columns

My friend Tim Leunig is a cerebral thinker of the best kind. Though not party-political, he has worked for Tory chancellors and would give the same advice to governments of any stripe. Wikipedia calls him a prize-winning economist and that’s right, but he has a gadfly instinct and a remorselessly rational intellect that takes him into the deeps: into first principles, logical consequences and the reductiones ad absurdum of some of our trains of argument. He writes a substack (timleunig.substack.com) and it was his recent summary there of proposals he wrote as chief economist for the Onward thinktank that caught my eye. ‘I bought this house from savings that were taxed as I earned. Now you want to tax me because I have it. No!

In the long and illustrious history of race chancing, there must have been many more egregious examples than that of Noel Deans’s recourse to court because a colleague ‘fist-bumped’ him rather than shaking his hand, but I can’t think of any right now. Certainly not over here in the UK, where we still lag a little behind the inventiveness of the top American chancers. It is quite possible that, through the best of intentions, I will appear before a tribunal one of these days The case brought by Mr Deans against RBG Holdings was one of racial discrimination. He alleged that on one occasion the firm’s senior partner, Ian Rosenblatt, greeted him with a fist-bump, which is apparently a common form of greeting among the African-Caribbean community from which Mr Deans hails.

Earlier this summer, my son and I biked over to fashionable east Hackney where it’s normal to pay £4.20 for a coffee and £3 for a croissant and everybody complains about the cost of living. The croissants, by the way, must come from the Dusty Knuckle bakery. I don’t know if it’s the same in other parts of London, but here in the north-east we have our standards. ‘Israel is literally a fascist state. Literally criminal. Soon it won’t exist at all and that’s great’ We’d biked a fair distance, so we found a café that sold Dusty Knuckle croissants and settled in. My son read his book while I eavesdropped on the conversation between three interesting-looking youngish people at the next table. Interesting because they all looked so very typical it was almost surprising.

I suppose there must be someone somewhere in this nation of ours who was surprised by the news that our fellow citizens have a much lower sense of pride in our country than has ever previously been the case. This apparent fact was reported by the National Centre for Social Research, whose representative did not seem terribly distressed by the findings. In short, only 64 per cent of us have any sense of pride in our nation’s history (down from 86 per cent in 2013) and a little over half of our number are proud of our democratic system. What do they put in its place, these guardians of Now?

Police are hunting a ‘hooded figure’ who sprayed ‘no whites’ on the wall of a primary school in Birmingham. The coppers presumably have racial hatred in mind, but there could be a much more innocent explanation for that which otherwise would be simply a case of vandalism – or even one of laudable graffiti art which may, one day, sell for millions of pounds to a rich idiot devoid of discernment. The school is located in the Alum Rock area of the city, a ward which consists almost entirely of ‘BAME’ people, according to a city council factsheet. So it may be that the hooded figure with the spray can was simply stating a fact, much as perhaps you are inclined to do when looking at television adverts or trailers for new BBC drama series.

Are radical lesbians dictating what we can and cannot eat, through the offices of this very magazine? It would certainly seem to be the case. A year ago this month, Julie Bindel wrote on The Spectator’s website disparaging sourdough bread with even more venom than she reserves for her more usual targets, i.e. those men-lady people and er, men. What has happened since that vigorous diatribe is the gradual disappearance of sourdough from the shelves of our supermarkets, as if by official edict. Marks & Spencer used to be full of the stuff, but my two local stores no longer stock packaged sourdough and the same is true to only slightly less a degree with Waitrose. I will not bother mentioning any of the other supermarkets as I assume you are as unfamiliar with them as I am.

Not so long ago we went to politicians for politics and comedians for comedy. Today, like many others, I watch politicians for amusement and listen to comedians for their political insights. Whenever I want cheering up, I watch Kamala Harris riffing on a theme of her choice, or sometimes a Labour politician trying to explain why a woman can have a penis. By contrast Joe Rogan analyses political questions better than any of them, as does Noam Dworman, of New York’s Comedy Cellar. So it was that when the question of free speech returned again recently, I did not turn to the hilarious Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood, but instead to the sombre and sage Rowan Atkinson.

Ihad entirely missed the online furore in which my colleague Douglas Murray was engulfed recently and only found out about it through a dubious article on the Guardian website by Kenan Malik. So I was slow off the mark, the reason being that I never read Twitter and have not the slightest interest in what anybody has to say on that absurd forum. (This includes whatever is said by the several people on there who are pretending to be me, incidentally.) Missing out on Douglas’s misery was a fairly crushing blow: there is nothing one enjoys more than revelling in the misfortunes of a colleague, especially if that colleague is also a good friend. I am way past the age when schadenfreude first eclipsed sexual intercourse as my principal enjoyment in life.