Columns

Wednesday

Katy Balls

What reshuffle season has in store

Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak have something in common: both men are under pressure to reshuffle their front benches and pick a final pre-election team. ‘The agitating tends to be done by those who want jobs, rather than those who have them,’ sighs one member of the Labour leader’s team. But with an election due next year – whether it’s in the spring or autumn – Sunak and Starmer know they have one last chance to refresh their front benches before going to the polls. Sunak’s mission is to refresh a tired, squabbling party to make it look like a new government A pre-election reshuffle isn’t just about managing teams and egos: it means choosing the personalities, tone and message on which to campaign.

Rod Liddle

The myth of intersectional politics

A few years ago I mentioned the profusion of moaning women on BBC Radio 4, after a longish car journey during which the station had broadcast pretty much nothing but moaning women over six and a half hours. I am glad to say that the proportion of moaning women has subsequently reduced to about 65 per cent of the station’s output, the rest of it now being taken up with infuriated and horribly subjugated black people. Watching the scales fall from the eyes of these idiots is something quite delicious to behold When I unwisely turned on the radio this afternoon it was to hear a young black lady tell her little brother: ‘They may be beating us, killing us, but that is no reason to give up’, before her father bemoaned ‘this godforsaken country’.

Lionel Shriver

The unspeakable truth about housing

Earlier this year I was a panellist for Any Questions, and a young man in the audience asked what could possibly be done to make it easier for Britons his age to buy currently unaffordable property. I said what none of my fellow panellists was foolish enough to venture on the radio: scarcity always raises prices, and the UK’s housing shortage is overwhelmingly caused by high rates of immigration. Reduce newcomers, ease the problem. I’ve appeared in enough public forums to read the room. A sudden pin-drop silence followed by murmurous resettling in chairs conveyed shock, then palpable unease. Clearly I had just broken a fierce social taboo. Once upon a time, taboo-breaking entailed saying something incorrect, tasteless or immoral.

Matthew Parris

Our God complex

Pantomime is meant to be silly and perhaps superficial, but fun. One does not (for example) join an audience for Cinderella to be driven into deep contemplation of life, morality and the cultural roots of human duty. But that is what happened to me last Saturday afternoon while watching the most marvellous performance at Nevill Holt of Rossini’s La Cenerentola, ossia La bontà in trionfo (‘Cinderella, or Goodness Triumphant’).

Douglas Murray

Joe Biden is not OK

One of the most reliable standards in international comedy has long been the outstanding ineloquence of American politicians. In this place I recently summoned up the golden memory of Dan Quayle. But if you look at the record, there was similar – far less justified – tittering at Ronald Reagan. Closer to our own time comedians and others had much fun with George W. Bush, Donald Trump and indeed almost everybody who has ever risen to the top of the Republican party. Kamala Harris picks up big subjects then says something simultaneously excitable, unfollowable and banal Something striking about this is that rarely is there any similar tittering over the ineloquence of American politicians of the left.

Wednesday

Katy Balls

The by-election that should most worry ministers

When the political cabinet met on Tuesday, by-elections were on the agenda. The Prime Minister is facing four of them. David Warburton, suspended from the party last year over a sex and cocaine ‘sting’, is the latest to step down. On 20 July the Tories will try to defend his constituency of Somerton and Frome, Boris Johnson’s old seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip and Nigel Adams’s Selby and Ainsty. Despite announcing she was also quitting on social media, Nadine Dorries is taking her time to trigger a vote in Mid Bedfordshire – and the whips’ office is assuming that she may hang on all the way to the next election.

Rod Liddle

The trouble with teachers

A teacher once told me that he couldn’t stand Pakistanis ‘because of the smell’. I was 13 at the time and it was during a classroom debate about immigration: he was very much agin, I was for. It struck me, suddenly, that he was very stupid – an astonishing realisation, as I was accustomed to believing teachers to be full of wisdom, a delusion inculcated in me by my parents. This all took place in a very large comprehensive school in the north-east of England – a good school by and large, but almost entirely white. Of the 1,800 pupils only one was not: a quiet lad of Chinese Malay extraction, I think, who was known to all the pupils and a good few of the teachers as ‘Fu Manchu’. In fact, there was another non-white face in the crowd, but we didn’t know it at the time.

Douglas Murray

The diversity trap

If anyone reading this ever bought shares in the diversity racket, then I would suggest you start dumping them now. Not that I would blame you for having bought them in the first place. ‘Diversity’ has been the great mantra of our age. Like ‘equality’, it is one of those words set up to be impossible to oppose. What even is the opposite of diversity? Enforced sameness? Monotony? It is hard to say. Nevertheless, everyone was encouraged to go along with the diversity racket. It didn’t matter who was in charge – Labour or the Conservatives. Diversity was said to be one of the defining virtues of Britain. Almost the aim of the place, in fact.

Mary Wakefield

Should we ban drones from our national parks?

I have a plan for my old age. Now that we all might live for a century or so, feeling redundant and bemused, it’s important to prepare and I have. In my eighties I will be a destroyer of drones. All drones will fall within my remit but my speciality will be hobby drones, the remote-control quadcopters that whine over the English countryside, up and down the coast and round and round above our national parks. To any passerby I will seem innocuous; just your average rambling octogenarian. But tucked away beside my Freedom Pass will be a catapult and the case containing my varifocals will be heavy with 6mm steel ball bearings. I turned and saw the little horror skimming the waves, a blot against the bright sky The plan came to me a few days ago as I was floating in the North Sea.

Wednesday

James Heale

Will Ulez be the undoing of Sadiq Khan?

London faces its seventh mayoral election next year and, yet again, the Tories are having trouble finding a suitable candidate. The publication this week of the final shortlist – Susan Hall, Daniel Korski and Mozammel Hossain – was accompanied by accusations of stitch-ups, counter-claims and legal threats between two of the defeated candidates. Sadiq Khan’s aides have enjoyed watching it all play out; Labour leads in London by a whopping 40 points. So a Tory victory next May is unlikely – but still not impossible. Air quality in the once-smoggy capital is the cleanest it’s been for centuries, but Khan has declared a pollution ‘emergency’.

Rod Liddle

The judgment of Carla Foster

‘No one has the right to judge you’ was one of the last posts made on Facebook by Staffordshire ‘mum’ (as the papers are calling her) Carla Foster shortly before discovering that, strictly speaking, this wasn’t quite true. It may well be the mantra by which everybody lives their lives these days, used to justify a myriad of anti-social behaviour stuff and bad life choices and stupidity, but it is in general a delusion. Judging people is an important part of maintaining a stable society – and we all do it. More pertinently, though, in the case of Ms Foster, it was Mr Justice Pepperall who did the judging at Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court and, hours after that Facebook post, sentenced her to two years and four months.

Lionel Shriver

The weather isn’t ‘climate change’

I was in New York while the smoke from Canadian wildfires filtered over the city for three days last week, and I took a guilty pleasure in the aesthetic thrill. Midday, the light assumed the roseate hue of sunset. A cloudless sky appeared overcast, and the ghostly sun was so occluded one could look straight at it. Honestly, the atmosphere of anomaly was electrifying. New Yorkers advertised their sense of snow-day exceptionalism by driving even more atrociously than usual. Despite hysterical health warnings to batten ourselves in our homes with closed windows, I played three daily hours of tennis throughout the respiratory emergency – though it was nice to have a ready excuse when I botched another cross-court forehand.

Matthew Parris

Why Conservatives must get behind Rishi

The hubbub about Boris Johnson is blocking the view. He is, of course, an easy and undemanding topic of conversation. His behaviour is, of course, unedifying. His unsuitability for office is beyond question. And his capacity to horrify, amuse, disgust or worry us appears limitless. So here we all are again, talking about ‘Boris’. And who am I to complain? I’ve been writing all this for at least a decade, the well of my indignation never runs dry, and – frankly – Johnson has put food on my and many a fellow commentator’s table for almost as long as we can remember. We’d miss him.

Douglas Murray

It’s been a bad week for former political leaders

The week of the three downfalls has been an interesting one. Boris Johnson resigning from parliament, Donald Trump going to court to face serious charges, Nicola Sturgeon arrested as part of a probe into SNP finances. I wouldn’t like to prejudge any of these cases, for I am – secretly – a fair-minded person. Of course, had Sturgeon not been involved, various leftist writers would now be penning articles claiming a great linkage between these events. Probably about the downfall of ‘populism’. But since Saint Nicola is involved this will not happen. Because as I have noted here before, our age sees all nationalism as poison, except for the Scottish and Irish varieties, which are inexplicably progressive and just.

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Why Rishi Sunak fears the Covid inquiry

A former Labour spin doctor recently offered some advice for governments considering a public inquiry. Rule No. 1: Don’t. But if ‘you’re stupid enough’ to do so: don’t make the inquiry independent, don’t give it powers, know the conclusion you want, set the remit accordingly and appoint a chair who knows the brief. Unfortunately for Rishi Sunak, the inquiry he has inherited from Boris Johnson’s time in Downing Street ticks none of these boxes. ‘It’s basically going to show that everyone hated each other. The pettiness will be embarrassing’ Even before its official launch this week, there were signs of trouble. The brief is to provide a factual account of the Covid-19 response across the UK and to identify lessons about preparing for future pandemics.

Rod Liddle

What terfs get wrong

The recreational use of psychedelic drugs, such as LSD or peyote, declined with some rapidity from the 1980s onwards as drug-users instead snorted up cocaine’s great gift of untrammelled narcissism. And yet the desire to live in a weird fantasy land did not quite disappear – far from it. Today, if you tell people that you are a pink giraffe, they are compelled by society to believe you and not judge you as being a deluded lunatic. Her response to Billy Bragg showed that Rowling is also bunkered down in her spurious victimhood silo We no longer need Carlos Castaneda, Ken Kesey or the ghastly Timothy Leary: we have created a counter-rational fantasy world for ourselves without the help of acid or psilocybins. This much is evident every day on social media and in our newspapers.

Douglas Murray

The inversion of history

It is 18 years since the last Colditz drama on British television, which apparently means we need a new one. And the times being what they are, it appears that the drama will have to reflect the values of our little cultural-revolutionary period. There is an effort to rip up our own myths while inventing wholly new myths about other groups of people Like most adaptations of already well-known stories, this one will be based on a book by Ben Macintyre. He is a fine popular regurgitator of history who has previously brought to public notice such things as the hitherto untold story of a spy named Kim Philby. The television adaptation of that book, A Spy Among Friends, was well-acted, though marred by having a working-class northern woman as an MI5 officer.

Mary Wakefield

The kids aren’t ‘trans’ – they just don’t want to grow up

If we rule out the notion that people have ‘gendered souls’ at odds with their biological sex – and we do, absolutely, rule that out – then there still has to be some explanation for the unstoppable rise in the numbers of young people who call themselves trans. A survey of secondary school teachers in England has found that nearly 75 per cent say they now have at least one trans pupil. What’s behind it? Well here, to celebrate Pride month, is my theory. I’ve spent many terrible rubber-necking evenings in the online trans world and my strong impression is that the whole phenomenon is (amongst other things) a desperate desire to remain childlike.

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

The case against Ulez – by a cyclist

Whether you’re more afraid of the forces of order or the forces of chaos is generally a matter of disposition. A natural anti-authoritarian who despises being told what to do – especially when told to do something stupid – I’m more horrified by excesses of order. Granted, my greater fear of the state may simply betray that I’ve largely lived in an orderly western world, and after a few dog-eat-dog nights of mayhem and carnage I might change my tune. Nevertheless, during the Covid lockdowns, for example, I was less distressed by the odd neighbour who dared to invite a friend to tea than by most Britons’ blind, bovine compliance with an economically self-destructive, socially disastrous, politically despotic and medically idiotic regime.

Wednesday

James Heale

The battle with the Blob

Most prime ministers fall out with the civil service at some point. David Cameron attacked the ‘enemies of enterprise’; Tony Blair spoke of ‘the scars on my back’ from battling the public sector. But the premiership of Boris Johnson brought relations to a new low, with prorogation and partygate fuelling paranoia on both sides. Under Rishi Sunak, tensions have been reignited by Dominic Raab’s resignation and the Cabinet Office’s attempt to hand over Johnson’s pandemic diaries to the Covid inquiry. For some Conservatives, the mandarins involved in these dramas are the embodiment of ‘the Blob’. The etymology of this term shows how Tory criticisms of the civil service have changed throughout their time in office.