Columns

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Our poor deluded MPs

They say that death and taxes are the only certainties in life. But I would add a couple more things to that list. ‘French rioting’ is one. And ‘MPs getting caught trying to make cash on the side’. This week a campaign group called Led by Donkeys released footage of a sting operation they have been running to try to trap MPs into agreeing to do consultancy work for a South Korean company. You may not be surprised to learn that the company does not actually exist. A number of MPs, however, clearly were. After some initial flirting, Gavin Williamson did not fall for it, though we can see from the beginning of the interview the horrific sight of him trying to be charming. It is like watching the Demon Headmaster on a date.

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Why No. 10 fears Boris’s banishment

Even now, months after he was forced to resign, Boris Johnson has a potency that no other British politician can match. Everything he says still catches the attention of Westminster and the media. Like Donald Trump, he enrages his enemies so much that they can seem obsessed. And rumours of a Boris restoration will not go away. ‘If he was six feet under in a coffin,’ says one minister, ‘he’d still have ambitions of a comeback.’ Some MPs do want to see his return to Downing Street, of course. ‘They may be noisy,’ says a member of government. ‘But they’re also small in number.’ Some of Johnson’s critics believe he will only stop being a threat to the government once he is out of parliament.

Rod Liddle

Childcare: an inconvenient truth

Wyndham Lewis once said that ‘the ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season’ – but that, of course, is not how they are seen by liberals today. They are regarded immutable, inviolable, permanent and not up for argument. This is especially the case when they are demonstrably counter-factual, such as in the claims that a rapist is a woman, or when they are truly stupid – such as it being OK for a black actor to play a white role but not for a white actor to play a black role. These are not simply the ‘clothes of a season’, we are told, but the inevitable consequence of Progress, and there will be no going back from them.  State-provisioned childcare is one such consequence of liberal ‘progress’. You will never hear anyone argue against it.

Matthew Parris

What I’ve learned from a lifetime of travelling

In the language of the Mapuche people of Patagonia, futa (I’m told) means ‘river’ and leufú means ‘big’. So Spanish--speaking Chile could have called it the Rio Grande but instead have kept the indigenous name, Futaleufú, for this sinuous, deep, swift-flowing river, hurling its clear turquoise waters at the black basalt that flanks its roaring gorges. That this is one of the finest white-water rafting and kayaking rivers in the world is uncontested. And the river has given its name to the small town nestling beneath snowy Andean peaks and glaciers, past which it flows. Before crossing the border into Argentina on a dirt road, six miles upriver, I spent a day in Futaleufú last week.

Lionel Shriver

The high price of low interest rates

You’ll recall that I’ve railed for years against zero interest rates, which transplanted a cancerous marrow into the very bones of the financial system. Originally a novel emergency expedience to shore up a fiscal skeleton riddled with osteoporosis in 2008, effectively free money was allowed to persist for an improbable 14 years. Not to forget, bank rates also plummeted in 2002, barely recuperating to a modest 5 per cent at last when the spectre of the end of the world shoved rates smack down to nothing. Brief expedience slid to long-term crutch. So we’ve really had two decades of central banks setting up lemonade stands on the corner: cups brimming with millions for five cents. Europe got downright dystopian with negative interest rates.

Douglas Murray

The joke is on America

I was brought up on Dan Quayle jokes. You know the ones – like the gag that the then vice-president had turned up in Latin America and apologised for not speaking Latin. Thankfully vice-presidents are no longer a laughing stock. Today we have Kamala Harris. Anyway, probably the most memorable line about Quayle was that people were surprised he was able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Yet recently such a feat has indeed come to seem extraordinary to the American right. Today’s Republicans seem to believe that America can have a foreign policy or a domestic policy, but not both. Just consider the main talking points on the American right relating to the war in Ukraine.

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Budget 2023: Restraint now, reward later?

The paradox of Rishi Sunak’s premiership is that even though he became Prime Minister because of the economy, it’s the issue on which many of his party disagree with him the most. He resigned as chancellor not because of partygate but because his fiscal conservatism was ‘fundamentally too different’ to Boris Johnson’s stance on the economy – tax less, borrow more. He lost the leadership contest last summer after he played down the prospect of imminent tax cuts. MPs flocked to his rival Liz Truss and only when her experiment imploded was he asked to clean up the mess.

Douglas Murray

The overuse and abuse of ‘fascism’

I would be very happy if I never had to hear the name Gary Lineker again. He was a vague presence in my childhood thanks to his playing the game of football and his advertising of a brand of delicious, obesity-inducing crisps. But after more than a week in which his name has dominated every news bulletin, I have serious Lineker-fatigue. I feel as one might had we just had a fortnight of discussion and talk of the collapse of major institutions due to a political view expressed by Russ Abbot. To speak plainly, I do not care to hear the views of a retired footballer or crisp-seller on the matter of immigration. Nor do I wish to hear the views of such a person on the Nazi genocide of European Jewry.

Cindy Yu

Michelle Yeoh and Britain’s invisible East Asians

This week Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian to win Best Actress at the Oscars – and not by playing a wise mentor, a martial arts fighter or an exotic villain, those classic Asian pigeonholes. No, the 60-year-old played a struggling immigrant mum in the mind-bending film Everything Everywhere All at Once, which also won Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Yeoh, who is Chinese-Malaysian, dedicated her acceptance speech to ‘all the little boys and girls who look like me’. You don’t need to be little to appreciate the moment, though. For much of my life, Asians have been firmly out of the spotlight. But in the past few years, there’s been a noticeable change in Hollywood, with far more films portraying East Asians, made by talented East Asian directors.

Rod Liddle

Why shouldn’t BBC staff express opinions?

There was a kind of peak BBC Radio 4 moment last week when the network put on a play called Bess Loves Porgy. As you might have guessed, this was a rewrite of Porgy and Bess, the twist being that Porgy was a black, disabled grime rap artist in south London. I hope it went down well with the millions of black, disabled grime rap artists in south London who are listeners to Radio 4. The network was, in the same week, continuing its serialisation of Georges – ‘Testament’s bold new adaptation of Alexander Dumas’ tale of racial intolerance’. They are absolutely obsessed with racism at R4, in a kind of mentally unhinged manner. I thought about these two plays while the ludicrous Garygate saga was playing out in the national media – and it made me tetchy and irritable.

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Why small boats are a big election issue

Rishi Sunak started the year with a speech announcing his five priorities. That was quickly followed by Keir Starmer, who sought to outbid him with five missions of his own. The Labour aim was to show more ambition: whereas the Prime Minister just wanted to get the ‘economy growing’, Starmer promised the fastest growth in the G7. This tactic has not had much resonance outside Westminster: a poll for The Spectator found that voters struggled to identify whose pledge was whose. There was, however, one exception: Sunak’s promise to ‘stop small boats’. Both Sunak and his Home Secretary see the virtue of a migration fight with Labour It’s one of the few issues on which voters see a real distinction between the two parties and what they would do.

Rod Liddle

What I make of Sue Gray

I am at a bit of a loss to understand the hoo-ha about the civil servant Sue Gray. She has been offered the role of Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, and many Tories suggest this implies that her investigation into those Downing Street parties may not have been wholly neutral. Where have these Tories been living for the past three decades? Of course it wasn’t wholly neutral. Almost the entire civil service – certainly in Westminster – loathes the Conservative party. Its members are, instead, hip and interminably liberal internationalist social-justice warriors. Sue Gray is probably among the moderates.

Matthew Parris

Why ‘safe routes’ to asylum can’t work

I have never met Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, but I have not the least doubt that his heart is in the right place. And that’s the problem. In the current and coming furore about small boat crossings and what to do about them, too many who comment are concerned to show that their heart is in the right place. Too few appear ready to contemplate the natural rather than the hoped-for consequences of stopping the government’s plan to deport those who come here without permission to a third country like Rwanda.

Lionel Shriver

Despotic social controls cost lives

Look, I realise you don’t want to read this column. I’m unenthusiastic about writing it. For most of us, any mention of Covid triggers a deep aversion and desperation to flee. Even recalling the uncanny tranquillity of the first you-know-what – the blue skies, the blazing sunshine, the serene silence in once-bustling London – makes me wince. Between the slow drip-feed of the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files and Rishi Sunak’s dubious Protocol breakthrough, most UK news consumers would have greeted last week’s headlines with a double-whammy of ‘Oh, no, not that again!’ – since the only subject that rivals Covid’s revulsion quotient for Brits is Northern Ireland. Waves of variants came and went, oblivious of state diktats.

Douglas Murray

Jonathan Coad and British TV’s most catastrophic interview

‘Coad. Coad.’ I wracked my brain. Distant bells began to tinkle as I turned the name over. As though performing a solo game of charades, I said to myself ‘Sounds like?’ And I landed on it. Jonathan Coad used to be known only to a small band of aficionados. Happily today he is almost a household name. This is because of his participation in what must be regarded, by some stretch, as the most catastrophic interview ever conducted on British television. And I have not forgotten about Michael Howard, Prince Andrew or Cathy Newman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuat8wBmMR4 This week Mr Coad was on GB News being questioned about Matt Hancock, WhatsApp, Isabel Oakeshott and the various other intrigues preoccupying us as our nation goes down the swannee.

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Rishi’s new momentum

When Rishi Sunak appeared in the House of Commons to outline the details of his new agreement on the Northern Ireland Protocol, one politician was conspicuous by his absence. Over the past few weeks, Boris Johnson had been warning that Sunak was making a mistake in his dealings with Brussels. His words were taken by MPs and journalists as evidence that he was preparing to lead the rebellion against a deal. But on the day, the would-be rebel leader was nowhere to be found. ‘It’s very Boris to march an army up a hill and then be missing in action,’ says a minister. Johnson’s retreat reflects the changing power balance in the party. A new Brexit deal had been viewed as a moment of peril for Sunak and an opportunity for Johnson.

Rod Liddle

Unmasking the truth about Covid

You want some tomatoes? Come up here, we’re inundated. We’ve got a tomato mountain. That’s because nobody in the north of England eats salad vegetables, yet the government keeps sending up vast lorry-loads of the stuff to stop us dying of diabetes. So much of what we were forbidden to say about Covid has turned out to have had considerable substance It’s an actual fact that nobody who lives north of Stamford, Lincs, has ever knowingly eaten cucumber. I watch the northerners sometimes in the Tesco at Chester-le-Street, shuffling hurriedly past the vegetable section, eyes averted, nervous lest a pak choi reach out and grab them.

Mary Wakefield

Why trans kids are now ‘coming out’ as animals 

It was announced last week that another gender has been added to the list: nominalgender. Most news sites reported this in the sort of proud way a zoo might announce the birth of an exciting animal, a baby Komodo dragon maybe – as if the gender had somehow hatched and was waiting to be adopted. You are nominalgender ‘if your gender is so much just you that no one else can even experience it’, I read. You’re xenogender if you feel more akin to animals or plants or foods than humans A gender no one else can experience? That sounds almost appealing.

Douglas Murray

Thomas Jefferson and the death of wisdom

In recent weeks I have been trying out a mental exercise. Perhaps you might join me? Cast your mind back to 1999. We were standing on the dawn of a new millennium. True, there was a strange fear that all the computers might crash because of a bug called Y2K. But aside from that there seemed to be a tremendous optimism. One of the biggest causes for this was the nature of information technology: specifically, the internet. Imagine if someone had said to you then: ‘We are heading into a world where almost anything can be read at the click of a mouse. Almost all the great books will be available free online. Almost any quote or reference can be found at the press of a few buttons. Oh and anyone in the world can speak to anyone else, swap information and solve problems.

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Sunak’s Brexit gamble

Since Britain voted to leave the European Union, every prime minister has had to grapple with the conundrum of the Irish border. How can Brexit be delivered, while protecting Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom and avoiding a land border with the EU? The hope is that the DUP will refrain from coming out against a Sunak deal even if they fail to endorse it Theresa May tried to solve the dilemma with the Chequers agreement, which would have kept the whole of the UK in an effective customs union with Brussels. It ended her premiership. Boris Johnson opted to let Great Britain differ from EU rules, which excluded Northern Ireland and created a de facto border in the Irish sea.