Columns

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Has Putin saved Boris?

It was with some relief that I heard that Labour’s Diane Abbott was opposed to the Russian invasion of Croatia, because you cannot always tell with the far left what way they are going to swing. The Stop the War mob, along with 11 serving Labour MPs, have been anxious to exonerate Vladimir Putin and, in the usual fashion, blame the West. Their Russophilia has easily survived the end of communism and the transformation of Russia into a fascist state. But Croatia presents additional problems for lefties – and I know many former communists who will not visit Croatia because of the role of the Ustase during the second world war: their loss, in my opinion, as it is a beautiful country full of people who wish they were Austrians, which is a noble aspiration.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Sanctions on Putin will hit Britain’s cost of living. Are we ready?

No British soldiers will go to fight in Ukraine. The UK’s military involvement will be limited to weapons shipments and more forces to Nato’s eastern flank to try to deter further Russian revanchism. Despite this, domestic opinion in Britain — and other western countries — will be hugely significant in this conflict. The West is trying to use sanctions to influence Vladimir Putin’s behaviour. However, there are clear limits to deterrence through economic measures, as Niall Ferguson writes in his article. The threat of sanctions was not enough to stop Putin unilaterally recognising the two breakaway republics in the Donbas, Donetsk and Luhansk, and agreeing to send troops there.

Mary Wakefield

Women-only train carriages insult us all

Sooner or later, somewhere in the UK, we’ll have trains with women-only coaches. It’s an idea which keeps rolling around, and though the train people complain — it’s unworkable, unenforceable — it makes no odds. It’s too seductive an idea for a progressive politician. Jeremy Corbyn was tempted by it back in 2015, and now the Scottish transport secretary, one Jenny Gilruth, is considering it. She often feels unsafe on trains, she says, because they’re ‘full of drunk men’, especially the train to Fife, which is her constituency. ‘I just want our railways to be safe places for women to travel.’ I’ve nothing against ladies’ coaches in principle. In my mind’s eye they look appealing.

Douglas Murray

The tyranny of Trudeau

Early in the corona era the historian David Starkey gave some thoughts on Covid. ‘We’ve got a Chinese virus,’ he said, ‘and we’ll finish up with a Chinese society.’ I remember at the time thinking the phrase neat, but doubtful. Fast forward a couple of years and the doubts have eroded. Although Britain seems to have avoided becoming a permanent Covid state (and is indeed one of the first societies to try leaping out of the Covid age), other parts of the West certainly do seem to be trying to meet the CCP more than halfway. Foremost among them is Justin Trudeau’s Canada. There is no shortage of things going on in the world at the moment. But you know that the world is in an especially perilous place when even Canada has become interesting.

Rod Liddle

In defence of Shakespeare

My most important new year’s resolution was cast aside this week. I had vowed that in 2022 I would eschew writing about the infinite idiocies of the woke and concentrate instead on bringing to light important, worthy causes. In other words, it was a pledge to make the world a better place, instead of just moaning. Wednesday gave me an excellent opportunity to put this plan of mine into action, because it was ‘World Spay Day’. A group of animal rights charities had come together to nominate this day in order to raise awareness about the many, many millions of cats in the world that need spaying.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

We blew our chance to befriend Putin

You have the advantage over me. It may be that you are reading this now in your makeshift fallout shelter, hair falling out and bleeding from the gums as the nuclear winter descends. More likely you are saying, rather smugly, to your neighbour: ‘I knew he was taking the piss. He’s a right one, that Putin.’ Or perhaps Vlad’s forces are already in London, having swept through western Europe in about eight hours, the Germans for once outdoing the French with their alacrity to surrender. Well, that should see an end to Stonewall and the Tavistock Clinic, no? Every cloud, etc.

Matthew Parris

Taking Ukraine would finish Putin

‘Never interrupt your enemy,’ said Napoleon, ‘when he is making a mistake.’ A Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine would prove (perhaps, by the time this Spectator is published, ‘will’ prove) a terrible mistake. Were it not for the death and despoliation such a mistake would bring — an outcome one could never welcome — the response to Vladimir Putin’s implicit threats should surely be: bring it on! When we told Russia they’d only be hurting themselves, did we not mean it?

Katy Balls

No one has done more to save Boris than Keir Starmer

Boris Johnson has a lot of people to thank for his survival in 10 Downing Street, but Keir Starmer should be at the top of the list. The Labour leader whipped his MPs to side with the government when lockdown votes looked tricky. Labour even saved Johnson from a defeat in the Commons over vaccine passports. But Starmer’s greatest service came last month, on a day that could have finished Johnson for good. Members of the 2019 crop of Tory MPs had met to discuss their problems with the Prime Minister. The scene was set for an old-fashioned Conservative regicide. But just as senior Tories began to tell journalists that a confidence vote was imminent, the Labour party announced that Christian Wakeford, a Red Wall MP, had crossed the floor.

Lionel Shriver

Our monetary bubble is about to burst

OK, I finally watched Netflix’s Don’t Look Up. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it — especially before its effective subtitle for us thickos, THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR CLIMATE CHANGE, YOU F-ING MORONS. Otherwise, the film might have playfully dramatised the more general phenom of fiddling with celebrity bodices while Rome burns. The comet at which I’m looking up could arrive far more immediately than perilous global warming. Money is in trouble. I’m not only referring to a cost-of-living crisis. Money itself is in trouble. Let’s contemplate, to coin a phrase, a basket of deplorables. US inflation just hit 7.5 per cent, the highest in 40 years. UK inflation, now 5.5 per cent and the highest in 30 years, is expected to reach 7 per cent by spring.

Douglas Murray

Work is no place for your ‘whole self’

One of the few things I have learned in this life is that Dante Alighieri was wrong. In the Inferno portion of The Divine Comedy (the only part most people read), the great Florentine poet describes hell as having just nine circles. Whereas whenever I survey matters it has always seemed me that this figure is on the low side. In fact I would go further. I would say that if you look down there is always a circle below every circle. The other week I wrote about our nation’s ambassador to the Ukraine — a woman who seems to think that expressions of vulnerability and not-quite-coping are somehow helpful public attributes in her job. What I did not get into is that Melinda Simmons is not alone. She is part of a movement.

Thursday

Katy Balls

The Tory warlords who will determine Boris’s fate

When news broke over the weekend that former minister Nick Gibb had become the 14th Tory MP to publicly call for Boris Johnson to resign, cabinet loyalists were furious. They weren’t just concerned about the growing number of no-confidence letters — they were angered by what they saw as a co-ordinated effort by ‘One Nation’ Conservatives to oust the Prime Minister. One Nation Tories, a 40-strong parliamentary group, have long been regarded with suspicion by Johnson’s inner circle. ‘They’re the government’s most obvious and vocal critics,’ says a member of the whips’ office. They tend to occupy traditional shire seats or sit in Lib Dem/Tory marginals. During the Brexit referendum they veered towards Remain.

Mary Wakefield

Is Britain heading for an opioid crisis?

Almost everyone here that I’ve spoken to about it assumes that the opioid crisis in the United States won’t ever come to the UK. Yes, the problem there is accelerating. Drug overdose deaths in America are now at more than 100,000 a year. A few days ago the Lancet predicted 1.2 million dead by 2029 but… it couldn’t happen here. We hold up those three sacred letters — NHS — like a talisman to ward off the evil. We tut about Big Pharma and its undue influence in Washington, we remove the Sackler name from galleries and museums, and then we get back to watching America overdose on TV. The opioid crisis in the US is almost its own entertainment genre these days, with any number of documentaries and dramas available to stream.

Rod Liddle

Nicola Sturgeon’s last laugh

I was delighted to discover that the University of Bristol has been advising students how to address those who identify as ‘catgender’. These are people who ‘strongly identify with cats’ or may have ‘delusions relating to being a cat’. Apparently these individuals ‘may use nya/nyan pronouns’. Nya is the Japanese word for ‘miaow’. I am not sure why they should use the Japanese word for miaow, rather than our own perfectly good word, although I understand that a lot of young people are very interested in certain aspects of Japanese culture, such as anime and manga (although not other aspects of Japanese culture such as discipline, deference and fortitude). Perhaps this is where they have got it from, then.

Douglas Murray

In defence of bad jokes

I was once at a terrific Shabbat dinner where late in the evening one of the other guests suddenly said: ‘OK, who’s got the best Holocaust joke?’ Even people who know something about Jewish humour might be surprised by this. I said that one Holocaust-related joke I knew was the story from the 1970s of the Monty Python crew being invited to Germany to film a television series there. The Germans had called the Pythons to say that of course they had no humour of their own in Germany and would like to import some. The Pythons agreed, arrived in Munich and were promptly taken to Dachau. In retrospect, this must have been some kind of signal from their hosts that they were accepting of their history and wanted there to be no awkwardness.

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Kamala Harris and the problem of affirmative action

In lauding Joe Biden’s promise to fill the upcoming vacancy on the US Supreme Court with a black woman, last week the commentator Jonathan Capehart effused on PBS NewsHour that any black woman was bound to duplicate the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer’s famous pragmatism, because ‘there is no more pragmatic people in the world, of necessity, than a black woman (sic)’. With no other knowledge of the prospective nominee beyond her race and sex, Capehart trotted out confidently that she will ‘probably be more impressive, have more qualifications, be more brilliant than the folks who have come in before her, because people used her race to downgrade and belittle and not think much of her simply because she was black’.

Douglas Murray

Is our Ukrainian ambassador OK?

I know the following sentence is going to get me into trouble. Still, there are times when you wonder whether highly feminised people should perform certain jobs. I am not saying ‘women’ and I am not saying ‘always’, just ‘times’. Still, I can hear you say: what sort of a dinosaur are you? Well, join me in the Jurassic period for a moment by contemplating the social media activity of our lead diplomatic representative and ambassador in the Ukraine, Melinda Simmons. Simmons is in a rather important position at present, yet her social-media account suggests otherwise. Here is Simmons a few months ago, writing on Instagram about a photograph of her at a podium with a chaplain to one side and a military guard at the other.

Matthew Parris

The Chancellor’s horrible task ahead

Whether Rishi Sunak is prime minister or still chancellor this spring, fate is handing him a poisoned chalice. Looking back, I cannot remember a time when the British people were readier to believe that responsibility for their welfare lies in the hands of the state. Looking ahead, I see a time fast approaching when the state will appear unusually powerless to help us. The gap between what people have come to expect and what government can deliver has never been wider. And at least in part, it’s a virus that’s to blame. The pandemic from which we’re emerging has elevated the role and power of the state, reliance upon the state, the moral justification for state intervention, and trust in the state, to levels unprecedented since the second world war.

Rod Liddle

Boris will never recover from partygate

When a political party is hit by a crisis, the tendency these days is for both the politicians and their supporters to pretend that there isn’t a crisis at all, hunker down inside a comfortable state of denial and blame it all on a hostile media. To a degree, this has always happened — but social media has unquestionably exacerbated the process, to the extent that at any one moment a vast number of people are living under a bizarre delusion from which only much later do they emerge blinking into the sunlight. The polarising effect of social media and its echo--chamber properties have led to it becoming little more than a vast conduit for confirmation bias, and this informs the way in which politicians react to crises.

James Forsyth

Boris Johnson is drifting

Tory MPs only have one topic of conversation: the fate of Boris Johnson. They huddle together in offices in Portcullis House, comparing notes, assessing the Prime Minister’s survival prospects. At the time of writing, there is a sense in Westminster that attempts to oust Johnson have been delayed; that the danger for him will flare up again after the police end their investigation into Downing Street parties or after the local elections in May. But Johnson is not being helped by the fact that many of the hints of favour or policy change he has dropped to MPs as he has tried to shore up his position have not come to much. This is causing irritation and making MPs more inclined to send in no-confidence letters.

Thursday

Julie Burchill

The ceaseless self-pity of cyclists

I know that all must have prizes in the Victimisation Olympics these days, but when I heard a bicycle-rider on Radio 5 Live this week complaining about being ‘dehumanised’ and ‘othered’, I really knew we’d reached peak woo-woo with the ceaseless self-pity of cyclists. ‘What’s the magic word?’ our mums used to ask us. Today it’s not ‘Please’ but ‘Mine!’ as various groups jostle for attention and funding. If you’re in a wheelchair I get your point — ramps all round! But it is ludicrous for those voluntarily on two wheels rather than forced to be on four to act all aggrieved. It’s pedestrians and drivers who need protection from them.