Columns

I have Netflix, and in particular the series Maid, to thank for the startling discovery of how easy it is to slide into a form of man-hating — not a righteous feminist rage, but a sort of dopey, palliative, unthinking misandry. Maid was released last month, and it’s already one of the stand-out Netflix successes of 2021. (It was announced last week that it’s set to take over Queen’s Gambit as the most-watched Netflix miniseries.) The show is catnip for women, and after several late nights, letting one episode tip into another, I can see why. It’s based on the real-life memoir of a woman in the US who fled an abusive boyfriend and supported herself and her small daughter by working as a cleaner.

I was intrigued to learn that Kamala Harris, the Vice President of the US, is worried about racist trees. I have always held trees in the deepest suspicion: it is their long-abiding silences which worry me. As we know from Black Lives Matter, ‘Silence is violence’ — and trees, for literally aeons, have been conspicuously silent on the matter of white privilege and racism. To follow this logic, then, trees are inherently violent. Nasty, leafy bastards. This certainly seems to be what Ms Harris thinks. During a visit to Nasa, instead of asking those space boys how to reverse park a shuttle, she instead became obsessed with keeping an eye on trees.

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is giving local residents £25,000 grants to enable them to change the names of the roads in which they live. Some Londoners, I believe, find it uncomfortable to live in a street which has a name redolent of colonialism. Fair enough. I hope, though, that Sadiq will also give grants to right-wing white neighbourhoods of the capital so that the residents there can change the names of roads to make them more redolent of colonialism — such as Cecil Rhodes Avenue, or Zulus 0 British Army 5 Crescent. Or perhaps install a name which commemorates the mayor himself, such as Vacuous Dwarf Close. This war on history, tradition, rationality, logic and complexity (known in short as ‘woke’) continues apace.

Thornton Wilder remarked that there are individuals who fall in love with an idea long before its appointed rendezvous with history. We hurl ourselves against the indifference of the age. It is now four decades since one of my first columns was published in London’s Evening Standard. In it I proposed an idea of which (if you read on) you’ll hear more. I got no response. It’s nearly 20 years since I wrote essentially the same piece as a whimsical side column for the Times. Labour’s Alistair Darling had called for debate on the idea. It never happened and my column attracted little notice. Fifteen years later, excited by a competition the Wolfson Foundation ran for the best proposal for implementing the idea, I wrote a serious 1,000-word column for the Times.

On the wooden jetty from which the ferry used to depart for the little island of Utoya, there stood for a while a small obelisk around which people deposited flowers. ‘If one man can show this much hate, imagine how much love we can show together’ was the marvellously trite inscription on the obelisk: vapid and close to meaningless, in either Norwegian or English. Utoya lies in the Tyrifjorden Lake about 45 minutes north of Oslo and it is where the Labour party’s ‘Workers’ Youth League’ once held its summer camps — until one afternoon in July 2011 when a man called Anders Breivik turned up, heavily armed. Breivik murdered 69 people on Utoya, 33 of them under the age of 18.

Many negative qualities are ascribed to politicians — name-calling, absenteeism, drunkenness — but you rarely hear of my favourite political emotion: petulance, which has caused us so much public entertainment in the political arena and promises to cause so much more. Think of Dominic Raab refusing to accept his demotion until he was made Deputy Prime Minister; the spat between Liz Truss and Dominic Raab over who gets to stay at Chevening; Angela Rayner’s scathing letter on Commons notepaper to a Brighton shoe shop after it failed to put a pair of £195 heels aside for her; the spectacular Starmer meltdown in February when Sir Keir went ‘puce’ and kept hissing at Boris Johnson ‘It’s not true, it’s not true!

I have not watched the BBC’s new period drama Ridley Road because I knew it would be impossible for the corporation to commission any series about anything without grafting onto it facile and usually pig-ignorant observations which suggest that history always reveals that the BBC left-liberal mindset is right about everything. So it seems to be from reviews I have seen from the likes of Melanie Phillips and one or two others. Ridley Road concerns the 62 Group’s struggles against fascism and anti-Semitism in east London in the 1960s, and especially Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement (NSM).

A report by MPs into the spread of the coronavirus has concluded that the government’s approach constituted one of this country’s worst ever public health failures. The MPs say the early fondness for herd immunity plus the delay in locking the country down ended up costing thousands of lives. What makes this worse is that everything the government did was done at the suggestion of its leading scientific advisers, Whitty, Vallance and Sage. And so one feels another slippage of faith. On this occasion relating to the imperium not of government, but of scientists. I know some people will be amazed that I should have any remaining trust in government scientific advisers. But everybody has to trust somebody, and I tend to trust people who know about things I do not.