Columns

Thursday

James Forsyth

Can Boris beat the vaccine passport rebels?

No prime minister wants to be dependent on the opposition to get the government’s business through the House of Commons. But it is likely that Boris Johnson will be in this position when it comes to ‘Covid status certificates’, other-wise known as domestic vaccine passports. More than 40 Tory MPs have already signed a pledge to oppose them, and the government’s majority is 80. ‘It is just down to Starmer. If he whips against, Boris will lose,’ says one of the leaders of the Tory rebellion. The policy has hit a nerve in the Conservative party. The view in government is that these MPs are unlikely to change their minds. They won’t be assuaged by promises to limit the scheme to mass events or anything like that.

Lionel Shriver

Why fear a society that’s tearing itself apart?

In my teens, rubbishing the implacable edifice of the United States felt like kicking a tank in trainers. Richard Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ was patriotic. Railing about my country’s disgraceful historical underbelly — slavery, the Native American genocide — seemed edgy. Fast-forward, and in the West trashing your own country has become a central preoccupation of the ruling class. University administrators, corporate board members and media pundits compete with one another over who can denounce their disgusting society with more fervour. Shame, or what passes for it, is the new ostentation. America’s own President decries his country’s ‘systemic racism’.

Matthew Parris

Vaccine passports are a ticket to freedom

In principle I’m in favour of vaccination passports, and don’t understand how — again in principle — anyone could be against the theory. One can have severe doubts about whether our NHS, pubs, theatres, sports grounds and restaurants would actually be capable of operating such a scheme, yet at the same time think it would be an excellent thing if they were. To me it seems not just sensible and fair but obvious that access to jobs or spaces where there is an enhanced risk of viral transmission might be restricted to people who could demonstrate a high degree of immunity. I’d add that in order for the idea to command widespread public acceptance, it might be best to wait until anybody who wants to be vaccinated has had free access to vaccination.

Rod Liddle

The dilemma of vaccination

We have a government which is basically libertarian in its instincts, despite its current affection for telling us what we can and can’t do on a daily basis. This seems like a paradox or a non-sequitur, but it isn’t really, because in a sense it is a coalition government between libertarian politicians and a big-statist regulatory medical clergy. It is an interesting political marriage, a marriage of expediency. And it will soon become very strained. The government is about to run into big problems over its rollout of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which many scientists believe could have a causal link to the prevalence of blood clots in a very small minority of the people who take it. The European Medicines Agency is about to announce the official finding into all this.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Why will nobody publish my religious cartoons?

I am having very little success in getting my collection of cartoons of great religious founders published. Perhaps it is because I am not known as a draughtsman and publications are notoriously conservative in hiring new talent. It is all very dispiriting. My drawings are, I think, puckish and yet respectful. For example, there is one of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, the man somehow regarded as divine by Rastafarians. He is depicted in a game of ten-pin bowling with Benito Mussolini, the controversial former leader of Italy. Both men seem to be enjoying themselves — Benito is holding a pint of lager while Selassie is biting into an almond Magnum, waiting their turn to roll.

Mary Wakefield

In defence of Flannery O’Connor

I have a thought for the students of Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland: this Easter, why not resurrect Flannery O’Connor? Why not show that you appreciate America’s greatest Catholic writer even if the poor, frightened duds in charge of you do not? Last summer, the university’s president, the Revd Brian F. Linnane SJ, removed O’Connor’s name from its halls of residence. The New Yorker had published a pompous piece about racism in O’Connor’s private correspondence, the George Floyd protests had begun and so… best not make the students uncomfortable, said Father Linnane. The cosmic joke of this has stayed with me ever since.

Douglas Murray

Want to see your friends? Call it a protest

I wonder exactly when we agreed that it is more of a priority to gather with strangers than to meet loved ones? You might chart a number of moments, but the presumption seems to have become fixed. You might say that it started before the pandemic with the idea that truanting from school is worthy, even admirable, so long as it is done in opposition to climate change. Indeed as we learned this week, if you leave school for long enough then you may eventually have a statue erected to you in an English town known for its cathedral and school but not for its university. If you were an adult you could close down major cities, prevent newspapers from leaving the print-works and much more for the same cause. So long as you were saving the planet.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

My eight ‘good reasons’ for leaving the country

We commemorated one year of lockdown by sacrificing a goat to the Highly Revered Virus Deity on a hastily assembled altar in the back garden, in front of a blazing fire. We then drank a little of the creature’s blood and danced naked around a pentagram, delivering incantations to the Covid Divine — Oh Great Lord Of The Slightly Ticklish Persistent Cough. Vaccines were presented and respirators borne aloft. It all seemed a bit rough on the goat, frankly, which had done nobody any harm. But it was preferable to the usual rituals which we are these days enjoined to observe — the endless minute silences for everybody who has died of anything ever, taking a knee, banging saucepans to thank nurses for turning up to work.

Lionel Shriver

How to make the facts fit the narrative

Distracted by vaccine warfare, for once the British haven’t leapt onto America’s latest bandwagon of fake self-excoriation. Following last week’s massacre of eight people at three massage parlours on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia, the US mainstream media has flown into ecstasies of self-loathing over the country’s racist attacks on East Asians. The rise in anti-Asian bigotry — naturally — is all Trump’s fault. If Americans blame the Chinese for the pandemic, that’s not because the disease actually did originate in China. Rather, it’s because the left’s much-missed nemesis kept calling Covid ‘the China virus’, thereby exploding a nascent prejudice to monstrous, murderous proportions. Granted, it looks terrible.

James Forsyth

Sturgeon fights on ­– but at what cost?

A year ago this week Alex Salmond was acquitted on all 13 charges in his sexual assault trial. In normal times the conclusion of the most significant political trial since the Thorpe affair in 1979 would have dominated the news for weeks. Instead, the story was overshadowed by the start of the UK’s first lockdown. But the aftershocks of this trial continue to rock politics in Scotland and beyond. A Holyrood committee this week concluded that Nicola Sturgeon had misled it regarding her conversation with Salmond at her house about the Scottish government’s inquiry into him. The committee, which has a pro-independence majority but not an SNP one, decided this by majority vote.

Matthew Parris

The sad decline of Britain’s buses

‘If anybody can write an interesting column about buses, Matthew,’ the then comment editor on the Times told me decades ago, ‘it’s you. And you’ve failed.’ Here goes again, because the government has just published an energetic 84-page report outlining a strategy for the future of English bus services. There’s even an affectionate foreword by Boris Johnson. Buses deserve our attention. Trams are newly fashionable but eye-wateringly expensive and in many ways, being less flexible, slower and more dangerous, a regression from buses. Many of the recommendations in Bus Back Better are sensible, though there’s the usual infestation of acronyms, consultations and new structures.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The new religion of the Church of England

With a heavy heart I must return once more to the subject of the Church of England. I recognise that is not a subject for everybody, and occasionally someone implies that it should not be a subject for me. But I am concerned about the fate of the national church because as the new religion heaves ever clearer into view, I realise that I prefer the old religion to the new one. I would rather attempts to influence the country’s morals were preached from a pulpit than through group stampede on Twitter. And though we haven’t heard much from actual pulpits for more than a year, the church hierarchy has not slumbered. It has been busying itself with the question of anti-racism.

Rod Liddle

The politicisation of Sarah Everard’s death

A woman called Jenny Jones, now elevated to Baroness Moonbeam, or something, in the House of Lords has proposed a 6 p.m. curfew for all men everywhere. This would prevent men from killing women on the streets. Mrs Moonbeam is a member of the Green party and presumably agrees with their manifesto which insists that men who identify as women are women and there’s an end to it. In which case all I would need to do is don a wig and take to the streets — and upon being apprehended by a policeman simply explain that my name was Loretta and I’d just popped out to do a spot of murdering, I mean shopping, officer. Technically speaking, I wouldn’t even need to bother with the wig. That’s one flaw in the mad woman’s argument, then.

Wolfgang Münchau

Europe’s reckless caution over AstraZeneca

The first smear campaign against AstraZeneca, when Emmanuel Macron falsely claimed at the start of the year that the jab was ‘quasi--ineffective’ in over-65s, did serious damage to public confidence in the Oxford vaccine across Europe. The latest concerted action by the leaders of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands may have destroyed it altogether. The decision temporarily to ban Astra-Zeneca originated in the German health ministry, which was spooked by reports of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, and was blindly followed by other European leaders. This is a scandal whose roots are political, not medical, and it will have terrible consequences.

Sam Leith

How to kill the English language

Probably, most of you will have only the dimmest idea what a ‘fronted adverbial’ is. I used one in the last sentence. Can you spot it? Very good. Those among you who did are either a) professional linguists, b) seven-year-olds, or c) are, like me, recovering from several long months of home-schooling a seven-year-old. Forgive me if in mentioning it I retraumatise members of category c). ‘Fronted adverbials’ have become something of a cause célèbre among the parents of primary school children. They even occasioned a prime ministerial joke, interpreted in some quarters as a dig at a certain former education secretary, about ‘every detail of the syllabus, from fronted adverbials to quadratic equations’.

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Why Elon Musk should fly me to the moon

I have just applied to fly around the moon. My chances of being selected are slim, but is it impossible? Hopefully the explosion of Elon Musk’s test rocket shortly after landing in Texas last week may have winnowed down the competition for a place on Yusaku Maezawa’s flight to the moon and back, scheduled for 2023. That Texas landing was in fact a success, proving it’s possible for a rocket of this size to launch and return intact: third time lucky, the first two rockets tested having exploded on impact.

Rod Liddle

‘My’ truth about Meghan and Harry

Caroline Rose Giuliani, the daughter of the former mayor of New York, Rudy, has been talking to the press about one of her hobbies. Apparently she likes nothing more than playing the role of a ‘unicorn’ — the third partner in a sexual liaison. She explained: ‘Finding the strength to explore these more complicated, passionate aspects of my personality became the key to harnessing my voice and creative spark, which in turn helped me better cope with depression, anxiety, and the lingering cognitive effects of adolescent anorexia.’ This is a fascinating approach to curing eating disorders, I think. Caroline’s dad, if you remember, is unable to tuck his shirt into his trousers without lying down on a bed and obtaining assistance from a young lady.

James Forsyth

Is Sturgeon losing support for Scottish independence?

Every politician likes to say that they don’t pay attention to opinion polls. In my experience, this is almost universally untrue. Those who sail in an ocean of public opinion want to know which way the wind is blowing. The most recent polls show the wind is in the Tories’ sails at the moment: the YouGov post-Budget survey indicated a 13-point Tory lead. But in Scotland for the past year, polls have consistently shown majority support for independence. That’s now changing. Nicola Sturgeon can’t claim she doesn’t pay attention to the polls; she has too often commented on ones showing independence ahead.

Lionel Shriver

The West has lost its moral high ground

International travellers running the gauntlet of English airports must already test negative for Covid before the flight, and on return to the UK get tested again before boarding, fill out a locator form, quarantine for ten days and test negative twice more. But that’s not enough oppression for Boris Johnson’s government. As of this week, outbound intrepids have also to fill out ‘declaration forms’ explaining why their trip is essential. Not doing so is a criminal offence. This new hoop to jump is obnoxious on a host of levels. The declaration form came in on the very day the first few lockdown restrictions were eased, with hospitalisations and deaths dramatically down and more than a third of the adult population vaccinated.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The real reasons children are going hungry

‘We’re idiots, babe, it’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.’ I listened to The Food Programme on Radio 4 this week, because the channel finder on my car radio wasn’t working and so I was stuck with it. It was, as it almost always is, four left-wing ratbags moaning to one another. As I’ve mentioned before, this is the template for almost the entirety of the station’s output: miserable women carping endlessly about everything. It is almost impossible to know what particular programme you’re listening to. You have to keep your ears tuned for key phrases which might give you an indication. If it’s a woman teacher moaning about having to do a spot of teaching, it’s probably World At One.