Columns

Even amid plague, economic apocalypse, and the cancellation of 2020, dumb stuff keeps happening. Besides, loads of us will now beeline for any column not about coronavirus. Key words: Hachette, Woody Allen. See also: Douglas Murray. This isn’t the first time we’ve agreed on something. American publishing has hardly covered itself in glory regarding Woody Allen’s Apropos of Nothing, which my New York editor read on the memoir’s submission last year. ‘It was really good,’ she emailed me. ‘We took an easier way out, that is for sure. Not to be repeated!’ The easy way out, which nearly the entire industry took, was not to bid on the book. Hachette acquired the memoir with no competition and no fanfare.

Something about the word ‘bomb’ has always thrilled me, and I know why. No school today. In the 1950s we lived in Nicosia, Cyprus, when the island was a British colony and Greek Cypriot terrorists were trying to kill us. Our house was near a big army camp and our Cypriot neighbours were friendly, so home felt protected. It never occurred to me, just starting school, that proximity to the military was not a guarantee of security; and it never occurred to Mum and Dad that our neighbours had a small bomb factory, later discovered underneath their chicken house; so indoors seemed safe. But outdoors was different.

I was mansplaining to my wife earlier this week about why we ought to be very, very concerned by the coronavirus. It wasn’t the prospect of one person in 50 dying, I said — or not just that. It was more, I said sagely, the knock-on effects. You know, if everyone self-isolates, you’re only about two missed Ocado deliveries away from starvation, looting, cannibalism etc. ‘You’re always catastrophising,’ said my wife. ‘You were like this about Trump. And Brexit. I think it’s because you spend too much time reading the news.’ ‘But Trump is very bad,’ I said, because he is. ‘He could start a war.’ ‘He hasn’t started a war.

The most surprising thing about the letter from Guardian and Observer journalists moaning about Suzanne Moore’s supposed ‘transphobia’ is that it contained 338 signatures. This must be the first time a newspaper has had more writers than readers. What an extraordinarily bloated institution — how does it survive? Through those often advertised workshops where Owen Jones explains to people how to write a column? Most bizarre. Surprise number two was that these hacks were prepared to get themselves worked up about a perfectly reasonable piece, for once, by Moore — but found no problem what-soever with Steve Bell’s disgusting and frankly racist depiction of Priti Patel in a cartoon.

I’ve put off sending a private email that’s been ready to go for weeks. Then last Sunday, I read Julie Burchill’s column in the Telegraph about the rigid ideological conformism amidst today’s purportedly ‘creative’ class, and it hit a nerve. Despite our sanctification of inclusivity and diversity, Burchill wrote, ‘exclusivity and groupthink still control the arts’. Because my own small experience of failing the progressive purity test this winter has been repeated up and down this country, it is not   small. Scaled up, the private becomes the public. So I’m finally sending my email as an open letter, allowing the Spectator readership in on a conversation germane to more than my social life.

We will rue the day we all decided bullying was a bad thing. The consequence is that the inept, the imbecilic and the perpetually frit will hang on to their jobs and we will become a much less efficient country. By bullying I do not mean physically beating someone up and stealing their lunch money, which is what it used to mean when it had a proper meaning. I mean telling someone they’re useless and deserve to be sacked, which is what bullying means today. As R.D. Laing might have put it, that kind of bullying is a rational response to irrationality. The Home Secretary, Priti Patel, who is 5ft 6in tall, has been accused of using bullying behaviour with regard to her civil servants. Nowhere near enough bullying behaviour in my book.

Most Britons assume at the outset that any misfortune involving a cyclist is the cyclist’s fault. After all, many a two-wheeled hellion has earned contempt. But put aside the understandable cynicism. This is not one of those stories. A week ago, I was cycling around Buckingham Palace while some low-key royal whatnot was pending but not under way. The vicinity was closed to traffic but not to bikes. As usual, I was heading for Hyde Park Corner via Constitution Hill, because the bike path on the right-hand side in Green Park is insensibly ‘shared use’ — meaning, teeming with pedestrians, and I see no point in our inconveniencing one another. As I passed, an officer shouted ‘Cyclist!’ and then barked something I couldn’t make out.