Columns

Sudesh Amman was singularly unsuccessful in his wish to kill kafirs, as he put it, and thereby find himself surrounded by the hoor al ayn — beautiful handmaidens who’ll do anything you want, frankly — in the afterlife. He had perhaps not followed the instructions in the book he had about how to stab people. Two were injured by the madman on Streatham High Road; both, mercifully, should live. However, Amman was shot dead by plain-clothes policemen before he could even scream out the old ‘Allahu Akbar’ thing. The cops were already there because Amman was known to them — known very well to them. I suppose, under British law, they were required to wait until he’d tried to stab somebody before they shot him.

A week of remembrance marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz last month had me thinking hard about what we mean by Evil. ‘Evil’, that is, when used with a real or metaphorical capital letter. You cannot join discussion of the Holocaust without hearing the word again and again. And indeed, what other words are available when we want to express complete horror? ‘Regrettable’? ‘Immoral’? Such vocabulary won’t do the job. Only ‘wicked’ and ‘sinful’ come anywhere near, and all are allied with what Evil, as a proper noun, tries to capture. ‘Evil’ eschews any notion of understanding or explaining, and sits uneasily with the idea of rectification, compensation or apology.

Readers of The Spectator who keep up with the latest literary hissy fits could have predicted (perhaps with a groan) exactly what Shriver will write about this week. Maybe it’s hard to pity Jeanine Cummins. Her third novel, American Dirt, secured a seven-figure advance, an Oprah Book Club pick and a huge publicity campaign (waste of money; last week the Guardian alone gave the book a scale of promotion that its publisher Flatiron Books could never afford, although the paper’s worthies are sure testing that maxim about no publicity being bad). An author’s note, in which Cummins rues not being ‘browner’, suggests a faint premonition of the stir that her thriller would cause.

I’m not one of these teetotallers who frowns on people who imbibe, like an angsty ex-smoker who petulantly swats away vape fumes. It would be rather hypocritical because for years, I was what you would describe as a ‘problem’ drinker. In the sense that, every time I drank it caused problems, not only for me but anyone in the vicinity. You know those people who end up going home in an ambulance instead of a taxi? That was me. Alcohol didn’t make me unwind; it made me unravel. Having grown up with an alcoholic mother I knew I wasn’t addicted to the stuff — it was more a case of bring allergic to it. So after a solid 15 years of drunken escapades, most of which I don’t remember, I knocked it on the head. That was about a decade ago.

Most people won’t have heard of Selina Todd. The only reason I had was because some years ago the BBC invited me to appear alongside her on one of those slots that used to be for intellectual discussion. ‘Would you be interested in coming on Radio 3 at about 10.30 p.m. to discuss class?’ I was asked. ‘Absolutely not,’ I replied, the subject being the only national obsession I would leave the country to escape. ‘That’s precisely why we want you,’ began the producer. And so eventually I ruined a perfectly good dinner and headed to the BBC where I met the aforementioned Todd. She turned out to be an Oxford professor whose area of study is the working class and whose specialism is resentment.

Whoever becomes the next director-general of the BBC should take a close look at last week’s Question Time. It came from Liverpool, which is perhaps the most left-wing city in the country, Brighton excepted. On it, the actor Laurence Fox was making sensible comments about the Harry and Meghan business (which is beginning to bore me into a stupor), when he was upbraided by a third-division academic from a glorified teacher training college. This was Rachel Boyle, a ‘researcher on race and ethnicity’. She trotted out the familiar, learned-by-rote cliché that Fox was possessed of ‘white privilege’ and was therefore, by implication, disqualified to comment on the matter.

More and more of us are staying home for our holidays — but even so, our small hotels and B&Bs are folding at a scary rate. UK hotel insolvencies are up 60 per cent, it was reported last week. Why? Competition bites, said the papers, blaming Airbnb. But there’s another biter, too — more sinister for seeming more helpful. The majority of hotel bookings are now made on the internet, and most of those via one of the two enormous internet travel companies: Booking Holdings and Expedia. It might seem to you and me, as we click away the January blues, that there’s a swarm of jostling online travel agencies (or OTAs) — Trivago, Kayak, Agoda, Hotels.

There is a fascinating social media group which I think we should all join. It is called ‘DeMOCKracy — 2019 12/12 UK Election Was Undemocratic’. I hadn’t realised, but apparently the election was ‘rigged by Tory billionaires’ to ensure Jeremy Corbyn was defeated. This was done with the aid of fraudulent postal votes, Tory lies, a media which was unanimous in rooting for the Tories — including the BBC and the Guardian! — and will lead, ineluctably, to fascism and the gassing of millions. Where is the evidence for this chicanery?