Columns

Thursday

Matthew Parris

History will soon judge this fraught time

Good stories have a dénouement. The Act III moment when all is revealed and the narrative comes in to land is critical to most plays and novels. And so we want it to be with Brexit. Who will turn out to have been right, and who wrong? Whose bluff will have been called, and to whom will go the secret pleasures of ‘I told you so’? Real life usually disappoints, however. No single event settles matters, and both sides of a dispute tend to find ways of maintaining that they were right all along, and if outcomes confound them then this was somebody else’s fault.

James Forsyth

Might there be a Brexit deal after all?

Parliament has not yet returned from its summer break but we are already in a bitter constitutional battle, with the Prime Minister pitted against the Speaker of the House of Commons and the opposition parties. Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue parliament is a deliberate attempt to raise the stakes. He wants to deny time to any effort by MPs to pass a law forcing him to request a Brexit extension. His message to them: bring me down or let me get on with Brexit. When parliament returns on Tuesday for a two-week session, MPs will have to decide how to respond to Johnson’s move. Opposition MPs had previously agreed to try to use legislative means to compel the government to seek an extension, as they did before the last Brexit deadline with Yvette Cooper’s bill.

Lionel Shriver

Don’t blame snowflakes – grown-ups are the idiots

San Francisco must be the virtue capital of the world. (The latest: just across the bay, Berkeley’s city council voted this summer that ‘manholes’ must hereon in be called ‘maintenance holes’.) But when the lofty run out of real enemies, they often turn on their own kind. Moreover, too much success in achieving a raft of progressive purposes means a runaway train with no sensible destination careens off the tracks. That’s the only explanation for the disconcerting San Francisco School Board spat over what to do with a series of 13 massive murals on the interior of the city’s George Washington High School. The murals’ now-esteemed creator, Victor Arnautoff, was a Russian immigrant and a committed communist.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Is there anything that can’t be put down to a ‘condition’?

I suppose it is overstating the case to suggest that dyslexia is simply a term coined to assuage the disappointment of middle-class parents faced with offspring who are considerably thicker than they fondly imagined them to be. There was an interesting report a few years ago by Professor Joe Elliott of Durham University. He wrote: ‘On the basis of current research, there are no meaningful grounds to differentiate between so-called dyslexic and non-dyslexic poor readers. Genetics, neuroscience and cognitive science can help us better understand the underlying nature of reading disability, but they do not offer means to make a dyslexic/poor reader distinction.’ Well, quite.

Katy Balls

It’s time to talk about what no deal really means

The main reason Conservative MPs prefer Boris Johnson’s government to Theresa May’s is because of its clarity of message. The government now has direction and purpose. Briefings from Tory HQ, delivered even to those MPs who have managed to get away on holiday, have gone from intermittent and inconsistent to daily and succinct. The message is simple: Brexit will be delivered by 31 October, crime is being tackled and the NHS properly funded. We can expect to hear these messages, or variants thereof, for the next few months. But there is one area where the government seems less sure of itself: what will happen in the event of no deal?

James Delingpole

When did English A-level become a science?

Now that my youngest has got her A-level grades, I’m finally free to say just how much I have loathed the past 20 or so years I have spent helping my children with their English homework. This is a sad admission. After all, I studied English at university and still love reading classic literature and learning poetry by heart. But when I read that the number of 18-year-olds taking English A-level has plummeted to its lowest level since 2001 I wasn’t at all surprised. If I were that age, I’m not sure I’d choose to do English either. The first taste I had of just how grisly English has become was when I helped the Rat with his GCSEs. I don’t think at any stage he was required to complete an actual book.

Thursday

Katy Balls

Taking back control

Every Friday at 6 p.m. government aides are summoned to No. 10 Downing Street for a meeting with Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s right-hand man. Here they are plied with alcoholic beverages, updated on the latest government messaging and given instructions for the week ahead. Such meetings seldom happened under the old Theresa May regime: Fridays were a bit of a non-event when ministers were in their constituencies and aides worked hard right up to lunchtime. The new end-of-week meeting register means that is no longer an option. At the most recent meeting, a handful of aides were singled out for good behaviour. Their achievement? Reporting the minister they work for to No. 10 for going off message. ‘You know who you are,’ said Cummings approvingly.

Rod Liddle

An all-female cabinet? Insert your own joke here

I wonder what Jacques Derrida would have made of the new leader of the UK Independence party? In the philosopher’s typically readable and sensible tract On the Name, Derrida muses: ‘The name: What does one call thus? What does one understand under the name of name? And what occurs when one gives a name? What does one give then?’ All good questions, Jacques. The new leader of Ukip is called Dick Braine. I expect he will prefer, perhaps insist, upon being known as ‘Richard’. Or perhaps this is the way Ukip intends to continue, with its rapidly changing leaders henceforth each chosen for an apt and mildly offensive nomenclature: Bob Wankpuffin, Vicky Shitgibbon and so on.

Lionel Shriver

Contraception is the answer to climate change

When last week’s IPCC report warned that the human race may soon have trouble feeding itself, my reaction was: duh. Having pooh-poohed the 1960s ‘population bomb’ alarmism that would have us all balancing on our allotted five square inches of Earth by now, we’ve grown complacent about increasing our 7.7 billion world population by at least a quarter in the next 30 years, and by about half in 2100, when we’re likely to number around 11 billion. Perhaps it’s forgivable that an outfit called the ‘Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’ would blame a perilous future food supply on climate change. Yet it’s astounding that in the report’s broad news coverage I never encountered mention of the main driver of agricultural stress.

Matthew Parris

Who’s to blame for my terrible journey?

Look out. Here comes a column banging on about something that, in the grand scheme of things, really doesn’t matter. But I’ve just turned 70 and surely among the compensations for old age must be the right to have a jolly good grumble from time to time. Mine, here, will be about the new hard train seats. ‘They feel like sitting on an ironing board,’ passengers are complaining. Since the beginning of last year, and all over the country, rail operating companies have been rolling out (hallelujah! — a chance to use this ghastly expression entirely appropriately) a new kind of railway carriage. First it was Thameslink; then it was GWR; and last week I suffered in one of these carriages going all the way to Leeds. My buttocks ache at the very recollection.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Remember, remember, the first of November

The United Kingdom is a country governed, in large part, by convention —but in the heat of the Brexit debate, those conventions are beginning to evaporate. The Speaker of the House of Commons overturned long-standing procedure to limit Theresa May’s room for manoeuvre. The opposition used a humble address to the sovereign to force the publication of the government’s full legal advice on the withdrawal agreement, though the convention is that such advice is confidential. Parliament then impinged on the executive’s crown prerogative powers by passing a law dictating how the prime minister must behave at an EU summit. Under May, Downing Street sighed at such behaviour but grudgingly accepted it. Boris Johnson and his team have a different response.

Mary Wakefield

Like so many parents, I’m a panic junkie

On that record-breaking, sweltering day at the end of July, my three-year-old son did a pirouette in the paddling pool — ‘look at this Mama!’ — then tripped, slid under the surface and lay there on his back staring up at me through two foot of water. I was in the pool too, just an arm’s length away, and it seemed to me that I did nothing for ages. I had time to think: he looks so calm. Why isn’t he moving? And, why am I not moving? Then I had hauled him out and we were spluttering on the grass. When he could speak, Cedd was more proud than scared: ‘I can go underwater! Did you see?’ But I felt the first stirrings of a familiar fear. There was clearly no reason to worry. He was fine. Children are forever sinking in baths and swimming pools.

James Delingpole

A gang of sheep rustlers is stalking our county

Though autumn is happily still some way off, we’ve already reached that stage in the shepherd’s calendar when full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn. In fact they now look bigger than their mothers. The easiest way of differentiating the ewes from the lambs is that the latter still have their fleeces while the former are shorn and look thoroughly careworn and knackered from having to feed their demanding and needy adolescents long after it’s strictly necessary. What’s rather spoiling my nature notes at the moment, though, is the nagging fear that next time I venture out into the fields on my morning walk with the dog, our pastoral idyll will have been reduced to a bloody shambles of discarded entrails and severed heads.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Boris may end up delivering Corbyn

Alastair Campbell has written a longish ‘open’ letter to Jeremy Corbyn, helpfully explaining why he has decided not to contest his expulsion from the Labour party. The remarkable thing is that Alastair believes there is anyone of importance in the party, or indeed outside of it, who gives a monkey’s one way or the other. For all of Jeremy Corbyn’s myriad faults, he has not visited upon this country the two greatest crises, foreign and domestic, that the UK has endured since the second world war (by which I mean the Iraq war and unconfined immigration). Nor has Magic Grandpa lied to the British public and parliament with quite the same level of barefacedness as Mr Campbell; nor used the death of a government scientist to settle a personal vendetta with a journalist.

Lionel Shriver

All money is dirty

Whitney museum: no space for profiteers of state violence // dismantle patriarchy // warren kanders must go! // supreme injustice must end // we will not forget // choking freedom is a crime // enough // greed is deadly // humanity has no borders // we grieve the harm… If that array of posters paving the entrance to New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art hasn’t plunged you into such an insensate catatonia that the print has blurred, here’s the drill. For months protesters have been campaigning to have Warren B. Kanders, the museum’s vice chairman, who’s already donated $10 million to the institution, removed from the board. Eight artists withdrew from the Whitney’s esteemed Biennial exhibition in solidarity.

Matthew Parris

Remainers, Leavers, post-imperial dreamers

Our involuntary responses know us better than we know ourselves. As I left King Charles Street in Whitehall last week and passed under the archway into the great court of the Foreign Office — and before I knew where it came from or why — an old and familiar feeling inhabited me. Dejection. This is where I started my working life as an administrative trainee, and those two years were a wretched time: a gradual understanding stealing upon me that I had no talent for this job. This courtyard was the opening scene of my every working day. It struck misery into my soul then, and 45 years later it still does. I blame myself, however, not our Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Thursday

Katy Balls

Lib Dem success may be the Tories’ best hope

When the leadership result was announced, Jeremy Corbyn’s keyboard warriors swung into action. Behold, they said: a new party leader whose track record involved overseeing years of austerity, voting for tax cuts for the super-rich and pursuing a neoliberal agenda. As for Boris the man, the Corbynites didn’t seem to mind him so much. It’s Jo Swinson, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, who is enemy number one. The Labour fear — and the Tory hope —is that the current Liberal Democrat resurgence continues and Labour loses seats in the North to the Tories and metropolitan seats to the Lib Dems. Under Nick Clegg, the Lib Dems were a greater threat to the Tories, but Brexit has created new opportunities.

Rod Liddle

We’ve made morons of our police force

I never believed Carl Beech’s allegations that he had suffered multiple depravities, including sexual abuse, at the hands of various very prominent members of the old conservative establishment. As a young journalist during the 1980s, I came into contact with many of the people named in Beech’s supposed evidence and on not a single occasion did one of them try to coerce me into sexual intercourse. That they would have done so, had they been inclined, is beyond doubt, as I was sexually irresistible back then. Further, I met Sir Edward Heath and at no time did he try to lock me in a room full of ‘mad’ wasps, nor did anyone ever attempt to empty a box of spiders over my shaking body.

Cindy Yu

Is China really the enemy?

China is a nation with values deeply at odds with the West. The Chinese spy, steal and bully. They don’t really care about human rights yet are getting disgustingly rich, and — well, I’m sure you’ve heard the rest. The western media likes to depict China as the new enemy — both morally and politically. It seems as if a new iron curtain is coming down, with my country (and family) on the wrong side of the divide. Of course, Britain is my country too: I’ve lived here longer than I did in China. But I have to confess that this fundamental ‘clash of values’ — described in such vivid terms by Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State — is one that passed me by. To be British--Chinese is not to be torn in two by competing value systems.

James Delingpole

Late at night, shrouded in protective gear, I crept up on the wasps’ nest

Halfway up the back stairs on a ledge is the body of a wasp so big it’s either a queen or some kind of hornet. I’ve left it there as a warning to other wasps and also because I enjoy the weird effect it has on me. Even though obviously I know it’s there, every time I pass it its shape triggers in me an involuntary shudder: the sinister curve of its abdomen, articulated like plate armour; the warning yellow and black; the horrible sharp black stinger which you can just imagine jabbing into your skin. God I hate wasps! Some people say that if you just leave them alone they won’t harm you. But I’m not taking any chances.