Columns

Thursday

Sam Leith

Twitter: no country for old men

As I write these words, I regret to inform you, John Cleese is on his way to being cancelled. Now there’s a sentence that straddles a generation gap. Many people very familiar with John Cleese will have only the dimmest idea of what ‘cancelled’ means; while people who are all about cancelling celebrities will tend not to know what ‘John Cleese’ means. If anything saves him from cancellation, it will be the hope that he can snuggle down and hide in that gap until it’s all over.

Thursday

James Forsyth

A fractured and crowded field

The remarkable thing about the Tory leadership election is how long it has been coming. When Theresa May blew the party’s majority in the 2017 general election, few imagined that it would be two years before she quit as leader. What kept her in place was not a lack of Tory ruthlessness but a failure to agree on who should replace her. A lack of consensus is the defining feature of this contest. No candidate is pulling ahead in the endorsements, and no one has the backing of most of the cabinet. Instead, the race is as fractured as it is crowded. There are two sides to this election: full-on Brexit vs the cabinet. On the Brexit side, Boris Johnson is consolidating his position.

Matthew Parris

How I very nearly became the victim of an online scam

Please don’t suppose I’m unaware I’ve been an idiot. I recount what happened to me last week without expecting your sympathy or understanding, and this account carries only the very slightest plea in mitigation: the suggestion that it could happen to you too, even if you don’t think you’d ever be so stupid. Because I certainly didn’t think I was. I’m not IT-illiterate, I’m not particularly slow-witted, I’ve attended ‘take online security seriously’ lectures, and I do know about the new ways thieves steal from the unsuspecting these days. I’m forewarned. So I thought myself proof against such attempts when the landline phone rang on Friday morning.

Lionel Shriver

Don’t use up all your rhetoric at once

Saturday night, a guest commentator on Sky News sputtered that Donald Trump has ‘normalised white supremacy’. Once the American President has floated off to the horizon after his three-day visit to the UK as an inflatable media punching bag, we will doubtless have been subjected to much further denunciation of this diabolical, fiendish, authoritarian, hate-filled, lying, misogynistic, crass, criminal, moronic, stupid … sorry, that’s a bit too close to ‘moronic’… then, you know, totally crummy leader who is also… also… fat! Sadiq Khan made a brave superlative play in labelling Trump a ‘fascist’. Now, that one’s hard to top  — which won’t have stopped fellow detractors from trying.

Rod Liddle

How to save the Tory party

How do you feel about the standard of political debate in this country? I ask this question at the very moment two blimps are flying over London. The first attempts to depict President Donald Trump as a giant baby in a nappy and is the property of people who do not like Donald Trump; the other attempts to depict the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, as a kind of transvestite dwarf and is the property of people who do not like Sadiq Khan. Both groups habitually call each other fascists, doing a passable impression of Harry Enfield’s Kevin the Teenager. Both groups, I would venture, are irredeemable narcissists with the collective IQ of a block of Cathedral City cheddar cheese.

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Can Carrie make Boris woke?

Philip May seems a decent cove. He’s been stoic and loyal but I can’t help hoping that the next prime minister’s spouse will be a bit sparkier — and give us something to talk about other than Brexit. I suspect that it will be a woman. If so, who? We have Lucia, Jeremy Hunt’s wife. He famously could not remember whether she was Japanese or Chinese. Then there’s Dominic Raab’s Brazilian wife, Erika, a marketing executive at Google. We discovered from a newspaper profile that the Raabs have a duck-egg blue and cream kitchen in their Surrey home. Sarah Vine, wife of Michael Gove, is well known for her acidic columns in the Daily Mail. If she makes it to Downing Street, will she be allowed to keep writing them?

James Delingpole

Going bonkers is no fun

If I’ve been incredibly rude to you or snappy or tearful lately, if I’ve taken offence where none was intended, or I’ve wildly overreacted to something you said on social media, I do apologise. It wasn’t the real me you experienced in those moments: it was the mad brain that sometimes seizes control of me. The reason I have these episodes — as I keep having to explain to my bemused victims, after the event — is that I’m currently undergoing intensive medical treatment which gives me these weird and powerful mood swings. Known as the Perrin Technique, the treatment — which involves regular massage of the limbic system — has been very successful at dealing with conditions including chronic fatigue syndrome and even, I hope, Lyme disease.

Mary Wakefield

Vegans should go cat-free

Is it ethical for vegans to own cats? It’s an interesting question because vegans look set to take over — there are more than 3.5 million now, up from 500,000 in 2016, and a fifth of us say we’d eat less meat if only we could be bothered. Veganism is the life-style choice for the thoughtful and planet-conscious. The only thing more 21st century than veganism is cats. Cat ownership in the UK is growing at almost as impressive a rate. A quarter of all British adults have cats. There are 11 million of the sinuous little horrors weaving in and out of our homes. More Brits own cats than dogs, which is depressing. That vegans are often cat owners is a no- brainer.

Thursday

James Forsyth

May’s grave mistake

The European elections were a gift for Britain’s two new political parties, Change UK and the Brexit party. But only the latter seized the opportunity. Change UK have had myriad problems. They have been unable to settle on a name and a logo. Their MPs, exiles from the two main parties, have struggled to understand how minor parties get noticed. But the biggest problem seems to be that their strategy almost assumes Brexit has happened: how else to explain their failure to propose some kind of Remain alliance for this contest? In order to get lift-off, Change UK need Labour to have ‘betrayed’ Remain voters. But the Labour leadership has consistently tacked towards a second referendum to avoid a full-on breach with its Remain base.

Matthew Parris

Boris is just the man to bury Brexit

Sit down, my swivel-eyed Brexiter friend, and pour yourself a stiff whisky. I’ve something to tell you that’s going to be a bit difficult for both of us. Sitting comfortably? Your swivel-eyed Remainer columnist has discerned just the tiniest glint of a silver lining to the dark cloud of a possible Boris Johnson premiership. And the reason? It’s this. The most important ability the next Tory leader must possess is the ability to break bad news. To get away with this and bring the voters with you, real leadership is required: not just eloquence, not just empathy, but the command, the confidence and the sheer guts to face the inevitable, grab the bull by the horns, and spit it out.

Rod Liddle

The politics of milkshakes

Should we make it illegal to study the social sciences? Imagine the amount of tendentious rubbish we could erase from the world if we did. The economists who pretend on Newsnight that they know what’s going on, when they haven’t a clue. The sociologists fabricating evidence to support their inane and inevitably woke theses. The lies masquerading as fact and able to gull the public because of the spurious claim that they are ‘scientific’. There is no science in economics or sociology, interesting though those disciplines might be once they have been shorn of their pretensions. Let me give you a recent example.

Lionel Shriver

Adversity is the new diversity

To clear up any confusion, American SATs are closer to A-levels than to British primary-school SATs. In my day, this hours-long test of maths and language mastery in the final year of high school was a bullet-sweating business. That score would dictate which colleges we could get into, and we took the results to heart as proof of how smart we were (or not). The exam’s aim, as I understood it, was to objectively assess intellectual aptitude on your basic level playing field. We all took the same test in the same amount of time, regardless of our backgrounds, to earn numerical scores that were comparable across the cohort.

Thursday

Daniel McCarthy

America’s war games

 Washington, DC Trump, believe it or not, is smarter than the last two presidents, who started fires they couldn't extinguish Donald Trump has an itchy trigger finger, and his name is John Bolton. The President’s national security adviser is a lifelong war hawk who, unlike Trump, was a diehard supporter of the Iraq War. Now Bolton has Iran in his crosshairs. He’s not the only member of the administration drawing a bead on the mullahs. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is also a throwback to the mentality of the George W. Bush years of high misadventure in the Middle East. But Trump, believe it or not, is smarter than the last two presidents, who started fires they couldn’t extinguish in Iraq and Libya.

James Delingpole

Eton embraces identity politics

‘Repeat after me, gentlemen: “Thank you for not letting me into your Oxbridge college because I belong to the wrong social class and I have been too well taught.’’ ’ I do hope they include this catechism in the new ‘gratitude’ lessons that they’re about to introduce at Eton. They should do because it’s true. Across the country, private school parents who have scrimped and saved about £40,000 a year for fees are increasingly finding that their sacrifice is being rewarded by near-automatic Oxbridge rejection for their blameless offspring. And who is speaking out against this class war-driven injustice? Almost no one. Which is why Anthony Wallersteiner, headmaster of Stowe, took so much flak for telling it like it is.

Rod Liddle

The Brexit party delusion

The echo chamber is the defining characteristic of this berserk and entertaining political age: squadrons of foam-flecked absolutists ranting to people who agree with them about everything and thus come to believe that their ludicrous view of the world is shared by everybody. It is true, for example, of the Stalinist liberal Remainers — that tranche of about one third of the remain vote who will tell you proudly that they have never met anyone who voted leave and that therefore either nobody did vote leave — or they voted leave but we shouldn’t take any notice of them because they are worthless.

Thursday

James Forsyth

May’s compromising position

Can Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn reach a satisfactory compromise on Brexit? The two leaders’ positions are not, in fact, that far apart. Neither wants a second referendum. They both think that the referendum result means that Britain has to leave the EU. Yet neither wants a dramatic rupture. They would prefer to inch away from the union. Gavin Barwell, Theresa May’s chief of staff, has remarked that half of what Labour has asked for in the cross-party Brexit talks has already been requested from the EU but to no avail. Even on customs, the standout issue, the differences between Labour and the Conservatives are more semantic than anything else.

Lionel Shriver

It’s time for feminists to call it quits

You would think that the British Film Institute’s sponsorship of a month-long festival celebrating some of the most memorable female characters in cinema would draw plaudits from feminists. You would be wrong. Featuring the likes of Nicole Kidman in To Die For, Meryl Streep in Death Becomes Her and Bette Davis in The Little Foxes, the BFI’s programme ‘Playing the Bitch’ is meant to explore the female anti-hero. But in a petition originating with academics at King’s College London, 300 signatories have objected that the festival’s theme ‘uncritically parrots rather than questions the misogynist logics that inform so much Hollywood cinema… The women of Bitches do not subvert gender norms, they inhabit stereotypes’.

Matthew Parris

Are you a Tweedy or a Trainer?

‘Too tweedy? Goodness gracious me!’ Rory Stewart sounded startled. A contender for the Tory leadership, he was being interviewed by the BBC’s Paddy O’Connell last Sunday morning on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House. O’Connell asked the MP for Penrith and the Border how he responded to the criticism that ‘the Conservative party is too tweedy’. A short discussion of the relationship between 21st-century Toryism and tweed followed, during which Stewart revealed that in his rural constituency ‘quite a lot of us wear some tweed’. Only ‘some’ tweed, mind you: Stewart sensed he was on tricky ground here. Leadership candidates in all parties get used to being asked if they’ve ever smoked weed — but worn tweed?

Rod Liddle

Are the village idiots right?

The former BBC presenter Gavin Esler has very kindly given us an insight into how BBC people think (had we been in much doubt). Esler, who is now standing for election as a member of the hilarious Change UK party, said the following: ‘TV news must stop giving airtime to the “village idiots” of Brexit — the dubious right-wing supposed “thinktanks” and pseudo-experts among ERG MPs who simply haven’t a clue what the implications of Brexit truly are.’ Remarkable, no? The ‘village idiots’ of Brexit are people who support Brexit. That’s a lot more idiots than there are villages, Gavin. This clown wishes the BBC to discriminate against people who are in favour of Brexit and stock the airwaves with people who are opposed to it.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Yet more derangement around rape

It is more than three years since the town of Tisdale, Saskatchewan, decided to ditch its motto ‘Land of Rape and Honey’. That was how the prairie outpost had been known for 60 years, a consequence of the large amounts of canola produced in the region and the fact that they have lots of bees. But the town authorities now thought the slogan had a certain ominous, menacing air to it, so they replaced it with ‘Tisdale — Opportunity Grows Here’, which is entirely lacking in threat, interest and anything else you care to mention. A year later the supermarket store Aldi was forced to change the name of a paint it was promoting from ‘Rape yellow’ to something else — probably ‘Bright yellow’, I don’t know.