Columns

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Without forgiveness, we’re all doomed

Over Christmas, I digitised slides from my twenties. In many an unidentified photograph, I didn’t recognise the scene. Where was I? Who are these total strangers? What were we finding so funny? Thus it’s credible that on being confronted with his personal page from a 1984 medical school yearbook, Democratic Virginian governor Ralph Northam wavered: presumably that’s him in the photograph; no, on second thoughts, it couldn’t be. The photo quality is poor, and the two jaunty figures holding cans of beer are disguised — one in blackface, the other in Ku Klux Klan robes. I’m more familiar with Virginia than many of the Americans nationwide clamouring for Northam to resign.

Thursday

James Forsyth

The Tories are a party in search of policies

‘What would a Conservative manifesto say on Brexit?’ Many Tories consider this question a slam-dunk argument against an early election. But the party’s predicament is actually much worse. It is easier to work out what their manifesto would say on Brexit than on a whole host of other issues. The Tories are relatively united on Brexit, for the moment. Only eight of the party’s MPs voted against Sir Graham Brady’s amendment last month which authorised Theresa May to seek ‘alternatives’ to the backstop. So this would be the Tory position in a pre-Brexit election. In an immediate post-Brexit contest May would presumably seek a vague mandate to negotiate the best possible future relationship, leaving open what precisely that is.

Freddy Gray

One Nation Trumpism

 Washington, DC Trump is articulating an upbeat vision for America, while Democrats talk only of the misery he causes Donald Trump, the unity president — doesn’t sound right, does it? Trump is, we know, divisive. Under his administration, America is polarised to the point of madness. Democrats and Republicans despise each other, culture wars rage, sane people speculate about another civil war. In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, however, Trump spoke about bringing his country together. He will never be an elegant orator, but ‘SOTU 19’ was objectively a good speech: its authors cleverly wove American themes of optimism and success into a political challenge to the Democrats.

James Delingpole

Lyme disease and me

Some medical experts claim that Lyme disease is worse than cancer. It’s not a competition, but I do know one thing: at least if you’ve got the Big C you get sympathy, understanding and prompt treatment. With Lyme you’re pretty much on your own. This isn’t a plea for public sympathy. I’ve had Lyme for God knows how long — decades possibly — and though it has disrupted my health and my life in myriad weird, torturous and sometimes hideous ways, I still consider myself one of the fortunate ones. First, it hasn’t killed me; second, I’ve had some state-of-the-art stem cell treatment which with luck will eventually cure me. But it’s definitely not a condition I’d recommend.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

The women lining up against Trump

 Washington, DC It’s no secret that President Donald Trump has women problems. His relationship with his wife seems strained. Feminists loathe him. His popularity among the opposite sex is lower than ever, according to the polls. And, to rub salt into his wounded machismo, he appears to have just lost a fierce political battle over the government shutdown to Nancy Pelosi, the newly reinstalled Democratic speaker. All week, the commentariat has gushed over the way Pelosi ‘schooled’ Trump in the art of politics by forcing him to reopen the government without giving him the funds he wants to build a wall on the Mexican border. She ‘spanked him’, they say. She ‘kicked his behind’ and ‘brought him to his knees’.

Rod Liddle

Millwall aren’t half as racist as you think

Where would you rather come from, Pakistan or Liverpool? Assuming you were somehow given a retrospective choice in the matter. It is not too tough a call for me. I could just about suffer being accused of a ‘cheeky’ wit and perhaps a sense of victimhood — both qualities maybe unfairly associated with Scousers — simply for the benefit of being born in England: it’s Liverpool for me, all the livelong day. This was the question posed, in an extremely offensive truncated form, by a minuscule sub-section of Millwall supporters during the side’s otherwise heroic victory over Everton in the FA Cup last Saturday. By minuscule I mean something well below 1 per cent of the home support.

Matthew Parris

Those who warn of Brexit unrest invite it

There’s a famous (or infamous) method of negotiation or interrogation called ‘Good cop, bad cop’. You’re probably familiar with the idea. An individual whose cooperation is sought is approached by an apparently reasonable negotiator whose friendly advice is to co-operate because if he doesn’t then his colleague, who has a nasty temper, may fly into a rage — in which case our friend cannot answer for what this dreadful fellow might do. The good cop holds himself out as anxious to protect the individual from somebody much worse than himself. He does not of course condone this person’s behaviour in any way, but he’s sadly beyond his control.

Lionel Shriver

Why reawaken the IRA?

When politics goes round in circles, the columnist inevitably revisits issues that would have been sorted if only everyone read The Spectator. So: back to the Irish border — a demarcation that takes up no geographical space, but has still mysteriously dominated a dozen years of my life. Oh, well. What’s one more afternoon, then? Derry’s recent car bomb underscores a curious omission in all the Brexit argy-bargy about a ‘hard border’. Throughout, neither May, nor Barnier, nor even Varadkar ever utters the letters I, R and A. Yet the scummy residue of this vanquished potato blight lies at the heart of the hysteria about hypothetical border infrastructure that could present a ‘target’. Decorously, no one ever says target for whom.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Even in moderate Malaysia, anti-Semitism is rife

The question I had hoped to pose this week was this: ‘Do people dislike Diane Abbott because she is black and a woman, or because she is useless?’ But then I worried that we would come to a fairly definitive conclusion a long time before my allotted 1,000 words had been used up. ‘The latter, I think,’ is the response I have heard time and time again both from Labour supporters and Tories. For the entire day before Ms Abbott’s appearance on Question Time, in which she thinks she was treated badly on account of the colour of her skin and her gender, my wife had been bouncing around the house in a state of enormous excitement, looking forward to the car crash which would inevitably occur that evening on the TV. It always does with Diane.

James Forsyth

Back to the backstop

As the prime minister walks up the main staircase in No. 10, he or she must pass the portrait of every previous occupant of the office. It is the British equivalent of the slave standing behind the Roman general and whispering ‘Remember you are mortal’ because the career of nearly every prime minister, no matter how distinguished, has ended in failure. Theresa May must find two of these portraits particularly haunting. Robert Peel passed the repeal of the corn laws in May 1846 with the backing of the Whigs and others, but was then forced to resign as prime minister the following month as the Tories split.

James Delingpole

Gove vs the wood-burning stove

When I first heard rumours that Michael Gove was planning to go round the country with his environmental Gestapo, ripping out our wood-burning stoves in order to heal the planet, greenwash conservatism and reduce an imaginary 36,000 deaths a year, I must admit that a small part of me felt ever so slightly relieved. Of all the desirable accessories that I’ve coveted in my life, I don’t think any has quite disappointed me as much as the wood-burning stove now staring at me accusingly as I sit at my desk. It looks very handsome and room-furnishing, as cast-iron stoves do. And when it gets going, it really does pump out lots of heat. But there’s a reason, you eventually realise, why western civilisation graduated from such 18th-century technology to central heating.

Mary Wakefield

Is cannabis driving us crazy?

Fewer people are smoking cannabis these days, down to 1.4 million from two million, they say. I say, if you believe that, you’re high. Arrests, prosecutions and the issuing of ‘cannabis warnings’ might be down — but then, I’ve seen the police quite deliberately look away from dope smokers on the street. Weed is everywhere. I’m sure of this, because the smell of the city has changed. A decade ago, as I cycled across town, the dominant scent was diesel. There were also wafts of tobacco from the fag-break gang and the odd drift of ground coffee. Ten years later both the cigarettes and the diesel have faded. There’s the cartoonish smell of vaping, but as far as I’m concerned, the smell of London is now cannabis.

Thursday

Alex Massie

Sturgeon and Salmond’s fight to the death

Amid the wreckage of a Brexit process that has disrupted every aspect of British political life, it is easy to forget that it is not the only drama currently playing. Nor is Theresa May the only political leader who has no need to go searching for trouble. Michael Gove openly warns that ‘winter is coming’ for Westminster, but in the north it has already arrived. In Edinburgh, Nicola Sturgeon faces the biggest crisis of her career. It is one that may yet destroy her. Civil war is always uglier than your standard political conflict. We have the First Minister complaining that she is the victim of a ‘smear’ campaign and a ‘vendetta’ launched against her by, astonishingly, her predecessor, Alex Salmond.

Lionel Shriver

Publishers must stand up to the mob

Suppose you’re a writer with a self-destructive proclivity for sticking your neck out. Would you sign a book contract that would be cancelled in the instance of ‘sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author’? Even cautious, congenial writers are working in an era when a bland, self-evident physiological assertion like ‘women don’t have penises’ attracts a school of frenzied piranhas. So journalists would be fools to sign a document voided if, in a magazine’s ‘sole judgment’, they were the subject of ‘public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals’. These are the ‘morality clauses’ arising in standard publishing contracts in the wake of #MeToo.

Matthew Parris

Leavers don’t actually want to leave

When intelligent, informed and rational people make a choice that onlookers can see confounds their own declared interests, we are wise to look to psychiatry for an explanation. This is where my thoughts turn, now that Tory Brexiteers have conspired to block Theresa May’s road from Chequers to the deal the Commons so spectacularly rejected this week. Until the last minute, I hesitated to accept the Tories’ European Research Group would join this rebellion. Cautiously I inserted ‘probably’, ‘by all accounts’ and ‘apparently’ into every column I drafted. That hardline Brexiteers would in the end want to kill the Prime Minister’s deal didn’t make sense. We Remainers have been unable to believe our luck.

Rod Liddle

On Nobel Prize winners and Mastermind losers

I once worked my way through two whole books of IQ tests devised by Hans Eysenck and by the time I had finished I was much cleverer than that self-publicising ass Einstein, according to the helpful chart, and quite possibly the cleverest person ever to have walked on the face of the earth. So I came to two conclusions. First, that — as I had long suspected — I was indeed the clever-est person ever to walk the earth and it was pleasant to have this suspicion of mine validated. And second, that one can learn to excel at IQ tests, despite the insistence from their promulgators that they are pristine and unrelated to culture or education: my score had risen by about 25 per cent by the time I threw the books away.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The National Trust and the evils of heteronormative history

There is a satirical website called ‘Guardian headline generator’ which purports to offer a service to aspirant journalists who wish to be published in the floundering, godawful rag. Press a button on the site and it will give you your subject matter for a typical article, such as: ‘Islamophobic white men will soon be widening the gender pay gap. This shouldn’t happen in 21st-century Britain.’ It even gives you a suitable name for your byline — in this case Jessica Veryangry. The problem, however — as the website rather forlornly admits — is that increasingly it is out-satirised by real Guardian headlines. It simply cannot match the woke idiocy and hysteria, nor the craving for victim-hood.

James Forsyth

Does May even have a Plan B?

Cabinets these days are fractious affairs. Ministers take increasingly unsubtle digs at each other as they rehearse the same old arguments. But this week, Theresa May chose to have a pop at someone who wasn’t there. ‘We’re still suffering from George,’ she told her colleagues — a reference to the former chancellor George Osborne. Her complaint was that Osborne’s over-the-top threats of a punishment Budget and other such claims during the 2016 referendum campaign had made it far harder to get Tory MPs and the public to take warnings of the consequences of no deal seriously. For her, this is a big problem. Her Brexit deal will only get through because of fear of the supposed alternatives: no deal or a second referendum.

James Delingpole

How I became the country squire I’d always dreamed of being

In the days when I was less happy in my skin than I am now, I used to feel stabs of envy whenever I visited the large country homes of much grander friends. I’d notice their array of class signifiers — the boot room with battered hunt coats and riding crops; the massive Victorian baths with enormous taps, weird cylinder devices instead of plastic plugs, and funny little dog foot stands; the framed pictures in the loo of Oxbridge matriculations and born-to-rule offspring posing with the beagle pack at ‘School’ — and think: if only this could one day be me. Well now it is me, more or less. Finally, in my early fifties, I’ve got round to joining, near as damn it, the country squirearchy.

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

What have migrants got against France?

Pitching your tent for weeks on end in the cold and mud, with no power or plumbing. Running in a pack after accelerating lorries and clutching frantically at the back door handles. Risking not only your own life but even the lives of your children by crowding into unseaworthy dinghies, in which to drift precariously across the busiest shipping lane in the world… All this full-tilt determination to flee intolerable circumstances and get into the comparative Valhalla of the UK makes perfect sense — if the place you’re so desperate to leave behind is war-torn Syria or famine-ravaged Yemen. But the country on whose coast these yearning, immiserated would-be UK immigrants are camped, and have historically camped for 20 years, is France. Excuse me.