Columns

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Save the rabbits from the predatory BBC

For a while, as a 13-year-old, I was obsessed with rabbits — the consequence of having read Watership Down by Richard Adams. I tried to share my enthusiasm for the book with my parents, but my father told me that he thought the scenario depicted by Adams was ‘improbable’. However, they did consent to take me to that indeterminate, shifting area where the novel is set, with its back legs in Berkshire and its front paws in the last remaining unspoilt quadrant of Hampshire. We were on the way home from a holiday at some grim Methodist guest house in the West Country and were undoubtedly tired from the drive. But still they followed me around with my map and tried to look excited when I suddenly proclaimed: ‘Look, that’s the combe where Bigwig met the fox!

Katy Balls

Will 2019 be Corbyn’s year?

It’s hard to think of a time when an opposition leader has had such a promising start to the new year. Jeremy Corbyn finds himself up against a prime minister who barely survived a confidence motion, with more than a third of the Conservative parliamentary party voting against her. The Tories have no majority of their own and have fallen out with their partner, the DUP. That same government is facing a make-or-break Brexit vote in two weeks’ time. It’s quite possible — some cabinet members believe probable — that it may soon collapse with a new general election called. All Labour needs is to be ready. In parliament, Corbyn’s closest allies are trying to do just that.

Matthew Parris

The fact no one likes to admit: many gay men could just have easily been straight

Long-suffering Spectator readers deserve a seasonal break from yet another Remoaner diatribe from me. My last on this page, making the outrageous suggestion that the populace may sometimes be wrong, is now being brandished by online Leaver-readers of my Times column as proof that I am in fact a fascist; so there isn’t anywhere much to go from there. Instead, I turn to sex. There is little time left for me to write about sex as the thoughts of a septuagenarian on this subject (I turn 70 this year) may soon meet only a shudder. But I have a theory which I have the audacity to think important.

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Never trust the people

It was late, and a friend and I were left to talk Brexit. He’s a keen and convinced Tory Brexiteer MP but to stay friends we have tended to steer off the topic. This, however, felt like a moment to talk. The conversation taught me nothing about Brexit, something about him, and a lot about myself and the strain of Conservatism I now realise I’m part of — and which is part of me. Oddly, then, this column is not really about Brexit, but about trusting the people. I don’t. Never have and never will. Our conversation forced me to confront the fact. My friend knows well enough why I’m a Remainer, but guessed correctly that I’ve puzzled about why he isn’t. I had not quite expected what I heard.

James Forsyth

Parliament and power

Who should govern Britain? This has always been the most contentious question in British politics. Magna Carta, the Reformation, the Civil War, the Glorious Revolution and the Reform Acts were all struggles over this fundamental point. Brexit asks this question twice over, so we should not be surprised by how divisive an issue it has become. It is about the extent to which the writ of the European Union should run in the United Kingdom — but also about the relationship between the people and parliament. By an overwhelming majority, MPs legislated to let the public decide. But ever since the voters returned the opposite answer to what the Commons was expecting, MPs have struggled to come to terms with the result.

Rod Liddle

My foolproof recipe for a better world

It is always a pleasure to watch Paris burning. On the surface a civilised country, but scrape a little deeper and France is revealed as a nation of kind of faux-Arabs (aside from that rapidly growing proportion who are actual Arabs): easily incensed into an incandescent toddler fury at real or imagined iniquities, things not working out quite the way that they had hoped. An inchoate existential rage, hilariously — in this case — exhibited by people wearing those absurd yellow fluorescent jackets. They have latterly realised that their leader, Emmanuel Macron, is a smarmy, loquacious, incompetent idiot with strange sexual tendencies. We knew that all along.

James Delingpole

A few of my favourite things

It’s that time of year again when I put aside my wonted snark and share with you a few of my brown-paper--packages-tied-up-with-string moments so as to gladden the heart and remind ourselves that life is about more, oh so much more, than Theresa May’s crappy Brexit deal… Best friends: Michael and Sarah Gove. Many harsh words have been said about Michael and Sarah — many of them, at least in Michael’s case, by me. But the point about good friends — even when they betray every-thing you hold dear and sell your country down the river like some back-stabbing traitor — is that you love them, warts and all, and stick by them. Sarah is the most brilliant and generous host in Christendom.

Lionel Shriver

You can’t possibly hate cyclists more than we hate each other

I’ve cycled for primary transportation for 53 years. Accordingly, I’m not naive about the degree of resentment — nay, loathing — that the general population harbours towards what I’m reluctant to dub the ‘cycling community’, since no group of people behaves less like brethren. You may hate cyclists, but you can’t possibly hate cyclists more than they hate each other. Nevertheless, ever since pedal-pushers in London have multiplied by a factor of a bazillion in the past few years, numerous of my encounters in traffic have entailed a degree of incendiary rage that takes even this cynical veteran of the cycling wars aback. All these incidents, if you can call them that, have conformed to the same pattern.

Lara Prendergast

Should we all write ‘feminist’ stocking fillers?

I arrived at Waterloo, half an hour before my train departed. Needing to buy a birthday card, I popped into Oliver Bonas, a shop which sells ‘lifestyle gifts’. I came across marble cheeseboards and gin-and-tonic scented candles. If you are looking for a lemon juicer shaped like a cactus, you will find one in Oliver Bonas. The shop also sells ‘gift books’. Most are aimed at women and quite a few have the word ‘feminist’ in their title. There is one called Vajournal: An Interactive Diary for Feminists. It invites the reader to engage with ‘thought-provoking activities’ and describe their ‘worst and best sexual experiences’ as well as any instances of ‘everyday sexism’.

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Out of the mouths of babes

For any bosses from the Singapore education department reading this, I have a message. It comes from (I’d guess) most of your schoolchildren. They detest their education system. They burn with resentment at the way their schooling tries (they think) to shackle their imaginations, their individuality, their free spirit. They hate being forced to compete, and are made miserable about what they see as learning by rote. That’s the bad news. But the good news is this. However they may chafe at the way they are taught, these children are anything but broken reeds. Imaginative, rebellious, thoughtful, original, poetic, these winning boys and girls (often of Chinese origin!) write English like little angels. How do I know?

Lionel Shriver

I love the idea of race becoming vague

Behold, the most incendiary statistic in America: the Census Bureau’s projection of when whites will become a minority in what last century was ‘their own’ country. (In only 1980, 80 per cent of Americans were white. Mind, where the US leads, Europe often follows.) When in 2008 that red-letter date moved up to 2042, notes California demographer Dowell Myers: ‘People went crazy.’ After decades of progressive lobbying for multicultural inclusion, the startling proximity of this demographic tipping point is enticing a certain brand of activist to embrace the rhetoric of replacement instead. Evident during the midterms, this new approach to the melting pot is militant. If I may paraphrase: ‘Move over.

Rod Liddle

Lord save us from Le Carré

Thank the blessed Lord it’s over. Not Brexit, or Theresa May’s flailing and spastic governance. I’m talking about John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl, which has been serialised on the BBC on a Sunday evening, just when people want to watch something interesting. I watched it with the missus, and by episode two decided I would much rather spend my Sunday evenings assaulting my own head with a claw hammer. But we persisted with this expensively shot garbage because we are a married couple and therefore think it right and proper to engage in joint activities and stick with them regardless of how distressing and unpleasant they may be — such as watching The Little Drummer Girl or having sexual intercourse.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Will no one ever take on the Green Blob?

Gosh it hurts when your little corner of paradise is destroyed by a few idiots’ ignorance and greed. This is what has just happened to one of Britain’s best-kept secrets, the magically beautiful and remarkably untouristed stretch of the Wye Valley round and about Builth Wells. Every summer we used to take a holiday let there, jumping into our favourite swim-hole in the Wye, playing Cocky-Olly in the bracken, exploring Llewellyn’s Cave, watching the last of the sun bathe the uplands from the shade of the boules terrain outside the house where we’d enjoy our well-earned fags and evening gin and tonic. But I don’t think I could bear go back there. The sight of what they’re doing to it is just too painful.

Rod Liddle

Why sex is welcome in Derby Cathedral, but the Holy Bible isn’t

Nic Roeg’s art-house thriller from 1973 Don’t Look Now was most famous, or infamous, for its lengthy and explicit sex scene. I think it’s fair to say that the lugubrious (and in 1973 near ubiquitous) Donald Sutherland gave Julie Christie a very thorough seeing-to, involving the first act of cunnilingus in a mainstream movie. Even after being trimmed a little it still received an X rating, but did well enough at the box office. It was shown again quite recently — in Derby Cathedral, for reasons which quite elude me. In its unedited form.

James Forsyth

What if she loses?

We are heading into uncharted waters. The great hope of No. 10 and cabinet loyalists was that once Theresa May’s Brexit plan was an international agreement, the debate would change. It wouldn’t just be the Prime Minister’s plan, but a deal between Britain and 27 other countries. They thought that this would imbue it with greater authority; that the House of Commons would embrace the deal on offer rather than opting for further uncertainty. But that hasn’t happened. Opposition to May’s deal has hardened since Sunday’s summit. Five days of debate will now take place in the Commons and there is painfully little support for May’s plan.

Mary Wakefield

I admit it – I’m a smartphone addict

I am often extremely dismissive of people immersed in their smartphones. I tut at the mole-ish pedestrians who step out into the traffic, faces uplit and shocked when a car goes by. Last week, in a toddler playgroup, I actually hissed at some poor father. We were in the middle of ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’, with actions, when he got stuck in an iPhone trance. There he stood amid the marching midgets swiping from text messages to email to Twitter and back again. It was when he tapped on the bus times app that I snapped. Well, what a hypocrite I am. And how is it that I’ve only just noticed? I was on my bike, in sight of Spitalfields Market, when I realised what I’d become.

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Jazz is dominated by men. So what?

I’d recommend any aspiring writer to marry a jazz drummer. It’s done wonders for my powers of concentration. If I can write while my husband is practising rolls, or rehearsing with his quartet loudly enough that I don’t know why they didn’t just set up in my study, or worst of all tuning his drums (Bam. Bam. Bam. ‘Nooooo!’ Bam. Bam. Bam. ‘Nooooo!’), then I could knock off novels amid shock and awe in 2003 Iraq. As part-requirement, part-perquisite, over the years I’ve attended a range of jazz clubs, festivals, and concerts. So I can testify: the musicians are nearly all men. Jazz and jazz education make up a small world, but gender disparity has become a mighty tempest in this teacup.

Rod Liddle

Haters gonna hate hate

If we are to ban states of mind, my vote would be for self-righteousness first, followed by sententiousness, with maybe imbecility as third choice. That would criminalise most of the people in the country I cannot abide, including all of the Lib Dems, Momentum and Justine Greening. Sadly, the state of mind which the government wishes to ban is that rather more useful quality, hate. You are not allowed to hate anything any more, except for hate itself. But at least in hating hate you can really let yourself go, even if it is usually a wholly imaginary hate that you are hating. You can spew out your bile suffused with self--righteousness, sententiousness and imbecility. You can have yourself an anti-hate hate fest, safe in the knowledge that your hatred of hate is commendable.

Matthew Parris

What does it mean to be moved?

Catching a train last week at London’s St Pancras I encountered a man playing a piano. You can do this at St Pancras: there’s an old Yamaha chained to the ironwork just by the lift serving the upper platforms for Sheffield and Nottingham. The instrument is somewhat out of tune but serviceable, and placed there for anyone who wants to play. The facility is generally respected: it’s not for buskers collecting money but just for pleasure — the player’s pleasure, and that of the random, changing audience who pause, hurry or amble by. I was hurrying yet in no hurry: there was plenty of time. But you just get a bit tense in London sometimes, and hurry for the sake of hurrying. And of late, politics has got me down.

Thursday

James Forsyth

May’s maths problem

The bad news for Theresa May is that Brexit isn’t over. She might have agreed terms with the European Commission and discussed these with her cabinet, but perhaps her most difficult task awaits: she must now get it through Parliament. Even if she had struck a good deal, it would have struggled to pass. May only has a majority thanks to her confidence-and-supply deal with the Democratic Unionist Party. Northern Ireland was always going to be one of the most contentious parts of Brexit, as the EU has demanded that its future is decided first — in the legally binding withdrawal agreement — rather than in the coming UK/EU trade negotiations. In theory, the DUP has agreed to support the Tories over Brexit.