Columns

Thursday

James Forsyth

Hedgers vs Ditchers: the new Brexit divide

Brexit could look very different by the end of this month. In the coming days, the government is expected to present a new version of the ‘backstop’, which is meant to address the Irish border problem. This would see the whole of the UK stay in a customs union with the EU and copy EU rules on goods and agriculture until, and unless, a comprehensive trade deal is done. So much for taking back control. There is another great danger in this approach — it would result in a permanent Brexit limbo. Britain would be a rule-taker unable to pursue a meaningfully different economic model. Once the ‘backstop’ is in place, it’s hard to see what incentive the EU would have to negotiate and approve a big free-trade deal.

Matthew Parris

The sorrow that turns sweet

It was the phrase ‘sad sweet feeling in your heart’ that arrested my attention. But who would have thought it would have been Abraham Lincoln who found those words? I’ve been searching for an adequate description of something we’ve all experienced but which is rarely discussed. Many years ago, beachcombing for pithily disobliging quotes for Scorn, my anthology of insult and invective, I was arrested by a remark of Samuel Johnson’s. ‘Depend upon it,’ Boswell quotes the great man as saying, ‘that, if a man talks of his misfortunes, there is something in them that is not disagree-able to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery, there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Lionel Shriver

Penguin wants its authors to represent all UK minorities. What about just publishing good books?

I’d been suffering under the misguided illusion that the purpose of mainstream publishers like Penguin Random House was to sell and promote fine writing. A colleague’s forwarded email has set me straight. Sent to a literary agent, presumably this letter was also fired off to the agents of the entire Penguin Random House stable. The email cites the publisher’s ‘new company-wide goal’: for ‘both our new hires and the authors we acquire to reflect UK society by 2025.’ (Gotta love that shouty boldface.) ‘This means we want our authors and new colleagues to reflect the UK population taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability.

Rod Liddle

Women, women everywhere

We had a long drive back from the north-east last weekend. Six hours or so, including a stop halfway, just past Britain’s most crepuscular town, Grantham. My wife does the driving because she thinks I’ll kill us all. My job is to feed album after album into the car’s admirably old-fashioned CD player. I rarely play more than three or four songs from the same album because my wife gets tetchy and says something like ‘This is too noisy’ or ‘This is boring, change it.’ So I’m kept pretty busy. Every time I remove a CD, the car’s ‘entertainment centre’ reverts to its default position of playing Radio 4. And here’s the point. We set out at midday.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Could a eurozone crisis benefit Britain?

Is it better to negotiate with a confident, optimistic European Union or a nervous, fretful one? Even Brexiteers are split on this question. Some take the view that the European Union’s difficulty is Britain’s opportunity and that bad news for Brussels is good news for Brexit. But most, and especially those in government, tend to think that a more confident EU will be less scared of other countries following Britain’s lead, and so more inclined to do a decent deal. In the immediate aftermath of the referendum, there were worries in Brussels that Brexit was just the start. Senior European political figures feared that 2017 could see the populist Geert Wilders top the poll in Holland and Marine Le Pen break the 40 per cent barrier in France.

Rod Liddle

The madness of murdering badgers

Buoyed by its huge popularity in the opinion polls and the fact that it is managing Brexit so well, the government has decided to further endear itself to the voters by shooting hundreds of thousands of badgers. Its cull of these creatures, previously limited to a few specific areas (where it has been staggeringly unsuccessful), is to be rolled out nationwide. This, then, is what we might call a Hard Brocksit strategy and it was revealed late on a bank holiday weekend in the hope that nobody would notice. But we did notice. It is not known yet how exactly these animals will be despatched. Previously the hunters have sprinkled peanuts in the middle of a field in the dead of night and shot anything which tried to eat them. Cages have also been used.

James Delingpole

Save us from ‘woke’ superheroes

Comics aren’t what they used to be. In 1976 I was 11 — the perfect target audience for probably the most subversive, gory and entertaining comic series in British history, the now legendary Action. The strips, often rip-offs of movies we readers were too young legally to see, were quite outrageously violent. Hook Jaw was about a heroic great white shark who eats everyone. Death Game 1999 was a death sport based on Rollerball. Kids Rule OK was about a post-apocalyptic world which made Lord of the Flies look like Mary Poppins. Hellman of Hammer Force was the second world war seen from the perspective of a German Panzer major. Inevitably, after complaints from the likes of Mary Whitehouse helped to create a moral panic, it got banned.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Our Obama moment? Let’s hope not

Here’s something to bear in mind over the next few years. Be wary of taking advice on social justice from someone whose wedding dress cost 200,000 quid. Marks & Spencer does one for £69, off the peg. Meghan could have donated the remaining £199,931 to Generating Genius, the charity set up by the brilliant educationalist Tony Sewell which tries, with huge success, to get inner-city black kids into our top universities by instilling in them a respect for academic excellence, hard work and discipline. Instead of encouraging them to languish in a state of victimhood, which is the white liberal approach. For sure, Meghan looked lovely and the wedding undoubtedly made a lot of people very happy, and one wishes her and Prince Harry nothing but the best for the future.

Jacob Heilbrunn

The sorry state of Trump’s affairs

 Washington, DC It was a petulant Donald Trump who appeared at a White House press briefing on Tuesday with the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in. When a reporter asked if Trump had confidence in the deputy attorney-general, Rod Rosenstein, given the latest complicated twists in the investigation into collusion with Russia, Trump snapped that Moon didn’t want to hear about it. But it won’t be easy for Trump to dismiss these questions as piffle for long. Even as the old boy tries to pose as a great statesman, tales of his past shenanigans keep mounting.

Lionel Shriver

Whatever you write will get twisted

During a dozen years in Belfast I collected a number of political coffee mugs, hailing from both sides of the divide. Unionist designs including the heartbreakingly punctuated ‘Ulster Say’s No’ (not merely to the Anglo-Irish Agreement; no to everything) and the impressively witty ‘Reservoir Prods’: four toughs in shades identified as ‘Mr Orange’ and ‘Mr Boyne’, etc. The republican mugs exhibit no such sense of humour, which won’t surprise you. Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams stare sternly from their porcelain. Worse, the mugs from the Sinn Fein bookshop are cheaply decorated with decals, which are less robust than the inked unionist ones, and tend to melt in the dishwasher.

Matthew Parris

Is ‘woman’ now an offensive word?

I do not know whether the Speaker of the House of Commons called the present Leader of the House a ‘stupid woman’. It certainly wouldn’t have been a nice thing to say, but I’ve found it hard to decide whether MPs should boot him out. Many Tory friends seethe with dislike for the man; there are plenty of allegations of partiality or vindictiveness towards individuals, and one does get the impression he doesn’t much care for the present government. Yet few Speakers in recent decades have stood up to ministers more resolutely, or done as much as Bercow in opening up the building and its institutions to a wider public.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Who can bridge the great divide?

Amid all the argument in Westminster, everyone can agree on one thing: the country is bitterly divided. The 52:48 divisions of the Brexit referendum are still there, and possibly even more entrenched than during the campaign itself. The result hasn’t been followed by a period of national healing — quite the opposite. Even the cabinet appears to be split along Leave and Remain lines. You would have to go back a quarter of a century to find a time when the two main parties were so far apart. The public, however, shows no sign of deciding which path it wants to choose. The general election resulted in a hung Parliament, and the local elections earlier this month suggest that if Theresa May went to the country tomorrow, the result would be even more inconclusive.

Rod Liddle

Why this deluded affection for the Palestinians?

The worst entry for this year’s Euro-vision song contest was that vast cater-wauling aboriginal. I can’t remember her name, only that her performance convinced me still further that Australia might not, technically, be a part of Europe. But then I was a little worried by the winner too. The song ‘Toy’, sung by Israel’s Netta Barzilai, was easily the most musically imaginative in the contest and so probably deserved its victory. But the lyrics were the usual deluded, self-aggrandising victimhood rot. ‘I am a beautiful creature,’ she sang, despite fairly compelling evidence to the contrary, right there in front of our eyes.

James Delingpole

Turns out life’s not so easy – just look at Ulysses S. Grant

When Winston Churchill was at the nadir of his career, he wrote a biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. In his wilderness years he needed to be reminded that even the greatest men of destiny go through periods when it all seems pretty hopeless. ‘Every taunt, however bitter; every tale, however petty; every charge, however shameful, for which the incidents of a long career could afford a pretext, has been levelled against him,’ Churchill wrote. Those Blenheim Palaces and Finest Hours: they don’t just give themselves away, you know. I wish someone had told me this when I was younger. Unfortunately, like many of us, I suffered the misfortune of having parents who kept telling me how very special I was.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

We’re deluding ourselves about gang violence

Hey, Londoners — been stabbed or shot yet this week? Just thought I’d check as the place seems to resemble, in its violence, downtown Mogadishu right now — and indeed is graced with many of the same kinds of people. That’s probably why you haven’t been stabbed or shot yet: the murdering has been committed exclusively, so far as I can tell, within the minority ethnic communities by young men who are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. So you’re safe for a while, until they’ve all been used up and the stabby shooty young men get around to you.

James Forsyth

Brexit is fast becoming a Tory no-win

Theresa May’s Brexit dilemma is becoming more acute. Last week, she failed to garner the support of the Brexit inner cabinet for a so-called ‘new customs partnership’ with the European Union. Even so, May can’t and won’t drop the idea. She’s convinced that it is critical for solving the Irish border issue, and thus unlocking a deal. But the bad news for Mrs May is that opinion has hardened against her scheme (which would see the UK collecting tariff revenue for the EU even after Brexit). Boris Johnson has publicly attacked it as ‘crazy’ and in no way ‘taking back control’. Tellingly, Downing Street didn’t feel it could slap him down for this.

Matthew Parris

Brexit has driven me mad, but I can’t let it go

Rosé wine is, I know, considered naff. Were you unaware of this you’d fast conclude as much from the incidence of lifestyle commentary informing us that rosé is newly smart. As with those columns advising that everyone is drinking sherry now, or that some prosecco is actually OK, or that men will be wearing skirts this summer, it’s usually a safe assumption that the opposite is true but an enterprising journalist aims to surprise us with an amusing unlikelihood. Anyway, I love rosé wine and we had brought a case of pretty inexpensive stuff back from Rioja, of all places. The bank holiday weather was glorious, the llamas were frolicking and blackbirds sang in the wood as I sat outside in the Derbyshire sun and sipped. But there was a shadow.

Lionel Shriver

Why should we give in to EU blackmail over the EU border?

In deference to public exhaustion, I’ve largely avoided Brexit in this slot. But a columnist’s output ought rightly to echo what she shouts at the television news. Big picture, the UK may have made an utter Horlicks of its putative withdrawal from the European Union because Britain should never have come to the EU with a begging bowl in the first place. Walking out first and reverting coolly to WTO rules, the UK might have negotiated from a position of strength. You don’t slap a party in the face, only to implore that same party for special favours while his face is still smarting. Big surprise, the strategy has been unavailing. Hindsight aside, the biggest mistake the UK continues to make is to naively accept the EU’s opening construct.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

A warm welcome to the UN’s envoy for idiocy

Another new word, this time from the deranged far-right: incel. This means a chap who is involuntarily celibate because women won’t sleep with him. Instead, these besoms prefer to have sex with attractive men. There are links with the Toronto murderer Alek Minassian, who drove a van into a bunch of pedestrians because he couldn’t get a shag. Incels applauded his actions online, demanding death to the ‘Stacys’ and the ‘Chads’. And also the ‘Beckys’. Ah, yes, three more new words. Stacys are attractive ‘unattainable’ women. Chads are the good-looking young men who get to shag them.

Mary Wakefield

Is it ‘Brexity’ to feel you belong to a particular place?

As I get older, and particularly after having a child, I feel myself unexpectedly drawn back to the countryside I grew up in. I nose about, late at night, on the websites of estate agents specialising in the north-east, hopping down the coast from barn conversion to barn conversion, pausing sometimes to inspect the odd terraced house looking out to the grey North Sea. I had thought that working in the city for 20 years would make any sense of being from a particular place fade. I had thought talk of belonging a bit naff. But the feeling only grows. The further away from the north I am, the more sure I am that grass should be coarse not lush, that hills should have heather and that any sea which doesn’t induce hypothermia isn’t worth its salt. I don’t plan to move.