Features

Wednesday

Lara Brown

Class clowns: the triumph of inanity over academia

Daniel Defoe observed that plague victims ‘never perceiv’d that they were infected’ until they discovered the ‘tokens’ on their skin. By that point, ‘nothing could follow but certain Death’. Something similar might be said of Britain’s universities. In recent days, the Jason Arday affair has captured the world’s attention because of its absurdity. But the humiliation of Cambridge is not an early sign of infection. It is just a particularly visible bubo. At one level, Arday’s fall reveals how, even in our most elite universities, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) dogma has warped intellectual standards to the point of madness.

George Brandis

Why Nigel Farage’s ‘Australia-style’ border policy is doomed to fail

When I served as Australia’s High Commissioner in London, I was naturally flattered by how often British politicians and officials invoked Australian precedents as examples of successful policy. Nowhere was that more evident than with immigration and border control. The ‘Australian-style points system’ became a cliché for describing best-practice migration policy. I remember a meeting with the Permanent Secretary of the Home Office, who frankly – and not a little ruefully – told me: ‘Whenever we want to get the public to think something is a good policy, all we have to do is put the prefix “Australian-style” in front of it.

Nigel Biggar

Who decides if a word is racist?

I swear Rod Liddle was smiling down on me last week, as I found myself tussling with an editor. I’d written a sentence containing the word ‘Chinamen’. She wanted me to remove it, because, she said, ‘Chinaman’ is widely acknowledged to be a racial slur. In my view, words have no single intrinsic meaning. Within limits, they can mean a variety of things, differing according to context – not least the tone of voice in which they’re delivered. Even ‘Yes’ can mean ‘No’, when said by an Englishman trained in the subtle art of oblique speech.

Owen Matthews

Who gets to decide when assassination is justified?

When is extrajudicial killing just war by other means, and when does it become a state-sponsored act of terror? ‘We were not terrorists but fighters for freedom who fought with our eyes open,’ Menachem Begin wrote of Irgun, the irregular group of fighters he led during the 1947-48 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, the tactics of whom included bombings and assassinations. But where does the 1 August bombing of the Balzi Rossi restaurant in central Moscow – which killed at least five people and injured more than 20– stand on the scale? Some would describe the attack as a legitimate military operation. The bomb targeted the lavish birthday celebrations of Colonel-General Aleksandr Chayko, Commander-in-Chief of Russia’s Aerospace Forces (whose son-in-law died in the blast).

Arabella Byrne

Do you have Old Money Face?

Recently, I have started to worry about my face. Early in the morning, before the children wake up, I’m sure I can see ghosts in the downstairs loo mirror. My 20-year-old self’s face flashes before me but soon vanishes reproachfully into the crow’s feet around my eyes; I didn’t like her anyway. My long-deceased father lingers over my cheekbones and draws the smoking lines around my mouth in ash. I frown back. My grandmother, anxious, appears in the split second between posing and relaxing. I squint as she used to when playing bridge. If the past is an inscrutable face, I am reduced to reading, not between the lines but between the wrinkles. I never thought I would get old – I’m 43 – but it’s happening.

James Dixon

Nothing beats writing by hand

I wrote the first drafts of both of my children’s novels by hand. It’s a great feeling: tactile, calming, a little ritualistic. I crack open a brand new Leuchtturm notebook, bought from the artsy place round the corner, pour myself an espresso, and set to work with the Cross ballpoint my nan gave me as a graduation present. It’s a slow and painstaking process, but one that is hugely rewarding. As a journalist and novelist, I can touch-type 100-odd words per minute, which is great when I’ve got a deadline for an article. It’s not what I’m after in a novel’s first draft manuscript, however. Time needs to be taken, the narrative voice discovered, pacing slowed a bit.

Wednesday

Kemi Badenoch

I didn’t want to like Rod Liddle

One of the joys of being director of digital at The Spectator, back in 2015, was seeing the magazine proofs before they went to print. Rod Liddle’s column was the first thing I looked for, always the one I was most eager to read. He made me laugh every single time, something very few columnists are able to do. I was annoyed I liked those columns, because I didn’t want to like Rod Liddle. All I knew of his personal life was through the scandal that followed him leaving his wife during the so-called ‘Sextator’ years. I took a dim view of that. Although we both worked for The Spectator, I didn’t actually meet Rod for a long time because, woke snowflake that he was, he only ever worked from home. The first time we met was at a Spectator summer party, years later.

Sophie Winkleman

‘The Middlesbrough Shakespeare’: Why I loved Rod

I met Rod 22 years ago this month. We had been selected as team-mates on a gameshow pilot, and, halfway through the morning’s filming, we went for a fag break. He said to me: ‘This is crap, shall we go to the pub?’ We scarpered and spent the rest of the day in a Covent Garden pub, working our way through the drinks list and chatting away like chipmunks. He would tell me that all the best people treat their bodies like bins (and all the worst like temples) I’d never been starstruck by anyone before I met Rod. However famous or talented actors are, their job is to say stuff written by other people. Rod, however, was a legend to me. I began reading his Guardian columns at university.

William Clouston

Rod had one great regret

In 2019 I had to explain to Iain Dale – live on LBC – that Rod Liddle’s suggestion in his Spectator column that elections should be held on Islamic holy days to deter Muslims from voting was not a serious proposal. Neither was his idea that students be drugged by their parents to the same end. It was humour, and they were jokes. When he was in hospital a few weeks ago, I visited Rod with some cake. While he munched away, he expressed a sense of regret that he could have been a great writer. Rod always thought his true calling was writing fiction, rather than journalism, and always wondered if he’d sold his soul by following the money. He was right – he did have the makings of a British Houellebecq.

Fraser Nelson

‘I asked for a substitute for the f-word. He suggested the c-word’: the joy of editing Rod

It was in Westminster Magistrates’ Court, where I was sitting waiting for the judge’s verdict, that I decided I needed a better way of handling Rod Liddle’s column. As editor of this magazine, I had inherited one of the greatest writers; a force of nature loved by his readers for his bravery and candour. But it sometimes led to difficulties: in this case, criminal prosecution. The judge had a choice: prosecute our owners, the editor, or the magazine. The magazine was fined. ‘Rod was right,’ I was told by Aidan Barclay, who as proprietor had nearly ended up in the dock himself. ‘But truth is no defence. Not any more. You need to spot these things before they blow up.’ Our lawyers were kept busy, too.

Titania McGrath

Good riddance, Rod

When a famous right-wing, straight white male dies, if your first instinct isn’t to gloat and trash his reputation then you clearly have no idea what it takes to be a progressive. The death of Rod Liddle is currently being celebrated by all of us on the right side of history. And because we announce our pronouns and wear keffiyehs, we can refer to him as a scumbag who deserves to burn in Hell and everyone will know that we’re actually incredibly compassionate. It’s a matter of simple mathematics. The population is divided into two factions: those who are good and those who are evil. Every time an evil person dies, the proportion of good people increases. Ergo, by dying, Liddle has made the world a gooder place. Being kind is largely about efficiency.

Boris Johnson

Rod’s genius? Driving his enemies nuts

There is a reason the death of Rod Liddle has provoked such a swirling tide of grief among his millions of followers, including readers of this magazine, and that is that in the last 25 years Rod came to occupy a crucial position in journalism, and indeed in our country as a whole. His columns became a haven, a refuge, in which he gave us permission to think things that are in fact common sense, but which have for some reason become taboo. He gave us a renewed permission to laugh – at him, at ourselves, at our collective absurdities – at a time when laughter is increasingly controlled and often suppressed.

Michael Gove

To be a Spectator reader was to love Rod

Since becoming Spectator editor there was one observation I heard more often from readers than any other: ‘Rod is the first page I turn to every week.’ Whatever people’s politics, background or other interests, to be a Spectator reader was to love Rod. Rod did his best, of course, to be unloveable. At least in print. Nothing, and no one, apart from possibly Millwall, was spared from his criticism. Savage, foul-mouthed, merciless. But also hilarious, superbly well-informed and honest. Above all honest. There are all sorts of enlightened souls in and around journalism who pretend to that virtue.

Lara Brown

Jason Arday has exposed Cambridge’s corruption 

The story of Jason Arday is so brilliantly illuminating of the rottenness of our Establishment that it seems – literally – fabulous. He seems to be almost too fantastic a figure for conventional fiction; rather, he is a character from fables of old – an archetype exposing the sins and hypocrisy of our times, a modern Till Eulenspiegel or Robin Goodfellow. In Arday’s frictionless ascent to academic eminence from a background of apparent disadvantage we see apparently elite institutions eagerly suspending their critical faculties in order to virtue-signal on race, disability and hardship. By studying Arday’s biography we can begin to understand just how in hock to progressive guilt our top universities are – and how damaging this is for real scholarship.

Lucas Chancellor 

Love lessons from my grandfather, Alexander Chancellor

After a lovely 25th birthday trip to Vienna, I returned home to face the reality of my quarter-life circumstances. I had been happy with my milestones to date – a degree, a stint of modelling on the European and New York runways, a couple of relationships and some encouraging writing contracts – but was then told by my mother what my grandfather Alexander Chancellor had pulled off by the time he was my age. Having moved to Italy to work for Reuters news agency, he spoke Italian fluently and had married my grandmother, Susanna Debenham; he had two children, he had bought a house and even had someone iron his shirts from time to time, which Susie was definitely not going to do. By the time he reached 35, he was editing this magazine.

Flora Watkins

The great hay shortage

For the connoisseur, pushing your nose into a bale of new-season hay is one of life’s small but glorious pleasures. As the peasant poet John Clare wrote in 1835, the ‘breath of flowers and grass and happy cow/ Fling o’er one’s senses streams of fragrance now’. Green and gold and sweet-smelling, first-cut hay is headier than marijuana, more complex than a Meursault. When the last bale was stored in the barn, you’d inhale deeply one last time, then close the doors with the quiet satisfaction that your horses were taken care of for the winter. Horses and livestock used to eat grass in the summer, with hay kept for the dead months.

Harry Mount

Never sue!

Don’t ever sue anyone! That’s what I would have told Prince Harry, Elton John and their fellow claimants, on the hook for a £34.4 million bill after losing their disastrous privacy case against the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. I trained as a libel barrister in 5 Raymond Buildings, the same chambers as Sir Matthew Nicklin, the judge in the case, and David ‘Orange Sherbet’ Sherborne, Prince Harry’s lawyer. In every libel case I saw as a pupil barrister, I thought it was crazy to sue. Clients risked fortunes for the possibility of minor moral victories. The barristers were certainly affable and bright. Sherborne got a First in Classics from New College, Oxford; Nicklin a First in Law from Newcastle. But, still, it isn’t worth risking millions to avenge an insult.

Wednesday

Lara Brown

Schools out: the dissolution of private education

St Joseph’s College in Reading survived two world wars, the Great Depression and a pandemic. But it could not weather two years under this Labour government. Next month, its 500 pupils will be among thousands across the country who do not return to the schools from which they broke up for the summer holidays. These are the casualties of the government’s decision to impose VAT on private school fees and remove business rate relief – a policy ministers promised would not have such consequences. We still haven’t seen the full effects of Labour’s recklessness. The true damage will take time to set in.

Patrick Kidd

The curious history of sporting superstitions

My father had been waiting his entire life for that whistle. After 75 years, the curse was over. Mayo were Gaelic football champions having overturned the second-biggest deficit in the history of All-Ireland finals. The county hadn’t seen such a miracle since Father Horan got the taoiseach to fund an international airport near the shrine of Our Lady of Knock. Three months before Dad was born in Castlebar, Mayo won the 1951 title. Their celebrations on the way home were exuberant and, so the legend goes, disrupted a funeral in Foxford. The furious priest (some versions blame the widow) cast a curse on them, saying Mayo would never again lift the Sam Maguire Cup while any of those players lived. Nonsense, right? Except that Mayo then lost 11 finals, four by one point.

James Heale

‘He’s either the Messiah – or the Antichrist’: on the campaign trail with Nigel Farage

‘We love you, Nigel!’ In Clacton-on-Sea, there is little sign that the Reform leader’s star has waned. Campaigning with Farage here is a burst of cackles, quips, nicotine and selfies: a march through sun-kissed streets with a cast of canvassers, aides and minders. A child clasping a teddy bear dances around, Reform’s rosette pinned to her top; a groaning assistant clutches two dozen poster boards. On the doors in Seawick, there is near-universal support, with variations on the theme which Farage has made his campaign slogan: ‘I’m with Nigel.’ In the middle of silly season, Clacton is hosting one of Britain’s most bizarre by-elections.