Wine Club

If, as Rod Liddle says, Brexit has been killed there is no shortage of suspects. 75 of them, in fact. That’s the number of Conservative MPs who voted against the Government in last night’s second – but not necessarily final – meaningful vote. They wanted Brexit and then, when they were given it, they decided it wasn’t the kind of Brexit they wanted after all. Fanaticism invariably devours its adherents and so it is with Brexit. The Brexiteers wanted the ball but once they had it they decided they did not actually want it after all. They had their chance and they blew it. All they had to do was vote for the withdrawal agreement. Now they have rejected that, there is little reason to pay them any further attention.

When I quit investment banking in search of daylight in 2014 I thought my life was going to be little easier crunching numbers for political campaigns. It wasn’t to be. Over the last few years, I’ve worked on the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, the 2015 general election, the Scottish Holyrood election in 2016, the EU referendum and the 2017 snap election. What I’ve never been able to wrap my head around through all these campaigns is why we’ve seen so many political upsets. Just why has the political consensus been wrong so often these past five years? When I worked on the Remain campaign, the upending of the consensus – against my own expectations – was a painful experience.

If racism is to succeed in corrupting institutions and countries it needs authorisation from the elite. The popular caricature of the racist as a white working-class man, or superstitious east european peasant, or shabby paranoid academic, shows not only class bias, but a lack of understanding that what transforms extremism from poisonous men muttering in corners to political movements with the power to ruin lives, is the authorisation given by leaders and intellectuals. A party can have racist members – as the Conservative party undoubtedly does. But because its leadership is not anti-Muslim their effect is constrained to personal abuse. I don’t mean to diminish it. If my experience is typical, race-based insults are something you never forget.

At last, having kept pretty shtum about it for the past few years, the virtue-signalling set has mustered up some sympathy for women caught up in the horrific Isis vortex. Unfortunately, though, their sympathy isn’t for the Yazidi women who were burned alive after refusing to become sex slaves for Isis jihadists. Or the Kurdish women who found themselves living under the brutal misogynistic yoke of the Isis empire. Or the Syrian and Iraqi women whose husbands and sons were beheaded for adhering to the wrong branch of Islam. No, their sympathy is for a woman who supported the movement that did all those things. Who provided moral succour to the Isis barbarians.

Some years ago I was introduced to one notion of how to tackle dishonest and insincere accusations of racism. It was not just that there should be a social cost to making a dishonest claim, but that the cost should equal that borne by somebody who is accurately and correctly identified as a racist. Without such a disincentive there is no reason (other than decency and honesty, which may sometimes be in short supply) for people not to level such accusations insincerely in order to beat away any and all critics. Since Monday night I have been wondering, amid much else, whether some similar aspiration could be encouraged regarding hate crimes. In recent days and weeks there has been much comment on the case of Jussie Smollett.

Margaret Nelson is a 74-year-old woman who lives in a village in Suffolk. On Monday morning she was woken by a telephone call. It was an officer from Suffolk police. The officer wanted to speak to Mrs Nelson about her Twitter account and her blog. Mrs Nelson, a former humanist celebrant and one-time local newspaper journalist, enjoys tweeting and writing about a number of issues, including the legal and social distinctions between sex and gender. Among the statements she made on Twitter last month and which apparently concerned that police officer: 'Gender is BS. Pass it on'. Another: 'Gender's fashionable nonsense. Sex is real. I've no reason to feel ashamed of stating the truth.

Liam Neeson has been ‘cancelled’, which is internet-speak for ‘cast out’. Overnight he has gone from being the avuncular star of ropey American thrillers to being ‘trash’, persona non grata, a foul, nasty man Hollywood should no longer indulge. His crime? He confessed, during an interview, to having once had a terrible thought, a thought he is now deeply ashamed of, a thought so wicked that when he thinks of it now he has to catch his breath and re-compose himself. Yes, that’s right: the Twittermob has become so unforgiving, so myopically obsessed with taking people down, that it is now persecuting even those who express deep regret about their past bad behaviour.