The Spectator's Notes

At the anti-Semitism “summit” in Downing Street, Sir Keir Starmer achieved a personal first. He used the word “Islamists.” But in order to utter a word he had previously avoided in relation to the subject, Sir Keir had to approach it crabwise. Instead of identifying Islamists as the main ideological and physical threat to British Jews, he said: “We’re clear-eyed about the fact that anti-Semitism does not have one source alone: Islamists, far-left, far-right extremism, all target Jewish communities.” Islamists were thus inserted into the conversation but also downplayed. It is obsolete not to recognize that the far right in Britain – for the moment at least – more or less leaves Jews alone.

If, as Donald Trump had threatened, “a whole civilization” had died earlier this month, the whole civilization concerned would have been that of the United States, not of Iran. If an American president had deliberately ordered the death of a civilization – whether or not such a thing is achievable – America’s claim to world leadership would have collapsed. Like, I suspect, many, however, I did not go to bed that night thinking that Trump would carry out his threat. I remember my parents telling me that, during the Cuban missile crisis, people truly believed there might be nuclear conflagration at any moment. It did not feel like that this time. It felt as if Trump had said something frightening and horrible to claim mastery over whatever was going to happen next.

The Prince of Wales seeks to assure us that, as a friend puts into his mouth, “I might not be at church every day, but I believe in it.” That formulation does not necessarily mean he believes in God or the doctrines of the Church of England. All it means is that he believes in the efficacy of the C of E and will dutifully fulfill his future role as its Supreme Governor. Actually, that is all we need to know. His great Tudor predecessor said she did not want to “make windows into men’s souls”; even kings are only men. The important thing, from a constitutional as opposed to a spiritual point of view, is that he acts the part with good grace, which he surely will. Whether he does so by divine grace poured into his heart is a question above all our pay grades.

I am glad that BBC Radio 4 is producing a series called How Reading Made Us, presented by the subtle, super-literate Times of London columnist James Marriott. I must declare an interest. Roughly 98 percent of my earnings over 45 years have depended on the fact that plenty of people like reading. Now we are thinking harder, however, about the fact that form affects substance. The idea of an encyclopedia, for example, as developed (from classical roots) in the 18th century, was that all needful knowledge on a particular subject could be assembled and consulted in a book or series of books. With AI, there is little need for this form. The form of a book, which often seemed so compendious, can now seem cumbersome. Fiction, too, is affected by form.

The death of Quentin Deranque is strangely under-reported here. He was a 23-year-old beaten up in Lyon on February 12 by supporters of the main party of the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise (FI). He had been part of a group escorting what the BBC website calls "far-right feminists," helping them protest against the visit to a university by a far-left politician. There was a fracas in the street with masked opponents connected with the Young Guard, a leftist FI-related group declared illegal last year. Deranque died of his injuries two days later. One of those arrested is a special adviser to an FI deputy.