In January 1980 Isaac Asimov, writer of ‘hard science fiction’, professor of bio-chemistry and vice-president of Mensa International, penned a column for Newsweek magazine in which he addressed a prevailing ‘cult of ignorance’ in America. ‘The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life,’ he wrote, ‘nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.
Forget footwear. The most telling thing about Theresa May, as suggested in interview with Robert Peston, is her cookbook collection – she has 100. Her remarks about her cookery writer of choice was an extraordinary exercise in character signalling. 'Delia is very precise,' she said, 'and I like a bit of… throw a bit here and a bit there, and Ottolenghi is really interesting in the stuff that he does. Right. Unless you’re a member of the smirking liberal metropolitan elite – or, like me, a cookbook reviewer – or Theresa May, you may not be familiar with Yotam Ottolenghi, but this is as clear an indicator as you can get that you’re a cosmopolitan internationalist with a free and easy approach to immigration.
Call it femocracy or gynocracy (my preference), or, a new age of women, as Justine Greening has it, the excited consensus is that we’re in for a benign new world of female governance. Hillary in the US, Theresa May over here, Ruth Davidson and Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, Angela Merkel in Germany…what could be more lovely? Except possibly the addition of Marine Le Pen at the helm in France, though oddly enough feminists rarely bring her into the new scheme of things… she’s up there with Sarah Palin as an female unmentionable. Oh and let’s not forget Angela Eagle as potential Labour leader, whose tearfulness as she knifed Jeremy Corbyn with her resignation this week was, I suppose, endearing to some.
I wrote a while back that the UK referendum wouldn't be at all bitter or divisive, and I think it's fair to say I was utterly, utterly wrong. I just hope whoever wins shows a spirit of magnanimity and conciliation, and tries to steer the country to the most moderate course available. Perhaps it was obvious that this debate would turn into a sort of British culture war, one that divided the country heavily over the issue of globalisation. As James Bartholomew points out in this week's issue of The Spectator, the referendum has exposed a huge rift between the metropolitan elite and the rest.
If Geert Hofstede’s name is familiar to you, it might be from pop-science articles explaining a spate of Korean airliner crashes in the 1990s. A widely held theory placed some of the blame on the hierarchical nature of Korean culture; this made the junior pilot reluctant to mention any mistakes made by his superior. If he noticed the captain heading for a hillside, he might summon up the courage to mutter, ‘Perhaps, honoured sir, you might like to pay particular attention to the interesting terrain.’ This contrasts with low ‘power distance’ cultures: New Zealand, say, or Ireland. On Aer Lingus, a stewardess could jab the pilot in the ribs and say, ‘Watch you don’t fecking crash, you gobshite!
Six weeks ago I was one of the 1.3 million Londoners who voted for Sadiq Khan as mayor. Boy do I regret it now. Because he’s just shown what he really thinks of us inhabitants of the capital: that we’re so mentally fragile, so pathetic, so vulnerable to the wicked charms of advertisers, that he must censor allegedly sexist ads on our behalf and protect us from offence. In proposing a blanket ban on bus and Tube ads that make people feel bad about their bodies, Sadiq has revealed his authoritarian, paternalistic contempt for the people who swept him to power. I’m amazed there isn’t more fury about his extraordinary proposal. He has instructed Transport for London to stop running ads that indulge in body-shaming.
Rolling news does not give its participants the option of shutting their mouths and biting their tongues, even when shutting and biting are the best available options. Silence is the producer's greatest fear. The supposedly contrarian presenter has to keep talking. The supposedly tough-minded pundit has to show she is nobody's fool. Better that than a hushed studio. Last night, Owen Jones of the Guardian made the rather obvious point to Mark Longhurst, a Sky News presenter, and the Telegraph’s Julia Hartley Brewer, that a terrorist who slaughters LGBT people in a gay club hates homosexuality.
I’m sitting in a gay café in Washington DC. Opposite me, a lesbian couple are hugging and kissing, trying to console each other about the massacre of 53 people in a gay club in Orlando last night — the biggest terrorist attack since 9/11. This weekend was supposed to be a big gay carnival. There was a huge gay pride march along this street yesterday, with thousands of people waving rainbow flags, bringing their children. President Obama repeatedly endorsed the 'Love is Love' campaign. And now, in Florida, a American Muslim maniac kills 53 people — and why? Might it be connected to what his father says: that he saw two men kissing in Miami and was upset?
What a strange human being the historian Eric Hobsbawm was. I was reminded of this the other day while reading a new report by the New Culture Forum on attitudes to Communism almost a century after the Russian Revolution. It includes this exchange between Michael Ignatieff and Professor Hobsbawm: Ignatieff: In 1934 ... millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time? To your commitment? To being a communist? Hobsbawm: ... Probably not. Ignatieff: Why? Hobsbawm: Because in a period in which, as you might say, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing ...
When we said we were thinking of moving to Lewisham four years ago, the locals in our pub in Bethnal Green thought we were mad. ‘It’s fuckin’ ’orrible,’ one of them said. Coming from people who’d lived all their lives in the East End, this was worrying. Nevertheless, swayed by a cheap ex-council flat, we moved to a hill that runs between Blackheath and Lewisham station. A good way to imagine Lewisham town centre is as the village in Asterix, surrounded on all sides by the forces of gentrification. Hither Green, Ladywell, Forest Hill and Brockley have delicatessens and artisan bakeries. Deptford has hipsters whereas Blackheath is proper posh, the Hampstead of the south. Even grimy old Catford has a gastropub. But Lewisham central resists.
Alain de Botton, to judge from his new novel The Course of Love, is trying to be the Freud for our day, the Facebookers’ Freud. For a book that presents itself as an affirmation of married love, it is rather bleak. And the bleakness echoes that of the Viennese know-it-all. Freud, remember, said that our sex drive makes life basically tragic. To have orderly lives, we must renounce our desire for promiscuous fun. To be mentally healthy, we must be honest about this; we must admit the force of our primal instinct, and not deny it or suppress it too rigidly, or we go neurotic. But we must suppress it. The funny thing about de Botton is that he comes to such conclusions against the grain of his temperament, which is doggedly upbeat.
Let me start by putting my podgy little hand up - the one not ferreting fervently through a big box of Belgian chocs, that is. Starting out positively sylph-like, I’ve reached a size 18 at the age of 56 solely through lack of discipline and love of pleasure. I have no time for people (except those with proven medical conditions) who pretend that it is generally otherwise. Nevertheless, I’m not attached to my flab in any way but the most obvious. I despise the Righteous Fat. (The Righteous Thin are bad enough, all that running around, sweating and smelling, and somehow believing that it means something.
'The isles of Greece! The isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung, Where grew the arts of war and peace, Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!' I couldn’t agree more with Lord Byron about the joys of the Greek islands. Here in Cephalonia, the poppies are out, back-lit by a strong spring sun. The swallows are swooping low across the villa, taking little sips from the swimming pool. The tavernas are gearing up for the summer season; the sea bass at lunch was freshly caught this morning. Still, lucky old Byron never had to deal with a ferry strike between the isles of Greece. A general strike meant our ferry from Cephalonia to the Peloponnese was cancelled.
Every wet leftie has been paying tribute to Muhammad Ali over the past 72 hours. Which is kind of weird considering Ali embodied everything they loathe. Male bravado, urban swagger, cockiness, masculinity by the bucketload: the things that made Ali great are the things his right-on mourners normally agitate and commentate against. Their hailing of Ali is as mad as a bunch of zebras turning up to the funeral of a lion. Nothing rattles today’s liberal-leftists more than the idea of the powerful bloke. Especially cocksure poor ones who are mouthy and — oh my God — use their muscle to get ahead in life. Indeed, this week’s New Statesman is devoted to the problem of masculinity.
A few months ago, Nigerian migrants housed at a government hostel in Milan suddenly refused to eat any more of the free food on offer. Italian food is monotonous and indigestable, they explained. Then they went berserk. This was not a one-off case. Far from it. There have been hunger strikes, demos, sit-ins and the odd riot in protest at the stuff. Recently, a group of mainly Pakistani migrants based in a Reggio Emilia hostel were given their own taxpayer-funded chef ‘specializzato in piatti pachistani e africani’. They had complained that Italian food was making them ill. Many migrants en route from Libya to who-knows-where are marooned in Italy for now, and they are getting fed up. They know that other EU countries have better food.
A question for those of you of a certain age. Who was the first articulate black person you ever saw or heard? My guess is that it would be Muhammad Ali or, if you are a little older, Cassius Clay. Obviously if you yourself are black the question should be a little different. Then it would be who was the first articulate black person you saw on TV? Of course there were plenty of black people in the world before Clay came along, loads of them. Back in the 1960s they impinged on the rest of us largely as entertainers, if they were famous black people, or as the unwitting cause of indigenous race riots if they were not. But they did not really speak to us; we knew nothing of them, here in England.
According to a recent law report in the Times, the Court of Appeal has just forbidden a mother to name her daughter Cyanide. The child was born to a schizophrenic woman, as the result of a rape. The girl is in local authority care. The mother’s lawyers argued that it is a statutory duty to register a child with a name and that the law has no provision to refuse offensive names. But Lady Justice King (itself a striking, though not offensive name) found that the choice of name was an act of ‘parental responsibility’. Because of the care order, this responsibility had devolved upon the local authority, which did not like the name Cyanide. So far, so good.
The Templeton Prize is known to lots of people from Richard Dawkins’ intemperate denunciation of it in The God Delusion in which it features as the unspeakable temptation for scientists to do business with the God lobby. But having been to the ceremony last night in which it was awarded to the former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks – who, unusually for a winner, featured, mike in hand, in a performance of a hymn to celebrate Israel by the Shabbaton choir - I’m still at a bit of a loss as to what it’s about. The billing is that it 'honours a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery or practical works.
I consider myself such an extreme feminist that I make Germaine Greer look like Greer Garson. (Ask your gran.) But this doesn’t mean that I have to believe women are superior to men in every way. Yes, we violently attack, sexually assault and feel the need to commit murder far less than they do. But when it comes to the little things, there are many ways in which manning up would make women better. Maturity is one of them. We are told from the get-go that females ‘mature’ far earlier than males. It’s weird that feminists go along with this, because it’s one of the main justifications for adult men having sex with female children: ‘She looked at least 18, your honour!
Apologies for the lack of blogs – I’ve been on jury duty for two weeks. Hang the bastard, regardless of the evidence, was my watchword as jury foreman. Anyway, normal service will soon be resumed. In the interim, let me give the few of you who care about football my take on the England team at present, and its chances in France next month. I was of course delighted we beat the hideous, cheating, Turks – and in the end with something to spare. But what we learned was this: Playing Jamie Vardy on the wing is stupid. Put him in the centre with Harry Kane. So that means some variation of 4-4-2. Yes, de trop. But it works for us.
