Roger scruton

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I know that, as the heat intensifies, you want me to write about the highly trained nudists who have stolen the best bit of our beautiful beach and what such manifestations of diversity, equity and inclusion entail. But I’m not going to, because I feel I must write instead about Churchill and Mussolini. In a three-hour documentary, the Italian equivalent of the BBC has (more or less) accused Churchill of ordering the execution of Mussolini on Lake Como in April 1945. His motive, apparently, was to stop the Duce making public secret wartime letters between the two of them that were very damaging to Churchill.

Sir Roger Scruton is remembered by most people as a conservative philosopher. Softly spoken and thoughtful in conversation, he was brave and unconventional in his views. Few things are as unconventional as being a convinced and articulate conservative. It cost him advancement in the academic world. But he was admired, liked and even loved by many. And today his work continues to be influential. But there was a part of Scruton’s life that is not well-known. It was clandestine. This secret life is currently being commemorated and honoured in an exhibition in Brno, the historic and rather beautiful second city of the Czech Republic. It is a two-and-a-half-hour train journey from Prague unless you are willing to face a direct flight on Ryanair.

How screwed is Britain? I’ve checked with the Impartiality Police. They said stick to the facts. Like many ailing, ageing western democracies, we’ve had low growth, soaring debts and flat living standards for nearly two decades. Have our politicians met the moment? You tell me. Perhaps, as The Spectator has long advocated, we need some heretical and brave thinking to improve our prospects and make sense of the giant forces – of technology, ecology and demography – that are reshaping our world at a dizzying rate. For a decade, I have tried to rebalance the news, from events to trends. The result of all this: a new podcast from the Today franchise, called Radical. I’ve always had a soft spot for the word.

I was in Sweden a few weeks ago, where my music was presented in Stockholm in the most recent International Composer Festival. One of the orchestral works performed was my football-themed ‘Eleven’ (11 players, melodies of 11 notes, chords of 11 pitches and various football chants woven into the fabric of the score). I’m not the first composer obsessed with the beautiful game. Bohuslav Martinu’s ‘Half-time’, written in 1924, was inspired by the supporters of his team, Sparta Prague. And more recently there have been bold examples by English composers Mark-Anthony Turnage (who worked chants for his beloved Arsenal into his orchestral piece ‘Momentum’) and Benedict Mason, in whose opera Playing Away even the ball sings an aria.

Disastrous decisions Sir: One cannot but agree wholeheartedly with Lionel Shriver (‘This is not a natural disaster’, 16 May). Given the unremarked impact of other diseases which she mentioned, Covid-19 is small beer. The government set out on the right path with its herd immunity policy, but was bounced into lockdown by the ‘science’, hounded by the media in full cry. We are now in a situation where employees, mainly in the public sector and supported by the unions, refuse to rise from their feather beds and return to work. This is not a situation from which we will recover easily — if at all.

Save the children Sir: Your leading article is correct that the government should have evaluated the detriment caused by shutting schools, against the risk posed by Covid-19 (‘Class divide’, 16 May). This is not a glib trade-off between protecting lives and allowing children to go to school: the predicament foisted on young people will affect their future for decades. Exams were abruptly cancelled in March. This has left many schools dealing with apathetic individuals. The disparity between disadvantaged and affluent students is widening: middle-class schoolchildren are twice as likely to receive online tuition, and only 8 per cent of teachers in low-income communities report more than three-quarters of work being submitted, compared with 50 per cent in the private sector.

This week sees the official launch of the Free Speech Union — an organisation that stands up for the speech rights of its members. It’s my baby, but a number of people have come on board as directors, including Douglas Murray and Professor Nigel Biggar. I’ve also had a lot of help behind the scenes from people who got in touch after reading about it in this column. I was on the Today programme on Monday to talk about it and have done a number of interviews since. By the time you read this, I’ll be recovering from the launch party, scheduled for Wednesday night. So far, it’s going pretty well.

Earlier this month the philosopher and author Sir Roger Scruton passed away. In a series of tributes to his work and his character, many reflected on the contributions he made to his fields of expertise and society at large. Today in central London, one of his final contributions was revealed. The Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission published its findings on housing in the UK this afternoon. The work, led by Sir Roger and Nicholas Boys Smith, is a product of a year-long review of the UK’s planning system, which has come up with 45 policy proposals organised around eight key themes for all levels of government. Scruton’s last piece of work was, for him, a very meaningful one.

Roger Scruton’s funeral takes place in London today, and he’ll be in the thoughts and prayers of his admirers worldwide – many of them in Poland. We Poles owe him an unusual debt, one he mentioned in his Spectator diary last month when he wrote about his journey to Warsaw. Andrzej Duda, the Polish president, presented him with the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit in recognition of his ‘extraordinary efforts in supporting the democratic transformation in Poland and for developing Polish-British academic and scientific exchange’. In his Spectator diary, he wrote about how he also met men that day who had been imprisoned for 20 and 30 years under communism.