Andrew Doyle

John Cleese enjoys tough questions. He’s currently touring America with An Evening with the Late John Cleese, and a substantial part of the show is thrown open to the audience. He tells me that when someone asks a particularly rude question – such as ‘Why can’t you stay married?’ – it simply adds to the fun. Another one of his favourites is ‘What’s the worst film you ever made?’ I ask him the same question. ‘Well, there are a lot of contenders,’ John says. Apparently his ‘sabre-toothed daughter’ Camilla might have the answer, because she often introduces him to the stage as ‘the star of The Pink Panther 2’. When I tell John that I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing it, he offers me some succinct advice: ‘Don’t.

In February 2020, I was invited on to the BBC’s The Big Questions to debate the topic: ‘Is wokeness the new religion?’ I had already anticipated that mine would be the unfashionable view, and so I steeled myself in advance for the inevitable onslaught. This being a British daytime television show, the onslaught took the form of audible grumbles and a few raised eyebrows. One of my fellow panellists expressed her dismay that we were discussing this topic at all, which is akin to accepting an invitation to a birthday party and then complaining about the bunting.

I like to think of myself as a latter-day Mother Shipton. I may not live in a cave in the north of Yorkshire, but I do occasionally dabble in prophecy. And, like Mother Shipton, I am accurate approximately roughly one per cent of the time. And I can prove it. In a diary piece for the Spectator in June 2020, I wrote the following: ‘Is it really any great leap to suppose that the same activists who would see a statue of Mahatma Gandhi toppled for his 'problematic' views might not wish the same fate on Eric Gill’s sculpture of Prospero and Ariel on the facade of the BBC’s Broadcasting House?’ This week, a man fulfilled my prediction by climbing a ladder and attacking Gill’s work with a hammer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Spectator contributors were asked: Which moment from history seems most significant or interesting? Here is Andrew Doyle’s answer: The Synodus Horrenda of January 897 is one of many bleak episodes in history that the Catholic Church would probably rather we forget. This is when Pope Formosus was put on trial for perjury and violating canon law. The twist is that by this point he had been dead for eight months.  The trial was an exercise in score-settling by his successor, Stephen VI. He had the corpse exhumed, dressed in his sacerdotal garb and propped up in the papal court. Pope Formosus was even provided with a defence council, but the outcome was never really in doubt.

Have you ever claimed to be ‘not racist’? If so, sorry, but you’re a bigot. Should this seem incoherent, then you’re clearly not well versed in critical race theory: a once niche academic field that has gone mainstream and popularised concepts such as ‘white privilege’, ‘white fragility’ and ‘systemic racism’. According to Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, ‘the claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism’. Alana Lentin, author of Why Race Still Matters, takes it a step further, arguing that to be ‘not racist’ is ‘a form of discursive racist violence’.

Reality seems thinner these days. As I walk along the high street, passers-by drift apart as though afraid of crossing auras. Three months of lockdown has made this repulsion of human contact a matter of instinct. I can’t help but see this tendency reflected in the escalating intolerance and hostility on social media. So at the start of the week I decide to spend a few days away from Twitter. It’s not the ideal forum for civilised debate at the best of times, but even some of those I respect are now behaving like poorly socialised children who’ve just learnt some flashy new expletives. J.K. Rowling is bombarded for holding views about biological sex differences that would have been considered self-evident only a decade ago.

When Tony Wang, general manager of Twitter in the UK, described the company as the ‘free speech wing of the free speech party’ he was expressing an ideal that would soon collapse. This was in 2012, long before the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency was anything other than a flippant punchline in The Simpsons. Six months after the 2016 election, Twitter’s co-founder Evan Williams expressed his regret for the part they played in securing Trump’s victory. The implication – that the decisions of the general public are shaped by bad actors who prey on their malleability, and it is the responsibility of technocrats to do something about it – is one that has since become depressingly familiar.

What does it tell us that so many left-leaning individuals took to social media this week in order to celebrate the news that Boris Johnson has tested positive for coronavirus? Others stooped even lower and openly yearned for his death, complete with triumphal emojis and GIFs. It would simply never occur to most of us to revel in the illness of a fellow human creature simply on the grounds that he or she represents a political worldview that we find repellent. So why does this instinct come so naturally to those who, barely a few weeks earlier, were hectoring their followers about the importance of compassion and peppering their tweets with the #BeKind hashtag?

I start the week by going through my iPhone to delete the numbers of former friends. It sounds depressing, but it’s actually quite cathartic. I suppose it all started with Brexit. I’m not a confrontational person, so it was surprising to find so many friends turning against me over their newfound devotion to a neoliberal trading bloc. Since then, I’ve watched the ongoing curdling of rational minds with a growing sense of incomprehension. So many on the left appear to have surrendered to a collective fantasy in which the slightest point of political disagreement is interpreted as evidence of fascism.

I start the week by going through my iPhone to delete the numbers of former friends. It sounds depressing, but it’s actually quite cathartic. I suppose it all started with Brexit. I’m not a confrontational person, so it was surprising to find so many friends turning against me over their newfound devotion to a neoliberal trading bloc. Since then, I’ve watched the ongoing curdling of rational minds with a growing sense of incomprehension. So many on the left appear to have surrendered to a collective fantasy in which the slightest point of political disagreement is interpreted as evidence of fascism.

There’s a moment in Ricky Gervais’s 2018 Netflix stand-up show Humanity when he talks about buying a first-class air ticket, only to be informed that nuts would not be served on board due to a fellow passenger’s serious allergy. ‘I was fuming,’ he says. ‘If being near a nut kills you, do we really want that in the gene pool? I’ve never wanted nuts more. I felt that she was infringing on my human right to eat nuts.’ A member of the public tweeted him directly to complain after hearing him tell this story on The Tonight Show, but instead of apologising Ricky wrote a routine about it. As he points out, when someone is needlessly offended, ‘it makes it funnier’.