Douglas Murray

Some years ago I heard a moving story about Roy Jenkins. An unpromising start to any anecdote but stay with me. It involved a croquet match during the late period of his life – as Chancellor of the University of Oxford – when Jenkins had become one of the grander, not to say more pompous, figures in our public life. According to someone playing with him, his Lordship had appalling luck. Although he wielded his mallet with all requisite skill, his ball would not go through the hoops. Eventually the grand old man stormed off the pitch in a great huff. Only after he had left did the other players discover that the ball Lord Jenkins had been working was from a different croquet set, and too big to fit through the hoops.

I’ve always admired Diane Abbott, though admittedly only for one thing. Many years ago the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington campaigned against private schools. As a good socialist this comes as part of the ideological package, and Abbott was more than happy to join in the class war against parents who are in a position to educate their children outside the state system. However, as some readers might remember, when it came to her own school choice Ms Abbott looked around the local state schools and decided that none of them was good enough for her own progeny. So she sent her son to the City of London School, a private school for boys. Confronted with this hypocrisy, Abbott did the sole thing that I admire her for.

A little while back I came across a copy of Ted Hughes’s Laureate poems which had an inscription to some friends. Inside was an unpublished squib by the late poet laureate which read: ‘The Royalist/ Is afraid/ The Queen’s a pin/ In a hand-grenade.’ If I understand the poet’s meaning correctly then I count myself such a royalist. I dislike criticism of the royal family, especially of the monarch. When it happens it feels too much like people hammering at something fundamental – far more fundamental than the critic appreciates. If criticism is to be made it seems to me that it should be done privately, so as not to disturb the fragile equilibrium of the rather magical arrangement we have on these islands.

I don’t know how many readers have visited the grave of Dobby the house-elf, but any who have should immediately be sectioned and have their subscriptions to The Spectator cancelled. This strong course of action occurs to me after reading one of those stories that can make you laugh, cry and smack your head into your hands all at once. It relates to a ‘memorial’ which apparently sits on Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales. The area is run by the National Trust – a charity which used to look after our nation’s heritage sites. The beach in question was where filming took place for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

How do you produce the type of person who cares deeply while seemingly not giving a damn? With great difficulty, it turns out. Plenty of people imagine that they can say what they think, but very few do. For most people, some real or imaginary social punishment lies on the horizon: a dinner they won’t be invited to; a club of which they fear they will never become a member. Rod Liddle was one of the happy few who was free. He was free to say what he thought. He was free to voice unpopular opinions and – often harder – he was free to voice popular opinions. When the whole world seemed to be falling on his head he had a perfectly contented attitude towards it.

I don’t know if you remember that old saw: ‘Always speak ill of the dead.’ I don’t recall being brought up with it myself, but a number of our fellow countrymen apparently were. After the brutal killing of Ann Widdecombe last week we saw some fine examples of people following this rule. Peter Tatchell – a prominent member of the ‘be kind’ brigade – took to social media to describe the death of Widdecombe in celebratory tones. He listed her crimes, such as her belief that marriage is a union between a man and a woman, and then ended his tweet by saying: ‘BIGOT!’ As though final judgment had been passed down from on high.

In January this year Dominic Cummings – once of this parish – warned The Spectator’s editor and assistant editor that Whitehall and the establishment parties would ‘stop at nothing’ to prevent Nigel Farage from becoming prime minister. As Cummings told the Quite right! podcast: ‘The people around [Keir] Starmer and all through the upper echelons of the Whitehall system are looking at Donald Trump. They’re looking across Europe, and they’re saying to themselves: “The lesson is to strike early and strike hard and not let these people in… Let’s smash the absolute living shit out of Farage, and make sure that he doesn’t win, by fair means or foul.

What are the circumstances in which it is right to smash up a building? When might one justifiably destroy an artwork? And what are the conditions under which one might splinter someone’s spine with a sledgehammer? Many on the left seem to have satisfied themselves on all these questions. But I wonder if they have even begun to reckon with the consequences. One can only hope that those who urge on ‘direct action’ have no idea how slippery a slope they are on Back in 2019 a group of activists from Extinction Rebellion took their views on fossil fuels to Belvedere Road in central London. There, at the site of the Shell building, they smashed windows, spray-painted walls and caused other criminal damage.

I get the sense that the political and media class badly miss Katie Hopkins. Back when the reality TV star was still a regular on our screens and in our newspapers, she could be relied upon to be the focus of attention whenever the people in charge didn’t want the public’s attention to be focused where it ought to be. So when a British soldier was decapitated on the streets of London, or a suicide bomber went off at a pop concert packed with teenage girls, Ms Hopkins could be found saying something that a lot of people were thinking – only in a more colourful or unwise way.

I wonder how many readers have ever heard of the name Kriss Donald? The young Glaswegian was just 15 years old in 2004 when he was kidnapped by a local gang of Pakistani men. The group selected him because he was white and they had some beef with a group of white men with whom Donald had no connection at all. After driving around for hours, the gang – led by one Imran Shahid – stabbed Donald repeatedly before dousing his body in petrol and setting him alight. I also wonder how many readers have heard of the name Tony Timpa? The white, unarmed Texan was 32 in 2016 when he suffered some sort of mental breakdown in public. Instead of assisting him, police arrived at the scene and restrained him in such a way that he died.

What would you say if your spouse bought a luxury campervan? I know what I would say – something along the lines of: ‘Get that thing away from me. I refuse to spend wet weekends campervanning around the Highlands, and I don’t care whether the bathroom facilities are “luxury” or not.’ In other words, any spouse of mine would get a tongue-lashing. But then I have a spiritual aversion to campervans, having spent many a childhood summer stuck behind them on single-track roads in the Highlands, watching their foul residents bespoil many of Scotland’s best beaches. We cannot know what Nicola Sturgeon’s reaction was to this luxury monstrosity. She would have us believe that when Peter Murrell took receipt of his top-of-the-range campervan she had nothing to say.