Douglas Murray is associate editor of The Spectator and author of The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, among other books.
There are many ways to do nothing. One is to sit on your hands; another is to call for ‘a conversation’. I have noticed quite a lot of calls for ‘a conversation’ since the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green last week. Some politicians and pundits have even been bold enough to call
Last Saturday evening, the American media class descended for its annual jamboree of back-slapping at the Washington Hilton. Protestors outside waved signs reading ‘Death to tyrants’ and ‘Death to all of them’. The atmosphere inside was more jovial. Donald Trump was attending the dinner for the first time since becoming President, along with most of
Willie Donaldson, who died in 2005, has a claim to having had the best obituary sub-heading of any writer I know. ‘Wykehamist pimp, crack fiend and adulterer who created Henry Root and Beyond the Fringe’ was how the Telegraph memorably summed up his life. As readers of his biography, You Cannot Live As I Have
The bombing of the Revolutionary government in Iran is drawing comparisons with the war in Iraq. But the comparisons are with the wrong war. In 1981 there was an attack on Iraq which much more closely resembles what Donald Trump is trying to achieve in Iran. The story goes back to 1976, when the government
There has been so much news of late that stories which might once have caused a splash have sailed by all but unnoticed. One in particular seems worthy of bringing into a greater light, not least because it has been almost entirely ignored by the English-language media. Tariq Ramadan is the grandson of the founder
I have spent a small portion of the past week wondering what I would do if I thought communists were about to take over our country. At the more civil end of things, I could see myself going on an anti-communist protest, though I would shrink away if I noticed that my fellow marchers were
During the Cold War I am fairly certain that films, TV dramas and other popular entertainment did not remain silent on the threat posed by the Soviets. In fact my memory from those times was that popular culture was filled with Russian baddies, drunken homosexualist double–agents and great western super-heroes who were intent on taking
Some years ago I was approached by someone from a platform called ‘Cameo’. Not all Spectator readers will have heard of this platform, and I hadn’t either. As a result I listened to their pitch with the same amount of scepticism I might reserve for an email addressed to me as ‘Dear Beloved’, revealing that
Sometimes the obvious is so obvious that people forget to state it. So let me observe one small footnote among recent obvious things. Earlier this month, Donald Trump killed the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and most of the senior leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary government in Iran. There are many things to be said against the
I am becoming rather fond of Prime Minister Starmer’s major foreign policy announcements. In early January, after US forces swooped into Venezuela and took President Maduro to New York to face trial, Keir Starmer was keen to get straight out in front of the cameras. There he said that he wanted to stress that ‘the
The interesting thing about political pendulums is that they always over-swing. In the campaign for this week’s Gorton and Denton by-election, one of the main lines of attack on the Reform candidate is that he used to be an academic and is therefore ill-suited to being the area’s parliamentary representative. The candidate who has suffered
As I have suggested here before, there are few joys in life equal to that of watching the left fall out among itself. Whatever your political views, the whole Judean People’s Front vibe of the parties to the left of the Labour party brings a special type of comedy. If anybody remembers the recent Your
There is a moment in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall which has been much on my mind lately. It is the bit towards the very end of the novel when our hero, Paul Pennyfeather, re-encounters the sinister modernist architect Professor Otto Silenus. By this point Pennyfeather has undergone all manner of travails. He has been
I think by now most of us can spot a double standard when we see one. So let me try two out on you. In what situation is it acceptable to denounce an MP or parliamentary candidate as ‘not very British’ or even someone who ‘doesn’t get our values, our culture, or our history’. When
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Who really runs Britain: the government, foreign courts or international lawyers? This question is at the heart of Michael Gove’s cover piece for the Spectator this week, analysing the role of those at the centre of Labour’s foreign policy. Attorney general Lord Hermer, national security adviser Jonathan Powell and internationally renowned barrister Philippe Sands may
They say you should never meet your heroes, a rule that is not always correct. But I did have a salutary session some years ago when a friend in New York asked me if I wanted to meet a comedian I really do admire. I had been looking forward to the meeting, but unfortunately it
I have never been the greatest fan of libertarianism as a political ideology. Libertarians seem to me to be the bisexuals of politics – they want a bit of everything. But even I felt a slight twinge of libertarian sentiment this week when I read some remarks by our Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood. The Labour
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Mickey Down, co-creator of Industry, reads his diary for the week; Charlie Gammell argues that US intervention could push Iran into civil war and terrorism – warning that there are more possibilities than just revolution or regime survival; false dichotomy at the heart of; Sean Thomas bemoans the bittersweet liberation
I think it was Zadie Smith who I first heard point out that race is in America what class is in Britain: the conversation underneath every conversation. When I first heard that remark I slightly baulked. Not least because one had rather hoped that class would be less of a thing in Britain in the
A friend mentioned to me last week that a third of young women in the UK are planning to vote for the Green party under its wonderful new leader, Zack Polanski. Bad as I tend to expect things to be, even I thought that surely things can’t be that bad. However I dutifully entered the
