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.
I hate to be one of those columnists who says ‘I told you so’. But I told you so. Looking back this week through the vast underground vaults at Spectator HQ I see that centuries ago in April 2020 I explained the problem with us humans as a species. As I said back then, someone
It isn’t hard to notice that some crimes are more important than others. Or at least more politically advantageous. It is six years since Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in her constituency by somebody who appeared to be a sort of aspiring Nazi. Back then, various campaign groups and newspapers in this country had
I wonder if we will ever be able to resist fixing the suffix ‘gate’ to the end of any not-yet-sufficiently-salacious scandal? Ten years ago Andrew Mitchell MP actually had a scandal involving a gate and caused the dashing of one of my greatest hopes. This was the hope that some day a scandal would emerge
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In this week’s episode: Is Boris Johnson planning to tear up Britain’s deal with the EU? James Forsyth says in his Spectator cover story this week that Boris Johnson plans to reignite the Brexit voter base by taking on the EU again over Northern Ireland. He joins the podcast along with Denis Staunton, the London
There are two things non-Americans can almost never understand about America and should probably never speak about. The first is guns. If you have a British accent and arrive in America, or talk about America, you should be very careful before opining on the Second Amendment. It isn’t a precise analogy, but you might compare
There are many ways to fracture a people. But one of the best is to destroy all the remaining ties that bind them. To persuade them that to the extent they have anything of their own, it is not very special, and in the final analysis, hardly worth preserving. This is a process that has
Some years ago there was a study at Harvard that tried to find out what people did when they held an incorrect opinion. Not an opinion of the kind that the era happens to deem incorrect, but one that is actually, provably not the case. The study looked at what happened when that factually incorrect
Perhaps I should stress from the get-go that I do not know Rishi Sunak. So far as I know, we’ve only met once, some years ago when he was working at the think-tank Policy Exchange. He showed me to my seat when I arrived late for an event. It is one of those things you
I have remarked here before about our era’s tendency to accept election results if your side wins but to reject them if they lose. Happily in the UK there is no significant body of opinion which believes that Jeremy Corbyn won the 2019 election. True, there are a few Momentum loons who still think that
It is uncanny how swiftly British culture imitates the worst of American culture. Take Whoopi Goldberg, who distinguished herself again last week on The View. For anyone who does not know, The View is a long-running US TV show in which a collection of the dimmest women in America are invited to opine angrily on
It is interesting to watch Ofcom finally remove the broadcasting licence from the Russian propaganda channel Russia Today (RT). I almost managed to do the job myself about 12 years ago. Back in the 2000s, a number of bad regimes were rushing into the broadcasting space to try to give themselves a better international image.
Over recent days I have been reflecting on War and Peace. Or Special Operation and Peace as it must now be known in Russia, unless you want to spend 15 years in prison. And I am reminded once again of how utterly unpredictable war always is. On this occasion almost every-thing that people imagined just
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On this episode of Spectator Out Loud, Douglas Murray starts by explaining why C. S. Lewis was right about war. (00:56) Mary Wakefield is up next, looking at the founding myth that Russia and Ukraine are fighting over. (10:18) Nicola Shulman finishes the podcast, reading her piece about Philip Larkin’s big problem. (16:53)
Well, at least Covid is over. No sooner had Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine than the UK’s Covid advisory group Sage disbanded. The same effect was felt in the US, where the outbreak of war in Europe led to the immediate, unlamented disappearance of Dr Anthony Fauci. After two years on primetime, suddenly the
A fracture on the international right may seem small fry given everything that is going on right now. But it is worth loitering over. Because in recent years an interesting divide has grown among conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. On one side are the Cold War warriors and their successors who have continued
Early in the corona era the historian David Starkey gave some thoughts on Covid. ‘We’ve got a Chinese virus,’ he said, ‘and we’ll finish up with a Chinese society.’ I remember at the time thinking the phrase neat, but doubtful. Fast forward a couple of years and the doubts have eroded. Although Britain seems to
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On this week’s episode, we’ll hear from Katy Balls on Labour’s strategy – would Starmer actually prefer Boris Johnson to stay in place? (00:51) Next, Julie Bindel on the rise of lesbian divorce (06:12) And finally, Douglas Murray on the hellish new trend of having to bring your ‘whole self’ to work. (14:00) Produced and presented by
One of the few things I have learned in this life is that Dante Alighieri was wrong. In the Inferno portion of The Divine Comedy (the only part most people read), the great Florentine poet describes hell as having just nine circles. Whereas whenever I survey matters it has always seemed me that this figure
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In this week’s episode: What’s the mood like in Boris’s bunker? For this week’s cover story, James Forsyth writes about the defensive bunker mentality inside No. 10 and the PM’s strategy of keeping MPs sweet to hold back a no confidence vote. James joins the podcast along with Spectator Editor Fraser Nelson to discuss. (00:50)
I was once at a terrific Shabbat dinner where late in the evening one of the other guests suddenly said: ‘OK, who’s got the best Holocaust joke?’ Even people who know something about Jewish humour might be surprised by this. I said that one Holocaust-related joke I knew was the story from the 1970s of