Douglas Murray

Do you remember the Duke of Edinburgh awards? Some of you may even have one somewhere. An award for map-reading, orienteering or otherwise managing to find your way around in the age before Google Maps and Uber. It was – and still is – a useful scheme, set up by a man who accepted his position as second fiddle, performed the role impeccably for decades and set up the awards to help millions of other people find their way. It was on my mind as I was reading the latest revelations from Montecito, California. For the memoirs of Harry Sussex are even worse than expected. If I was the head of Netflix, I would be hopping with rage that Harry had kept all his most snore-a-thon stories for Netflix only to deliver the real juice in his memoir.

Towards the end of his life the art critic Hilton Kramer was overheard leaving a cinema with his wife. One of them said to the other: ‘Darling, from now on could we only see films that we’ve seen?’ I know the feeling. I find it almost impossible to watch most of the films that now come out, and have spent quite enough hours with serial killers on Netflix. In the same way that there comes a time when it is a greater pleasure to reread than to always read a new book, so perhaps it is the same with film and television. Yet I soon realised that there is a vast chasm in place of what I want to see. This first became clear when I was talking with a friend about Anthony Blunt. ‘Do you know A Question of Attribution?’ I asked, and it turned out he’d never heard of it.

This week I had the pleasure of going to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. I say ‘the pleasure’ but visiting the Pitt Rivers was never precisely a pleasure. Twenty years ago, as an undergraduate, the collection was something of a rite of initiation. The place, filled with strange and wondrous objects, was famed above all for its gruesome pickled heads: artefacts reminiscent of the ‘coconut’ that the one-eyed Brigadier Ritchie-Hook collects in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour.  What did we think of them in those now distant days? That they were part of another age, naturally – a collection of artefacts from another time, representing another era, with its interests and curiosities. Today the collection is still there, although the heads are not.

Unlike some fair-weather fans I maintain a fairly constant interest in the workings of Fifa. Not because I especially care for football, but because I consider myself something of a connoisseur of corruption. I do not spend all my time studying the matter, but I do take an interest in corrupt people and entities. They form a sort of hall of fame in part of my head. Top of my list is probably Abdalá Bucaram. For anyone who failed to follow Ecuadorian politics in the 1990s, that is the period when Bucaram was elected to office in his country. Known as ‘El Loco’ (‘The madman’), the president had a colourful period in power. Among other things, he released a pop single trying to adopt his nickname in a positive light (‘The madman who loves’).

Dame Edna Everage says one of life’s most precious gifts is the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others. You may lament this instinct, yet we all harbour it. New Yorkers are especially prone when it comes to property envy. Every couple of years, it feels like, a skyscraper goes up in the city that is significantly taller than the previous very tall new skyscraper. Each time one does, the only thing that goes higher than the tower’s residences is the cost of purchasing them. So with what rapture do New Yorkers read about the misfortunes these buildings go through. Oh, the thrill of learning that they sway in the wind, that people get seasick in the penthouses, that when owners put their garbage in the rubbish chutes the noise on the lower floors is like a tactical nuke.

Bullying appears to be suffering from inflation, like everything else. Certainly as an art form it seems to be in decline. As exhibit A I should like to present the ‘bullying’ recently ascribed to Gavin Williamson MP. Williamson is a hard man to defend. He has not excelled in any of the portfolios he has been given. The principal reason he sticks in the memory is that he does quite a good impression of someone doing an impression of someone sinister. The figure he most resembles is of someone who, at a young age, read the tiniest amount of Machiavelli and experienced feelings of arousal that they had not previously felt. ‘Haha, yes,’ I imagine a young Williamson saying. ‘It is indeed better to be feared than to be loved.’ He rose to be minister without portfolio.

It is sometimes said, correctly, that conservatism is more an attitude than an ideology. And for me there have always been certain individuals who embody that attitude. The late and much-missed Tessa Keswick was one such person, and for some reason a remark of hers has recently been in my head. A few years ago we were at a friends’ house for dinner, with an eclectic group. At one point we were all debating something or other and one slightly left-wing woman at the table said: ‘Well, it’ll all be after my time, so I don’t see why I should care.’ If my eyebrows raised, Tessa’s positively shot up. After the meal the two of us debriefed. ‘That is one of the most shocking things I’ve ever heard,’ Tessa told me. I agreed.

So much is happening on the surface at the moment that it can be difficult to notice certain undercurrents. Since the following story has gone almost unheeded in the Anglophone press, let me point at one especially suggestive current which could be glimpsed on the Continent this month. Cast your mind back to March 2016 and you may remember a co-ordinated set of suicide bombings in Brussels: two at the airport, one at a metro station. The three Isis-inspired terrorists managed to kill 32 people that day. But you may, understandably enough, have forgotten about it. The attacks came after the even larger ones in Paris, and people didn’t really have much to say about them.

There is almost nothing I like more than a running battle. As my friend Julie Burchill also says, when a really good row comes along it gives you this warm, cosy feeling inside. So it was not with disappointment that I received a noteworthy response to my column of last week. For those who were sleeping on the job (or only read Rod’s column), I made some pertinent comments about community relations in the Leicestershire area. Community relations, you may recall, have essentially broken down, with Hindu and Muslim gangs facing off in the city and some of the surrounding area.

As I have said many times in recent years, if you import the world’s people you import the world’s problems. Which is not to say that you do not also get some upsides. The upsides of ‘diversity’ are focused on all the time. But we have a curious habit of downplaying the downsides. Just one of which erupted in the city of Leicester last week. The origins of the disturbances are disputed, but what is agreed on is that they initially broke out between local Muslims and Hindus in the last days of August. During the India-Pakistan cricket match on the 28th, local fans of the Indian side began shouting ‘Pakistan Murdabad’ (‘Death to Pakistan’).