Douglas Murray

As readers of The Spectator know, Sir Roger Scruton died in January this year at the age of 75. Before his death, he agreed to the setting up of an institution that would bear his name and seek to continue his legacy. The Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation is that institution and it has now launched. As the foundation puts it, ‘The mission of the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation is to establish the legacy of Sir Roger Scruton through supporting the conservation, care, and continuation of humane wisdom and culture from the Western tradition.’ Lady Scruton sits on the RSLF’s board. Many of Scruton’s numerous friends and former colleagues are also involved and I am honoured to be among the members of the advisory board.

Hearing that Dawn Butler MP had been pulled over by the Metropolitan police, I briefly hoped the taxpayer might get back the whirlpool bath she charged us on her parliamentary expenses. But the officers skipped the boot and went straight to the passenger side, where they found the member for Brent Central recording them with her phone and looking pleased as punch to audition as the new Rosa Parks. As it happens, the footage she released showed the police being deeply polite, and they subsequently explained that the pull-over had been due to a registration-plate mix-up. But Butler claimed it was a case of the dreaded ‘stop-and-search’ and within hours she was on Channel 4 News, being grilled by one of their crack interviewers.

The case of Johnny Depp vs the Sun, heard over recent weeks at the High Court in London, certainly gives fresh life to the old warnings about dirty linen and its public laundering. Whatever the results, I would be surprised if it didn’t provoke others to think again about the wisdom of reverting to the law. The influencers formerly known as the Sussexes, for instance, must be wondering whether their forthcoming legal case will result in them solely being showered with praise. Of course one has sympathy for famous people who feel that they have been badly portrayed. It is unpleasant to read nasty things about yourself in the newspapers. Especially if you have spent years reading largely pleasant things, carefully placed there by yourself or your PR team.

The only memorable argument I have ever heard in that tedious debate about whether Shakespeare was a Catholic came from the poet Tom Paulin. I remember him claiming in a lecture that the ‘bare ruin’d choirs’ sonnet must have been written by someone who had seen the despoiled monasteries, desecrated churches and ravaged holy places of a faith of which they were a part. Famously, such an argument only gets you so far, for by this logic Shakespeare was also a king, empress, ex-king, sailor, magician and fool, among many hundreds of others. But part of the rationale stayed with me. Which is that the bitterest truth of all is that loving a thing does not mean you can protect it, and that even the things you consider most sacred can be trampled over.

Earlier today, Bari Weiss resigned from the New York Times and published a devastating letter of resignation on her website (also available here). There will be those who try to pretend that this is no big deal, or that it is just a storm in a journalistic tea-cup: they would be wrong. For several generations now the New York Times has been seen as America’s ‘paper of record’. You might have appreciated some aspects of it more than others, and it may have been a little dull, but it was reliable; even necessary. A sort of journalistic fibre. Then at some stage in recent decades, it started to exemplify a rot which has wormed its way through much of the legacy media. Its reporting became unreliable and its comment pages monotone. The paper became increasingly unreadable.

Of all the people who have made cash in the past month, few can have raked it in like Robin DiAngelo. Since the death of George Floyd, the white American academic and author of White Fragility has been absolutely milking it. A term I probably shouldn’t use, since Peta last week declared milk a symbol of white supremacy. I might say she is absolutely creaming it, though by the time you read this ‘cream’ might be racist too. In which case it will join the British countryside, which was designated as racist by the BBC’s Countryfile last week. A fact that I learned after opening Google’s homepage, where I was educated about the late black American drag queen Marsha Johnson.

Since the whole world is in crisis, a crisis in the world of publishing might seem like a niche issue. But something that has been going on at the publishers Hachette is worth noting. Not least as it may be a portent of worse things to come elsewhere. Earlier this month the publishing house was thrown into turmoil after its most famous author, JK Rowling stirred up the most demented people in our society. Rowling – whose Harry Potter series was all published by Bloomsbury – has written a number of books for Hachette, most recently a scheduled book for children called ‘The Ickabog’. But earlier this month, Rowling objected on Twitter to a headline which used the words ‘people who menstruate’ in order to get around having to say ‘women’.

During these months of inertia, I confess to having on occasion made illicit trips to churches in the English countryside. Enjoying the frisson that surely accompanies all law-breaking, I have often gone so far as the church door, there to examine not only the locks and bolts but also the laminated notices which adorn so many buildings of the Church of England. The other week I visited a 12th-century church whose laminated instructions were an especially fine example of their kind. These signs informed the visitor that the church was closed due to the Covid crisis and that God can of course be worshipped anywhere, but (and this part was underlined) ‘not here’. A little harsh, that wording, I thought.