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.
14 min listen
Fraser Nelson reads his cover piece campaigning for the British government to offer citizenship to the Hong Kong Chinese; Douglas Murray asks - why do the Black Lives Matter protestors get to be exempt from the lockdown? And Tanya Gold reviews: Monster Munch.
It is nearly four years since Black Lives Matter had their first major protest in London. Emulating their US counterparts, the protestors held up their hands and chanted ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’, a chant popularised after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. By then it had been known for a year that before his death Brown almost certainly said no such thing and had lunged for the arresting officer’s gun before being shot. Still the London protestors chanted what they believed Michael Brown had said, as they processed along Oxford Street, accompanied by unarmed British policemen who couldn’t have shot them if they’d wanted to.
God, I loathe the bishops. Not Beth Rigby, Robert Peston and the other hacks who seem to be auditioning to guide the morality of the nation. I mean the actual bishops, who turn out to be even less use than these competitively incensed cross-examiners. Most people in Britain couldn’t name a bishop if they tried. But Nick Baines is a name worth remembering. The otherwise utterly un-noteworthy Bishop of Leeds came to my attention in January 2019 when he gave a talk at Bradford Cathedral in which among other political interventions he referred to Boris Johnson (then foreign secretary) as ‘an amoral liar’.
From our US edition
There have been an enormous number of positive attributes on display during the lockdown in Britain. Family members keeping an eye on each other. Neighbors looking after each other more. But there have been ugly attributes about as well. None uglier than the sort of tell-tale attitude that makes you realize how the secret police could always rely on a certain portion of the populace in any country. Everyone has their own anecdotes. A friend who lives in the countryside told me that someone she knew said to her, ‘Are you aware that this is your second walk of the day?’ That sort of thing. The people who have reported on others who they think are doing something they shouldn’t.
There have been an enormous number of positive attributes on display during the lockdown. Family members keeping an eye on each other. Neighbours looking after each other more. But there have been ugly attributes about as well. None uglier than the sort of tell-tale attitude that makes you realise how the secret police could always rely on a certain portion of the populace in any country. Everyone has their own anecdotes. A friend who lives in the countryside told me that someone she knew said to her, ‘Are you aware that this is your second walk of the day?’ That sort of thing. The people who have reported on others who they think are doing something they shouldn’t.
19 min listen
On this week's Audio Reads, Douglas Murray advises Labour to get a new attack line, now that the Conservatives have become the party of the NHS. Professor Paul Dolan, a behavioural scientist at the LSE, ponders what would have happened had the pandemic started in Sweden, rather than China. And Andrew Watts says - if Brexit talks are scuppered because of fish, shouldn't Brits at least eat more of it?
I wonder what the Labour party will use as its scare slogan at the next election? After all, the usual one of ‘[Insert number] weeks/days/minutes to save the NHS’ may not work next time. Not that it worked every time before. But it has long been the favourite attack line of a British left that likes to portray the Conservative party as so ravenously right-wing that whenever it comes to power it wastes not a moment in dismantling Attlee’s post-war creation. And yet, although the Conservative party has been in power fairly often since 1945, not once has it managed to dismantle, privatise, or otherwise sell off the NHS. Its tendency, rather, has been to increase spending, ring-fence spending and more.
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned in the magazine how the Chinese Communist Party has been trying to bully our allies and friends in Australia. The government of that country having had the audacity to demand an independent and international inquiry into the origins of the Wuhan virus. Since then, the CCP has been upping its game, and not just with words, but by imposing huge tariffs on Australian products. Which I suppose means that the rest of us are going to have to make up for over a billion Chinese consumers and guzzle as much Australian shiraz as we can in the coming months. Can we do it? Possibly.
Of course most people don’t read the New York Times. But the paper retains a certain cachet in America, and undoubtedly directs a lot of public thinking in that country, if not further afield. Which is why the paper’s anti-British animus (which has been noted here before) is worth highlighting. The trend has been going on since 2016, when the NYT seemed to have decided that the Brexit vote led the way for the election of Donald Trump. Since then the paper’s desire to attack Britain has appeared insatiable. A fact that leads the paper’s readers to be woefully ill-informed about this country.
22 min listen
This week, Douglas Murray writes on why we shouldn't be hugging China any closer; Nigel Farndale writes on why there's nothing morbid about obituaries; and Susan Hill on the lessons she's re-learnt from the pandemic.
Like nearly everything named a ‘scandal’, ‘affair’ or given the suffix ‘gate’, almost nobody now remembers the Dalai Lama affair. But back in 2012, flush with recently acquired power and optimism, David Cameron and a man called Nick Clegg went to see the Dalai Lama while he was on a trip to London. Whether Cameron and Clegg knew what they were getting into wasn’t clear. The pair had a short meeting with the Lama at St Paul’s Cathedral — or at least in one of those bland conference ante-rooms English cathedrals constructed in the last century to atone for the splendours next door. Looking like a couple of travelling salesmen trying to flog the Dalai Lama a timeshare, Cameron and Clegg had the meeting and moved on. Not so Beijing.
There is an obvious attraction in certain simple claims. ‘Believe all women’, for instance, is easy to utter, beneficial to the speaker and guaranteed to get applause from any live audience, terrified as they are into not clapping vigorously enough. It is also a deeply unwise piece of advice. As unwise as it would be to say ‘believe all men’ or ‘believe all humans.’ It suggests that the word of a woman is inevitably worth more than a man. Or that women do not lie, and could never be expected to. Or that while some women may lie it is worth accepting the consequences of this as collateral in order to make up for lost time.
24 min listen
It's the 10,000th edition. This week's episode features historian Tom Holland on the Spectator's winning recipe; Douglas Murray on why he loves journalists; Mary Wakefield on coronavirus uncertainty; and Tanya Gold on what it's like to be the magazine's restaurant critic.
It’s one way to keep in touch with people. Each morning, somewhere between the first coffee of the day and the first drink, I open my computer, log on to social media and see which of my friends or colleagues is ‘trending’ today. ‘Ooh,’ I think as I see their names flash up, ‘I wonder what Julie/Charles/Allison/James/Rod (usually Rod) has done now’. Then I click and read all about their crimes, usually through a filter of people labouring under the impression that a writer’s job is to say what everyone else has already agreed on. The howls, incidentally, mostly emanating from people who in no sense subscribe to the organ in which the crime is said to have occurred. This is one of the brightest moments of my day.
19 min listen
The Spectator is meant for sharing. But in the age of coronavirus, that might not be possible. This new podcast will feature a few of our columnists reading out their articles from the issue each week, so that you don't miss out. It's a new format, so tell us what you think at podcast@spectator.co.uk.Toby Young on why Britain needs Boris; Douglas Murray on what he finds heartening about the national response to coronavirus; and Melissa Kite's Real Life column.
There was always one key flaw in our species. Which is that someone always shags a monkey. I have expressed this thought fairly regularly in private, often to friends who don’t get the reference about the likely origin of Aids and look at me strangely ever after. Still, I find it a useful rule. We humans are — perhaps always have been — as weak as our weakest member makes us. And if just one of us chooses of an evening to force themselves on one of our simian cousins, then before long people across the planet start dropping dead. I suppose the monkey-shagger rule will now have to be updated to take into account the fact that someone will always blend a bat.
One of the things that lockdown allows you to do is not just to read but to re-read. Obviously the smart thing to do is to say that you are ‘re-reading’ vast books you haven’t actually read (Gibbon, Macaulay etc). Easier, and often more enjoyable, is to re-read pieces you remember but haven’t read for a while. Recent days have given me a good opportunity for doing that, among much else. And perhaps I should say at the outset that the editor has not asked me to do this. I have been offered no bribes, dangled no promotions and offered not even one bottle of Pol Roger. But I simply say, with honesty, that when the mind roams over various subjects and memories of recent years, pieces in The Spectator do stand out.
17 min listen
The Spectator is meant for sharing. But in the age of coronavirus, that might not be possible. This new podcast will feature a few of our columnists reading out their articles from the issue each week, so that you don't miss out. It's a new format, so tell us what you think at podcast@spectator.co.uk.Douglas Murray asks, where do we find purpose? Tanya Gold writes on the Cornish revolt against second-home owners, and Mark Mason's gives tips from history on working from home.
Perhaps we are at least past the beginning of this crisis. The phase where the hunt for multipacks of loo-rolls briefly became the national sport. Now we are into the second, perhaps even less glorious stage, in which we all have to sit in our solitude and hope that the storm blows over us. And if this passivity is the great demand of our generation — a demand that brings its own ironies — then now is a good time to ask the question: ‘How do we spend our time well?’ The question is one we ought to ask more throughout our lives. But the truth is that most of us tend to ask it only at moments of personal crisis: when a job or relationship suddenly ends, or a loved one dies. By asking ‘How do we spend our time well?
At times of great stress it is necessary to find your enjoyments where you can. And as I mentioned in the magazine last week there are few joys in the world comparable with that which comes from watching the left eating itself. Which brings me to a small but diverting set of events which are rolling on at the Guardian. Readers will remember that earlier this month that paper started to devour itself after the admirable columnist Suzanne Moore had the temerity to write a column about trans issues that did not exactly toe today’s leftist line on the issue. Hundreds of Moore’s colleagues signed a letter to the editor condemning Moore. Indeed the signatories comprised around a fifth of the total Guardian workforce.
