Douglas Murray

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.

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.

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.

As coronavirus sweeps across the country, I am sure people will be reassured to know that the NHS is doing everything it can to address the pandemic, at such times when a health service’s resources are likely to be overstretched. So it must come as exactly no comfort to see what one section of the NHS was highlighting this Friday: Ensuring pregnant trans men get equal quality care. There may be some lucky people who had to read that twice. Or read it more than once and are still labouring under the impression that the headline includes a glaring misprint. Others, alive to the absurdities of the age, will know that the NHS is doing exactly what one would expect.

Last weekend’s papers claimed that the government desires a ‘massively pruned back’ BBC. Former Conservative cabinet minister Damian Green and someone called Huw Merriman spoke out against this, which allowed the BBC to put the headline ‘BBC licence fee: Tory MPs warn No. 10 against fight’ atop its characteristically impartial coverage. I suppose there are various reactions one can have to this, ranging from outrage at supposed ‘cultural vandalism’, via a vague shrug, all the way through to the full Charles Moore. In recent years I have moved through all these stages. The discovery that mattered most was the realisation that the less BBC I had in my life, the better.

Most people won’t have heard of Selina Todd. The only reason I had was because some years ago the BBC invited me to appear alongside her on one of those slots that used to be for intellectual discussion. ‘Would you be interested in coming on Radio 3 at about 10.30 p.m. to discuss class?’ I was asked. ‘Absolutely not,’ I replied, the subject being the only national obsession I would leave the country to escape. ‘That’s precisely why we want you,’ began the producer. And so eventually I ruined a perfectly good dinner and headed to the BBC where I met the aforementioned Todd. She turned out to be an Oxford professor whose area of study is the working class and whose specialism is resentment.

Here is a good test case going on before our eyes. The broadcaster Alastair Stewart has left his job of decades after sending a quotation of Shakespeare to a member of the public. The quotation (because it refers to an ape and the recipient happens to be black) is being interpreted as a sign of racism. A sign so grave that a long and illustrious career is over. So here is a test. Does ITV actually think that Alastair Stewart is a secret racist, really hates black people and has spent his life hating black people? Does it think that he has managed to hide this throughout the course of a long and illustrious career, in which I imagine that he worked with people of every imaginable race and background? Does it think that his deep, terrible racism has only come to the surface once?

‘Cancel culture’ is a horrible term because outside of a dictatorship nobody can actually be ‘canceled’ or otherwise ‘disappeared’. All that can happen is that people can be found to have trodden across one of the orthodoxies of the age. A small number of bullies then come for them. And a larger number of otherwise decent people then fail to stand up for them. It is this last part of the matter that is worth focusing on. It is the only part that is fixable. All ages have their orthodoxies. And if writers, artists, thinkers and comedians do not occasionally tread on them, then they are not doing their jobs. Meanwhile human nature remains what it is.

Sir Roger Scruton has died. Diagnosed with cancer last summer, he passed away peacefully on Sunday surrounded by his family. There will be a lot of things written and said in the coming days. But perhaps I could say a few things here. The first is to reiterate something that the Scruton family have said in their announcement of his death. There they refer to how proud they are of Roger and of all his achievements. I think I can say that all Roger’s friends share that feeling. His achievements were remarkable. He was a man who appeared to know about absolutely everything, producing books on architecture, philosophy, beauty, music, religion and much more. In many ways – as his former student Rabbi Sacks once said to me – he seemed bigger than the age.