Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray

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.

Sunday

Douglas Murray

Turkish democracy has just died; Europe could not have saved it

Well farewell then Turkey.  Or at least, farewell the Turkey of Kemal Ataturk.  It’s a shame.  Ataturk-ism nearly made its own centenary. But the nation that he founded, which believed broadly in progressive notions such as a separation of mosque and state, has just been formally snuffed out.  President Erdogan’s success in the referendum to award himself Caliph-like powers for life finally sees the end of Turkey’s secular and democratic experiment. Perhaps the poll which gave him victory was rigged.  Perhaps it wasn’t.  In the same way that perhaps the ‘coup’ last summer was real.  Or perhaps it wasn’t.

Saturday

Douglas Murray

The BBC’s adaptation of Decline and Fall was near-perfect

A politician once told me ‘You should try to remember to try to encourage us when we get things right and not just scold us when we get things wrong.’ I’m not sure anyone could keep to that civil piece of advice when it comes to politicians. But it should certainly apply to broadcasters. The BBC comes in for plenty of stick, and rightly so at times. But in recent weeks it has done something wonderful. Its adaptation of Decline and Fall – the third and last episode of which aired on Friday night – was a triumph. I had always assumed that this earliest of Evelyn Waugh’s novels was un-filmable. The plot is slightly sketchier, the characters slightly more limited than in Waugh’s later novels.

Friday

Douglas Murray

Berlin, Westminster, now Stockholm. On and on it goes

So this time it is Stockholm. And I am tempted simply to write ‘copy’, ‘paste’ and ‘repeat’ with links to my recent piece on the Westminster attack. Which in turn referenced my piece on the Brussels attack. Which itself was a re-run of my piece on one of the Paris attacks. And so on and on it goes. If there is nothing new to say it is because nobody has anything new to learn. On Wednesday of this week, two weeks to the day after Khalid Masood ploughed a car into the crowds on Westminster Bridge and stabbed PC Keith Palmer to death inside the gates of the Houses of Parliament, what was billed as a ‘Service of Hope’ took place in Westminster Abbey. One hopes that it consoled those injured and mourning.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

In defence of  Ken

We never loved each other, Ken Livingstone and I. We first clashed in public more than a decade ago, and have enjoyed castigating each other ever since. But now that he has been suspended from the Labour party for a second year in a row, I come not to bury him but to praise him. For there is something valorous, even glorious, about his downfall. It was the MP for Bradford West who triggered his demise. In April last year Naz Shah was exposed for sharing anti--Semitic content on social media. Among these posts was a graphic advising the deportation of all Israeli Jews to the USA. Though such views are hardly a problem (can even be a boon) for a Bradford MP these days, any ambitious young politician may still find them a hurdle. Sure enough, Shah performed all the textbook PR moves.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

In defence of Ken Livingstone

Listen to Douglas Murray and James Forsyth debating Ken Livingstone's non-expulsion: We never loved each other, Ken Livingstone and I. We first clashed in public more than a decade ago, and have enjoyed castigating each other ever since. But, now that he has been suspended from the Labour party for a second year in a row, I come not to bury him but to praise him. For there is something valorous, even glorious, about his downfall. It was the MP for Bradford West who triggered his demise. In April last year Naz Shah was exposed for sharing anti-Semitic content on social media. Among these posts was a graphic advising the deportation of all Israeli Jews to the USA.

Monday

Douglas Murray

The political dinosaurs aren’t helping matters

As a type of (Platonic) gerontophile, I never expected to say this, but can the dinosaurs not shut up? In recent weeks the nation has had to suffer repeat appearances on the television by Lord Heseltine.  In each interview the Remain-supporting peer appears ever more viciously angry - brimming over, indeed with a sort of concentrated, zealous fury at a nation that dared defy his imprecations on how to vote last June. Then this past weekend we had to witness the Leave-supporting Lord Howard talking up the possibility of war with Spain over Gibraltar.  This morning’s papers as a result get to talk quasi-seriously about a military confrontation over the rock.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

The response to the Westminster attack has been predictably farcical

Since last week’s attack in Westminster, various readers have asked whether my list of ‘standard responses to terrorism’ has held true in the aftermath of this attack as in the aftermath of so many attacks before. And since it appears that good news must now immediately be seized from any tragedy – even within minutes of that tragedy occurring – in keeping with the times, I am happy to report that my list does indeed hold true. I had already noted last week that we were swiftly into the realm of hashtaggery with ‘Pray for London’ trending. I must say that I’m never sure how many of the people urging people to do this actually pray themselves, or think prayer works, or what it might achieve.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Pray for London, for Antwerp, for Nice: this is Europe’s new normal

The hashtag ‘PrayForLondon’ is trending on social media. But so is ‘Antwerp’. Because no sooner were we invited to pray for London than a man of ‘North African descent’ was narrowly prevented from doing something similar in the Belgian city. This is life as usual in Europe now, of course. But among the endless replays to date - and the endless replays yet to come - there are several things worth noting about Wednesday’s attack in London. The first is that the perpetrator – now identified as one Khalid Masood – was in one sense unusual. A recent comprehensive analysis published by my colleague Hannah Stuart found that among Islamist-related offences in the UK the most common age of the offender was 22.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

The morally illiterate obituaries to Martin McGuinness are just what he would have wanted

Well the obituaries for Martin McGuinness are in. And many are as morally illiterate as the man himself could have wished for. For instance, various obituarists have noted that the young McGuinness’s failure as a young man to get an apprenticeship as a mechanic started him off on the road to terror. Few of these eulogists have noted the many people across continents and generations who also failed to get apprenticeships (often for even more sectarian reasons) and yet strangely refused as a consequence to pick up some pliers and an Armalite and torture and kill their way to political power. Other obsequies have been even stranger. Alex Salmond, for instance – perhaps recognising a fellow nationalist – praised Martin McGuinness as ‘a friend of Scotland’.

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

At least Martin McGuinness made old age. Many others didn’t

So Martin McGuinness has died. Already this is giving vent to the sort of ‘How McGuinness became a man of peace’ stories. Personally I have always thought the salient point about the man is not that he became a man of peace but that he was ever a man of violence. Over recent years a narrative has developed around the Troubles, that the people who ‘became men of peace’ are much to be admired.

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

How the Turkey question could swing the Dutch vote

Douglas Murray and Melle Garschagen, UK and Ireland correspondent for NRC, discuss the Dutch election: The Dutch public go to the polls tomorrow, and the question of Turkey is on the menu. This past weekend the Dutch government forbade a plane containing the Turkish Foreign minister from landing in the country.  The Turkish minister had been due to address a crowd in Rotterdam.  Another Turkish minister – the hijabi Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya, due to attend a similar rally – was prevented from entering the Turkish consulate in Rotterdam.  All of which led the Turkish government to dismiss the Dutch people (and then the Germans as well) as ‘Nazis’. Last night, Turkey then banned the Dutch ambassador from returning to Ankara.

Saturday

Douglas Murray

Paul Nuttall and the tricks memory plays on all of us

Poor Paul Nuttall. He seemed to have everything a cheeky by-election victor needed: the outsider vim, the accent, the cap. Then it emerged he had made stuff up about Hillsborough. That was that. He moved from admirable Scouser to tragedy-crasher. In interviews over the years, Nuttall has referred to being at the stadium in Sheffield on the terrible day, and he still insists he was. We shall probably never know why that developed on his website into his having lost ‘close personal friends’ there — something which is not, it seems, true. Yet while it is good fun blowing raspberries and deriding politicians, we should allow them a little understanding too. After all, who is not susceptible to a soupçon of Falstaffian exaggeration in their stories?

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Where is the evidence that Donald Trump is an anti-Semite?

Several months ago, after his election victory, I asked for any proof that Donald Trump is – as some of his most mainstream critics were claiming – a vile homophobe. I thought it a perfectly reasonable question to ask, and the only evidence I was given in reply was one gay man in America who cried after the election.  This did not satisfy my standards of evidence.  But a related question now also needs asking.  Where is the proof that Donald Trump is an anti-Semite? I ask because in the last week there has been considerable, nay ecstatic, reporting of an accusation that the President of the USA is not only fuelling anti-Semitism but has installed anti-Semites at the heart of the American government and is himself a vile anti-Semite.

Douglas Murray

Memory games | 2 March 2017

Poor Paul Nuttall. He seemed to have everything a cheeky by-election victor needed: the outsider vim, the accent, the cap. Then it emerged he had made stuff up about Hillsborough. That was that. He moved from admirable Scouser to tragedy-crasher. In interviews over the years, Nuttall has referred to being at the stadium in Sheffield on the terrible day, and he still insists he was. We shall probably never know why that developed on his website into his having lost ‘close personal friends’ there — something which is not, it seems, true. Yet while it is good fun blowing raspberries and deriding politicians, we should allow them a little understanding too. After all, who is not susceptible to a soupçon of Falstaffian exaggeration in their stories?

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

The Stop Trump protesters have got their priorities all wrong

There’s almost as much talk about ‘virtue-signalling’ these days as there is about ‘fake news’. But one thing that doesn’t get said often enough is why virtue-signalling isn’t just irritating, but destructive. Like Brendan, Will and others here, I also take a slightly dim view of the anti-Trump protests that took place in Britain last night. I walked around the one in Westminster to come to a view, and found myself feeling unsympathetic to people carrying placards that said, for instance, ‘Fuck Fascism’. It’s a sentiment with which most of us can wholeheartedly agree, but I cannot see its applicability to the question of whether or not the US President should enjoy a state visit to the UK.

Friday

Douglas Murray

James O’Brien spreading ‘fake news’ via the BBC is a must-watch

The row about ‘fake news’ and the ‘crooked media’ appears to be ongoing.  And every time the BBC and other mainstream media mention it they present themselves solely as the victims of such phenomena.  So let us turn to just one edition of the BBC’s Newsnight. On Wednesday of this week the programme was presented by James O’Brien.  Now in the first place Mr O’Brien is a strange choice to present this programme.  Not just because his awkward, cut-out, Lego man gait makes it obvious why he has made his career in radio, but because he is the sort of hyper-partisan figure who, if they came from the opposite political side, would never be hired by the BBC. But back to Wednesday’s Newsnight.

Monday

Douglas Murray

The shameful hypocrisy of Sweden’s ‘first feminist government’

A couple of weeks ago I named the Labour MP Tulip Siddiq as my pious political hypocrite of the week, mainly for being silent on her bigoted aunty while strikingly vocal about a total stranger. I’m afraid that I was so overwhelmed by applicants for last week’s award that I have only just emerged from the pile of entries. However, I am now in a position to reveal the latest recipients of this increasingly coveted prize. Pipping even Speaker John Bercow to the award are the brave sisters of the Swedish government. Here is a photo from earlier this month of Isabella Lovin (Sweden’s Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for International Development Cooperation and Climate and spokesperson of Sweden’s Green Party).

Saturday

Douglas Murray

The David Beckham email leak should trouble us all

What would you do if naked pictures emerged of a celebrity you liked? Or one you didn’t? What about a slew of emails that were meant to be private that were hacked and then leaked into the public domain? Would you turn away from them, tutting. Or might you be tempted to read them? Would your inclination to read them increase if you liked the person, or if you really disliked them? We seem confused about all of this at the moment. The leak of David Beckham’s emails has condensed the confusion. Most of us believe that private communications should be private. Most of us believe that people’s private communications should not be hacked. And yet whenever they are hacked and then released we cannot help but crawl over the results. Perhaps we should pause.

Saturday

Douglas Murray

Some ‘anti-fascists’ need to look in the mirror

I have noted before in this place that the people who seem most fascist these days are self-described ‘anti-fascists’. The inaugural weeks of Donald Trump’s Presidency are – whatever else you think of them – doing a fine job in smoking these people out. The principal cause of ‘anti-fascist’ ire today would appear to come from the collective decision that anybody whose opinions do not wholly concur with a narrow set of agreed upon ‘liberal’ views is a ‘fascist’. This is not a wholly new development – Allan Bloom noticed this more than thirty years ago.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Abandoned to their fate

Another day in northern Nigeria, another Christian village reeling from an attack by the Muslim Fulani herdsmen who used to be their neighbours — and who are now cleansing them from the area. The locals daren’t collect the freshest bodies. Some who tried earlier have already been killed, spotted by the waiting militia and hacked down or shot. The Fulani are watching everything closely from the surrounding mountains. Every week, their progress across the northern states of Plateau and Kaduna continues. Every week, more massacres — another village burned, its church razed, its inhabitants slaughtered, raped or chased away. A young woman, whose husband and two children have just been killed in front of her, tells me blankly, ‘Our parents told us about these people.