Douglas Murray

Gay marriage will never jeopardise straight marriage. But it can provoke political divorce. In America a new generation of Republicans is challenging the traditional consensus of their party on gay marriage. They — as well as some of the GOP old guard like Dick Cheney — are coming out in favour. In Britain the subject is also back on the agenda with the coalition government, at the insistence of the Prime Minister apparently, planning a ‘public consultation’ on the matter. Though not exactly political leadership, this nevertheless constitutes a change — not least in stealing the mantle of gay equality from the left. For decades it was presumed that conservatives could only oppose such moves.

 With the same coat of inevitability with which everything else gets glossed, it now seems inevitable to me that I ended up at Eton. But it was never any such thing. None of my family had been to the school or anything like it. Like most parents, mine had put their faith in state schools, not simply because they believed in them but because no other option was viable. I attended the local state primary and secondary schools and then to what had been a grammar school, but was now an inner city comprehensive. My parents had been promised that the old grammar school standards and ethos remained, but none did.

‘I’m told you’re the one to watch,’ Julian Assange says when I introduce myself in the Green Room. ‘Likewise,’ I reply. We’re backstage at Kensington Town Hall on a sunny Saturday afternoon to debate the ethics of whistleblowing. The seats sold out in minutes and the audience, almost all young, female or both, are clearly here for him. One of my colleagues tries conversation. Government comes up. ‘Companies are the new government,’ Assange says. He expands on his theme. The room is becoming blurry. I’m zoning out. It’s not just the sixth-form politics but the sheer anti-charisma of the man. I start to worry about the debate. What will I do if he numbs my brain on stage? Assange’s conversation is aural Rohypnol.

‘Hello. Is that the European Union? This is Earth.’ It’s a conversation that could have happened at any time in recent years, but if the EU’s planned global satellite system ever actually takes off it might yet become reality. The plans for ‘Project Galileo’ were dreamt up in the late 1990s. They are intended as a rival to the Global Positioning System satellites, or GPS, used by almost all of today’s satnav devices. GPS worked well — but it was owned by the United States. This did not please Jacques Chirac, then French president, who thought a rival satnav project would make a fine grand projet. Lift-off for Galileo has taken a while, with hopes for a speedy launch repeatedly thwarted.

On 30 January 1972, a 41-year- old man named Barney McGuigan stepped out from behind a block of flats in Londonderry. Some witnesses saw a white handkerchief in his hand, others remember his hands being empty. Across the road, a soldier from the 1st Battalion of the Parachute regiment was seen by another soldier going down on one knee to a firing pos-ition. A bullet entered McGuigan’s head from the back. The head exploded, as one witness told the judge, ‘like a tomato’. Thirty years after this incident the soldier accused of firing that shot, Soldier ‘F’, testified in London. In the humming air-conditioned room, a mortuary photo of McGuigan’s head was shown to him at the request of the family’s lawyer.

Irving Kristol didn’t coin the term ‘neoconservative’ but he was the first person to run with it. Although it was originally intended as an insult towards those alleged to have abandoned their initial ‘liberalism’, Kristol wasn’t bothered with quibbling. ‘It usually makes no sense... to argue over nomenclature,’ he once said. ‘If you can, you take what people call you and run with it.’ Besides, ‘having been named Irving, I am relatively indifferent to baptismal caprice’. Some of the best qualities of Kristol — who died last week — can be gleaned from such casual phrases.

Douglas Murray says that he stopped being an Anglican after analysing Muslim texts and deciding that no book — of any religion — could claim infallibility Just over a year ago I told a lie. In print. In this magazine. I was one of those asked by The Spectator last Christmas whether I believed in the virgin birth. Since it had always seemed to me that if you believed in God a ‘pick and mix’ approach to the central tenets of the faith was pointless, I said ‘yes’. But in fact I felt ‘no’. It wasn’t that I had been wrestling over the doctrine of the incarnation, I simply felt that if I didn’t believe in the virgin birth, I would not believe in God. The truth is I didn’t and don’t. The guilt has been lingering since.

Debate about Geert Wilders and his anti-Koran film Fitna is everywhere in Holland. Newspapers, television shows and private conversations are awash with apprehension. Since the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, and the hounding into exile of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wilders is the most prominent critic of Islam in Holland. With his shock of blond hair and startlingly frank language, the MP and leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom is instantly recognisable. But what about Fitna — the movie that no one has seen, but everyone, including the Dutch government, has already condemned for being likely to kick off the next round in the violent confrontation between radical Islam and European liberalism?

Michael Burleigh is riding a career high. The author of the 2000 bestseller The Third Reich: A New History has just published the last of a gargantuan trilogy of books on religion and politics in Europe since the French revolution. Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes took us up to the war on terror. Now, with Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, Burleigh comes right up to date. Not that Blood and Rage is only about Islamic fundamentalism. As the 52-year-old former academic tells me when we meet at his home in south London, the new book is about terrorism as a culture — as a way of life, and death.

Tom DeLay has a slightly deflated air about him in the London club in which we meet. It might be the financial accusations and personal attacks made on him for 11 years before his indictment and consequent stand-down from Congress last year. ‘I was pretty much burnt out, exhausted,’ he admits. Or it could be the inevitable attitude of a former Republican majority leader observing Washington once more in the grip of the Democratic party — he is over here to speak at the Oxford Union, opposing the motion ‘This house looks forward to seeing a Democrat in the White House’ in a debate with the Rev’d Al Sharpton. But even observing Nancy Pelosi, Dennis Kucinich and co. jollying off to Damascus, Tom DeLay cannot get that enraged any more.