Douglas Murray

You can tell a lot about a country by who it admires. I was pleasantly surprised some years ago to see a poll showing that the most admired man in the UK was Richard Branson. You may not love all his publicity stunts, or have liked the sandwich selection on Virgin trains, but that poll suggested the British public still liked entrepreneurialism and achievement. It seems mainly to affect people who have really never done very much with their lives I slightly dread a rerun of such a poll today, because I suspect that among the youth vote in particular the winner would be the person with the most perceived disadvantages in life.

In February there was a commotion at Canterbury Cathedral. Or, to be more precise, there was a silent commotion. The cause was a ‘silent disco’ which took place in the nave over two nights. For anyone above the age of 12, a silent disco is where everybody has headphones on and is in their own world. Like the London Underground but with more legroom. There is a DJ as well and so I think (if I’ve got this right) everybody is listening to the same music. In any case, over two nights thousands of revellers came to the cathedral, put on headphones, bought drinks in the side aisles, brushed past the tomb of Thomas Becket and then waved neon lightsabers and danced around to their heart’s content.

What a thrilling number of glass ceilings have been broken this century – with more still to come, apparently. In 2008 America elected its first black president. In 2012 Barack Obama was re-elected and so became the first black president to win re-election. In 2016 America had a chance to elect its first female president but the public blew it and failed to elect Hillary Clinton. Fortunately they somewhat made up for this in 2020 by voting in the first female vice president. A vote that was made sweeter by the fact that, on that occasion, the public had a two-for-one offer and were also able to vote in the first black vice president. Now the public have a further chance to improve themselves by voting for the first black female president.

Not so long ago we went to politicians for politics and comedians for comedy. Today, like many others, I watch politicians for amusement and listen to comedians for their political insights. Whenever I want cheering up, I watch Kamala Harris riffing on a theme of her choice, or sometimes a Labour politician trying to explain why a woman can have a penis. By contrast Joe Rogan analyses political questions better than any of them, as does Noam Dworman, of New York’s Comedy Cellar. So it was that when the question of free speech returned again recently, I did not turn to the hilarious Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood, but instead to the sombre and sage Rowan Atkinson.

As the days slip by, the likelihood that anything will be learned from the recent rioting looks ever more remote. And with that suspicion comes the inevitable sense of déjà-vu. Because we have indeed been here before. In 2011 England was engulfed by riots, originating in London but leading to copycat violence across the north of England. The ostensible cause that time was the shooting by police of Mark Duggan, a charming young drug dealer who was in possession of a gun. The initial unrest in Tottenham may well have started as a result of claims that police had shot an innocent man – and an innocent black man at that. But by the time Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool were going at it, the proximate cause for the violence seemed to have been forgotten.

There’s no shortage of people who have spent recent years comparing Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler. Among other places, the comparison has been made on magazine covers from America to Germany. Neither is it uncommon for people to say that Trump is planning to usher in an authoritarian state and is a Nazi, neo-Nazi or similar. After the attempted assassination of Trump last Saturday the people who went in for this sort of thing are in a certain bind. On the one hand they seem to sense that urging on the assassination of a political opponent is not a good look. On the other they can’t just reverse course and declare: ‘Of course it was just hyperbole.

We have entered a new dark age. I’m not just referring to the situation in Britain since last week. Though if I were, that too would seem irrefutable. I mean in a far broader sense – that the world has entered a new dark age. The first dark age was characterised by a lack of information. For centuries almost nobody – even the most privileged people of the day – had access to any knowledge. The second dark age, by contrast, is characterised by a surfeit of information. Indeed there is so much information around us that nobody has a chance of absorbing even a calculable portion of it. A number of our wonderfully informed MPs joined the throngs passing the Lancet’s figure around Never mind the millions of books published each year, or the billions of podcasts.

As all non-bigoted readers will know, this is the holy and most ancient month of Pride. The time of year when – like our ancestors of yore – we bedeck our banks, supermarkets and public buildings with the latest variant of the rainbow flag. For a while now, the flag has kept coming with added details, such as circles, triangles, squares and other ways to provoke epilepsy, all because some people felt the old ‘inclusive’ flag was not inclusive enough. Each year something happens that confirms the entire thing has got wildly out of hand So it had these extra bits added to celebrate everyone from gay men to asexuals and anything in between.

For some while I have marvelled at the way in which artworks seem to have become the focus of hatred for people wanting to say something banal. If you wish to make a point about politics, the climate or anything else, there are a range of ways to do it. But the least effective must surely be to glue yourself to a painting, throw soup on it or attack it with a knife. Nonetheless, artworks have become the means to communicate certain rote-like messages – with the violence stepping up a notch each time. It is two years since a couple of morons from Just Stop Oil decided to throw a tin of soup at Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ in the National Gallery. A glass cover protected the painting.

There is a favourite Fleet Street story about the legendary Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie. While editing the paper, he discovered that his horoscope writer was recycling copy. He decided to dispense with her services in a letter that opened: ‘As you will no doubt have foreseen…’ You do not have to hold claims to being a mystic to predict certain things. The results of last week’s EU elections were easily predictable, as was the response from much of the British media. As I uncannily prophesied in last week’s column, the BBC’s Europe editor, Katya Adler, went with: ‘The far right is on the march.’ Elsewhere, she offered the claim that people across the continent often say: ‘This feels like the Europe of the 1930s.