Douglas Murray

There are many ways to do nothing. One is to sit on your hands; another is to call for ‘a conversation’. I have noticed quite a lot of calls for ‘a conversation’ since the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green last week. Some politicians and pundits have even been bold enough to call for a ‘national conversation’. This is when you can tell people are pulling out the big guns. One reason I say it is also a variant on doing nothing is because this has happened so many times before. I remember Theresa May standing near the site of the London Bridge attacks in 2017, surrounded by various leaders, insisting that we need to tackle ‘extremism’. The results were a real stunner – even for connoisseurs of inertia.

Willie Donaldson, who died in 2005, has a claim to having had the best obituary sub-heading of any writer I know. ‘Wykehamist pimp, crack fiend and adulterer who created Henry Root and Beyond the Fringe’ was how the Telegraph memorably summed up his life. As readers of his biography, You Cannot Live As I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This, will know, all of the above was true. Donaldson came to mind this week because of something a mutual friend once told me about him – that is his fondness for using the word ‘dead’ as a pejorative. While practising the vituperative arts, he would occasionally describe a politician whose reputation he had it in for as ‘the dead politician’ etc.

There has been so much news of late that stories which might once have caused a splash have sailed by all but unnoticed. One in particular seems worthy of bringing into a greater light, not least because it has been almost entirely ignored by the English-language media. Tariq Ramadan is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. In recent years he was probably the most famous Muslim intellectual in the West. Last month, a court in Paris found him guilty of the rape of three women and sentenced him to 18 years in prison. To Islamic audiences he preached one message, to western audiences he told another The case is the culmination of several trials since allegations were first made against him in 2017.

I have spent a small portion of the past week wondering what I would do if I thought communists were about to take over our country. At the more civil end of things, I could see myself going on an anti-communist protest, though I would shrink away if I noticed that my fellow marchers were flying swastikas. I don’t exactly know what I would do next. Perhaps I would hope for another election soon, and do what I could to unite other anti-communists. One thing I am fairly sure I would not do would be to dance. In fact, were this country facing the prospect of Stalinism coming at us full force, the last thing I would do would be to get a DJ, book a stage in Trafalgar Square, hire some go-go dancers and rave it up.

During the Cold War I am fairly certain that films, TV dramas and other popular entertainment did not remain silent on the threat posed by the Soviets. In fact my memory from those times was that popular culture was filled with Russian baddies, drunken homosexualist double--agents and great western super-heroes who were intent on taking down the commie threat. As cineastes know, this culminated in David Zucker’s 1988 master-piece The Naked Gun. In the opening scene, Lieutenant Frank Drebin of Police Squad disrupted a meeting in Beirut where an attack on America was being planned by Idi Amin, Yasser Arafat, Colonel Gaddafi, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Ayatollah Khomeini. Our hero duffed up each of them one by one.

Some years ago I was approached by someone from a platform called ‘Cameo’. Not all Spectator readers will have heard of this platform, and I hadn’t either. As a result I listened to their pitch with the same amount of scepticism I might reserve for an email addressed to me as ‘Dear Beloved’, revealing that a distant relative had left me a share in a Nigerian diamond mine, and that if only I sent a quick cash deposit the diamonds would start flowing in my direction. I was informed that Cameo was a platform where I could make ‘easy money’. Being part-Scottish, I do not believe that there is any such thing. In fact I find the whole idea of easy money a contradiction in terms.

Sometimes the obvious is so obvious that people forget to state it. So let me observe one small footnote among recent obvious things. Earlier this month, Donald Trump killed the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and most of the senior leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary government in Iran. There are many things to be said against the Ayatollah and his friends. Since 1979 they have repressed the population of Iran and hurtled one of the great civilisations backwards by a millennium. From the start of the revolution they have murdered their domestic opponents by the thousands. They have shot students in the head when they came out on to the streets in protest. They have massacred, raped and tortured prisoners. They have exported terror around the world.

The interesting thing about political pendulums is that they always over-swing. In the campaign for this week’s Gorton and Denton by-election, one of the main lines of attack on the Reform candidate is that he used to be an academic and is therefore ill-suited to being the area’s parliamentary representative. The candidate who has suffered these attacks – Matt Goodwin – has countered that he is the first person in his family to have gone to university. He has also stressed that he was brought up in a one-parent household. That hasn’t cut it with the class-warriors of his rivals like the Green party’s Hannah Spencer. In one of her campaign videos, Ms Spencer has gone so far as to do a speech to camera while preparing some plaster for a wall.

There is a moment in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall which has been much on my mind lately. It is the bit towards the very end of the novel when our hero, Paul Pennyfeather, re-encounters the sinister modernist architect Professor Otto Silenus. By this point Pennyfeather has undergone all manner of travails. He has been debagged and sent down from Oxford, accused of human-trafficking and sent to prison. But, as the pair sit outside the Corfu villa in which Pennyfeather is staying, the professor suddenly offers to reveal his theory about the meaning of life. How many people in politics have been picked up and flung off this great revolving fairground ride? Silenus describes a particular fairground attraction, the Devil’s Wheel (‘the big wheel at Luna Park’).

They say you should never meet your heroes, a rule that is not always correct. But I did have a salutary session some years ago when a friend in New York asked me if I wanted to meet a comedian I really do admire. I had been looking forward to the meeting, but unfortunately it took place during the summer of 2020. If you remember those far-distant days, this was a time when America was obsessing over the story of alleged disproportionate police violence against black Americans. One of the cases was that of a woman named Breonna Taylor. Although the case for the police’s actions and the victim’s innocence revolved around a number of issues, the main one was whether officers should have shot when they did.

I have never been the greatest fan of libertarianism as a political ideology. Libertarians seem to me to be the bisexuals of politics – they want a bit of everything. But even I felt a slight twinge of libertarian sentiment this week when I read some remarks by our Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood. The Labour minister had told MPs that artificial intelligence is an ‘incredibly powerful tool that can and should be used by our police forces’, though she added that it must be regulated in a way that is ‘always accurate’. I have never before read the words ‘police’ and ‘always accurate’ in the same sentence, so the novelty grabbed my attention.

I think it was Zadie Smith who I first heard point out that race is in America what class is in Britain: the conversation underneath every conversation. When I first heard that remark I slightly baulked. Not least because one had rather hoped that class would be less of a thing in Britain in the 21st century. I suppose it is, although you do still meet people who treat the English language as though it is a minefield in which one incorrect vowel will suddenly take them out. But if the class stuff still lingers in Britain, the good news is that we now have the American race obsession too. For anyone who hasn’t lived in America, it is hard to describe just how permeated race is into every conversation in the culture.