Matthew Parris

Liverpool airport is a curiously unreal place in the half-light before dawn on a cold November morning. Out across the Mersey at high tide, raindrops turn the silver to lead, and at the easyJet departures gate people in tracksuit bottoms brush against the occasional tweed and Remembrance Day poppy. Intending stag-weekenders, and the set who have a little place in the Pyrenees, coincide but do not mingle. A young woman is trying to buy rosé wine, and an elderly gent is trying to find a copy of that morning’s Times. The elderly gent is me, flying to Barcelona for the day for my sister’s 60th birthday lunch, to return that night to Manchester.

When the White Queen told Alice she had sometimes believed as many as six contradictory things before breakfast, she spoke for us all. But our irrationality goes further than a simple after-the-event report. Even while we’re believing it, we can know that something we’re believing contradicts something else we believe. Take, in my case, addiction. I believe that addicts lack self-discipline and willpower. Yet I know that this cannot really be the explanation. I feel a faint but ineradicable disapproval of people who can’t stop eating, smoking, drinking or injecting themselves with heroin, while knowing that this reaction is not only harsh, but must be ignorant.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_Oct_2014_v4.mp3" title="Lord Pearson and Damian Green discuss Ukip and the Tories" startat=81] Listen [/audioplayer]Like many, I’ve always been a bit baffled by the story of the rise of Nazism. The Germans I’ve met have appeared to be human beings like any other: in no signal way a different breed from my own countrymen. Yet these are the great-grandchildren, grandchildren and children of a generation that was taken in by Adolf Hitler; or, worse, carried him forward; who supported (many of them) the Nazis; who knew or guessed what was happening to Jews, homosexuals and other minorities; who must either have turned a blind eye or positively encouraged what was happening. How could they have?

I doubt I’m alone among English readers of this magazine in having felt uncomfortable with our last issue. ‘Please stay with us’ was a plea I found faintly offensive to us English. Not only did it have a plaintive ring, but there seemed to be something grovelling, almost self-abasing, in the pitch. Why beg? A great many Scots have wanted to leave the Union; and by arranging a referendum Westminster has asked Scotland to make up her mind. Let her, then. When did England become a petitioner in this affair? ‘Please stay’ implied that the Scots were minded to go and we were pleading with them to relent of their intention. Yet I haven’t thought of this referendum as a bid to change Scotland’s mind, but as an exercise to discover a nation’s wishes.

When Mary Jane Mowat remarked recently that rape conviction statistics would not improve ‘until women stop getting so drunk,’ the retired Crown Court judge knew there would be a row. It followed. The judge, knowing that only 60 per cent of rape charges that reach court end in conviction, was making a narrow point. There are big evidential difficulties in pitting the claimed recollection of someone who says she was too drunk to know what she was doing against the claimed recollection of someone who plainly wasn’t. But the row spread wider, as it keeps doing, into the moral status of taking advantage of an inebriated woman.

Having written (for a Times diary) a few sentences about consciousness in robots, I settled back to study readers’ responses in the online commentary section. They added little. I was claiming there had been no progress since Descartes and Berkeley in the classic philosophical debate about how we know ‘Other Minds’ exist; and that there never would be. A correspondent on the letters page referred me to Wittgenstein’s treatment of the subject and so I studied his remarks. I have to confess they are, to me, unintelligible. But I cannot let the matter rest. My earlier thoughts had been prompted by newspaper reports of the adventures of a talking, hitchhiking Canadian robot called Hitchbot. Every time such a ‘Whatever will robots learn to do next?

There’s a little bit of a fascist in all of us. For some, the tragedy of human want may provoke an impatient urge to expropriate and centralise for the more efficient use of economic resources. Others, alarmed at the world’s exploding population, may be attracted by calls for a programme of mass compulsory sterilisation. But for me it’s letter boxes and street numbering. I want order. I want consistency. I want standards. And I want eye-watering penalties for property owners who try their fellow Britons’ patience and waste our time by making their addresses impossible to find.

Ross Clark is a columnist I try to read because he is never trite. So I was sorry to miss performances of his musical play staged earlier this month. Shot at Dawn is about a sister’s quest for a recognition (after his death) of her brother, Harry Briggs, a soldier in the Great War who was executed for desertion. The play is sympathetic to the idea of posthumous pardon; coupled with this, it’s a lament that society punishes people without trying to understand why they do what they did. A second theme emerges: homosexuality, and the difficulty (then) of living with this in a world that does not understand. I suppose you could say that Ross’s play is about looking back not in anger but in sympathy. Here’s a heresy, then.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_10_July_2014_v4.mp3" title="Matthew Parris and Dr Liz Davies discuss the child abuse enquiry" startat=48] Listen [/audioplayer]As essay titles go, ‘On losing an argument with Tim Loughton MP’ may fail to catch the imagination; but there we are: I don’t need to be re-elected. You know before you start when you’re on a losing wicket, and I had fully expected to lose this argument, which was on live television with Adam Boulton. But I thought the attempt might be interesting. I’d been inspired by a thoroughly sensible contribution to the subject on the Today programme, by Peter Bottomley MP.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_12_June_2014_v4.mp3" title="Matthew Parris vs Douglas Murray on the Birmingham Trojan Horse plot" startat=55] Listen [/audioplayer]I can remember where I was when Colin Powell presented to the United Nations his evidence for the existence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. I was taking a friend to an emergency medical consultation at Victoria station in London and while she saw the doctor I settled down in the waiting room to watch the presentation on TV. I found it compelling.

I’ve found myself strangely drawn to the videos made by the 22-year-old assassin Elliot Rodger just before he went on his killing spree in his university town of Santa Barbara, California, last week. In a series of stabbings and drive-by shootings Rodger killed seven people, including finally himself, and wounded 13 more. The son of a film director, he had spent the first few years of his life in England, moving to America at the age of four. Rodger had been preparing for his murderous spree and made a series of videos, many of which are accessible on the internet as I write. The last was recorded by himself the day before his attack. He sits parked in his car, arranged so that the sun, low in the sky, spotlights his face in an orange glow.

I could start by remarking that we should not speak ill of the dead, quoting the pertinent Latin phrase: de mortuis nil nisi bonum (‘of the dead, only good’). But this would be to miss a key qualification because the whole quote (from Diogenes Laertius, circa ad 300) adds ‘dicendum est’: ‘is to be said’. And that puts a different complexion on things. Commentators have preferred to describe the advice as an established social convention rather than necessarily their own opinion. Indeed it is often used as a sly way of indicating (without stating) the speaker’s disapproval of the deceased. But if the phrase has been thrown once at my head by my newspaper readers this week, it has been thrown a score of times.