Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris is a columnist for The Spectator and The Times.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Did The Spectator prompt the new consultation on gay marriage?

It isn’t often that a piece in the Spectator makes its way straight into a Prime Minister’s party conference speech but, as this magazine’s online Coffee House hinted last week, Douglas Murray’s ‘Why conservatives should welcome gay marriage’ (1 October) looks like an example. I’ve often disagreed and occasionally crossed swords with Mr Murray but always admired him as a writer; this article, though, was to my mind not only framed with clarity and grace, but came close to constructing the definitive case in moral logic for ending inequalities between civil partnership and marriage. I can’t add to it. For years after being elected to parliament I tried to explain the Conservative case for giving social status to same-sex relationships.

Friday

Matthew Parris

The pathology of the politician | 14 October 2011

With ministers behaving particularly oddly, we thought CoffeeHousers would enjoy Matthew Parris' Spectator column from May, in which he explains the weirdness that afflicts politicians. Politicians are not normal people. They are weird. It isn’t politics that has made them weird: it’s their weirdness that has impelled them into politics. Whenever another high-profile minister teeters or falls, the mistake everyone makes is to ask what it is about the nature of their job, the environment they work in and the hours they work, that has made them take such stupid risks. This is the wrong question. We should ask a different one: what is it about these men and women that has attracted them to politics?

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Why don’t we want a government that is on the side of ‘ordinary people’? 

It’s often the peripheral that catches the eye, gets you thinking. My newspaper’s fringe meeting at the Labour conference in Liverpool this week, featuring an analysis of Labour’s standing by the Times’s Populus pollster, Rick Nye, was really centred on the immediate: what was the electorate’s perception of Ed Miliband-led Labour? Our guest, the shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, was there to discuss this with the audience. But a rather different question leapt at me from Mr Nye’s presentation: one of the very few polling questions to which respondents were returning consistently and overwhelmingly pro-Labour replies.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Absolute power corrupts one’s dress sense absolutely

If you’re near a laptop and in search of a giggle, go to http://tinyurl.com/6gamb73. Otherwise, let me explain in words: that links you to a gallery of scores of photographs of Muammar Gaddafi in silly clothes. There are images of him in absurd, invented, full military dress, festooned with the gilt and silverware of bogus medals; sashes of every kind, colour and cloth, all gaudy. There are images of the tinpot dictator decked out in purple like a Roman emperor, swathed in silk with turbans, in mid-desert in combat gear, taking the salute in braid and twill, or crowned in gold.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Day by day through someone else’s life

Is the book — the solid, rectangular repository of the whole damn thing, from Chapter 1 to Chapter 32 — always and in principle the superior vehicle for a story? Is the book — the solid, rectangular repository of the whole damn thing, from Chapter 1 to Chapter 32 — always and in principle the superior vehicle for a story?

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Perhaps editors should all agree not to hype up the riots

It feels odd to start a column having failed to persuade oneself that what one proposes is sensible. My problem is this: whenever I put the thoughts that follow to friends whose judgment I respect, they talk me out of my conclusion. Convinced by their counter-arguments, I banish the idea. Then I wake up in the small hours — and the idea’s back.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

My painter uncle had his wife’s support. He needed Brian Sewell’s criticism

I have spent a day committing to oblivion by far the greater part of a man’s whole life’s work. I have spent a day committing to oblivion by far the greater part of a man’s whole life’s work. Let me start this story at the beginning. Donald Young, my uncle, died 21 years ago. Lung cancer killed him at 66, an age he was lucky to reach, given the pipe he had puffed at almost continuously since he was a teenager. The only other thing he had done continually since youth was paint.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

At last: precisely the wrong prescription for the future of Conservatism

It isn’t often that political commentary presents us with a perfect portrait — a neat and simple miniature in oils — of where a faction is going wrong. It isn’t often that political commentary presents us with a perfect portrait — a neat and simple miniature in oils — of where a faction is going wrong. Just such a picture, however, was painted unwittingly for us by Tim Montgomerie in the Telegraph last Sunday. Tim Montgomerie is an admirable and capable figure, and co-editor of ConservativeHome. Without him the world of political commentary would lose one of its most interesting and significant voices on the right. Never unheeding, never unthinking and never unarmed, he’s a formidable protagonist.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Machismo is no way to beat the unions: I prefer Cameron’s quiet approach

David Cameron is absolutely right to avoid at all costs a confrontational tone in ministers’ approach to the coming showdown with the public sector unions. David Cameron is absolutely right to avoid at all costs a confrontational tone in ministers’ approach to the coming showdown with the public sector unions. Our editor, Fraser Nelson (‘Strike and counterstrike’, 2 July), is absolutely right to insist that the Prime Minister and his Cabinet must not blink. But The Spectator’s and Mr Cameron’s approaches are entirely reconcilable. The bigger the stick you carry, the more softly you can speak.

Matthew Parris

Witness for the prosecution

This is a humdinger of a tale. You might have thought that journeys into the heart of the Dark Continent with David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley and the likes of Richard Burton had already inspired so vast and breathless a literature that there were few surprises left to report. But that’s the miracle of this story. Alastair Hazell’s genius has been to plough through the huge and well-documented archive, follow his nose, and tell a tale from an entirely new perspective: the life of Dr John Kirk, an early companion to Dr Livingstone, and afterwards a humble Scottish medical officer and Acting British Consul in Zanzibar.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Whose revolution is it anyway?

It is no criticism of our redoubtable corps of foreign correspondents to remark that once an arena goes (in the modern military jargon) ‘kinetic’, sociology goes out of the window. It is no criticism of our redoubtable corps of foreign correspondents to remark that once an arena goes (in the modern military jargon) ‘kinetic’, sociology goes out of the window. When there are battles to report, a correspondent’s instinct is to find the action and describe it. News is what good journalists do, first and foremost. In the claimed Arab Spring this year, therefore, the ebb and flow of conflict is at the centre of media reports. And of course the ebb and flow of conflict matters, urgently. But (for me at least) the urgency becomes a problem.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Revenge is not a sin, it’s a public service

It was never likely that Chris Huhne’s agonies over what will sooner or later be called Penaltypointsgate would arrive unaccompanied by a rash of commentary about revenge. It was never likely that Chris Huhne’s agonies over what will sooner or later be called Penaltypointsgate would arrive unaccompanied by a rash of commentary about revenge. All of three hours elapsed before ‘Hell hath no fury…’ — now so over-used that we have to tail off into a sheepish ellipsis after the first few words — appeared in a Fleet Street headline.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

The pathology of the politician

Politicians are not normal people. They are weird. It isn’t politics that has made them weird: it’s their weirdness that has impelled them into politics. Whenever another high-profile minister teeters or falls, the mistake everyone makes is to ask what it is about the nature of their job, the environment they work in and the hours they work, that has made them take such stupid risks. This is the wrong question. We should ask a different one: what is it about these men and women that has attracted them to politics? Politicians are not normal people. They are weird. It isn’t politics that has made them weird: it’s their weirdness that has impelled them into politics.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Is there any hope in politics for pointy-headed intellectuals?

When the Alabama governor George Wallace described intellectuals as ‘pointy-heads who couldn’t ride a bicycle straight’, he coupled two insults. When the Alabama governor George Wallace described intellectuals as ‘pointy-heads who couldn’t ride a bicycle straight’, he coupled two insults. The first — ‘pointy-heads’ — went straight into the legend and remains there, though I’d always thought intellectuals had domed heads. Less remembered is the second barrel of Wallace’s revolver. But in five words it contains a potent argument.

Matthew Parris

Precious little warmth

There’s something wrong with these diaries. There’s something wrong with these diaries. This is not to disparage the scholarly efforts of their editor, Dr Catterall, nor the skill with which he seems to have pruned the original papers (twice the length) into the greatest coherence achievable, nor his helpful contextualisation and calmly rational explanatory notes. Nor is it to question the importance for modern historians of the whole painstaking enterprise, to observe that the general reader will plough onward from summit, to cabinet, to dinner party, to pheasant shoot, to bilateral meeting, with a half-formed question growing in his mind. Who was Harold Macmillan writing all this for? For himself? For friends and family? For history? To answer questions? To settle scores?

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Rage, rage against the dying of the lightbulb

When I was young, all the traffic lights in central London had black iron flambeaux, about the size of your forearm, at the top of each pole. I doubt many people even noticed the decoration consciously, but it lent a faintly monumental touch to otherwise utilitarian ironwork – like those magnificent bronze fish wrapped around the streetlights along the Thames Embankment. In however small a way the flambeaux gave our metropolis the air of an imperial city. Ornamentation in the stone of buildings or the steel of street furniture does this: because, and precisely because, it serves no purpose but to beautify or dignify. Because it is (strictly speaking) useless and extravagant, it elevates the scene.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

A tradition of fine writing is on the way out – and that may not be a bad thing

I know it’s absurd, I know it’s juvenile, I know that awards ceremonies are perfectly ludicrous occasions for everyone except the winners and their mothers, but I am what I am, competitive, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. I know it’s absurd, I know it’s juvenile, I know that awards ceremonies are perfectly ludicrous occasions for everyone except the winners and their mothers, but I am what I am, competitive, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. So I will not pretend that receiving the Best Columnist award at the Society of Editors Press Awards dinner at the Savoy last week was anything less than heavenly. But there are other things there’s no point pretending.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

For happy travel across Europe, avoid the black hole of Paris

This week I narrowly failed to reach the Mediterranean coast of Spain from the north of England by train, within the daylight hours of a single day. The problem was Paris. Train buffs (and rail service planners) read on. Let’s begin at the end. High-speed rail from France has until this month always hit the wall at the Pyrenees. From Paris you set out on the TGV at a tremendous lick until Avignon, as high-speed track yields to something more sedate. And in the Languedoc, where the Pyrenees totter into the Mediterranean, everything used to slow down further. From Perpignan to the Spanish border the old line squeezes and sidles painfully slowly the long way around a bulge of coast, by way of dreary Portbou. The motorway, meanwhile, punches a huge short-cut through the range.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

The Arab world deserves our pity, not our fear

The Spectator of March 2030 will wonder how the immense, mature, formidable, intelligent, capable, rational western society of 2011 got itself into such a tizz about the Arab world. Why ever (our successors will ask) did we think we had anything really big to fear from the 21st century’s most spectacularly unsuccessful regional culture? Last weekend news reached us that Arab League leaders had approved the idea of a (presumably) US-led and UN-flagged imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya. ‘Great news,’ cry the muddle-headed advocates of such a plan — as though what the Arab League leaders think is of any serious importance, even in their own countries.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

What luck to spend the night on a Victorian coal steamer on Lake Titicaca

Dawn on Tuesday last week found me bobbing around in a small sailing boat in Sydney Harbour, yards from the wash of two of the world’s greatest liners: Cunard’s ocean liner Queen Mary 2, and the company’s enormous new cruise ship, the Queen Elizabeth. Dawn on Tuesday last week found me bobbing around in a small sailing boat in Sydney Harbour, yards from the wash of two of the world’s greatest liners: Cunard’s ocean liner Queen Mary 2, and the company’s enormous new cruise ship, the Queen Elizabeth. They were entering the harbour together, and we’d sailed under Sydney Harbour Bridge to watch what the local papers called the Royal Rendezvous. The occasion, which I wanted to write about for the Times, was breathtaking.