Niall Gooch

‘The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons,’ was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s immortal line to express his practical scepticism of hifalutin self-aggrandisement. We should probably have some similar aphorism about high-profile left-wingers who loudly advocate for egalitarianism in education while quietly sending their own children to selective or fee-paying schools. The list is long, and includes such influential figures as Diane Abbott, David Aaronovitch, Polly Toynbee, Harriet Harman, and Corbynite éminence grise Seumas Milne. Nick Clegg and Tony Blair, meanwhile, both sent children to the London Oratory, nominally a comprehensive state school but with the kind of highly expensive catchment area that renders the label more than a little ridiculous.

When I started secondary school in 1994, we were supplied with a copy of the rules for our uniform, haircuts and footwear. These ran to more than a page of closely typed A4 – and they were strictly enforced, too. ‘Tuck that shirt in, boy!’ was a regular refrain in the corridors. Generally, committing time to being well-dressed and well put-together signals that someone is taking your time seriously At the time, we regarded these regulations as a source of annoyance and ridicule. I dare say even some of the parents might have thought them rather excessive. Nowadays they might run afoul of equalities law. But looking back, it is not difficult to see their merit.

As Mrs Thatcher stood to give her speech at the 1980 Conservative party conference at Brighton, she was under considerable pressure. The government had slumped in the polls since their decisive election victory barely a year before – imagine that! – while unemployment and inflation remained high. So when left-wing activists interrupted her with cries of ‘Tories out!’, she could have been forgiven for getting flustered. But of course, she did not. She took it in her stride. ‘Never mind, it is wet outside’, she remarked, without missing a beat, as the intruders were removed, and then came the famous line: ‘I expect that they wanted to come in. You cannot blame them; it is always better where the Tories are.

Nigel Farage is the perfect folk devil for the British liberal left. He is robustly patriotic, cheerfully irreverent about modern pieties, and a Barbour-wearing libertarian smoker and beer-drinker. He represents – in both the literal and figurative sense – the Britain that the Sensible classes dislike and ignore and would like to see consigned to irrelevance: a Britain made up of ambitious City boys, the aspirational middle class, farmers, left-behind coastal towns and small business owners. Perhaps I am old-fashioned, but there is something rather feeble and underhand about playing the informer on contemporaries from your schooldays What makes it worse for them is that none of their attacks seem to stick.

Displays of sheer physical bravery are always impressive. Having been in precisely one real fight in my life, I enormously admire those who put their lives on their line for the rest of us every day, so I almost found myself applauding when I saw last week the police bodycam footage of Inspector Molloy Campbell taking on the drug-crazed sword-wielding murderer Marcus Monzo. Armed only with his extendable baton, Campbell kept Monzo at bay, before other officers eventually subdue him with tasers. The ‘long peace’ of low crime enjoyed by Britain from the last decades of the nineteenth century to around the middle of the twentieth, is well and truly over Nevertheless, admiration was not my only reaction to that video.

In the vestry of the church where my father was priest, there was a large wall-mounted plaque commemorating some long-dead worthy of the eighteenth century. I cannot recall his name, but he left a large bequest to the parish for the support of ‘poor persons known to be of good character.’ There are similar inscriptions marking similar bequests in churches up and down the country – though perhaps fewer of them now, in these days of fervent ideological scrutiny of such memorials. As an idealistic young man, I used to find the plaque rather irritating. I thought it was archaic and unchristian, a relic of the Bad Old Days when the gentry’s arbitrary prejudices about the undeserving poor led to misery and injustice among the working class.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency noted on X their discovery that “federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania” Tuesday. Apparently, the facility employs 700 people, over 200 feet underground, processing around 100,000 applications per year, which are then stored in boxes and brown envelopes. This processing can last many months, according to the intrepid boys at DoGE. The clear implication was that they had uncovered yet another absurd and archaic operation, needlessly long-winded and ripe for automation. I must confess this was not my reaction. I am generally sympathetic to the idea of lean, thrifty government.

Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill passed its Second Reading in the Commons on Friday, which means that it is considerably more likely than not to end up on the statute book. Normally, when momentous legislation is before the House, the media is full of glowing tributes to the quality of the speeches, and we hear many warm words about MPs rising to the occasion and so forth. If you read Hansard from even 30 years ago, let alone 50 or 60, the sophistication and rigour of parliamentary argument is quite remarkable It may be my imagination, but there seems to have been rather less of that this time round. Even the most generous of Westminster observers would have struggled to find much to admire in the speeches given in favour of assisted suicide.

Where American left-liberal rhetoric leads, British left-liberal rhetoric invariably follows. Hate speech, reparations, decolonisation, white fragility; there is no intellectual fad so inane that it will not be enthusiastically mimicked, with childlike credulity, by journalists, academics, civil servants and broadcasters, regardless of whether it even makes sense in a British context. The impression you get is of status-conscious provincials seizing, herd-like, on the latest fashions and conventional wisdom from the imperial centre.