Stephen Daisley

Stephen Daisley

Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail

Friday

Stephen Daisley

MPs can no longer employ family members – and SpAds are delighted

It wasn’t quite our answer to the West Wing — too young, too cynical — but it filled a Bartlet-shaped hole in the TV schedule. Party Animals followed a clique of sexually bipartisan political advisers at Westminster in the dying days of New Labour. Matt Smith and Andrea Riseborough played researchers to a Caroline Flintish Home Office minister, pragmatic and idealistic in the right measure, while Shelley Conn and Pip Carter worked for her shadow number, a sort of dishy Ed Vaizey eager to modernise the Tories one decriminalised spliff at a time. There was little in the way of Sam Seaborn idealism and the implausibly attractive leads seemed to switch romantic allegiances in the time it took to power-walk down a corridor in Portcullis House.

Friday

Stephen Daisley

How Buffy the Vampire Slayer transformed pop culture

Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Right there, those four ridiculous words, are why it shouldn't have worked. What was this? Some low-camp Russ Meyer knock-off? Joss Whedon's generation-defining TV hit debuted 20 years ago tonight. Its anniversary is being marked by the fans who adored it and the critics whose cool detachment it drove a stake through. It is fourteen years since Sunnydale collapsed into the Hellmouth and Buffy left the airwaves after seven seasons. But far from turning to dust, this unlikeliest of cultural landmarks has enjoyed an afterlife through graphic novels, fan fiction, merchandise, conventions and the long-running chatter about a Hollywood adaptation, a rumour that has proved harder to kill than the show’s durable lead. (She died twice.

Sunday

Stephen Daisley

People of faith are being driven from public life

'They will hate you because of who I am,' Jesus says in the Gospels. He forgot to add: 'And the ones who don't have a clue will point and laugh.' It's a lesson Carol Monaghan has learned abruptly. Monaghan is MP for Glasgow North West and a member of the Scottish National Party. A former science teacher, it’s fair to say she hasn’t grabbed the media spotlight in the way some of her colleagues have since entering Parliament in 2015. Still, she’s gone about her duties as an MP, seeing to the needs of her constituents, and serving on the Commons science and technology committee. This week, the TV cameras finally found her. On Wednesday, Monaghan turned up to her committee and was met by a colleague’s question. What was that on her forehead?

Tuesday

Stephen Daisley

Gerald Kaufman: Labour hero, Jewish villain

Gerald Kaufman, who has died aged 86, was instrumental in saving the Labour Party, back when the Labour Party was something that could still be saved. It was Kaufman who pithily pegged the 1983 manifesto as 'the longest suicide note in history'. He knew the phrase would hang around the far-left and dog any attempt to dodge responsibility for the calamity.  In his heart, he was a radical, but he parted ways with the 1980s Labour left in its mush-headed confusion of ends and means. The mush is now party policy but Kaufman expended considerable wit keeping it at bay during the Kinnock years.

Sunday

Stephen Daisley

Trump has done what journalists should have done: boycotted the White House Correspondents’ dinner

The most dangerous place in Washington DC, the old joke goes, is between a politician and a television camera. It's a wonder there are any such places left, so intimate have the third and fourth estates become. Periodically, American journalism gets itself into a funk over its proximity to power and the consequences for integrity and neutrality. The lamentations are sincere but short-lived and before long the quarrelling lovers are reconciled and slip into old habits. ‘I hate myself for loving you,’ sang Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, lashing at the morbid affections of co-dependency. Iraq was supposed to be The Line. The press corps concluded in retrospect that it had been too credulous about the Bush administration’s claims.

Saturday

Stephen Daisley

How to get away with murder

Given our seamy obsession with serial killers, real and fictional, one would expect the crimes of Stephen Port to have made more of a mark on the national psyche. Port was convicted in November of the rape and murder of four young men in Barking, east London over a 15-month period. His modus operandi was cold and calculating: He would contact men on gay hook-up sites and incapacitate them with 'date rape drug’ GHB, before sexually assaulting and murdering them. A further seven men were drugged and/or raped but lived. Port is serving a whole-life sentence; he will die in prison. What makes these crimes particularly shocking is that the Metropolitan Police apparently had multiple chances to stop them and failed each and every time.

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley

Is Donald Trump good for the Jews?

Yakov Blotnik, world-weary custodian of the synagogue in Philip Roth’s short story 'The Conversion of the Jews’, has a simple outlook on life: “Things were either good-for-the-Jews or no-good-for-the-Jews”. The Blotnik Test confronts us as the new administration in Washington begins to take shape. We've just seen the first hints of what to expect at today's joint press conference between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. The US president used to it to break with the US's decades-old commitment to a two-state solution, insisting the arrival at a peace deal was more important than its details. “I’m looking at two states and one state,” he admitted.

Monday

Stephen Daisley

John Bercow must be saved from the paroxysms of Parliament’s angry men

John Bercow is a curious little poppet. He's come a long way since his spotty days of undergraduate hangem'n'floggery in the Federation of Conservative Students, an organisation banned by Norman Tebbit for being too right-wing. Today he's more likely to be found welcoming one acronym or another to Parliament or accosting the word 'progressive' and roughing it up.  Bercow, now handsomely perched in the gods of the liberal establishment, has defied the axiom that we become more conservative as we grow older. (Then again, if you start out in the Monday Club and keep going right, you'll end up in Rhodesia by Friday.)  We need to understand this change of heart to appreciate the splenetic fury he inspires in the worst, most tribal brand of Tory.