Subscribe to The Spectator

Sunday 27 May 2012

Latest issue

Buy the current issue

Jobs at Telegraph

Our enemies are right to mock us

14 April 2007

A taxi driver in Mexico City, who in my presence had just paid la mordida (the bite) to a traffic cop, taught me some lines by the 17th-century Creole nun and poetess, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz:

    O who is more to blame,
    He who sins for pay
    Or he who pays for sin?

The application of this particular moral conundrum to the recent events in our own country is all too obvious. But whatever answer you may give to it, one thing seems indisputable: Britain has been shown in the past couple of weeks, quite accurately, to be a country of very slight account, with a population increasingly unable to distinguish the trivial from the important and the virtual from the real, led by a man of the most frivolous earnestness who for many years has been given to gushes of cheap moral enthusiasm (cheap, that is, for him, not for others who have to pay for it).

More articles from: Theodore Dalrymple | this section

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Comments Post comment

Be the first to comment on this article!

Back to top

Cartoons

sponsored links

Spectator recommends

Spectator classifieds

THE PRESENT FINDER

1,700 Unusual Christmas Presents Request Catalogue 01935 815 195 Quote SPEC10 for 10% discount www.presentfinder.co.uk

OLIVE BRANCH FLORISTS

Pimilco based Florist with online ordering Web: www.olivebranch.net Tel: 020 7630 1868 Fax: 020 7233 8844

RUFFS Bespoke Signet rings

62 Shore Road, Warsash, Southampton, SO31 9FT Telephone: 01489 578867 Web site: www.ruffs.co.uk