Diary

Wednesday, 25th July 2007

I am registered as a voter in Ealing-Southall and have a problem...

I am expected at a breakfast pre-chat at 7 a.m. I sleep in, and join my co-panelists at breakfast late. They are Irshad Manji (unbelievably professional and bubbly for this hour) and the former New York Times reporter Judith Miller (colder than the waiting coffee). The panel goes well, the 3,000-strong crowd is warm, and for a discussion on terrorism we gain some good laughs. Miller and I cross swords on Hamas, but this is now routine. There is a signing afterwards which I assume isn’t for me. But I am dragged to a table where my most recent book is on display. Irshad, sitting beside me, has a queue stretching far out of sight. I tell her this is similar to every author’s nightmare, where you turn up to a multiple-signing to discover the author at the next table is J.K. Rowling. Irshad barely manages to scrawl her name before the next fan is up. I draw out conversations with my queue to make the periods of solitude less marked, and write lengthy, elaborate inscriptions. No one actually asks me to stop, but I can see some wondering whether a book so graffiti-ed by the author doesn’t end up losing value again. For lunch I drop by the Giuliani campaign headquarters near Wall Street. I’m supporting the campaign, and advising it a little, so I go and have my brains picked over a hamburger. Here’s the real thing — and it is balm to this Brit. Like Thatcher and Reagan in their day, Giuliani and his team just ‘get it’. Here, just a little way away from the crater left by the World Trade Center, there’s no talk of hijackers as criminals or terrorists as mere megaphones for left-wing grievance.

I fly from JFK on a flight arriving in at 7 a.m. Always awful. I have to be in a meeting at my Westminster think tank at 9 a.m. I limit myself to one whisky and soda on the flight over, the lesson having been learnt too many times (good drinks, bad movie, worse sleep = poured on to the dawn tarmac at Heathrow). I read the US edition of Christopher Hitchens’s new book God Is Not Great on the flight. My neighbour has the latest Ratzinger tome. We smile at each other weakly. I arrive in London enthused as ever by America, and as prepared as possible for the accelerating degradation of British politics.

Douglas Murray is an author and director of the Centre for Social Cohesion.