Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

Holly Rigby and the ignorance of the Corbynistas

One of the few advantages of going on television or radio is that in time you meet all the leading nutters in the land. In most ordinary situations, I would never have encountered Holly Rigby. She says that she is a ‘teacher’, though seems to be part of that miraculous class of leftist activist able to juggle a full-time job with popping up on media channels at any hour of the day or night as a full-time activist for Jeremy Corbyn. 

Last week, I found myself on air with Holly for an hour on the BBC’s ‘Politics Live’. She seemed harmful enough. I don’t think there was an answer she gave which did not begin with the words ‘As a teacher’. Presumably as some kind of appeal to authority. And she gleefully trotted out every known far-left trope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc3Ci4NFLgM

But when we got around to the discussion of my recent book (copies of which can be found etc etc) it became clear what she was really there for. Without having read the book under discussion or being in the slightest way familiar with its arguments she immediately launched at it. Specifically she appeared to think – or was content to pretend that she thought – that my book was some kind of cover for murdering people, or making them kill themselves.

She then waited till I said something she could portray as bigoted (on this occasion I referred in passing, casually to the whole ‘trans thing’) so that she could let out the great denunciation she had been working up to. 

For anyone unfamiliar with this trend, the Corbynistas do this solely in order that their supporting chorus of fellow crackpots online can celebrate a great ‘destruction’ of a right-wing monster. It is the best chance that the Hollys have of something that feels to them like stardom.

Afterwards it was brought to my attention that Holly had been braver on social media than she had been in person.

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Douglas Murray
Written by
Douglas Murray
Douglas Murray is associate editor of The Spectator and author of The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, among other books.

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