Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

How to save the Tory party

How do you feel about the standard of political debate in this country? I ask this question at the very moment two blimps are flying over London. The first attempts to depict President Donald Trump as a giant baby in a nappy and is the property of people who do not like Donald Trump; the other attempts to depict the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, as a kind of transvestite dwarf and is the property of people who do not like Sadiq Khan. Both groups habitually call each other fascists, doing a passable impression of Harry Enfield’s Kevin the Teenager. Both groups, I would venture, are irredeemable narcissists with the collective IQ of a block of Cathedral City cheddar cheese. And yet both groups are also very much of their time, with their respective resorts to infantile insult simply because they disagree with the opinions of Trump or the hapless Khan.

Actually, the first impulse of the anti-Trump demonstrators, including Magic Grandpa himself, was to try to stop the US President from coming, to ban him from speaking because they don’t like his views. That’s very au courant, of course. Last week a livid little leftie quack called Alan Woodall, who describes himself as a ‘doctor and a scientist’, succeeded in his attempts to prevent the right-ish journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer from speaking at a conference he was to attend. He did that because he thinks he should be permanently insulated from views with which he disagrees.

I do not know the man, but my suspicion is that he is a moron. Not because he and I would disagree about stuff, but because the determination to clamp your hands over your ears when you fear someone might be about to disagree with you is surely the recourse of an imbecile, a four-year-old child, a halfwit.

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