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.
I do the overnight from Washington in order to be back for Jewish Book Week. Some months ago the organisers asked who I would like to interview me. I suggested Fraser Nelson or one of my other delightful Spectator colleagues. They give me Rod Liddle. Dozing on the plane, after a foul BA dinner and a beaker
If I needed a safe space, I would nominate California. Against most odds this seedbed of censorious liberalism has thrown up the antibodies to the lurgy it created. Here within a short space of each other are a group of leftists and conservatives, religious and non-religious, all of whom are united in deploring the ‘You
Last month, I wrote here about the BBC and ‘grooming gangs’. In particular, I speculated that it was unlikely that having once (after more than a decade) dramatized the mass gang-rape of British girls (and a man from Wales having partly been fired-up by it then ploughing a van into a crowd outside a mosque) that
We live in a strange era when it comes to Russia. On the one hand there are people who seem willing to insist that absolutely everything is controlled by the government and agencies of that country. They claim that Russia has the power to install an American President, to make the British vote Brexit and
The story about Jeremy Corbyn’s contacts with a member of Czech intelligence in the 1980s has not been treated with great seriousness by our national broadcaster. At first the BBC deigned not to run the story. Then they treated it like some kind of joke. For instance, given a chance to question Corbyn over his
When I saw the photo of Tom Daley and Dustin Lance Black holding a photo of an ultrasound, and all the subsequent headlines proclaiming ‘Tom and Lance are having a baby’ I thought one thing above all: ‘That’s strange’. Not ‘eww’, or ‘gross’, or ‘what a way to get over certain negative recent publicity’, but
In January, Channel 4’s Cathy Newman interviewed the Canadian academic Jordan Peterson. The channel broadcast a short version of the interview on the evening news bulletin, where it would have been seen by the few hundred thousand people who watch the programme nightly. But to its credit, Channel 4 also published online the full half-hour
When I saw the photo of Tom Daley and Dustin Lance Black holding a photo of an ultrasound, and all the subsequent headlines proclaiming ‘Tom and Lance are having a baby’ I thought one thing above all: ‘That’s strange’. Not ‘eww’, or ‘gross’, or ‘what a way to get over certain negative recent publicity’, but
The future of modern Britain looks set to be an unusually complicated affair. Take just one piece of news that came out of the trial of Darren Osborne over recent days. According to relatives of the Finsbury Park attacker, the first trigger towards his radicalisation was watching the BBC drama Three Girls about the Rochdale
Last week I wrote in this space about Cathy Newman’s catastrophic interview with the Canadian academic Jordan Peterson. Since then a number of things have happened. One is that millions of people around the world have watched Newman’s undisguisedly partisan interview. The other is that Channel 4 has tried to turn the tables by claiming
Last Sunday night a capacity crowd of mainly young people packed into the Emmanuel Centre in London. Those who couldn’t find a seat stood at the back of the hall. When the speaker entered, the entire hall rose to its feet. It was his second lecture that day, the fourth across three days of sold-out
In the magazine this week I have written a piece about the Canadian Professor Jordan Peterson. He has been in the UK over the last week to talk about his new book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Among many other things – much more of which I go into in the piece
I am fascinated as well as appalled by the new morality being created in our country. Last night, Dawn Butler MP was on the television again (this time Question Time) making charges against Toby Young and doubling-down on a point she had made earlier in the week on the Daily Politics. The essence of it
If there is one lesson the world should have learned from Iran’s ‘Green Revolution’ of 2009 and the so-called Arab Spring that followed, it is this: the worst regimes stay. Rulers who are only averagely appalling (Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak) can be toppled by uprisings. Those who are willing to kill
The newspapers are full of end-of-year round ups, photographic highlights of the year and so on. And I thought I would add to the melee by mentioning my ‘person of the year’. There are plenty of people who I could think of who have made my year more interesting, more enjoyable and more besides. But
We’re closing 2017 by republishing our twelve most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 7: Douglas Murray on the sexual counter-revolution: We are in the middle of a profound shift in our attitude towards sex. A sexual counter-revolution, if you will. And whereas the 1960s saw a freeing up of attitudes towards sex, pushing at boundaries,
As Kim Jong-un might blow up the world next year, if not this, and people are forever trying to work out what is going on in his country, perhaps it is worth describing a military parade I attended in Pyongyang a few years back. The occasion was the centenary of the birth of the current
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, likes to make a stand. Specifically he likes to present himself (and the city in which he has been elected Mayor) as an antidote to global concerns about immigration, human unpleasantness in general and Donald Trump in particular. For instance, on the BBC on Sunday morning he explained his
On Friday the Guardian columnist and Corbyn-supporter Owen Jones sent out this Tweet to his followers: Palestinians urgently need our solidarity. Join me protesting Trump’s Jerusalem speech outside London’s US Embassy *tonight* >> https://t.co/JfGW6sTqjJ pic.twitter.com/2VPeqf21og — Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) December 8, 2017 As a video of the resulting demonstration shows, the crowd outside the embassy
One of the nicest things in life is the discovery that one-time enemies are in fact terrific, brave people who you might have been wrong about and have grown to respect. For instance, when I was growing up I had a rather marked dislike of Germaine Greer. Then, in recent years, I discovered she was
