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.
Why do people always fall from grace for the wrong reasons? I had always hoped that if Keith Vaz finally fell from whatever form of grace he could lay claim to, it would be for really good reasons. Regular readers will know that my detestation of him dates back to 1989 when as a young MP
Private Eye used to run a column called the ‘Neo-philes’, listing some of the endless cases of hacks saying ‘X is the new Y’ (‘This season green is the new black’ and so on). So let me put in an early entry for the return of any such column by announcing here that ‘The Burkini
So farewell then Anjem Choudary. At least for a few years. Britain’s biggest loudmouth Islamist has finally been convicted in the UK for encouraging support for Isis. He now faces up to ten years in prison. There have been reporting restrictions on his conviction for several weeks now, as we waited for the conclusion of
Earlier this week the Times had a leader column entitled ‘Protect Prevent’. As a defence of the government’s counter-extremism strategy it was all well and good, but it missed a very crucial point. It said: ‘The success of Prevent has been undermined, however, by a failure of public relations. The government failed to cast it as
It is almost two months since Omar Mateen walked around the Pulse nightclub in Florida, gunning people down while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’. During the assault Mateen spoke to American law enforcement and swore allegiance to Isis. Frustratingly Omar Mateen failed to call the group ‘so-called Islamic State’, thus betraying a woeful lack of linguistic sensitivity among his
A few months back, after the Brussels terrorist attacks, I pointed out on Coffee House that there is a certain routine after any such atrocity. One part of it is that, after a couple of days pause, we always get the ‘Muslim good news story’. This is the part when after a couple of days of everyone
How is your Merkelsommer going? For now, Britain seems to be missing the worst. True, a couple of men of Middle Eastern appearance tried to abduct a soldier near his base in Norfolk for what was unlikely to have been an interfaith dialogue session. But Britain’s geographical good fortune, relative success in limiting weapons and
Update: This piece was written yesterday and so is already out of date. This morning two armed men entered a church near Rouen during Mass. They took the priest, two nuns and a number of congregants hostage. It appears that they slit the priest’s throat before themselves being killed by French security forces. Nobody can think of any possible motive,
A couple of weeks ago I watched a ‘Black Lives Matter’ protest in the centre of London. It was a Sunday and the assembled group of perhaps 1,000 people marched up and down Oxford street a couple of times. This was shortly after the shootings of five police officers in Dallas, Texas while they policed
Last Friday I noted that you don’t have to go back many months to get the latest mass-casualty terrorist atrocity in Europe these days. But even while people were still trying to find ways to portray the Nice truck driver as a victim of urban-planning laws we had the next attack. Yesterday it was an ‘Afghan
The BBC headline says it all: ‘The killing of 84 people celebrating Bastille Day is the worst attack on France since the 13 November attacks.’ These day in Europe you don’t have to reach back many months to find carnage even exceeding that in Nice last night. We still don’t have many details about last
A specific nightmare keeps occurring to me. It is an episode of Prime Minister’s Questions in which Jeremy Corbyn and Andrea Leadsom face each other across the dispatch boxes. Unlike most of the world, including most of the Conservative party, I had heard of Andrea Leadsom before a week last Friday – indeed had spent
There is a moment at the start of most authors’ careers when it is hard to get anything published, and there is a moment towards the latter stage of some authors’ careers when it is hard to stop everything being published. A.S. Byatt is in the latter stage of her career, and however great the
Well I might as well say publicly what I’ve been saying to everyone who will listen privately for the last week. It seems to me that our country will regret the distraction and levity we have shown this past week. For those who campaigned to leave the EU, June 24th was not an opportunity to
It is now almost three days since David Cameron announced his resignation. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has been in hiding ever since. And the Parliamentary Labour party is revolting against its own leader and members. It is one thing for the whole political class to be in disarray. It is quite another for the
A few thoughts on today’s events. First – it wasn’t working. With each year it was becoming more and more obvious that Britain and the EU wanted different things. Many (though not all) continental countries seem happy with a political union which pools their national sovereignty. There may be virtues in that, problems in it
So the great day is here. Those of us who wish to vote ‘Leave’ will be heading to the polls in the hope that this is the eve of our nation’s independence. Those voting ‘Remain’ will obviously be heading to the polls hoping that the current status quo in Europe will continue. Throughout the campaign
A young British man was arrested last night in Las Vegas at a Donald Trump rally. He is accused of trying to seize a police officer’s gun and assassinate the Republican candidate for President. According to the BBC report: ‘He had reportedly tried to seize the gun after saying he wanted Mr Trump’s autograph at
Despite the ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ campaigns rightly halting as soon as the news of the savage murder of Jo Cox MP came through, some people could not pass up the opportunity to press what they saw as a political advantage. The campaign for Britain to leave the EU may have been silent, but EU officials
Last night a gunman attacked a gay club in Orlando, Florida. At present at least 50 people are confirmed dead and another 42 are confirmed injured – which would make it the worst mass shooting in American history. The gunman appears to have been a US citizen called Omar Mateen. Even the FBI is now
