Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris is a columnist for The Spectator and The Times.

Today

29 Oct 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

Why I’m ducking the Rashford debate

Moments arrive when it becomes clear you’re losing the zeitgeist. Whatever might be the spirit of the era, you don’t get it any more. For me such a moment occurred last week as I followed news and commentary about the footballer Marcus Rashford’s campaign for meal vouchers for disadvantaged children during the school holidays. A Nottinghamshire Conservative MP, Brendan Clarke-Smith (Bassetlaw), had spoken in the Commons debate. ‘Where is the slick PR campaign encouraging absent parents to take some responsibility for their children?’ he asked. ‘I do not believe in nationalising children.’ ‘Brilliant!’ I thought. And well put. Of course I don’t believe that all children who go hungry do so because their parents can’t be bothered; there will be as many different circumstances as there are deprived families.

Why I’m ducking the Rashford debate

Thursday

15 Oct 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

Get yourself to Sweden – while you still can

An idea gains ground that we shouldn’t go abroad any more: that the very act of travelling without urgent reason is somehow irresponsible. I don’t subscribe to this. To me, travel has always been such an important and productive part of life, a source of knowledge and happiness. So while I can travel, I will. But quarantine is making it harder. My partner and I belong to what one survey reports is the 18 per cent of quarantined people who actually do stay at home. Much as I love our Derbyshire home, 14 days quarantined in one corner of the Peak District is a serious deterrent from visiting most of the rest of the world. But not from visiting Sweden, yet. As I write, their Covid case-rate is about a quarter of Britain’s, and our requirement to quarantine does not apply to people arriving from Stockholm.

Get yourself to Sweden – while you still can

Thursday

1 Oct 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

The memo Dominic Cummings never sent

There’s something about Dominic Cummings I will always like, and perhaps partly it’s the danger. I hardly know him well — perhaps at all, really — but will never forget an evening many years ago after a Times debate, when a few of us participants repaired to a restaurant called Fish near London Bridge. We sat up late, talking and drinking until we were just a handful; and one was Dominic. Hours with this arresting man sped by. He reminded me of one of my heroes in politics, the late Sir Keith Joseph, though Cummings is relaxed and loose, and Keith could be stiff and shy. What they shared, though, beyond a beguiling intellectual confidence, was an appetite for stripping things back to first principles and following the logic.

The memo Dominic Cummings never sent

Thursday

17 Sep 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

The next generation of gay men will be far more boring

Last week we broadcast my BBC radio Great Lives episode on Kenneth Williams. The effervescent comedian and presenter Tom Allen chose him. It was just enormous fun. You don’t, as a presenter, need talent to lead a programme on Williams: you just play archive clips and everybody falls about laughing. We certainly did. Funniest of all was his ‘Julian and Sandy’ sketch, about a holiday in Portugal. In the ‘Polari’ gay lingo Williams popularised, he described how they’d both been badly stung. ‘Portuguese man o’war?’ asked their interviewer. ‘I never saw him in uniform,’ Williams replied. And I fell to thinking: if in 1967 the BBC had broadcast a documentary dealing in anything other than condemnatory terms with promiscuous gay sex, all hell, and Mary Whitehouse, would have broken loose.

The next generation of gay men will be far more boring

Thursday

3 Sep 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

Are liberal conservatives now history?

It was a luminous late August sunset, and we were in France, dining outdoors with some friends who have a magical, charming place in the countryside there. We were discussing audiobooks of the kind you could listen to on a long car journey and I mentioned how Julian, my partner, and I had enjoyed my Times colleague David Aaronovitch’s memoir of childhood and youth, Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists. If you haven’t read it, do. David’s family were hardline members of the British Communist party. He was brought up to believe that ‘God Save the Queen’ was an anthem of imperialist oppression, and the revolution, hopefully peaceful, was perhaps just around the corner. The family holidayed in Bulgaria, had high hopes for the Soviet Union, and spent their leisure time in London at party meetings, distributing leaflets and banging the drum for the ideology in which they placed all their faith.

Are liberal conservatives now history?

Thursday

6 Aug 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

Why should anyone be forced to shield?

The best way (and with politicians sometimes the only way) to know whether people are aware they’ve made a mistake is seldom to put that question point-blank. A reflexive ‘oh no I didn’t’ kicks in. Do you honestly think, for example, that government ministers are privately confident that as Covid-19 swept the country, hospitals were right to send elderly patients back untested to care homes, even with the limitations to our knowledge at the time? Of course not. But something stupid about British politics appears to constrain them from saying so. Possibly, before trying to persuade us, they have persuaded themselves they were justified; and we all do this to some degree. We spend too many of our sleepless small-hours almost persuading ourselves we did not misjudge things.

Why should anyone be forced to shield?

Thursday

23 Jul 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

In an age of science, why are face masks a matter of opinion?

In 1846 Vienna, as across much of the world, a relatively new disease called puerperal (or ‘childbed’) fever had reached epidemic proportions in the local maternity hospital. Death rates of mothers and babies after childbirth were averaging 10 per cent, sometimes twice that. Across the western world millions were dying, the rate reaching 40 per cent in some hospitals. A Hungarian doctor in Vienna’s hospital, Dr Ignaz Semmelweis, began to wonder whether the problem might be something on the hands of doctors who’d been conducting post mortem examinations on the fever’s victims. He suggested handwashing with a chlorine solution. It worked. Deaths plummeted. But Vienna’s medical community would have none of it, content with the well-established belief in foul winds as spreaders of disease: ‘miasma’ theory.

In an age of science, why are face masks a matter of opinion?

Thursday

9 Jul 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

The Spanish approach to face masks

We self-critical British should never forget that other nations are pretty crazy too. I write this from Andalusia, Spain; and when it comes to cockeyed rules for limiting the spread of Covid-19, the Spanish offer us some stiff competition. One is reminded of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Very gradually (I’d guess) over the months during which Spaniards have been subject to a face-mask regime, people seem to have lost touch with the reasons the rules were laid down in the first place. Practices have simply been absorbed into popular culture, their origins now ignored, forgotten or never understood. We landed in Almeria from Manchester last week and, wearing our face masks like other Ryanair passengers, picked up our hire car and headed out on to the motorway for the hour-long drive to our destination town, passing through empty semi-desert and seeing nobody until we got there.

The Spanish approach to face masks

Thursday

25 Jun 2020
The Edition

The thin blue line: why are relations between police and black youths just so bad?

45 min listen

On the podcast this week, a former police officer gives his take on why black youths loathe the police (01:05); we discuss why Downing Street would prefer Joe Biden to win (17:25); and will anything really change after the pandemic? (30:50).With former Surrey Police and Crime Commissioner Kevin Hurley; campaigner Katrina Ffrench; the Spectator's Political Editor James Forsyth; the Spectator's Economics Correspondent Kate Andrews; and our columnists Matthew Parris and Rory Sutherland.Presented by Cindy Yu.

The thin blue line: why are relations between police and black youths just so bad?

Saturday

13 Jun 2020

Thursday

11 Jun 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

In praise of statue-toppling

I couldn’t disagree more with Sir Keir Starmer (it was ‘completely wrong,’ ‘it shouldn’t have been done in that way’) or with Boris Johnson (‘if people wanted the removal of the statue there are democratic routes which can be followed’). No, there was something magnificent about the sight of the Bristol mob throwing into the harbour the statue of a man whose trade was notorious for throwing sick slaves with no monetary value into the sea. 1890s Britain raised that statue. 1890s Britain — the decade in which my grandparents were children, for heaven’s sake — had only just closed the slave market in Zanzibar: and if you want to know more about that stain on our fairly recent history, read Alastair Hazell’s enthralling, horrifying The Last Slave Market: Dr John Kirk and the Struggle to End the East African Slave Trade.

In praise of statue-toppling

Thursday

28 May 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

Covid has all but left London. Why?

My partner, Julian, hovered at my shoulder on Friday as I tapped out my Times Saturday column (about travel quarantine). I’d slipped in a paragraph with my own thoughts about the transmission of Covid-19. ‘Cut the lot,’ he said. ‘You’re not an epidemiologist. Nobody’s interested in your theories.’ This was probably good advice so I put my own thoughts on hold. Until now. Because something’s still nagging me. I know I’m not an epidemiologist, but silences speak loud in science, and from those experts put up for media interview I notice a curious silence — a silence on what feels like a most important report and, from their interviewers, a timidity about pressing them. The question the experts should be asked is about London.

Covid has all but left London. Why?

Thursday

14 May 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

Does Google know me better than I know myself?

My research assistant, John Steele, is also a songwriter. A friend emailed him with the lyrics of a Fleetwood Mac number. These days Google often appends emails with a shortcut to save you typing your own answer by suggesting one or two likely responses. In the Fleetwood Mac lyric a former lover wonders whether her ex can see her reflection in the snow-covered hills. Google’s suggestion was ‘No’. Musicians have pondered some of life’s most profound questions, so John and I tried posing a few in emails, to see Google’s suggested response. Some were hilarious. If only David Bowie were here to know that ‘Yes!’, there is life on Mars. To Freddie Mercury’s ‘Is this the real life?’ the suggested answer is ‘Yes’. Mind you, to his question ‘Is this just fantasy?’ the answer is ‘Yes’ too.

Does Google know me better than I know myself?

Thursday

30 Apr 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

Lessons from the plague village that isolated from the world

Locked contentedly into the rhythms of farming life and digging for lead on its Derbyshire Peak District slopes, the village of Eyam lay blissfully unaware of what was about to hit it, and propel it into the history books for ever. The Viccars family, the Reverend William Mompesson and his family, Elizabeth Hancock and her six children, 350 villagers at least… none had any inkling. London existed in most minds only through talk in the public house, stories from travelling merchants and perhaps the first periodicals beginning to circulate in England. The metropolis was half a world away, a foreign place, a foreign culture. News of the plague we now call bubonic will at first have been more of a curiosity than a concern.

Lessons from the plague village that isolated from the world

Thursday

23 Apr 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

The difficult balance of public vs political agony

Fear is the politician’s friend. When terror grips the public, an opportunity arises for those in power to step forward as the people’s guide and protector in dangerous times. One sees this in wars. One sees it whenever the public suspects hostile conspiracies, networks of spies or mischief-makers. We likewise cleave to leaders who will confound predatory foreign powers, terrorist plots or the danger of being swamped by waves of immigrants. In fear or anxiety the people will hug their leaders closer, and their leaders know this as surely as every priest knows that despair and anxiety are his faith’s most reliable draw. Do not, therefore, overlook the power of a submicroscopic virus to herd the flock we call the electorate towards the shepherds we call the political class.

The difficult balance of public vs political agony

Saturday

18 Apr 2020

Thursday

16 Apr 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

We’re all guilty of recruiting this virus to our cause

There must be a quote from Shakespeare for this, but so far I haven’t found it. It’s the way we all of us contrive to see in cosmic events the evidence, the signs and portents, for what we already believed even before the cataclysm had occurred. These are the days of miracle and wonder, sang Paul Simon… The way we look to a distant constellationThat’s dying in a corner of the skyThese are the days of miracle and wonderAnd don’t cry, baby, don’t cry, don’t cry… Somehow there never was a plague, earthquake, flood or epidemic that was not also a sign that the human race must mend its ways according to wisdom we had long recommended, even during less extraordinary times. One fine day, perhaps, something remarkable and strange may happen that causes us to review, even (horrors) abandon, a dearly held belief.

We’re all guilty of recruiting this virus to our cause

Saturday

4 Apr 2020

Saturday

21 Mar 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

The secret excitement that lurks beneath our distress

Something about the word ‘bomb’ has always thrilled me, and I know why. No school today. In the 1950s we lived in Nicosia, Cyprus, when the island was a British colony and Greek Cypriot terrorists were trying to kill us. Our house was near a big army camp and our Cypriot neighbours were friendly, so home felt protected. It never occurred to me, just starting school, that proximity to the military was not a guarantee of security; and it never occurred to Mum and Dad that our neighbours had a small bomb factory, later discovered underneath their chicken house; so indoors seemed safe. But outdoors was different. Our parents, apparently anticipating by about half a century the casual use of improvised explosive devices, issued the sternest of warnings about kicking old tin cans we found lying around.

The secret excitement that lurks beneath our distress

Saturday

7 Mar 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

The unbearable lightness of Boris Johnson

Months ago, not long after Boris Johnson’s 2019 general election triumph, I wrote a Times column of a cautiously hopeful nature about his prospects in Downing Street. The column was in reaction to well-sourced reports that Mr Johnson’s management philosophy was to encourage ministers to get their heads down and get on with the job, to avoid the TV sofas and broadcasting studios unless there was something important to get across, and not to suppose that media exposure should be equated with career success. There was a view widespread at the time that Johnson would treat the governance of the United Kingdom as he had (as mayor) treated the governance of London: an occasional touch on the tiller, a benign presiding presence, but a disposition to appoint competent people to the big jobs, trust them and let them get on with it.

The unbearable lightness of Boris Johnson

Saturday

8 Feb 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

The concept of Evil is an evasion

A week of remembrance marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz last month had me thinking hard about what we mean by Evil. ‘Evil’, that is, when used with a real or metaphorical capital letter. You cannot join discussion of the Holocaust without hearing the word again and again. And indeed, what other words are available when we want to express complete horror? ‘Regrettable’? ‘Immoral’? Such vocabulary won’t do the job. Only ‘wicked’ and ‘sinful’ come anywhere near, and all are allied with what Evil, as a proper noun, tries to capture. ‘Evil’ eschews any notion of understanding or explaining, and sits uneasily with the idea of rectification, compensation or apology. It’s hard to reconcile even with thoughts of forgiveness.

The concept of Evil is an evasion

Saturday

25 Jan 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

Vegans are brave – and they have a point

It was a clear and icy night at home in Derbyshire last week. I love these times and, before bed, stepped outside to stand on the lawn in the moonless pitch-black and take it in. All at once the dark was pierced with an awful scream. I was not greatly alarmed — the rural night is full of strange noises — but stood there, puzzling out what it might be. The scream, almost human, was repeated, and its provenance seemed to be moving from one side to the other of the field adjacent to ours. Could it be a fox? Vixens do make some blood-curdling cries during the mating season but does that start as early as January? Or might it be a fox’s victim — a hare or rabbit, perhaps, fighting back as the poor creature was carried off — or even an owl’s prey? Might it be the call of some kind of night-bird? But this was a call I’d never heard from anything with feathers.

Vegans are brave – and they have a point

Thursday

9 Jan 2020
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

My fellow Remainers should not aim for a ‘soft Brexit’

‘I like to write when I’m feeling spiteful,’ remarked D.H. Lawrence. ‘It’s like having a good sneeze.’ A perennial challenge for a Fleet Street columnist is how to walk the fine line between writing as though your opinion mattered, and writing as though it were just an entertaining sneeze. My fellow Spectator columnist, Rod Liddle, has developed a very marketable pitch in the columnar sneeze. I perhaps err on the other side: writing with the implicit suggestion that the nation waits upon my verdict. I know, of course, that nobody does, but have to pretend to myself (and inhabit the pretence) that I’m a kind of prime minister-in-waiting, and my opinions (which in fact have often been inconsistent or even whimsical over the years) were being chiselled in granite.

Saturday

28 Dec 2019
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

Coffee House Top 10: The fact no one likes to admit: many gay men could just have easily been straight

We’re closing 2019 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 4: Matthew Parris on sexuality and gender: Long-suffering Spectator readers deserve a seasonal break from yet another Remoaner diatribe from me. My last on this page, making the outrageous suggestion that the populace may sometimes be wrong, is now being brandished by online Leaver-readers of my Times column as proof that I am in fact a fascist; so there isn’t anywhere much to go from there. Instead, I turn to sex. There is little time left for me to write about sex as the thoughts of a septuagenarian on this subject (I turn 70 this year) may soon meet only a shudder. But I have a theory which I have the audacity to think important.

Coffee House Top 10: The fact no one likes to admit: many gay men could just have easily been straight

Wednesday

18 Dec 2019
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

Labour’s failure isn’t necessarily the Tories’ success

A moment arrives when one does just have to admit defeat. We shall leave the European Union and there isn’t a lot of point going on about it any more. I’m still sure it’s a mistake, but there we are. In a democracy the majority is entitled to make a mistake, just as the minority is entitled to say so. I say so. I’d hoped we could change people’s minds but we haven’t, so enough from me on that. A general election is a different matter. Here too, of course, the majority is entitled to make a mistake, but resistance remains possible and legitimate because there’s always the opportunity at the next election to reverse the electorate’s previous decision. The trouble is, however, that I don’t want to. I don’t want a Labour government: certainly not one led by Jeremy Corbyn but (assuming he goes soon) not one led by Rebecca Long-Bailey, Angela Rayner, or whoever.

Thursday

5 Dec 2019
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

I’m calling it: the Tories will win a majority

It’s time to stick my neck out. What follows is anecdotal and my hunches have often been wrong. But I think that though Boris Johnson will get his overall majority, Tory strategists’ hopes of surfing a tidal wave of new support from ‘tribal’ Labour voters in the English Midlands and the North will not be fulfilled. Mr Johnson will win this time, but there will be no substantial and enduring shift northwards of Tory support. I live in the north Midlands. The two closest constituencies to that (safe) Conservative seat of Derbyshire Dales neatly fit the description political pundits offer of the sometimes struggling Midlands and northern seats where Johnson’s Tories hope to make huge, game-changing advances on 12 December.

Thursday

21 Nov 2019
Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris

What on earth are the Lib Dems up to?

Jo Swinson is right. Most of the gains that it’s worth her party aiming for would be made at the expense of the Conservatives. There are three reasons. First, glance at the 29 seats where the Liberal Democrats came second in 2017. Some 22 produced a ‘close’ result. Sixteen of these are held by the Tories, and only four by Labour. As my Times colleague Oliver Wright explains: ‘Even quite a dramatic swing from any of the other parties towards the Lib Dems could still reap very little reward.’ Secondly, Conservative and Lib Dem ideologies are not diametrically opposed. Anyone who’d even consider voting Tory would be fiercely resistant to Jeremy Corbyn. Lib Dems strike us, the Conservative--inclined, as comparatively harmless.

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