Matthew Parris | The Spectator columnists & writers

The 31 inventions that Britain really needs

‘Get Brexit done, then Arpa’ read Dominic Cummings’s WhatsApp profile. Arpa was what’s now the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Mr Cummings has departed, but our very own British Arpa has arrived. Downing Street has tweaked the Yankee acronym to ‘Aria’ — the Advanced Research and Invention Agency. Its aim? ‘High-risk, high-reward’ scientific research. The cost? £800 million over four years. Ludicrous, no doubt: one of those fast-forgotten ‘eye-catching initiatives’ beloved of our leaders. But it got me thinking. We’re responsible for so many of the world’s great technologies and inventions. Steam engines, electric motors, television, telephones, incandescent light bulbs, the jet engine, computers, the world wide web, penicillin… What new achievements could lie in store? Where are the great unmet needs of we British? I’ve been asking around.

The sticky truth about Navalny

His courage is exhilarating. Even if you think his cause hopeless, Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and Putin-baiter, deserves our admiration. To return to Moscow after being poisoned, surely knowing arrest awaited him, is beyond brave. The chances are he will be crushed. But annihilation is not certain; and if one day he wins his battle with Putin, his return to Moscow this winter will become the stuff of legend. Navalny is not crazy: he has made a rational calculation, weighing the relative safety of a tedious future in grey and indefinite exile against a small possibility of making Russian history. With open eyes he has chosen risk. That sooner or later Vladimir Putin will be swept away is likely — but when? Might it be sooner? I hear those many media commentators who, after rehearsing with approval the story of Navalny’s return, go on to caution that he hasn’t a chance, and that all the cards are stacked in favour of Putin’s continuing and uninterrupted hegemony.

‘Inessential’ workers have helped keep the country afloat

A common sight across Britain these past ten months has been those rainbow flags fluttering in urban and village streets: ‘Thank you NHS.’ Many add an afterthought: ‘And other key workers.’ And who would dispute either sentiment? To these expressions of gratitude are added ministers’ and their medical advisers’ thanks to everyone who just ‘stays home’. We are saving granny. We are, if only by inaction, doing our bit in a great national effort, pulling together with the team. We join the ranks of the public-spirited, the selfless, the just. And again, who would cavil? Prudence, caution, carefulness… in a pandemic these are needed qualities. But there’s a group of our fellow citizens whose efforts during these pandemic times have gone somewhat unremarked.

Spectator Out Loud

Lionel Shriver, Matthew Parris and Jonathan Beswick

25 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Lionel Shriver, Matthew Parris and Jonathan Beswick

25 min listen

On this week's episode, Lionel Shriver says we believe what we want to believe. (00:45) Then, Matthew Parris says Peter Mandelson, infamously nicknamed the Prince of Darkness, could have been prime minister. (09:50) And finally, Father Jonathan Beswick explains why he's keeping his church open during lockdown. (17:10)

Mandelson’s story could have been so very different

Matt Forde, the stand-up comedian and presenter of his regular Political Party Podcast, has hit on an overlooked technique for getting the most out of big-name interviewees. He pretends to know nothing. Wide-eyed and star-struck (actually he is neither), Forde puts them at their ease in conversation with an apparent fanboy ingénue. ‘Do keep up, Matt,’ said Peter Mandelson, affectionately, as in his Christmas holiday interview Forde claimed to be unaware of some half-forgotten political turbulence that Lord Mandelson, his star interviewee, once encountered. It worked a treat. Lord Mandelson is normally a wary interviewee, but with Forde I have never heard him so unguarded: more confessional even than in his own autobiography.

My cure for the common cold

You really don’t want to know about my coughs and sneezes, particularly during the festive season, but bear with me because this it isn’t really about my sniffles. My argument applies to everyone, and it’s cheerful. All of us have a lifetime of experience of seasonal colds and flu, starting with the fact that they don’t always happen in winter. Mine is typical of many. Every year, often about this time, I get a fairly bad cold. Sometimes two in a year. I call it ‘flu’ and women call it ‘man flu’ but let’s not bandy names: it starts with a sudden sore throat and one or two uncomfortable nights. Within a few days this has passed and I feel better — but left with a hacking cough. It sounds dreadful, annoys the hell out of others and lingers for a fortnight or so.

The importance of giving offence

As dons at Cambridge vote on a new protocol on constraints to free speech, we mark this month the 500th anniversary of the public burning of Martin Luther’s books outside the west door of Great St Mary’s, the university church at Cambridge. After the 1517 publication of his famous 95 Theses, raging against the Church’s sale of ‘indulgences’ that purported to pardon sin in exchange for money, Luther had been denounced by Pope Leo X in a papal Bull. This accused him of (among other things) saying things that were ‘offensive to pious ears’. Luther then burned the papal Bull on 10 December 1520, giving further offence. He was excommunicated the following year. Make no bones about it: Martin Luther intended to offend.

Coffee House Shots

Are the Lib Dems too soggy?

17 min listen

Coffee House Shots

Are the Lib Dems too soggy?

17 min listen

In this week's Spectator, Matthew Parris asks why the Lib Dems have lost their ideological backbone. On the podcast, he discusses this 'soggification' of the party with Katy Balls and Polly Mackenzie, former special adviser to Nick Clegg and now chief executive of the think tank Demos.

Soft-left squatters have taken over the Lib Dems

I was never afraid of Jeremy Corbyn, never afraid of Momentum. I’ve never really feared Britain’s hard left at all. They’re wrong, of course, and they can do some serious localised damage; but their ideology is so obviously daft and has so comprehensively failed wherever in the 20th century it was tried that they occupy in my mind a position similar to that of Satanists. Grisly, yes, but a threat to civilised society? Hardly. The hard left always gets found out in the end, and always will. Their doctrines have no natural appeal to the middle-of-the-road British (which is most of us) and in the unlikely event they were ever elected to government, they’d soon enough crash the car. So in this new century I observed the takeover of the Labour party by Momentum-recruited entryists with a shrug.

It’s shameful how we have locked down our elderly

There’s a lot I don’t know about care home visits during this pandemic. I don’t know how straightforward it would be to find a way for close relatives to make proper and regular visits to the very frail. I don’t know details of the arrangements for staff in those care homes to work there and go home afterwards, as hospital staff do too. I don’t know the floor-plans of the thousands of care homes in the United Kingdom, nor how each could be adapted to allow high-priority visits from a relative. There are some 15,000 homes in England alone, and some half a million old people living in them. I don’t know how the management or staff of these homes would view making it easier for visits by relatives, or whether they would have the staffing to arrange this.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Will the shock of Covid change anything?

Earlier this month, a curious report caught my attention. Apparently there exists no rigorously established evidence that electric shock therapy, or ECT (electroconvulsive therapy), works. At all. In Electroconvulsive Therapy for Depression: A Review of the Quality of ECT versus Sham ECT Trials and Meta-Analyses, Dr John Read, Professor Irving Kirsch and Dr Laura McGrath have shown that the therapy, commonly administered for severe depression, has not (despite claims) been shown to have any significant positive effect, ever. It can be dangerous, carrying a small risk of death and a higher risk of serious memory loss, yet (the authors say) more than a million people worldwide are undergoing this therapy today, for no proven benefit.

The Edition

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

45 min listen

The Edition

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

45 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Audio Read: Douglas Murray, Matthew Parris, and Kate Andrews

29 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Audio Read: Douglas Murray, Matthew Parris, and Kate Andrews

29 min listen

Douglas Murray reads his cover piece in which he argues that liberalism is under threat; Matthew Parris rejoices in the toppling of Bristol’s Edward Colston statue, calling it a thrilling act of history; and Kate Andres explains the problems of policing back in her home country of America.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Spectator Out Loud

Audio Reads: Matthew Parris, Isabel Hardman, and Toby Young

21 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Audio Reads: Matthew Parris, Isabel Hardman, and Toby Young

21 min listen

This week's Audio Reads are from Matthew Parris, who writes about using coronavirus to support your own ideological cause; Isabel Hardman, who reveals the extent of domestic abuse during the crisis; and Toby Young, who is bonding with his new puppy.

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.

Spectator Out Loud

Audio Reads: Matthew Parris, Lionel Shriver, and Isabel Hardman

20 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Audio Reads: Matthew Parris, Lionel Shriver, and Isabel Hardman

20 min listen

Matthew Parris warns against comparing coronavirus to the war, Lionel Shriver fears the economic repercussions, and Isabel Hardman explains why stockpiling hens isn't such a good idea.