I do not mean whether he was right in his policy decisions or political stances, although this can’t be discounted. In the Coalition government of 2010-2015, it is near-impossible to recall a single policy which, either then or now, seemed like a good idea. Perhaps the sole exception was Gove’s free schools’ policy, which offered children from often disadvantaged backgrounds the chance to have a world-class education.

This was achieved in the face of extreme opposition from the trade unions — not least the teachers’ unions — and other parts of the Left. It was also passed with minimal support from sections within his own party. When David Cameron was shown the opinion polls ahead of the 2015 election, he fired Gove from Education because he thought his approval ratings were, largely thanks to the lies of the teaching “blob”, subpar for a leader wishing to win a general election. Nevertheless, Michael Gove was right — and it wasn’t for the last time.

After the 2015 election, he became known in Whitehall for his mastery of his brief. Most ministers who go from portfolio-to-portfolio struggle to understand the complexities of just one of their jobs, let alone each of them in turn. Yet this is exactly what Gove did at Justice — even though he was there for less than a year — and in each of the cabinet positions he subsequently held.

He was right, too, in the call he made in 2016. Before Gove chose to vote for “Leave”, there were concerns that the Brexit campaign would suffer from being led by too few senior politicians: an operation with Chris Grayling and Bernard Jenkin as its figureheads was unlikely to inspire a democratic revolt. Gove recognised this — and while campaigning to leave the EU was entirely in keeping with the principles that defined his political career and the years in journalism that preceded it, it still took bravery for him to step up. It alienated Gove from much of his friendship group (not least the Camerons), and could have cost him dearly politically.

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The thing, though, that Gove was most right about, and for which he has been praised for the least, is the act which made him most infamous. It gave him a reputation for snakery. This was, of course, his decision in the immediate aftermath of the referendum to turn on Boris Johnson.

It is not easy to forget the febrile atmosphere of June 2016; every hour turned up enough news to last a month in normal times. But it was also a perilous time: people were genuinely afraid. Basic questions remained unanswered. Would EU citizens be allowed to remain in the UK? Who is running the country? Once David Cameron left office and his Chancellor, George Osborne, decided to punish the country further by disappearing completely, only the Governor of the Bank of England emerged to say anything on behalf of the nation. “We are all prepared for this,” Mark Carney reassured the country. Yet it was a moment of maximal instability.

The Leave campaign “victory” press conference the morning after the referendum was like a funeral. Perhaps the news of David Cameron’s political demise, and the looming Tory chaos that would follow, cast a pall over proceedings. Or perhaps it was the realisation of the task that lay ahead. In those uncertain hours, the one thing that seemed clear was that to the victor most go the spoils. Boris Johnson had led the Leave campaign and it seemed inevitable that he should become the leader of the Conservative Party and the Prime Minister of a newly independent country.

But Michael Gove put a stop to all that. Over the weekend after Brexit, something changed. Some people claim that Gove suddenly had visions of his own ascent to a higher office. Others believe that Nicholas Boles is to blame. Or was it that, in the aftermath of the referendum, Gove watched Boris Johnson and saw a man who was fundamentally unfit for the role of Prime Minister?

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When Gove held a press conference in which he announced that he would not be leading Johnson’s campaign for the leadership, he immediately assumed a new role in the public imagination. Suddenly, he was Gove the turncoat, Gove the assassin, Gove the backstabber. The Gríma Wormtongue of British politics. The party swiftly showed its disapproval.

This cloud, by and large, has not left him. Only yesterday, one embittered newspaper columnist saw fit to describe Gove as “a conniving, reptilian politician”. Is this really true? He did, after all, survive through Theresa May’s premiership, and stuck loyally beside her when other people would not. He even entered Johnson’s own cabinet, and excelled in the roles he held in that short-lived administration. And not only is he the only politician who has remained at cabinet level through this tumultuous decade and a half, but he is also one of the few people from Cameron’s cabinet who is still in the House of Commons. Some lost out on the top prize and huffed off. Others whose abilities could have been of use to the country decided that the country did not deserve them — though various investment funds, as chance would have it, did.

It seems unlikely that Gove will actually remove himself from frontline politics. I read his announcement at the weekend as an act of cynical self-deprecation. Or perhaps a hint that he needs to simply “step back” for a bit. But whatever his own future holds, it shouldn’t prevent us from taking a clear view of his legacy.

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Historians will debate when exactly Gove saw through Johnson. Perhaps it was during the referendum campaign or perhaps it was before it. Perhaps, like so many other people, he knew Johnson’s faults as well as his virtues, but simply hadn’t seen both in such clear focus before. Perhaps it was the lack of seriousness, lack of attention to detail and lack of hard work — the feeling of coasting when he should have been concentrating harder than he ever had in his life. Or perhaps there really were things in the immediate aftermath of the referendum that persuaded him that Johnson was fundamentally unfit to lead the country; the weekend after the vote, as the country desperately looked around for a leader, Johnson decided it was the perfect time to host a “boozy barbecue” and a cricket match.

It could have been some of these things, all of them or more. But after the thwarted, indecisive, wasted years of the Johnson government, there is one thing people should reconsider. In 2016, Gove didn’t simply backstab Johnson; he issued a warning. It took the rest of the Parliamentary party and much of Britain another six years to decipher his warning: that when Johnson finally lumbers out of No 10, he will leave defeated and humiliated. Don’t say we weren’t warned.

Still, there are times when a refusal to engage in self-criticism can be a hindrance to your tribe — as both the American Right and Left are now discovering.

Since 2016, the American Left has desperately cut itself off from reality: its unwillingness to concede that Donald Trump won the election precluded the Democrats from being able to consider why their candidate lost. But the American Right is equally capable of deluding itself. In fact, with Biden in the White House, it is now as much a problem for the American Right as it was for the Left during the Trump years.

Absent any self-reflection, political tribes are condemned to return to the same question: what is it about their opponents that makes them so belligerently wrong? This is why Democrats and Republicans responded to the 2016 and 2020 elections in a similar fashion. What on earth was there to dislike about Hillary Clinton? What could possibly be said against the character of Donald Trump?

Sometimes, however, this lack of self-criticism is more profound. Towards the end of last year, I was invited to speak at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida. Being, as I told one of the organisers, only about two-thirds in agreement with the conference agenda, I didn’t feel it was my place to give a speech. So instead, I took part in an interesting panel discussion with Dave Rubin, Sohrab Ahmari and the conference’s convenor, Yoram Hazony.

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It was a rich discussion, but we passed over too lightly a subject which demands serious focus. At one point during the panel, Dave brought up the popular talk-show host Bill Maher. In recent years, Maher has singled himself out on the American Left for his willingness to criticise the excesses of his own political side, in particular “cancel culture” and the “cult of woke”. Dave suggested that, given how much Maher agrees with conservatives on these points, it is strange that he still identifies with the Left. In other words, why should he not come over and join the merry men of the Right?

There are a number of possible answers to this question. The first, which many conservatives would offer (while no doubt patting themselves on the back), is that Maher somehow lacks the bravery or courage needed to commit such an act of apostasy. He may have moved Rightwards, but he is not willing to concede as much.

The second answer, which I imagine Maher himself might offer, is that he hasn’t left the Left — the Left has left him. He has stayed precisely where he was, and remains as true to his principles as ever. There is, perhaps, some truth here. But this still fails to address the key question: why, in the face of the current Leftist orthodoxies, are so many on the traditional Left reluctant to admit they now have more in common with the Right?

After all, previous generations of American public figures had no problem with making a move from Left to Right and admitting as much. Both Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz flirted with Marxism before coming out for conservatism. British public life is also peppered with individuals who made similar journeys without any embarrassment: Malcolm Muggeridge, Paul Johnson and Kingsley Amis, to name but three.

Yet in America today, such apostasy is almost unheard of. There have been semi-regular defections from the Right, especially during the Trump era, when people such as Max Boot broke publicly with their own side to support a Democrat president. But there is a glaring absence of any movement in the opposite direction.

Bill Maher, Bari Weiss and a slew of other liberals who have fallen out with their own tribe have chosen not to identify as conservative. And that should be a cause for concern. Rather than ignoring this trend, conservatives need to ask themselves: what is it about the Right that is so unappealing that people who agree almost entirely with its views resile from joining its ranks?

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As it happens, I suspect the one of the answers to this question can be found in one of the speeches given at the National Conservatism conference. During his talk, the distinguished conservative scholar Patrick Deneen offered — and I do not say this to do him any injustice — a lament for the Fifties; for the change in people’s habits of dress, manners and sexual etiquette. I listened to all of this with great interest and considerable disagreement. But as I did so, I could not help thinking that here in a nutshell was the main reason why disenchanted liberals like Maher would never in a million years join the American Right.

All political and social movements have their own oddities and obsessions. Many of the obsessions of the American Right, however, are too illiberal to possibly win over anyone but that type of person who jumps political sides, boots and all, because they favour the political certainty of its all-encompassing ideological home. Why won’t thoughtful ex-liberals consider joining the Right? Well, perhaps it has something to do with the type of conservative they’d be associated with.

What liberal or former liberal would want to find themselves in an ideological movement in which opposition to the right to abortion, opposition to no-fault divorce, and a nostalgia for the era before the invention of the pill are commonplace? This isn’t to say that the conservative movement in America should not make these arguments. They can make them as much as they want. But they can hardly be surprised if others outside of their flock refuse to join them as a consequence.

At the heart of this lies a centuries-old tension in America between the worlds of politics and religion. It was always said that the genius of keeping religion in the background during the founding of America was that it allowed it to flourish in the foreground later on. By contrast, the centrality of the established church in England almost guarantees the obscurity of religion’s place in public life.

And yet in America, the desire on the Right to mix religion and politics remains a significant temptation. The National Conservatism conference was filled with a disproportionate amount of Catholic social doctrine, and it is not the first time I have observed this encroachment. Most gatherings of conservative intellectuals fracture along this same line. The Vanenburg meetings fell into this problem at the start of the last decade. And I was once at a meeting of conservatives on the continent where, on several occasions, an American participant gleefully referred to gay couples as being in “sodomitical relationships”. Should we be surprised that so many liberals instinctively revile conservatism?

All of which is to say that this overlap between politics and religion remains a special type of kryptonite to any separation-of-church-and-state liberal. And that would be a subject of niche interest were it not also for the fact that it is electorally disastrous for the American Right, however enjoyable it may be as a religious or intellectual enterprise.

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As many as three in ten American adults are now religiously non-affiliated; fewer than half of Americans belong to a religious congregation. In such a world, the idea that a conservative movement can succeed while being intrinsically tied to religion — let alone one particular denomination — is a steer into the political wilderness.

After all, why would people who share 95% of your political attitudes not wish to join you? More often than not, the answer is not because of any lack of fortitude, but because of that 5% of beliefs you had hoped they might overlook.

Perhaps that small portion of ideas is worth fighting for; perhaps even to the extent that it’s worth alienating would-be conservatives. But these are questions the Right needs to answer, rather than blaming liberals for pointing them out.

Its founders, including Ian McKellen, fought a very public, often personal but ultimately successful battle to bring about political change through changing hearts and minds. John Major’s government, the New Labour government of Tony Blair, and finally the Conservative-led coalition of David Cameron saw every single one of the unequal treatments of gay British people rescinded. By 2013, when the Coalition passed the gay marriage act, the battle for gay rights was essentially won.

But there is a problem with rights battles, which is that even once they are won, not everybody will leave the barricades. Many have no other homes to go to. Many find purpose only in the struggle. Still others, more cynically, have lifestyles to sustain and pensions and mortgages to pay. Besides, power and influence once accrued is a hard thing to give up.

So, it appears, was the case with Stonewall, who around the time that the Conservatives passed the gay marriage act, decided to pivot onto an entirely new cause: gender ideology.

Trans rights had always been part of the LGBT cause. Most gay people were sympathetic to the small number of trans people we met in bars or clubs. But their cause was not the same as ours — and, besides, most trans people seemed to want to just get on with their lives, passing as the opposite sex and being accepted. This all changed the moment Ruth Hunt took over as chief executive of Stonewall in 2014. With her arrival, the organisation’s focus changed. And the cry of Stonewall adverts “Some people are gay. Get over it”, morphed into a more complex set of assertions. This included the claim that some people are trans so, therefore, biological sex does not exist and, in fact, there is an endlessly growing number of different gender identities.

Perhaps Hunt and her colleagues did not realise the explosive device they were placing beneath their own movement. For if you accept that there is no such thing as sex, but only self-identifying “gender”, then same-sex attracted people are erased. This means you delete your core constituency if you are an organisation like Stonewall. Regardless, Stonewall persevered. Not least because by now they had discovered an especially lucrative business.

This was summed up in what became known as the Stonewall Equality Index and Diversity Champions Scheme. The charity would effectively audit companies and other public and private sector organisations to grade how good they were for LGBT employees and how advanced they were in LGBT rights. Again, at the start of this project in the 2000s there was something to be said for it. But by the 2010s, it was charging companies £2,500 just to apply to be part of the Diversity Champions Scheme. Commercial interest had taken over. As The Times demonstrated, Stonewall confected arbitrary rules to force employers into doing more to become Diversity Champions. It coerced those involved in the scheme to lobby for Stonewall’s point of view. And it misrepresented the law in relation to trans rights, confusing the law of the land with Stonewall’s preferred law.

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After publication of The Times report, Equalities Minister Liz Truss called for government departments to leave the Stonewall scheme. Around the same time, the Equality and Human Rights Commission also left, saying that it was not best value for money. The fact that Stonewall had been appraising the work of the EHRC was a demonstration of just where the organisation had been sitting in the new clerical class that had come to dominate Britain. The principles of this new elite were centered around the new religion of “diversity” and “equality”, and the groups which claimed to be the holders of the doctrines of this faith had done exceptionally well. Until now.

As things started to fall apart Stonewall and its allies responded in the way of all trapped elites. They continued to accuse their critics of malicious-intent (specifically, in this case, bigotry) and refused to take any of the criticisms onboard. So a devastating summary judgement came down upon them which they did not even bother to answer. It came from a somewhat surprising source.

The BBC is among the corporations to have been caught up in Stonewall’s various schemes. And yet the questions over Stonewall’s connection with the BBC and the wider British elite came from a far-flung, if noble, corner of the great BBC empire: Stephen Nolan of BBC Radio Ulster.

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Nolan takes 10 episodes to fully investigate the influence of Stonewall and its empire. This includes the gender ideology that Stonewall pushes, its closeness to government, its penetration of Ofcom and, finally its closeness to the BBC itself. It is a remarkable act of journalism, demonstrating that among the finest attributes of the BBC is the ability of people at the corporation to question their own bosses.

It also, inevitably, takes some time to get through. And so the response has been predictably ill-informed. Stonewall’s defenders — and those pushing the same ideology as the group — immediately attacked the podcast and its makers. They did so suspiciously fast, given that you’d need to dedicate at least eight hours to listen to the whole thing. As Stonewall’s foundations started to collapse, they attempted to rise above the fray. As Gareth Roberts noted, their response was a deeply unserious tweet asserting that they were simply working towards a better world.

https://twitter.com/stonewalluk/status/1448654195658088453?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

They didn’t address any of the very serious questions raised by Nolan: questions about Stonewall’s undue influence inside and outside government, its misrepresentation of the law, its displacement of the law with its own interpretation of it (or hope for it) and its ability (through OfCom in particular) to effectively mark its own homework.

Stonewall has tried to pretend that it is above answering these very significant questions. But it is not. One clip from Nolan demonstrates this above all. It’s with Ben Cohen, the founder and Chief Executive of Pink News. The legacy online gay publication likes to act as a sort of ideological enforcer for Stonewall, pursuing their perceived opponents and otherwise engaging in activism in the guise of journalism. They attend the same black tie dinners and Downing Street receptions.

But worth the price of listening to the Nolan show alone is the moment in episode three when Nolan asks Cohen to define a couple of the gender-bollocks terms that Stonewall and others expect everyone in the UK, including BBC presenters like Nolan to be able to understand and all those “Diversity Champions” out there. What is “two-spirit?” Nolan asks Cohen. Cohen cannot explain. What about “genderqueer”? Again Cohen is stumped. While undeniably funny, this moment also represents something very serious in Stonewall’s wider collapse.

It is one thing that a group should be caught out in a dodgy money-making scheme. It is another that people should be seeing through their influence-peddling operations. Yet it is far worse when a clerical class cannot explain the doctrines of their own faith. A faith they have been busy trying to spew out across the whole of society, but which is so baseless, that even the priestly class doesn’t know what they are talking about. It is the end of the faith.

Earlier this week, when the White House’s press spokeswoman Jen Psaki was asked about this ignominious withdrawal, she refused to concede that there was anything wrong with it: “I would say that this is now on track to be the largest airlift in US history. So no, I would not say that it is anything but a success.”

The long-term consequences of the collapse of Afghanistan will naturally take time to come into focus. But it seems unlikely that they will be associated with “success”. Already it seems inevitable that America’s enemies — in particular China — will have noted how easy it is to push around the world’s superpower. Meanwhile, America’s allies now face challenges of their own; the EU and UK now surely know that they need to be more operationally adept, capable of doing basic things like holding an airport without requiring the support of the US.

Of course, none of this can be predicted with absolute certainty. And yet I strongly suspect that there is at least one consequence that Europe can anticipate as a foregone conclusion: that, thanks to the fall of Afghanistan, in the coming months and years the West will experience a new migration challenge that it is incapable of preventing.

Throughout the last decade, the migration crisis in Europe has been exacerbated by the fact that many European governments and citizens had nothing but sympathy for the millions of immigrants — many of them from Syria — whose homelands have been destroyed by war. Indeed, when Angela Merkel steps down this year, she will largely be remembered for her decision in 2015 to open Germany’s borders to Syrian refugees.

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Yet although there have been large numbers of Syrians among those who arrived in Europe in the past six years, Syrian refugees did not make up the bulk of the arrivals. Instead, the Syrian migrants ended up inadvertently becoming the sharp tip of the world’s migration demands. Behind them came people from a bewildering array of other countries; from across Africa, the Middle East and Far East.

Even then, Afghan refugees were certainly among them. I met many myself in the refugee camps of southern Europe. On one occasion, I spent the day with a group of Hazara Afghans, a persecuted Persian-speaking minority group. I remember one of them asking me why Syrians should be given priority over Afghans when applying for asylum in the EU. After all, he said, by that point Syria had only been at war for five years. His country had been at war for 15 years. Should that not be taken into account?

It was — and remains — an important question. One of the most complex aspects of the global migration challenge is the fact that everybody has a competing claim to asylum, and that privileging one group inevitably comes at the expense of another.

In any case, it is striking that six years ago, Germany and almost every other European country reported the same phenomenon, which was that many people said they were Syrians in order to get into Europe. However, once they were inside, very few countries were able to verify this. And for much of the general public it was enough to be told that Europe was responding to a “refugee” crisis rather than a “migrant crisis”.

Which brings us back to the situation in Afghanistan today. In the coming months and years, there will invariably be a steady flow of refugees fleeing the Taliban’s Afghanistan. The hurried nature of the American departure means that there will have been people left behind who have a credible case for asylum in the West. And as the Taliban’s rule once again reasserts itself, they will attempt to flee.

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At the same time, within the West there will be a prevailing cloud of shame hanging over the way in which Afghanistan has been abandoned. NGOs and other groups will argue that we all have a moral obligation to accept refugees fleeing Afghanistan. As ever, they will not bother specifying where this obligation begins or ends. Many will be persuaded that we are in some way responsible for Afghanistan not being a thriving liberal democracy. They will be told that we are responsible for Afghanistan’s precarious humanitarian situation. And because there will be a grain of truth in this — if nothing else then because of the nature of the exit — it will be exceptionally difficult to reject those claiming to be fleeing Afghanistan.

The problem will lie, as it always does, in the details. No European country or border force has anything like the number of experts required to work out where exactly those entering Europe have come from. The dearth of language experts alone has remained unfixed since 2015. And as a result, no doubt many migrants who are not from Afghanistan will recognise the benefits of pretending that they are.

Some of this will affect America, though its geographic position makes it a less accessible destination. Europe does not have the same luxury. Indeed, one border official I spoke to last week said that the UK is already seeing an increase in the number of people crossing the English Channel claiming to be Afghan refugees. In many cases, this will be untrue. After all, if it were then they got to the UK awfully fast.

But is it so surprising that they would say such a thing? No doubt they are aware that the UK and EU feel morally sordid over the Afghan withdrawal. The smuggling gangs will certainly know this, and will advise migrants on how to use it to their advantage.

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What will make it more complex still is that politicians and the public cannot have an honest conversation about the impact of this new migrant wave. At times of humanitarian crisis such as these, most Western Europeans do not want to hear politicians being “heartless”. But after their experience of 2015, it seems unlikely that they will want them to be too relaxed either.

The British public, for instance, currently believes that it is their moral duty to take in refugees from Afghanistan. But I suspect that feeling will not last indefinitely. It will take years for us to know how many Afghans decide to flee to Europe. It seems likely, though, that while a significant number will come from Afghanistan, an even more significant number will arrive pretending to be Afghans. And once they see Europe welcoming these migrants with open arms, others will likely follow.

There can be little doubt that those concerned about the safety of Afghanistan’s refugees are well-intentioned. But that doesn’t mean those good intentions won’t be exploited. And when that happens, neither European citizens nor European governments will be capable of dealing with the consequences.

The philosopher’s standing was at its height when he died last year at the age of 75. The second of his three great books on Wagner had recently come out; his advice was sought by the British Government; conservative intellectuals and politicians across Europe were eager to seek his approval. His life ended just as his reputation reached the stage it ought to have been at for decades: though by the time he died he had become Sir Roger Scruton, he had spent many years in a type of intellectual isolation, if not wilderness.

In 1980, Scruton had become effectively unemployable in British academia, with the publication of his book, The Meaning of Conservatism. His column in The Times, that same decade, brought him to the attention of the wider public — but it also marked him out. A few of his pieces became notorious. Among a certain type of Leftist, he was identified as Right-wing bogeyman.

On the page Scruton could often come across as harder-edged than he was in person, but his learning and wisdom made him unlike any polemicist. And this was part of his problem. The Left did not just dislike him, they feared him, because he always knew more than they did. Indeed, he always seemed to know more than everybody. Perhaps that’s why, throughout his career, he was subjected to so many extraordinarily personal attacks. These included one libel so severe that, when the Left-wing paper responsible finally paid out damages, it allowed him to make a down-payment on his first home.

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But Scruton’s reputation as an outcast was, in some ways, the making of him. In the years before his death, he was discovered by a new generation of young people eager to find an alternative vision of life to that being offered by mainstream academia, the media and popular culture. They came to him and he encouraged them. He even ran informal seminars for people he referred to as refugees from the modern academy.

These were reminiscent of the far more dangerous seminars that Scruton and others led in the countries of Eastern Europe while they languished under communism — a movement known as the underground university. His brave work should have been better appreciated — especially after his death. Scruton offered a vision which was rare enough in his day and rarer still in ours.

But there are many hopeful signs that he is, posthumously, getting the recognition he deserved: this week sees the reissue of one of Scruton’s later books, titled Confessions of a Heretic. The work first came out in 2016, published by the excellent Notting Hill Editions, and I have had the pleasure of writing a new introduction for it. The title — which was Roger’s own — needs a certain amount of explaining.

When people think of the word “heretic”, they may imagine many things, but not perhaps a tweed-wearing conservative philosopher. And yet when Scruton was writing, it was indeed a heretical thing to be a conservative — or at least to be a conservative intellectual. There is no small amount of irony in this fact. The Conservative Party was in power throughout most of the 1980s and 1990s, and yet these were the years when Scruton was most intellectually isolated.

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Of course, to be a conservative philosopher was already to be an uncomfortable hybrid. The conservative is by nature suspicious of grand ideas, but such ideas are seen as the very currency of philosophy. Scruton wrestled with this conundrum throughout his career, finding ways to justify the sensible instincts of sensible people, against intelligent lies told by brilliant fools.

Scruton was scrupulous in performing the necessary task of slicing and dicing the fools and frauds of the age. His book, Thinkers of the New Left, was first published in 1985; in preparation, Scruton carefully read all the works of the people he criticised: Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre and others. He understood them — and helped his readers see through them in turn. He deconstructed the deconstructionists. He realised the danger of these thinkers ahead of time, but he was hardly thanked for it.

In fact, he was excoriated for his heresy in attacking the most celebrated philosophers of his day and Thinkers of the New Left did not sell. Great piles of copies sat at his house, causing him considerable feelings of failure. But the work found its day: in 2015 it was republished in an extended edition as Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. By then people had caught on to what Scruton had been talking about 30 years earlier. They had seen what he had been trying to warn them about and began to take better notice of him.

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Confessions of a Heretic is a selection of otherwise uncollected essays which deal with some subjects of Scruton’s ire. They also tackle the timeless issues to which he dedicated a lifetime of energy. Although Scruton is generally referred to as a “conservative philosopher,” he ought simply to be referred to as a “philosopher”. The deepest works in this book — his “Effing the Ineffable” and his “Reflection on Strauss’s Metamorphosen,” for example — go far deeper than mere politics.

Re-reading the essays this year, there was one which stood out — one I read in a very different light. “Dying in Time” is a profound meditation on death. It is easy to approach this essay with a fear that the author — who of course had no idea at the time he wrote it that he had only a few years left to live — might not have fulfilled the task he set himself. Scruton more than did so. In part this is because his meditation on dying is also a meditation on living — and comes as close as Scruton ever came in his writing to putting down a personal manifesto. “The main point,” he writes, “it seems to me, is to maintain an active life of risk and affection, remembering always that the value of life does not consist in its length but in its depth.”

There were others of his generation who saw some of the same political threats, though few who explained them with such clarity. Fewer still managed to maintain the position of heretic — and even outcast — while defending the importance of instinct and tradition.

My own suspicion is that Scruton’s reputation will only grow, as the problems he warned of grow in their dimensions, and the need to find ways out from them become more compelling still. He may have written most movingly of dying in time, but anyone interested in living in time should reach for his work.

This has largely been borne out across the world. For better or worse, countries such as Britain and France have been relatively united around their political leaders. Any perceived failures have largely been forgiven thanks to the sense that they were doing their best under difficult circumstances. There were even strange moments of forced unity: in the case of the UK, there was weekly applause for the NHS.

The only country in which this was not the case was the United States. From the start of the virus, the pandemic became as highly politicised as everything else. Aware that a roaring economy was one of the central pillars of his return to office, President Trump was unwilling from the start to respond drastically. He was, perhaps, the world’s most reluctant leader to concede to lockdowns or mask-wearing — and, as a consequence, both of these issues fell, like everything else, along entirely partisan lines.

Many who hated Trump became dedicated to mask-wearing precisely because the President was not. Single, double, or triple mask-wearing — even when engaged in an activity like jogging — suddenly became an even better way of displaying your political sympathies than wearing a “Biden-Harris” t-shirt.

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Likewise, the rejection of mask-wearing and an opposition to lockdowns became the mark of a Republican with a strong Trumpist sensibility. During a visit to the States ahead of the election I was struck by how New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and other Democrat cities were filled with mask-wearing lockdown enthusiasts. Towns in Florida, by contrast, resembled party destinations in an especially frenetic holiday-season.

There was a feeling throughout all this that the cause resided in the White House. Once Trump was gone, so the argument went, so the obscene divisiveness of American politics would recede and there might at least be some unified narrative on Covid and the national response to it.

Unsurprisingly, this did not happen. Trump may be long gone, but the polarisation of America’s pandemic politics remains. Vaccine hesitancy, in particular, has become an issue that divides the Left and Right. For example, one poll carried out last month found that while 86% of Democrats had received at least one Covid jab, while only 45% of Republicans had — and while a mere 6% of Democrats said that they would most likely avoid being vaccinated an extraordinary 47% of Republicans said the same.

It isn’t quite analogous to compare this situation with Labour and Conservative voters in the UK; this is clearly more than a political dispute. But even if you transpose the Democrat-Republican vaccine divide on to the most divisive British counterpart argument of recent years —Brexit — the divide is less pronounced. A poll carried out by YouGov in April found that vaccine hesitancy in the UK saw only a five-point difference between people who had voted Remain and those who had voted Leave.

There are a range of possible explanations for this. The first is that the UK’s Brexit divisions have begun to heal, if not completely. People who voted Remain have, by and large, accepted the new reality and do not in large numbers believe that they can continue to overturn the 2016 vote.

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In America, by contrast, more than half of Republican voters still believe that Trump won the last Presidential election and that the Democrats stole the vote. Around three in ten Republican voters believe that Trump will be reinstated as President this year. In other words, they believe the election was stolen, but that the facts are going to come out, forcing Biden to step aside.

And yet it is not only about politics. From the start of the pandemic, it was striking that reactions to the pandemic in America fell across a quasi-philosophical line. Most Americans have lived all their lives better acquainted with the concept of risk than their British and European counterparts. In part this is because of the absence of the European-style model of the welfare state. In Europe, life’s game of snakes and ladders exists in a much more sanitised form. But in the US, the reality is far more extreme.

The American Right’s suspicion of the state and state agencies remains more pronounced than it is on the European right. Ever since the British and European Right made their peace with the welfare state, there have been those who have wished to reduce the size of it, but no significant figure who has wished to abolish it. The same cannot be said for the US.

Ultimately, political polarisation has become a way of life, one that is more than capable of surviving the rotation of Presidents. Indeed, as a phenomenon I suspect it will only become more pronounced. At the end of last month, the CDC advised all Americans, including people who are fully vaccinated, to once again wear masks in a number of scenarios. And this week, more than a dozen large US corporations, including Walmart, Google and United Airlines, announced that their workers would be expected to demonstrate that they have had the vaccine in order to work for them.

So off the American cultural divide goes again. America may have survived the worst of the pandemic — but the deep divisions which it has highlighted look increasingly irreparable.

In no area has this become more apparent than in our perpetual “gender wars”. My own views on the issue are fairly well-known: I believe human beings have chromosomes. I believe gametes exist. I don’t think homo sapiens are a hermaphroditic species. And I don’t think that the existence of creatures like the clownfish mean that humans are hermaphroditic.

My belief is that something exists called “gender dysphoria”, but we know almost nothing about what causes it, know almost as little about how to respond to it and know infinitely too little to be assertive about it — let alone enough to medically experiment on children.

Why do I mention this? Only because, as I first expressed publicly to Lionel Shriver some years ago, it has become clear that men and women are treated differently in this debate.

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Perhaps I am wrong and I have merely been able to express my views on trans issues either because nobody has noticed what I have written or because everybody knows I am a lost cause and highly unlikely to be bullied into silence. But then it may simply be the fact that I am a man.

After all, countless female authors have written articles expressing scepticism towards the transgender movement — many of them more moderate than my own. Yet almost every time, I have watched in horror as online and offline mobs are stirred up against them and not me. Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock, Selina Todd, JK Rowling, Abigail Shrier, Helen Joyce — some of these women have been subjected to physical assault; the rest threatened with it.

Joyce, whose excellent book Trans came out last month, is just the latest to be hounded. For her troubles — a deeply researched, humane and thoughtful piece of work — she was subjected to entirely baseless and libellous claims of, among much else, anti-Semitism. Because there is nothing a trans extremist won’t say to try to intimidate their opponents. Libel laws appear not to bother them.

Another of the things that all these attempted witch-hunts have in common is that they are orchestrated by a small number of highly motivated activists who behave as they do precisely because they are so deliriously certain that they are on the right side. And no one is more certain in this regard than the YouTuber Owen Jones.

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Like me, Jones happens to be a gay man. But unlike me he seems to think that transgender activism is simply the latest, logical progression in the gay rights movement. I think that transgender people are as deserving of dignity and respect as anyone else in society. I never have, nor ever would, treat them with anything other than courtesy and respect.

But I remain deeply uncomfortable about the idea of a young effeminate boy being told he is actually a girl or a young tomboyish girl being told that she is a boy — and then being medically transitioned to approximate the opposite sex. Rather than being seen as an advance for gay rights, I see it as the opposite. In fact, knowingly or otherwise, it absorbs one of the most homophobic tropes of the past: that men and women should fit a particular stereotype.

But so high on certainty is Jones that he consistently uses his considerable social media platform to denounce “transphobes”, who invariably end up being women.

That isn’t to say that Jones has never targeted a man. He has, for example, on a number of occasions libelled me, and on one occasion I suspect tried to have me sacked. So much for his concern that gay people are underrepresented in journalism.

But none of this bothers me. What does bother me is that he was one of the people — along with the very weird gays at a pseudo-publication Pink News — who has repeatedly tried to destroy JK Rowling’s reputation after the country’s most successful author had the temerity to say that women exist. Jones, Pink News and others consistently suggested that Rowling had said things she had not said, deploying one of the nastiest tactics of this inquisition. They pretended that rather than expressing a view they disagreed with — and that Rowling had every right to hold — she was, in fact, attacking trans people.

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This is, of course, a deranged claim. But it is not an uncommon one. Last year, for instance, Jones was one of the more prominent figures in the witch-hunt against the then Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore. Moore happens to be someone I often disagree with. She is Left-wing; I am not. But by any standards, as a columnist she is one of the standout talents of her generation.

She is also one of the rare examples of a working-class woman who has made her way up the ranks of Britain’s commentariat solely through her own talent. But for Jones, any professed solidarity stopped the moment that a working-class woman dared to disagree with him on the issue of transgenderism. Eventually Moore was indeed pushed out of her position at The Guardian.

There is now a pattern. This week, Jones targeted another exceptionally talented female writer, Sarah Ditum, for the same reason: she disagreed with him about trans issues.

But this time, people started to notice the trend. As the Left-wing journalist Helen Lewis — formerly of the New Statesman — observed, it is becoming increasingly clear that Jones only seems to go for female journalists. She pointed out that a male journalist recently wrote something similar to Ditum, and did so in the low-circulation New Statesman to boot, yet Jones did not organise a pile-on against him.

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And so I wonder if it’s time to start treating Jones in the same unforgiving way he treats everybody else. In a discussion with the campaigner Nimco Ali, which Jones enjoys circulating online, he obsesses over a single stupid phrase (“bum boy”) used by Boris Johnson in a Telegraph column a quarter of a century ago. He then asks Ali, who is godmother to Johnson’s child, whether she believes he is a homophobe.

But let us apply the same endlessly uncharitable interpretation to him. Owen Jones’s problem is that he hates women. He is a misogynist. Using his skewed logic, we might even say that because he treated Nimco Ali with such visible disdain he also has a particular problem with women of colour.

This is how Jones and his supporters treat their opponents. They distort their opponents’ language and demonise them. So why not treat him in a similar manner? The answer, of course, is because it would be terrible to live in a world where the rules were set by such awful people.

According to Helen Lewis, a number of her mutual friends with Jones no longer speak to him because they believe he has become a bully. She also observed that Jones has spoken publicly about feeling like an outsider, and about the times he’s been the victim of abuse in the past.

If that’s true, one might expect Jones to act with more compassion. But self-reflection has never been his forte — as countless women are starting to discover.

My thoughts were with those former employees this week when I read that Rusbridger has another act left in him, this time as the editor of Prospect magazine. His appointment to the helm of the centre-left magazine did not cause many ripples beyond the confines of Twitter. But it was a reminder of an iron rule of British life, which is that prizes will always remain available for a certain sort of person on the Left. For them, no setback is ever forever. Often, it is hardly a setback at all.

One of the most perplexing aspects of every Conservative government is the continued reluctance of people on the Right to put themselves forward for public appointments. One reason for this, sometimes put forward by ministers themselves, is that people on the Right are often too busy pursuing private careers to spend their energies in the public sector. The argument goes that if they do move to the public sector, they only do it towards the end of their careers once they have made money.

There may be some truth to this, but it is at best a partial explanation. In recent years, the more likely reason is the tendency of the Left to hound anyone who dares encroach on what they regard as their territory. So a few years ago, when Toby Young was put forward as a non-executive member of the Office for Students, he was not merely deemed unsuitable for the job, but had almost every other part of his career torn from him.

It was the same with Sir Roger Scruton when he was appointed to an unpaid position on an advisory committee on house building. The activist Left used the opportunity to attempt to end in his career — even if it meant making up lies. In this climate of censoriousness, is it so surprising that Right-wingers and even centrists remain loath to put themselves forward for prominent appointments? Who would want every aspect of their personal life upturned for the sake of a job?

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But as Rusbridger’s latest appointment demonstrates, such concerns are not shared by the Left. For by any reasonable standards, Rusbridger is a surprising person to appoint to any editorial position — and not only for his budgetary shortcomings.

The recent public admission by Roy Greenslade that he had been an active supporter of the IRA throughout his period of employment at The Guardian might normally have been dismissed as simply a matter of a foul personal conscience, had Greenslade not used his position at the paper to repeatedly push it in a pro-IRA direction. Greenslade’s pro-IRA opinions were well-known at the time — but when  Rusbridger was repeatedly warned about this, he decided that those telling the truth were liars.

You might say that this was a different era and different standards applied. But Rusbridger failed one of the most notable standards of our own era as well. During his time as editor, he allowed Greenslade to downplay the rape of a woman, Máiría Cahill, and its subsequent cover-up by members of the IRA. By then Rusbridger must have been well-aware that his employee was a supporter of the IRA.

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Why was that contributor allowed to smear a woman blowing the whistle on one of the IRA’s many disturbing practices? It is worth considering the outrage that would have erupted if, say, an editor of a Right-wing tabloid had allowed a female rape victim to be smeared in his pages. Their career would be finished. For Rusbridger, however, all he had to do was step down from an Irish media commission he was on.

Elsewhere, his career has continued to flourish. After leaving The Guardian he sailed into the comfortable position of Principal of Lady Margaret Hall — a position that it is impossible to conceive would ever have been offered to Paul Dacre. But last year, he announced his plans to leave his Oxford perch to spend more time addressing “the question of trust in media and society”.

No doubt he was confident that the revolving door would continue to work for him. Even if the old media wouldn’t give him another job, I suspect he felt safe in the knowledge there were plenty of other opportunities out there. Indeed, it is noticeable that in the wake of the Máiría Cahill scandal in March, Rusbridger did not resign his membership of other boards he was on.

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He did not, for instance, resign from the deeply sinister Facebook Oversight Board, which decided that former US President Donald Trump should be barred from the platform. Perhaps he neglected to take that particular hit because the Board reportedly pays its members six-figure salaries for not much more than a dozen hours of work a week.

Yet in many ways, Rusbridger’s long tale of success is to be expected. After all, the Conservative Party may be the dominant political force in Britain. But there remains an unassailable culture that will always favour relatively unimpressive figures on the Left who preach about the importance of diversity but always take the jobs that they could so easily offer up to others.

If they have no business acumen, it doesn’t matter. If they have broken the standards of their trade, it doesn’t matter. If you’re lucky enough to be part of a small circle on the establishment Left, the world is your oyster. That is what keeps conservatives out of so many corners of public life. Britain still belongs to the Left – the Right just pretends to govern it.

Supporting voter rights is, of course, a noble cause — but does it really warrant Beckley’s description of herself as “brave”? What could be the cause of such hyperbole? The answer, I suspect, is that Beckley was one of several representatives who chartered a private jet and fled Texas on Monday for Washington DC to break the quorum needed in her state’s House of Representatives and stymie a Republican bill relating to future elections.

These Democrats complain that the bill will restrict voting rights by, among other things, introducing identification requirements and banning drive-through voting. For the time being, the two parties are in a stand-off. It is, however, a scenario which is being played up and down the country; Texas is merely one of a number of states where local Republicans are attempting to introduce voter identification laws.

On paper, this array of new bills might seem like perfectly reasonable demands. But for Democrats , the proposed measures are inherently racist because they will disproportionately affect people of colour. Indeed, President Biden himself went so far as to describe a recent election bill in Georgia as “an atrocity”, likening it to “Jim Crow in the 21^st century”. He doubled down on his comparison in a speech earlier this month, in which he claimed: “The 21^st century Jim Crow assault is real. It’s unrelenting. We’re going to challenge it vigorously.” He went on to describe the recent attempts to increase voter ID at the polls as “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War”.

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These are extraordinary, not to say histrionic, claims to make. But to watch them playing out, accompanied with charades like Beckley’s flight from Texas, is to observe the deeply damaged state of American democracy. Such fragility is sadly endemic. One recent poll found that roughly a third of American voters believe that Biden is only President due to significant voter fraud. Likewise, a majority of Republican voters have repeatedly said that they believe that the election last November was unfairly won.

There is, of course, a caveat that needs to be added here, which is that while Donald Trump never proved that there had been enough voter fraud to sway the election, there certainly were a number of egregious cases played out publicly and able to be seen by millions of Americans.

But the important thing to keep in mind is that concerns about the integrity of American elections are not new. Indeed, it has become a habit in modern American democracy for the party that loses a particular election to complain about the crookedness of the system. Way back in 2006, the Democrat Senator for California Diane Feinstein told the Senate that “serious questions have arisen about the accuracy and reliability of new electronic voting machines, including concerns that they can be susceptible to fraud and computer hacking”.

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And who could forget the grace and ease with which Hilary Clinton accepted her defeat in her fight for the Presidency in 2016? For five years she has continued to argue that the 2016 election was illegitimate. A month after losing, she told her party donors that the race had been stolen: “This is not just an attack on me and my campaign. This is an attack against our country. This is about the integrity of our democracy and the security of our nation.”

Surely, then, if anything is able to unite the American Left and Right, it should be an attempt to uphold the integrity of the vote? Since both Democrats and Republicans have their own concerns about voter insecurity, why would they not be able to agree on measures to combat it?

A cynic might respond that neither party really cares about the corruption of the vote, so long as they win. Why does it matter if the system is open to internal or external manipulation if it brings about victory? But such a question forgets that an election is not just about a winner knowing that they have won, but about the losers knowing they have lost. As recent American elections have shown, when this doesn’t happen, the results can be toxic.

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So why can they not agree on some reform of the vote, such as requiring voters having to show some proof of identity to go to the polls? The simple answer is that the current system has worked for the Democrats this time round, and they are happy for the system to stay corrupted so long as it rules in their favour.

As for the voting public, I doubt there are many in America who sincerely believe that being asked to prove your identity when performing a civic duty amounts to “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War”. After all, Americans are already required to prove their identity for a number of reasons, whether it’s hiring a car, ordering alcohol or buying a firearm.

For despite all the charged rhetoric, all the anachronistic analogies, requiring voter identification remains a simple requirement — one that, as it happens, is practised across Europe during elections. That America cannot unite around it — and even dismiss it as racist — is a tragedy. It is a move that would give millions of Americans more confidence in the legitimacy and accuracy of the democratic process. And looking at the embattled state of democracy in the US, nothing could be more urgent.

There are some who want to celebrate today — principally Dorsey, along with the small number of other people who have become unimaginably rich off the platform. But for everybody else on the planet, I suspect we should welcome the anniversary with roughly the same enthusiasm that we would the emergence of the Ebola virus. For the further away we have come from Twitter’s birth, the clearer it has become that the platform is a source of unimaginable harm to almost every aspect of society.

In the early days, it didn’t feel like this. Like Facebook, Amazon, Google and the other Big Tech monoliths, it all started out so well. Twitter was actually fun back then. People said whacky things. There were cat videos. There was Follow Friday and friendships were made. As professional and amateur newshounds took to the platform, it became the fastest way to learn about any developing story.

If something was going on, Twitter was there first, certainly ahead of the BBC or any of the other news establishments who had to lumber through the old legal and editorial hurdles, rather than enjoying the lightning-quick response time of social media. Politics is a drug, and the most successful drugs provide an instant hit. But they are also the most dangerous, and the downsides soon started to assert themselves.

Soon many started using the site in a game of competitive grievance, or competitive sanctimony. They took obvious glee in targeting victims who had transgressed some moral code; the obvious righteousness of these online crusaders meant they rarely recognised themselves as the aggressors or bullies.

And soon it became apparent that, while everyone was on the site, everyone also hated it. Those on the ideological Left began to turn against the platform when it became clear that it allowed their opponents on the Right to spread “hate”, a scourge which they defined generously. Just as they used it themselves to spread their message.

This all reached its nadir with Donald Trump, whose presidency is to many people the most concrete result of Twitter. The world watched aghast as Trump was able to say often the craziest of things to millions upon millions of followers, speaking unfiltered and directly — in a way the old news media would never have allowed. When he won the presidency and then thanked Twitter for the helping him to get it, many of these natural Twitter followers lost their faith in the platform. How could they have let it happen? It was their platform, after all, this noisy minority of the American and British electorate. Indeed, if you had read UK Twitter ahead of the 2019 election, you would have been absolute certain of a Jeremy Corbyn landslide. Where were these millions of Tory voters who didn’t like Jeremy?

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Twitter began to ask itself the same questions, and finally, after Trump’s response to the disturbances of 6 January, the decision was made to chuck the most famous and powerful man in the world off the platform. He went the way of Katie Hopkins into the next world (aka Parler) along with a string of others. Just this past weekend an odious little toad and anti-Semite called Nick Fuentes was chucked off the platform. Very few people were sorry to see him go.

But Trump’s removal was the most audacious sign yet that the platform was willing to make editorial decisions. It could no longer pretend that it was simply a neutral platform — it had become a curated outlet. The suspicion grew, too, that they were playing more insidious games behind the scenes. Twitter had always denied the practice of shadow-banning, which is when a user’s tweets mysteriously stop appearing, before it was eventually confirmed by Twitter that they were doing exactly that.

Yet all of this is as nothing compared to the devastating virus-like effect that Twitter has had across the public arena.

It has undeniably coarsened public discourse. There are commentators and journalists for whom I used to have some respect, but who use Twitter so constantly that I read their work with ever less anticipation and regard. There is almost no prominent figure on Twitter who hasn’t lowered themselves in one’s estimation. There are those who use the platform as a venue to carp about everything that their contemporaries, rivals or friends are saying. They berate other journalists, as though they are masters of the genre whose verdict is final. The pleasant communal hackery of old has been replaced by a melee of endless fall-outs, unnecessarily initiated and often with irreparable results.

The platform has also given the greatest possible voice to the general scold: the type of person who achieves great pleasure in taking offence and even causing someone to lose their livelihood or reputation — the “I am offended by that” or “I don’t find that funny” brigade. Where once people simply shrugged, now they “take to Twitter”, in the annoying parlance, to show that they are unimpressed, or to tell people off for saying something which they disagree. There is a performative rage which the platform has encouraged, and which people find it hard to withdraw from once they are caught up in it. It’s addictive. It’s thrilling.

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And then there is the chihuahua effect: the way in which any small, yappy animal can distract the platform for at least a day at a time. Would-be chihuahuas can get the hang of this very easily. You simply say something silly and instead of the grown-ups just ignoring the small yappy dog, all respond to it. A whole day can go by in which some relatively good minds and a great many more mediocre ones have done almost nothing but got themselves in a lather about how annoying the small yapping dog is.

There are countless other reasons to loathe the platform: photos of dinner; stories of deeply dull train journeys or traffic jams; glimpses into the mundane aggravations which are bad enough in your own life without needing to read those of others. People misery-share their lives and the sadness and anger proves infectious. It is all a colossal waste of time, of course, yet is by no means the worst aspect of the all-powerful site.

That has been illustrated once again these past few days, with the anonymous racist abuse posted at black England footballers. Twitter acted as a megaphone for the most hysterical of these bigots, and highlighted the platform’s complete inability to sensibly and reasonably offer judgements about the actual state of the world we live in.

It made it seem as though these racists are vast in number. As though they are powerful and need the full force of every arm of the state to unite against them and quell them. Never mind that many of these tweets came from outside the UK, and that they were utterly dwarfed in number by supportive messages.

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The New York Times, whose correspondent seems to spend an awful lot of time news gathering on Twitter, even went as far as to describe these as “racist attacks”, never missing a chance to take a swipe at Britain. But we live in a country which is by every standard one of the least racist on earth, with statistics all demonstrating a vertiginous fall-off in people holding prejudice attitudes. Britain is one of the countries most unbothered, indeed most favourable, about things such as interracial marriage, or living next door to someone of a different race.

We have one of the most diverse cabinets in the world and our public square, from television and film to our national football team is visibly and un-controversially multi-ethnic. And yet reading Twitter you’d have no idea of that. No wonder that in Britain, as in the US, young people think that they live in such a racist society, beyond redemption. Here on this platform a very few shrill voices can be so magnified that people mistake that sound for the country as a whole. And so, 15 years after its launch, Twitter has become not just a megaphoning platform, but a distorting one, and the distortion continues to have a toxic impact on real life.

The US has promised to remove all its forces from Afghanistan by 11 September this year, and there is something astonishing about the world’s hyperpower agreeing to a date that will become doubly resonant not of American victory but of American failure. Were America leaving Afghanistan after 20 years of spent blood but with a thriving, stable Afghan society, then it is possible that the whole exercise could still have been marked up as a success. Instead, the opposite is true.

After two decades of insurgency, open warfare and betrayal, the US and her allies are leaving an Afghanistan that could be overwhelmed by the Taliban at any moment. Only yesterday, just hours before Boris Johnson announced the end of Britain’s military mission in Afghanistan, Sir Nick Carter, Chief of the UK Defence Staff, revealed that the Taliban now holds “nearly 50% of the rural districts”.

Suhail Shaheen, the Islamist group’s spokesman, this week warned that all foreign troops must obey the withdrawal deadline — a demand that the Biden administration has so far displayed every indication of following. Yet it would be wrong to think Biden is solely to blame. As wildly different administrations have come and gone in the past two decades, a vacillating commitment to the Afghan operation has remained a constant.

Perhaps it is inevitable that when a conflict goes on for so long, people, including politicians, eventually switch off. But even without that, I suspect that many would have tired of the Afghanistan war long before this grim season finale. For the truth is that if there is no point in fighting wars you’re going to lose, there is even less point in fighting wars you’re going to lose slowly.

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In hindsight the outlines of the Afghanistan disaster were clear from an early stage of the conflict. The US and her allies went in to ensure that Al-Qaeda and its affiliate groups would never again be able to have a country they could call home and from which they could plan attacks on the West. The allied bombing campaigns and ground operations wound up the first stages of that operation successfully and in good time.

And then, within the first year, the mission creep began. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban merged into an understandable blur in the eyes of the allies. The borders of Afghanistan and her neighbours were more porous than our generals expected, and as the conflict became entrenched within the country, it also seeped out. All the while, America and her allies failed to create anything that resembled civil society.

It was famously, if erroneously, claimed in 1883 by Sir John Seeley that Britain acquired her empire in “a fit of absence of mind”. America today has spent her time as the world’s leading superpower attempting not to be accused of the same. But while the US has often been criticised by her enemies for “empire-building”, the country’s problems on the world stage have largely been caused by her unwillingness to do any such thing.

If you are going to invade a country like Afghanistan and attempt to transform its society in the space of a few years — or in this case decades — then your military, diplomatic service and political class all must contain people who wish to engage in that activity; people who are fascinated with the local culture, are willing to learn the language and are eager to live among its people and to show leadership if needs be. To put it simply, if you are going to acquire an empire then you need empire-builders.

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For better or worse, this is not an American instinct. Its military does not want to remain in control of large countries thousands of miles away from home. Its diplomats have no special vision for how these societies might realistically look. And its political class professes its desire to get out as swiftly as possible even as they become more embroiled in conflict. Whether it is Barack Obama, Donald Trump or Joe Biden, all wanted to get out of the mess they had inherited. Yet all professed commitment while dreaming of abandonment. And now we see the results.

Will anything be learned in all of this? Possibly. The undoubtedly hubristic moment that America engaged in under George W. Bush after 9/11 is unlikely to return. There is now no appetite for foreign adventures on either the political Right or Left. The late John McCain could always be relied upon to call for American intervention in any country he saw, but since his death no one has stepped forward to pick up his mantle.

After all, they have witnessed countless interventionists talk with certainty about what societies would look like if America showed its might and the muscle, before watching them get it wrong again and again. I know, because I was one of them. I had hopes for Afghanistan, as I once had hopes for Iraq. But nobody could watch these interventions  and come away believing in America’s half-hearted imperial ambitions. That isn’t to say that the UK would have been any better if it had attempted such missions alone. Simply that America has repeatedly demonstrated herself to be eminently capable of starting fights while being profoundly disinterested in actually winning them.

Syria was the moment I decided to get off the train, having become immune to claims of foresight, special intelligence or “operational ease”. By then — late in the day, it may well be said — I believed that America had neither the will, knowledge nor desire to see through the operations that it started. It had the resources and the technology, certainly. But without the personnel to make a success of it, that’s meaningless. The country had fallen for the pottery barn rule of intervention (“You break it, you own it”), despite having no wish to own the countries it intervened in and forgetting that in warfare it is perfectly permissible to go in, break a lot of things and then leave.

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That is what America should have done in Afghanistan: gone in, carried out some punitive strikes, made an example of her enemies and then left. Would it have still had to return to the country from time to time? Most certainly. Would it have been able to do everything it wanted to do from 20,000 feet? Almost certainly not. But it would have beaten two decades of American soldiers having to give up their lives for stretches of road which their colleagues — and eventually their government — would shortly abandon.

So perhaps it is inevitable that the stories emerging from Afghanistan are greeted quietly. They stir quite a cocktail of feelings: inevitability, boredom, disappointment, shame.

But when a word gets used so relentlessly, it begins to take on a certain legitimacy — and even begins to crop up in the minds of people who loathe it. Indeed, it even happened to me recently after I read a number of pieces in the American press claiming that “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) was a bogeyman of the Right. Now here, I thought, is something that is definitely gaslighting. Surely these people must be trying to drive readers mad by making assertions that are so clearly untrue; presenting one vision of the world and then denying that it even exists. If this is not “gaslighting”, then what is?

In the New York Times last week, Michelle Goldberg claimed that the current wave of concern across America about CRT had simply been whipped up by a clever propagandist — and that, as a consequence, CRT had become a maddening debate. In particular, she said, “the phrase itself had become unmoored from any fixed meaning”. Elsewhere she criticised people of being guilty of a “moral panic” and said that she was “highly sceptical” of the idea that CRT is being taught in schools, before going on to explain that “antiracist education” isn’t “radically leftist” but just “elementary”.

This slew of claims demonstrates the problem at hand. For in CRT we are not talking about some hidden theory; we are talking about a school of thought which was openly heralded within American academia and has now been forced upon the wider world. Yet just at the point that it has infiltrated the public sphere, Goldberg and others claim that our understanding of CRT has become confused — as if an ideology that is wilfully obscurantist ought, in fact, to be straightforward and agreed upon.

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In the Washington Post and elsewhere, this debate has come to define American politics in recent weeks. Most prominently, Joy Reid of MSNBC has taken to claiming that CRT is not being taught in schools, is not what its critics say that it is and is both too complex for people to understand and also an exceptionally obvious demand for social justice.

What prompted such a desperate defence? Well, American parents have finally woken up to what is being taught to their children. At one prestigious Manhattan school, the headmaster even resigned after a group of parents complained about a number of school initiatives, ranging from “racist cop” re-enactments in science lessons to classes about “decentering whiteness” and “white supremacy”.

But now, just at the moment that the American public are starting to push back, supporters of CRT are stepping away from their creation, pretending that concerned citizens have misunderstood it, or are railing at a mirage.

The aforementioned Reid, for instance, recently interviewed a leading CRT scholar — indeed the person who reportedly coined the term — Kimberlé Crenshaw, who has described the backlash against CRT as an effort “to reverse the racial reckoning unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetime”.

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There is, to put it simply, a lot going on here; clearly, today’s discussions about CRT are unclear and disingenuous. But if there is a reason for this, it is that CRT’s decades-long advocates are no longer being honest. In their 2001 work Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic described CRT as a “movement” consisting of:

“A collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism and power… Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

So this is not a hidden campaign. Its thought leaders did not try to hide the revolutionary, activist nature of their “discipline”. They boasted about it; the activism was the point. The purpose of CRT was never simply to throw around ideas — it was to change America, and by extension the wider world, by applying these new racial rules in the widest possible way.

So why the sudden reversal? Why the sudden retreat into contradictory forms of self-defence? The reason, I suspect, is clear: the ugly little game that has been playing out in American academia is — like many a theory before it — not surviving its first encounters with the public.

In that sense, at least, it faces a similar problem to that experienced by Marxists. On paper, Marxist academics were able to make grand claims about how to make an equitable society. But try it out on the public and they soon learned that what worked on paper did not work in practice

A similar, if so far less bloody, discovery is being made with CRT. Yes, its advocates may believe that they have come up with a system to create universal justice. But applied in American schools, for instance, all they come up with is a system which causes untold pain and ugliness.

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Earlier this year when Grace Church School in Manhattan was in the headlines, people could see this for themselves. In private the headmaster conceded that there was a problem with the racial games he was forcing on all of his students. “Problematising whiteness” may seem fine in theory, but in practice it creates discord. As its headmaster reluctantly conceded, there are a lot of white children at his school; and if you “problematise” whiteness then you problematise them. Crenshaw, Reid and their fellow CRT supporters failed to account for that — and now this failing of theirs has plunged America into chaos.

In the meantime, their response has been to run for cover, camouflaging themselves with every technique possible. They say we don’t understand them. They say that CRT doesn’t really exist — or that it is all too complex to explain to ordinary people. But the simple fact is that CRT does exist, as a very large number of Americans have discovered. As for CRT’s bad reception, there is only one group to blame: its creators. It is their fault, not ours, that their ideology’s first mass encounter with the general public is proving such a failure.

Suffice it to say, then, that Bercow’s brief re-emergence into public view this week hardly came as a surprise. It all started on Sunday, when he told the Observer that he had joined the Labour Party. The story made the newspaper’s front page, even though his transfer of allegiance was hardly a surprise. Personally, I had expected it to happen 14 years ago, in June 2007.

That was when the news broke that a Conservative MP had been so enamoured and enthused by the prospect of Gordon Brown’s move from Number 11 to Number 10 Downing Street that he had chosen to cross the floor of the House.

The minute I heard the news I assumed it must be the then MP for Buckingham, John Bercow — a man who had already adopted the most ingratiating manner imaginable whenever he spoke across the Commons floor from the government of Tony Blair. He oozed and schmoozed and exuded a pseudo-charm devoid of wit and without much discernible purpose.

On that occasion, however, the Conservative MP who crossed the floor was Quentin Davies. John Bercow had missed his chance. Or so it seemed.

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Why would a former member of the Monday Club give it all up to join a beleaguered Labour Party? The most plausible reason is, as so often, a personal one.

In 2002 Bercow married a Labour Party activist called Sally, and it is clear from his memoirs that it was a transformative match. The unattractive, dwarfish Bercow could not believe his luck at bagging a tall, leggy blonde several times his height. He spent the ensuing period not just counting his luck but trying to make sure that he continued to dazzle her, principally by adapting his politics to fit hers: a strategy that turned out to be largely unsuccessful.

In any case, during his time as Speaker, Bercow’s political sympathies were clear. The famous side-eye that David Cameron frequently gave him was well-earned, as was the amused acceptance of his charms by successive Labour front-benchers who accepted the fealty and fawning of the man in the speaker’s chair with much the same good humour as an organ-grinder regarding his monkey.

But now the monkey in question has been caught in a lie. While giving an interview on Sunday to Sky News, Bercow presented his decision to join Labour as though it were solely a question of principle. “The real issue”, he insisted, “is who has the vision of a more equitable society, who thirsts to deliver social mobility, who wants to better the lot of people less fortunate? On that, Keir Starmer is vastly preferable to Boris Johnson.”

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It was classic Bercow, of course. Who honestly uses the word “thirsts” in relation to “social mobility”? The excellent Trevor Phillips, who was interviewing him, wasn’t convinced. Was this not all about something else entirely? Was his decision to switch to Labour simply a calculation to get around the Conservative Party’s clear refusal to put him in the House of Lords by throwing in his lot with Labour?

Bercow, however, was in high dudgeon at such a low motive being attributed to him.

“I’ve had absolutely no discussion whatsoever, either with Keir Starmer or any other member of the Labour leadership about that matter. There has been no barter, no trade, no deal whatsoever. And if I may very politely say so, and I do, the people who make what they think is that potent and coruscating criticism of me are operating according to their own rather low standards.”

Again, it was classic Bercow: grandiose, self-sanitising, pompous and untrue — as we were to discover not more than 24 hours later, when The Times published a letter which Bercow had written to Jeremy Corbyn while he was still Labour leader. It proved to be just one part of the former Speaker’s campaign to lobby Corbyn, having been preceded by a number of secret meetings with the Labour leader in the aftermath of the 2019 election.

It might have been possible for Bercow to present the Times emails as forgeries, were it not for their all-too-predictable style. For example, in his explanation for his suitability for the Upper House, Bercow boasted that he had held “no fewer than five shadow ministerial roles”. It was typical Bercow self-praise. All of these roles were performed in remarkably quick succession, during a tumultuous, talent-short period of Conservative opposition. And all were performed by Bercow without any distinction.

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Then came the clincher — the absolute proof that this was not the creation of a Russian forgery operation or the like. Bercow, in his exhaustive account of his political career, went on to explain that not only had he once served as deputy leader of the Tory group on Lambeth council, but he is “a qualified lawn tennis coach”. Anyone who has read Unspeakable — and I appreciate that we are few — will immediately hear the clear ring of truth in this last boast.

Why should that preclude him from the House of Lords? It is true, of course, that the Upper Chamber contains some remarkably unimpressive figures. But only John Bercow, in the full flight of his seriousness, would imagine that what the Lords needs is an amateur tennis coach. No foreign agent could have inserted this detail. No critic of the former Speaker within the Conservative or Labour parties could have fabricated it. It is John Bercow through and through. A year later, he remains as unspeakable as ever.

A similar trick was pulled off five years ago with the launch of Stop Funding Hate. It seems such a reasonable demand, doesn’t it? Who wants to fund hate? Everyone is against “hate”, aren’t they? But of course, the detail lies in exactly how you define it.

In the case of Stop Funding Hate the answer is straightforward. For this group, “hate” is the existence of any media or publication which leans — or can be accused of leaning — anywhere to the right of the political centre. Since its founding the group has targeted a range of conservative-leaning papers and magazines. Its modus operandi is always the same: it identifies a conservative outlet full of “hate”, and then lobbies its advertisers to pull their cash — thus eliminating one of the major revenue streams of the free press.

There are, of course, a number of things wrong with this; the most obvious being its mistaken presumption that to advertise in a magazine or newspaper is to endorse everything contained within its pages. If this is a category error, then it is one that Stop Funding Hate has been very happy to revel in — for the simple reason that it allows them to pursue their deeply political, targeted agenda. It is also, incidentally, a game that anyone with sufficient time and venom can play.

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One could, for instance, set up a group called “Stop Funding Bigotry”, and target any company which advertises in a range of Left-wing papers. We could then pretend that all Left-wing papers are a source of bigotry and that advertising in them constitutes an endorsement of it. As I say, you could do that. But it would be a fairly maniacal way to behave, and inimical to the idea of tolerance or respect for a differing range of views that must exist in a free society.

But even by its own maniacal standards, Stop Funding Hate this week managed to excel itself. In the month running up to the launch of GB News, the group announced that it was planning to target every company that advertised on the channel. Indeed, Stop Funding Hate boasted in advance that it had engaged a crack team of researchers to find out who was advertising with GB News — presumably by tuning in and making a note of each advert during the commercial break.

Within days of the launch, their arduous work had clearly paid off. The group identified a number of advertisers who quickly folded under pressure. Among them was Ikea, which has since announced that it has “safeguards in place to prevent our advertising from appearing on platforms that are not in line with our humanistic values”.

What might those “humanist values” entail? We need only look to Ikea’s French wing for an answer; it has just been fined €1 million and its former CEO given a suspended two-year sentence for hiring private detectives to spy on the private lives of its employees.

Yet by talking about “safeguards” Ikea helped hand an additional victory to Stop Funding Hate. For such a term suggests that material on GB News is not merely “hateful” but also so dangerous as to require a type of safeguarding commonly associated with the language of child protection.

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Yesterday, bosses at Ikea seemed to wake up to the absurdity of such rhetoric; the furniture retailer acknowledged that it “is simply too soon to make an informed decision as to whether advertising there is in line with our advertising policy and brand guidelines”. It was, in effect, an apology without the apology — though encouraging all the same.

It is yet to be seen whether other businesses follow suit. But even if they do, it is crucial we remember the remarkable rapidity with which they caved in to Stop Funding Hate. It was not the first time and it won’t be the last.

And if the past week’s corporate capitulation has taught us anything, it’s that there’s really only one driving factor: Stop Funding Hate’s intention to put out of business not just media organisations that it disagrees with, but those which it fears it could disagree with in the future. There is a name for that: “totalitarian”. If you can’t cope with any dissent — and Stop Funding Hate have consistently shown that they can’t — then you disavow democracy and sacrifice the principles of a free society.

So what is to be done? One possible solution would be to play in the game Stop Funding Hate is showcasing. In that world, a small group of us would single out Stop Funding Hate, pointing out that it is a hate-group — because it hates the free press, among much else. We could then go a step further, and target any and every company that has ever cooperated with such a hateful group. We could lobby, petition and harass them, while stressing that Stop Funding Hate is racist, homophobic, sexist, misogynistic and much more. At this stage, facts or details needn’t matter, for the winds of righteousness would be beneath our wings.

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We might then add that, as a hate-group, Stop Funding Hate seems to be propelled by racism and sexism. Since the initial team who are presenting shows on GB News appears to be notably more ethnically diverse, and with a better gender balance than any competitor channel, we could say that there can really be only one reason why Stop Funding Hate is trying to rid them of their salaries. And that is a desire to return women to the drudgery of household chores and ethnic minorities to the era of Jim Crow laws.

Would these claims be outrageous? Certainly. Would they have any basis in fact? Only if you allow hysterics and catastrophists the right to decide that their interpretation of events is reality. But that is what Stop Funding Hate has been doing. It would be an irrational and blinkered approach — yet it is the logical extension of the world that this vicious hate group has chosen to instigate.

As soon as the President touched down at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk this week, he made it clear he was a man reborn. He was, he told US service personnel serving at the airbase, going to meet Vladimir Putin once the G7 wrapped up and “let him know what I want him to know”. Cue a great roar of approval from the servicemen stood behind him, and an even greater roar of approval from the US media.

Of course, if President Biden’s predecessor was still in office and had said something similar, he would no doubt have been accused of being “bellicose”; his words would be heralded up as proof that he lacked diplomatic skills and was at serious risk of starting World War III. But different presidency, different rules.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that President Biden should wish to be seen to be standing up against Vladimir Putin. After all, the Russian leader is an easy target for Western leaders hoping to display some clout.

The same cannot be said for Biden’s host country, which makes the US President’s recent broadside against Britain all the more perplexing. In the lead-up to today’s summit, Anglo-American relations were subjected to two contradictory developments. On the one hand, Biden and Boris Johnson met yesterday to sign a new Atlantic Charter, modelled on the historic statement agreed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in 1941. The contents of the Charter are typically vague, though the intent behind it is obvious: it is an attempt to breathe new life into the much-vaunted (by the British at least) “Special Relationship”.

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For Biden, the agreement also slots in nicely with his oft-repeated claim that “America is back” — as though it somehow disappeared from the world stage in the four years before he became President. Initiatives like this go some way to making it look like America is becoming a grown-up player again, deftly rebuilding important alliances that were allegedly damaged during the Trump era.

That may also explain the Biden administration’s second, more uncharacteristic incursion into British politics: the decision of the White House to instruct Yael Lempert — its most senior diplomat in the UK — to accuse Boris Johnson of imperilling the Irish peace process over Brexit.

It was, as Keir Starmer predictably acknowledged, an “unprecedented” outburst. But it also reflected an interestingly non-pragmatic side to the Biden administration; a side that is deeply ideological and seems willing to risk a diplomatic fallout in order to satisfy internal pressures within his party. For the warning, remarkable as it was, forms part of an ongoing and very curious set of misunderstandings which have taken hold at the very top of the Democratic Party.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is just one of a number of senior figures who in recent years has claimed that Britain’s decision to leave the EU risks upsetting the Good Friday Agreement. Only last September, she castigated Dominic Raab on the matter, warning: “If the UK violates its international agreements and Brexit undermines the Good Friday accord, there will be absolutely no chance of a UK-US free trade agreement passing the Congress.”

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This view seems to get some of its impetus from the connection — in the minds of many US Democrats, at least — between the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump. But there is another reason why this strange ideological strand exists within the Democratic Party: the prevalence of a dogmatically pro-Irish reunification agenda.

For much of this century, administrations on both sides have tended to downplay this aspect of American politics — not least because in the wake of 9/11, George W Bush took a suitably strong line against the IRA and its political allies. But now, thanks to the misguided belief that Brexit could imperil the Good Friday Agreement, this ugly element of Democrat politics has returned.

This became clear almost exactly a year ago, when Chuck Schumer — the current Senate Majority leader — agreed to speak at an online conference organised by Sinn Fein; among the other speakers was Gerry Adams. In his remarks, Schumer boasted that while “the road to Irish unity” is “now more within reach today than at any time”.  He then went on to say: “I wish you the best in your critical efforts to build support for a truly united Ireland.”

Put to one side the fact that Schumer gave his approval to a political party that approves of terrorism. The fact that a senior American politician would publicly say that to anyone is, in itself, extraordinary; it’s like the Leader of the House of Commons wishing success to anyone in Texas who wants to break away from the United States.

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It seems, then, that Yael Lempert and Joe Biden are in good company. But while it is one thing for a US President to be bellicose with Vladimir Putin, it is quite another to do the same with a close ally who is acting on a decision ordered in a democratic referendum.

So for once, I suspect this year’s G7 summit won’t be remembered as yet another pointless gathering, garlanded with the usual soundbites about the rule of law and the importance of democracy. For while Joe Biden’s administration makes one set of noises about the promises of Anglo-American cooperation, its behaviour in the past week has revealed the opposite: that it views British democracy as a threat to its own ideological agenda.

In recent years, this has increasingly taken place with language as well as facts. Progressive activists on the Left, for instance, used the term “woke” with admiration for some while. At a certain point, however, the word became more associated with its pejorative use by the political Right. And almost overnight, the same people who coined its popular usage started to pretend that the term was a fantasy; these stupid Right-wingers, went the claim, were railing against a concept that didn’t even exist.

A similar “bait and switch” now appears to be underway over the existence of the culture wars themselves. In the past week, both the Times and the Guardian have run pieces claiming that the culture wars don’t really exist, and are either a figment of febrile Right-wing imaginations or a cynical tool being used by conservatives to remain in power.

One of the most striking aspects of this claim being made in the Guardian, of course, is that it comes from a paper which seems to believe that everything British is racist, laced through with bigotry, slavery and empire — up to and including botanical gardens. Now, after assailing everything from Winston Churchill to the rhododendrons, the same paper seems to believe that the culture wars are a myth.

The spur for these “bait and switch” claims are two new polls: one carried out by Ipsos Mori for the Policy Institute at King’s College London and another by YouGov. The first, in particular, couldn’t have come at a better time: only last week, news emerged of a member of King’s staff being hounded by colleagues for the crime of sharing a photograph of the Duke of Edinburgh following his death. Apparently, the tribute caused “harm” because of the Duke’s “history of racist and sexist comments”.

But back to the King’s analysis of the so-called culture wars that, as last week’s event proved, most definitely do not exist. At the heart of its research is data that purports to show how there are several “culture wars” terms that the public do not recognise. For example, just over 1% of respondents associate the culture wars with transgender issues, suggesting that the transgender debate has had less cut-through than coverage in the media might suggest.

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But there are a number of very obvious reasons for this. First, there’s the fact that the number of people who identify as transgender appears to form an extraordinarily small percentile of the general population, and most people — wisely enough — do not engage in issues unless they directly cross their path.

Likewise, there is an obvious reason why terms such as “cancel culture” and “identity politics” are less popular than some people might imagine (61% of respondents claimed they don’t understand the phases). As terms, they are very recent imports or creations, while many people find them inexact or unclear (myself included).

There is also the more obvious reason why writers, journalists and other people in the public eye might disproportionately focus on a phenomenon such as “cancel culture”: they are more likely to suffer from it than a person with a less visible public platform. As for the fact that 54% of people say they are unaware of “trigger warnings” and 46% know little or nothing about “cultural appropriation” — is that really so surprising? Not everybody in Britain can be expected to spend their days keeping up with every passing fad to emerge from the least productive portions of our universities.

What is revealing, though, is the term which has the highest cut-through: “white privilege”, which was recognised by 82% of respondents. Why might that be? Well, white people remain the largest ethnic group in the UK. Just as trans issues would be more familiar if most people in the UK were transgender, so it is inevitable that the culture war issue which commands the most awareness among the general public is the one that targets the largest demographic.

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Moreover, it is not just unsurprising but inevitable that if you tell people that there is something wrong and oppressive about them because of the colour of their skin, they are likely to take notice. At some point later, they might even object to such gross and racist generalisations.

The recently published YouGov research — which claims that Red Wall voters are no more concerned about the culture wars than conservatives elsewhere — similarly misses a crucial aspect in this debate. YouGov’s definition of “culture wars”, for example, includes not just transgender issues but censorship of online hate and abuse. Yet it isn’t at all clear that this can be counted as an arena for the “culture wars”.

It is a free speech issue, certainly, but even in the small percentage of the British public who see free speech as a major issue — see, once again, writers and journalists — there is by no means agreement over how to balance the problems of curtailing online comment and allowing a wild-west online. Using this to claim that Red Wall voters care more or less for the “culture wars” is to miss the point by incorrectly defining it.

Yet that is largely forgivable when compared with those who wish to push the culture wars in a particular direction while also pretending that they either do not exist or are being weaponised by a Conservative government. It’s a classic case of presuming that one’s enemies are both strikingly stupid and wickedly clever.

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Back in the real world, whether they like it or not, I suspect that what we call the culture wars will most certainly continue. In fact, for proof we need only turn to yesterday’s Guardian: in addition to publishing an opinion piece that claimed the culture wars do not exist, they also ran a “long read” with the headline: “Why every single statue should come down.”

Here was “bait and switch” in action: stoke a crisis and then, just a few pages along, pretend it doesn’t exist. It is a tactic of a kind. A dishonest one — but by no means out of character for the people who use it.

The reason is simple: by the time an issue has been solved, or almost solved, the business is at its peak. Employees’ salaries and pensions are at stake, reputations have been built and influence has been secured. And so it is that Eric Hoffer’s great insight is fulfilled: every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket.

Very few causes have degenerated into a racket so completely as the former gay-rights group known as Stonewall. When it was founded in 1989, gay rights in Britain, as across Europe, had some way to go to reach equality. Back then, there was a different age of consent for homosexuals and heterosexuals, homosexuals did not have the right to marry or to have their partnerships legally recognised and, most pertinently, a Conservative government had made it impossible for young gay people to be in any way informed about their sexuality during their time at school.

There was certainly a long way to go, and Ian McKellen, Matthew Parris, Simon Fanshawe and the rest of the group’s founders faced an uphill battle for many years. But it was a battle which they helped to win.

Once most of their objectives had been achieved, though, what were Stonewall to do? There were several options in front of them. The most obvious, one might think, would have been to scale down and remain in place to deal with residual issues, such as the existence of homophobia in schools and other remaining pockets of society.

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Instead Stonewall went the other way, and decided to cash in on its victory. This is, of course, unsurprising. For it is at the point at which you are victorious that you are most popular, and those who were once not by your side swiftly become your allies.

So it was with the corporate world and the machinery of government. Both the private and public sector suddenly provided Stonewall great reservoirs of cash to keep the organisation’s coffers full. Both were willing to invite Stonewall in to tell them what they could or should do better.

For instance, Stonewall had for some years been producing a list of the top employers for gay people in the UK. Yet even though the battle for equality was all but finished during the Blair and Cameron years, major companies suddenly decided that they wanted desperately to be on the list; having Stonewall’s gay stamp of approval became essential. With time, it became standard procedure for a company to invite Stonewall in to grade their commercial operations. Thus was born a relationship which was compromised from the outset and rife with vested interests.

Meanwhile, the Government became increasingly obsessed with obtaining the same gold star from Stonewall, asking the group to instruct departments what to do in their own workplaces, as well as craft policies in the wider world.

In particular, one of Stonewall’s most influential money-making programmes of recent years has been its “Diversity Champions scheme”, in which members are invited to pay a fee to Stonewall to allow the group to vet their internal policies. Among the 850 groups who have signed up are GCHQ, MI5, the Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office, the Department for Education and the Ministry of Justice.

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Yet the degeneration of Stonewall has been evident for years; indeed, you can see it in the calibre of people involved at the top. When Stonewall started out, its leaders were prominent in the British media and public life. They were known to people who were straight, and certainly known to people who were gay.

Can the same be said today? I doubt it. In fact, I suspect if you were to visit every gay venue, you would find that fewer than one person in a hundred would be able to name Nancy Kelley as the current head of Stonewall. They would not know who she was or what she does. And that is because the group is neither at any forefront, nor any barricade. It is instead a business still running largely for the comfort of its employees.

It would be wrong, however, to assume that Stonewall is merely rich and benign. Far from it. For it is at just such a moment, when the coffers are full and the beneficiaries are content, that an organisation is liable to take a wrong turn. And that is what Stonewall has done in recent years. It says that its job is to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. But in reality, the first three letters of that acronym slipped off Stonewall’s radar at least six years ago. That was when Stonewall decided to sustain what campaigning impetus it had by arguing — along with a number of other legacy organisations — that nobody who is gay will be free until all TQ+ people have the same rights as everyone else.

And there are several problems here. Firstly, it is not clear that trans rights have any intersection (to borrow a popular term) at all with gay rights. In fact, they run very distinctly counter to them. It is, for instance, perfectly possible that boys and girls who do not conform to gender stereotypes may grow up to be happily straight or gay.

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Surely a group which protected gay people would recognise that there is a need for nuance here? It would certainly not jump on the increasingly dogmatic bandwagon that claims — running against all the progress made by the gay rights movement — that such children are most likely of the opposite sex.

Yet what is worse is that rather than being open to a discussion with gay people who differ on these issues, Stonewall has decided to undermine them — and in some cases actually persecute them.

The recent case of Allison Bailey is instructive. Bailey is a criminal defence barrister, a feminist and a lesbian who, in response to Stonewall’s “trans agenda”, helped to set up the LGB Alliance. Stonewall, as a result, attempted to get Bailey into severe trouble at work, not least by helping to get her barrister’s chambers to put her under investigation because of her views on sex and gender. All of this and much more reveals the despicable bullying tactics deployed by Stonewall. It has, to put it simply, turned into an organisation that hounds gay and lesbian people who dare to disagree with them.

This week sees the group celebrate its 32^nd anniversary — a landmark which nobody but its employees could possibly celebrate. Yet even they will likely do so with a sense of profound unease; in recent days, one of its founders, Matthew Parris, publicly urged Stonewall to stay out of the trans wars, while the Equality and Human Rights Commission announced that it would not be renewing its membership.

And quite right, too. No taxpayer-funded entity should be funnelling money to Stonewall. And private companies who continue to do so should be made aware that they are supporting a group which has stopped looking out for gay people and started hounding them in their workplaces instead.

So happy 32^nd birthday, Stonewall. And no offence, but I hope you don’t make it to 33.

Such is the position of the British Labour Party, which in both its Blair and Corbyn incarnations gave the impression that all moves towards immigration restrictionism constituted some form of racism; even if it wasn’t spelled out, it was heavily implied. Yet here we are in 2021, with the Leader of the Opposition and the Shadow Home Secretary repeatedly berating the Government for not sealing our borders more comprehensively.

This week Shadow Home Secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds, joining the rush to turn Britain into a hermit kingdom, criticised the Government for failing to shut down flights from India, and the position of the official opposition now appears to be that Britain should be entirely quarantined from the rest of the world. Keir Starmer used the opportunity of Prime Minister´s Questions to again complain that there are too many people coming into the country and that the hotel quarantine system was not brought in early enough and is not widespread. It is all quite a turnaround.

And yet what else could they do? The job of an official opposition is to oppose, after all. And the Labour Party has decided to do its opposing by portraying the present Government as lax about our borders. As with all areas of Covid policy, its position — and that of our country’s other, semi-official opposition, the SNP – is not that the Government is doing the wrong thing, but that whatever it’s doing, it should be doing more.

It is a stance, at least. But it is interesting that the Labour Opposition (or indeed any opposition) continuously comes at the Government from the direction of greater caution and rarely if ever presents the opposite line of attack.

In the whole political debate over Covid and Britain’s response to it, it is striking that there has been almost no counter-pressure from the other side of the debate. While there is plenty of pressure on the Government to be more cautious, there is none at a party-political level urging the Government to be more favourable towards the case for liberty.

Here the comparison with the Covid debate in the United States is striking. While Dr Anthony Fauci enjoyed a reign of near-complete reverence for a time, politicians and pundits now routinely pour scorn on the chief medical officer for urging people to wear masks in an empty room even after being vaccinated, for people to double and triple mask, to wear a mask outside, to wear a mask alone in a forest.

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In the UK, by contrast, the mask debate seems to remain where it always has been, with Members of Parliament and other leading figures sticking religiously to the wearing of masks at all point. In contrast to the United States, no one seems to have in any way questioned whether post-vaccine mask-wearing has any point to it other than theatre.

While Dr Fauci’s wisdom is questioned openly, Britain is haunted by the presence of Prof Neil Ferguson, who repeatedly returns to our screens like a bad horror movie. Rarely has any expert in British life been more wrong about so many major things, and yet still he crops up, where he is given a respectful audience at government level and by most of the media. His latest appearance has seen him warning — with the Prime Minister following suit — that the Indian variant of Covid might necessitate delaying the end of lockdown. But what is striking is not just that Ferguson gets away with repeatedly being wrong, but that his constant urges for greater caution are not balanced by any force urging the opposite.

In the US the dispute over masks and reopening has followed largely along predictable Red State/Blue State lines. Republican-run Florida has barely shut down and the rest of the United States has been watching with interest, concern and envy to see whether the Floridians suffer an excess mortality rate, benefit from keeping their economy alive, or both. You may say that in America the issue has been over-politicised, and indeed it has, with mask-wearing having become a sign of tribal affiliation among Democrat voters while a type of blitheness towards Covid has been a badge of honour among large swathes of Republican voters. But at least the argument is occurring; in Britain there is almost nothing.

Without the political pressure coming from organised pro-liberty forces, the British Government has throughout the pandemic had an unhindered ability to be as cautious as it likes about reopening the economy and allowing the general public to get back to our lives. We have had a constant drip-feed of warnings from Boris, the BBC and others that if we are not careful then the right to drink a pint of beer inside a pub, a right only just recently returned to us, might once again be taken away. And all this is accepted mildly without political complaint.

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Having spent a portion of the past year in the US, I am by no means certain that the British approach is the healthier one. For instance, is it especially healthy that when the Prime Minister ponders whether lockdown-easing will remain on track that there is no significant political pressure on him to stick to the timeline he has laid out?

Is it healthy for British politics that when the Government and BBC tell us how, where and when we might hug our loved ones, which direction to face, how often to do it and what settings one might do it in, there is only the sound of dull acceptance or audible gratitude from grateful subjects? I am not certain that it is.

And what about the Government briefings to the media that, because some people have chosen not to get vaccinated, therefore the lifting of lockdown could be delayed? Doubtless this provides some pressure on members of the public to get their jabs, but why is there no political pressure on the Government telling them about their obligations? Why is no one telling them: “You told us yourselves that the vaccine is the way out of lockdown. Those who have chosen not to get vaccinated have chosen to take their own risks, and we cannot allow them to keep the rest of us back.” Instead there is a competition to be more cautious than the next politician.

It is the same with the question of foreign travel. As Freddie Sayers argued here yesterday, the Government’s latest quandary is over the question of international travel. While it is legal to travel to so-called “amber” countries, members of the Government now say that we should not do so.

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Health Minister James Bethell said on Times Radio that “Travelling is dangerous. Travelling is not for this year. Please stay in the country.” And once again this advice landed into a political vacuum. Doubtless Labour, the SNP and others will seek to find a moment to berate the Government for not having made travel to amber countries illegal, or for not imprisoning everybody who returns from such a country.

But there will be no organised political opposition pointing out that the whole point of the amber part of the traffic-light system is that these are countries which people can visit.

Perhaps it was understandable this time last year that there was a degree of unity in British politics. Perhaps it was also understandable that non-scientists and others deferred to the pandemic experts for a period. But it seems unhealthy that at this stage of the pandemic, with all that we know about the virus and vaccine, that the British political scene still lacks any organised force pressuring the Government to restore our liberties as soon as possible. In the to-and-fro of British politics it seems as though the cause of freedom is having trouble finding defenders. It is about time she got them again.

Predictably, it all started with a letter. Published in Valeurs Actuelles last month and signed by around 1,000 servicemen and women, including 20 retired Generals, it warned President Macron that Islamist extremists, and the existence of the banlieue ghettos, have the potential to tip France into civil war.

The contents of the letter were disturbing. But so was the timing, coming as it did on the 60^th anniversary of the failed generals’ putsch of 1961, when generals of the French Army attempted to topple President Charles de Gaulle. Indeed, it’s hardly surprising that it sparked an extraordinary scandal, with government ministers threatening to punish all the letter’s signatories.

Undaunted by these threats, the warning was repeated this week in a second letter, this time signed by 130,000 members of the French public. Once again the French government condemned it. Elsewhere, their reception has fallen along predictable political lines: mainstream politicians of the Left and Right have criticised the letters, while Marine le Pen has been careful to express support for the signatories.

This is, of course, to be expected. Le Pen will seize on whatever embarrasses the rest of the political mainstream, while the rest of that mainstream will continue to resist anything which could be seen to provide ammunition for Le Pen.

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But it is really the longer-term effect of interventions like these that are of most interest. Because what is striking about the debate on immigration, integration and security in France in recent years is not that the same lines keep getting drawn. The interesting thing is that, while this has gone on, French politics has experienced a silent revolution. Indeed, things are today said in France on immigration that would normally end a political career in most English-speaking countries.

The most high-profile demonstration in recent weeks came in the form of Michel Barnier. The Frenchman turned 70 in January, a milestone which precludes him from taking up another job in the European Commission. And perhaps as a result, he is now eyeing up a run for the French Presidency.

How do we know this? Because in an interview on Sunday, Barnier dropped this bombshell:

“There are links between [immigration flows] and terrorist networks which try to infiltrate them… There is a risk of an explosion, particularly on the topic of immigration. We need to introduce a moratorium on immigration. We need to take time to evaluate, check and if necessary, change our immigration policies.”

In this and later interviews the same day, he speculated that France should consider a total suspension of immigration for between three and five years, as well as a reassessment of free movement within the Schengen area. In other words, it is time for France to take back control. Suddenly, external migration and internal movement in the EU are now up for debate in the political centre.

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There are several interesting things to note about this. The first is the way in which the events of the last year have already shifted the debate on immigration and border control more than anyone might have expected. For more than a generation, governments in the developed West have argued that high levels of immigration into Western countries are a fact of life; migration cannot be stopped altogether even if the governments of the developed countries wanted to do so.

But the events of the last year have shown this to be a lie. In an extreme event — on this occasion a global pandemic — countries around the world have shown that they are able to close their borders. Even Justin Trudeau’s Canada and Angela Merkel’s Germany, which have made a great show in recent years of being open to migration from around the world, did something that nobody could ever (before the pandemic) have expected them to do: they shut the borders and kept them shut.

The public and some wilier politicians will have noticed something here. If it is possible to close the borders to prevent a pandemic, then it should be possible to close the borders to prevent excessive migration. Whether you agree with the policy or not, it has suddenly become a viable option.

The only discussion, then, is whether a particular set of circumstances is serious enough for a pandemic border response to be enacted. Clearly there are many in France who think they are at this point. And that raises an important question over what is a more serious challenge to the long-term security of France: the Covid pandemic or the ongoing divisions and security concerns brought on by high levels of immigration?

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If you go to parts of Paris — even in the city centre — there are migrant tent communities set up that resemble somewhere in the third world, or California. As long as they exist, it is surely understandable for Parisians to wonder why this problem can’t be fixed.

Their Government has shown that it can mandate everyone to stay in their homes, lock the borders and force everyone to wear masks. Why can it not deal with the issue of mass migration? Clearly the thought is out there. Otherwise Mr Barnier would not have taken — utterly cynically, no doubt — up the cause.

And yet it is not just Covid that has changed things. Rather, as I described in The Strange Death of Europe, public opinion in France on immigration has long been shifting in this direction. Very few people, year on year, say that they are less concerned about integration; and very few believe that multicultural France has a happy future if migration continues at the rate of recent years.

Politicians of the Left as well as the Right have long been facing up to this. But the Barnier intervention — like that of the generals — is a demonstration that the political reality, as well as the political rhetoric, in France is changing. Things that were once unthinkable are now being proposed as national policy. No doubt that will all come as a shock to Mr Barnier’s former colleagues, but they would be unwise to ignore it.

But some of the voting patterns are far from surprising. No one would expect yoga teaching to be a hotbed of radical right-wing activity, for instance, and yogis do indeed push heavily to the left.

Perhaps even less shocking, though, is the realisation that there is one area in which the political left appears to have an absolute clean sweep of the profession. In the book publishing industry 100% of respondents in the survey identify as being on the left, the sort of echo chamber that even academia can only look at with envy.

To those with friends in publishing, despairing at the regular struggle session-style get-together they are now subjected to in which every conceivable centre-left political orthodoxy is celebrated, this is not a revelation. Although the survey in question is from the US, it is certain that a similar pattern can be found over here, too.

It is only by understanding this that one can make any sense of an otherwise baffling and strikingly badly-written letter which appeared this week in The Bookseller (the trade publication of the book publishing business). The open letter, inaccurately titled “The paradox of tolerance”, is a strange document for many reasons. Not the least is that it is signed anonymously, by figures in the book trade at once both sure of their convictions and also terrified of having their convictions attributed to them. What is the cause of this pseudo-samizdat? What opinion can be so errant that it requires this level of anonymity?

The answer is that the open letter is based around the claim that “transphobia is still perfectly acceptable in the British book industry”. From the outset this anonymous letter is framed in Lutherian terms. “Somebody, sooner or later, must speak up,” the authors bravely begin. This is proper “Here I stand” territory. Yet whereas Martin Luther was simply facing down the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Emperor at the Diet of Worms, the anonymous authors of this letter are taking on the might of children´s fiction departments across west London. No wonder they wish to keep their identities secret. The retributions could be unimaginable.

Although The Bookseller claims that it has tried to independently verify that the signatories of the letter are in fact people in the book trade, one does begin to have doubts. For instance, in relation to trans issues the authors believe that “Our industry is still very comfortable about giving this form of prejudice a powerful platform.”

Doubtless referring to the decision of Hachette to publish the fearsome and controversial work known as The Ickabog, by J.K. Rowling, the letter makes the claim that it is perfectly acceptable in the publishing industry to argue that trans people should have “less than full human rights”. Anti-trans sentiment is now so rife that they are forced to make a stand.

“We need to step away from the paradigm that all opinions are equally valid,” they state: “It isn’t true, and it never was.” To back up this claim they rope in the late Douglas Adams, and his quote: “All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others”.

That is true, of course, although not in the way they think.

The letter then goes onto make the claim that “gender is a spectrum, a whole colour wheel, rather than just pink and blue”, although they at least make a somewhat original argument here.

Ordinarily at this stage activists wheel out the example of the clownfish, the argument generally being that because of the existence of clownfish (not a very close relative of homo sapiens) we humans are part of a hermaphroditic species.

Instead, they write that other world cultures recognise different genders and therefore we in the West are just so far behind, citing the examples of the Buginese people of South Sulawesi. Because a minority ethnic group in Indonesia have a slightly esoteric attitude to gender – they recognise five in total – therefore biological sex does not exist. All opinions are not equal, indeed.

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One suspects that the authors of the letter are the sort of liberal arts graduates who dominate the publishing world, and who bring with them the intellectual clutter of their education and their class, indicated by such jargon as “paradigms”. These are not social milieus where any sort of dissenting opinion is encouraged or tolerated, let alone the sort of hardened illiberal prejudice that they imagine – or pretend to imagine – is rife.

Perhaps one of the clearest characteristic of people raised in this utterly homogenous political world is the tendency to slip into “historian here” appeals to authority to make wildly dubious analogies.

Warning that “At this moment what needs to be expressed most urgently is the distinction between a petty anxiety and the horror that rises when you become aware that you are witnessing a persecution,” they go on to say: “Those of us who have studied history can see perhaps more clearly than many that the language and accusations against the trans community are ‘exactly’ those that have been used against: homosexuals, Jews, disabled people, people of colour, Muslims, suffragettes, even left-handed people in our past.”

Anyone who has actually read any history would surely know that Jews in Nazi Germany were not treated in “exactly” the way in which the publishing industry is here alleged to be treating trans people today.

There is no ban on trans authors being published in Britain or America. Quite the opposite, most publishing houses are going out of their way to find and push them to the fore. Publishing houses have lately taken to sending around author questionnaires in which the questions rather noticeably quiz authors on their race, sexual orientation and whether they identify as trans or not. These clearly do not exist in order to trick and expel any author who identifies as trans, but in order to try to highlight how relatively few trans authors there are and use this as a reason to seek out more.

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Publishing houses in Berlin and Vienna in the late 1930s did not send out questionnaires asking about the ethnicity of authors in order to better promote Jewish authors. They were not competing to find and publish the next Joseph Roth. They were trying to do away with them, remove them from their catalogues, and allow their books to be burned.

Besides, if the treatment of trans people by the publishing industry today is “exactly” like the treatment of Jews in the past then there must be at least some prominent people in the publishing industry or the wider culture calling for the physical annihilation of all trans people? Can anybody find such a monster? Does he or she exist anywhere but in the feverish imaginations of these anonymous publishing brains?

Having “studied history”, the authors feel qualified not only to declare what history has said, but also what it will say. They warn their colleagues that “Íf you are a publisher or organisation that is aware that you are providing a platform for these fearmongering, discriminatory views to be expressed, and for that bias against a minority in society to perpetuate, then please consider very carefully why you have allowed that to happen and not acted when the matter came to light. How will your actions appear in the clear light of history?”

Ah yes, the famously clear light of history which always bathes your own views in the most positive possible warm glow of righteousness.

How is it possible to have such an inaccurate understanding of the industry in which you work? What level of delusion is demanded of a person for them to work in what is the most left-leaning business in one of the most liberal societies on earth, and still imagine yourself dwelling among aspiring Nazis? Imagine looking at the politics section of Waterstones, or even the now heavily-political children’s section, and not being at least aware that British publishing might be somewhat more liberal than the public at large?

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The letter was revealing, although not in the way the authors intended, showing a group of people so devoid of intellectual diversity or curiosity that the slightest ideological deviation is comparable to the most monstrous crime in history – which, aside from American history, is the only that they know.

This is a pattern seen across publishing houses in Britain and America; they tried and failed to cancel J.K. Rowling, and tried and failed to cancel Jordan Peterson, only because book sales still trump politics. But they will find it easier to push out smaller authors and editors, and to make the industry even more politically uniform and intolerant than it already is – and they will.

For now, the adults running the industry can ignore their wilder claims while making soothing noises, but one day the people who write and believe this will be the adults in the industry. And you don’t have to be a historian to appreciate how awful it will be when that time comes.

In 1998, voters in the capital were given a referendum on whether or not we wanted to have a Mayor of London. It was the first time I voted — and I was delighted to be in the distinct minority of people who said “no”.

But we lost, and we lost bad. We made up just 28% of the vote, among a measly total turnout of just 34%. And yet, given the opportunity again, I would vote the same again.

Back then, the likely candidates to lead the nation’s capital ranged from Jeffrey Archer to Ken Livingstone. It did not require a clairvoyant to know where this was heading. In the end Jeffrey Archer went to prison and Ken Livingstone did not. So Ken Livingstone became Mayor.

Two embarrassing terms later, it soon became clear that the trouble with City Hall lay in the same problem that distinguishes all superfluous offices in government. People always equate expanding layers of government with increasing accountability; but the truth is that the more there are, the harder it is to hold people to account.

During Livingstone’s reign, for example, whenever the underground service ground to a halt there was always a fight over whether he was responsible or not. It was the same with every budgetary issue.

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And yet, somehow, the most memorable feature of Livingstone’s time in office was the way he managed to impose his own outlandish foreign policies on his fiefdom. For example, while Westminster looked somewhat askance at Hugo Chavez’s regime as it set about crashing Venezuela, Livingstone made special alliances with it. Similarly, while the Government was distinctly pro-Washington, the Mayor of London, by contrast, was not; when President Bush visited the capital in 2003, Livingstone declined to meet him and denounced his arrival by calling him “the greatest threat to life on this planet that we’ve probably ever seen”.

Now the reason I believe it’s worth returning to Livingston isn’t to justify my vote in 1998, but merely to point out that the problems at the heart of London’s mayoralty are endemic. The powers that come with the position are too unclear — or have, at the very least, the potential to be made unclear. And then there is a more obvious pitfall: that the position attracts  — possibly requires — figures who believe that London is merely a stage to stand on; a means to project themselves on to the wider world.

To that extent, the problems of Sadiq Khan’s mayoralty are no different from those of his predecessors. Just like those before him, Khan has been able to jump from one photo op to another, looking the other way as his city burns.

For instance, take crime in the capital. Under Khan, knife crime in London has remained at near-record levels, while rape prosecutions have slumped. But whenever the mayor is challenged on these issues, he avoids taking responsibility for them, preferring instead to prevaricate over “institutional racism” or talk about how London’s crime wave is caused by cuts ordered by Whitehall. The message is clear: it’s not my problem.

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Like Livingstone before him, Khan has also decided that he can make up for what he lacks in actual power with narcissistic grandstanding. His time in City Hall has coincided with a number of major events on the national and international stage, into all of which he has tried to interject himself.

When, for example, the UK voted to leave the European Union in 2016, Khan didn’t seem to care that it was a national plebiscite — or that 40% of Londoners voted for Brexit. Instead, he sought to weaponise the result, using it as an opportunity to present London as distinct from the rest of the backward country. He continued to parade the EU flag at every opportunity, up to and including turning the city’s 2018/19 New Year’s Eve celebrations into a tribute to Brussels.

Emulating Livingstone, Mayor Khan has even tried to make political capital by opposing an American President. In fact, he arguably took things one step further during President Trump’s visit to the UK in 2019; before the President had even touched down at Heathrow, Khan fired off a newspaper article comparing him to the “fascists of the 20^th century”.

Yet there are, of course, no prizes for guessing which of Khan or Trump went on to establish a totalitarian-sounding “Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm”. Put to one side the fact that one of the activists hired by Khan to review London’s landmarks was sacked within a fortnight for being anti-Semitic; far more striking was the decision of the Mayor’s office to announce the findings of the Commission in advance — a move seemingly taken straight from the Stalinist playbook.

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Naturally, it is easy to scoff at such a fatuous approach to politics. But dismissing Khan in this way forgets that while he has busied himself with his “progressive” agenda, it has all been at the expense of addressing the genuine political issues that concern his constituents. Public transport in London has never been more expensive or inadequate — a reality made all the worse by the introduction of a new Green “ultra low emissions zone” that has made car-travel eye-wateringly expensive. Meanwhile house-building, which is so badly needed to address the shortage of affordable property, has actually gone down since he assumed office.

So what has Mayor Khan done? Well, one part of the Mayor’s budget has rocketed enormously: his PR budget, which has risen by a third since he took office. And perhaps Khan’s lead in the polls justifies the spend; it certainly seems to confirm the fact that, even if you do nothing very well, you can still succeed by spending on self-promotion. Either way, it’s a grim sign for the future of democracy in the capital, and a late — if pointless — vindication of the 28% who saw this coming over 20 years ago.

Of course, such candour has its advantages. But not in frontline politics — where, for good or ill, a different set of skills is needed to make allies and get things done.

And so it was hardly surprising that Mercer was unceremoniously sacked this week, after expressing anger at the Government’s failure to keep its promise to protect veterans of the British Armed Forces from facing prosecution for historic offences. Next week, two unnamed veterans will go on trial in Belfast for the 1972 murder of an IRA commander — the first time that British soldiers will be prosecuted for the alleged killing of an IRA terrorist.

Mercer was understandably frustrated; the Government had previously pledged that such a prosecution would never occur. Few sacked politicians can say they were dismissed for taking a stand on an important issue. Mercer, in that respect, is the exception.

For ultimately, it would have been far easier for Mercer to have taken the easy way out and turn a blind eye to the trial. The issue of historic prosecutions is an ethical and political nightmare, one which is very easy to put off — as successive governments have demonstrated.

Even when such investigations do take place, they tend to be far from fruitful. Take, for example, the probe into the killings in Londonderry in 1972 that became known as Bloody Sunday, when 13 people were killed. It gave rise to the longest and costliest inquiry in British legal history.

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The Saville Inquiry published its findings in 2010 — a full 12 years after it was established — and found that a number of the soldiers present on the day fired in a way that was “unjustified and unjustifiable”. And yet, for the soldiers who took part, the Saville inquiry was of little utility. They were granted legal immunity from future prosecution so long as they told the truth. But a number of the soldiers — most notably the man known as Soldier F — perjured themselves in their attempts to whitewash their actions, thus leaving themselves open for future prosecution.

Not that anyone was in any hurry to do so. After Lord Saville’s report was published, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) announced that it would begin a murder investigation into the killings. And there was a distinct sense of foot-dragging around the matter.

The PSNI announced that it would have to begin its investigations as though they were starting from scratch, implying that the incomparably detailed Saville report had no worth. It took almost a decade for them to decide to only prosecute one of the soldiers — Soldier F — for his actions on the day. Even now Soldier F only faces prosecution for two of the deaths he was most likely responsible for — much to the horror of the families of other victims, who are believed to have been killed by Soldier F.

Today, discussion surrounding Soldier F’s prosecution tends to be strikingly reductive: either wholeheartedly in support of the prosecution or in defence of the veteran.

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And on the face of it, it seems like a straightforward decision to make. Having watched Soldier F testify in 2003 — and written a book on the matter — I can say with certainty that he is a liar. He pretends to have no memory of what happened on that day because he knows that what he did was indefensible; he disgraced not just his regiment but his country. In any normal situation, it would be impossible to justify not prosecuting him.

But the situation in Northern Ireland is not normal — not least because prosecutions there have become a very one-sided affair. In order to secure the current peace arrangements, it was necessary to take decisions that would ordinarily be unconscionable. Most notably, the British government, led by Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell, carried out secret side-deals with the IRA and its political wing Sinn Fein as part of the Good Friday Agreement. These included the assurance to unconvicted terrorists who were “on the run” that they would not be prosecuted for their historic crimes.

Blair and Campbell kept the existence of these letters classified, knowing full well that the British public would not be able to stomach them. Indeed, these “get out of jail free” letters remained such a secret that when John Downey was prosecuted in 2014 for his participation in the IRA’s 1982 Hyde Park Bombing, the trial collapsed when the defence produced the assurances secretly given to Downey by the British government.

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Downey was as responsible for the Hyde Park Bombing as Soldier F was for Bloody Sunday — yet it is only one of these men who faces prosecution. And as a result, many believe there is a double-standard at play here: why should Soldier F face the possibility of being charged one day when a number of the terrorists Britain was fighting are able to walk free?

Certainly it’s a legitimate concern. But is this double-standard not defensible? After all, Downey was a member of a proscribed terrorist organisation, while Soldier F was a serving representative of the state. Surely a soldier must be held to a higher standard than a terrorist?

For the most part, that claim has a certain appeal, and if it were the case that the army still has lessons to learn from Bloody Sunday and its aftermath, then it might be more applicable. But it is almost fifty years since Bloody Sunday happened, and the inquiries into it — in particular the Saville Inquiry — have already established the many lessons that should have been learned. There has even been a Prime Ministerial apology for the actions of British soldiers on the day. What more is there to achieve?

Mercer, then, was right to condemn the Government for failing on its promise not to allow former servicemen to appear in court. But now that he is on the backbenches, perhaps he can put forward a more subtle argument that needs making.

For ultimately, even in the case of Soldier F, there is little need to condone or defend the historical actions of the few rogue British troops in Northern Ireland. That doesn’t mean whitewashing Soldier F for his crimes, any more than it means whitewashing Downey for his.

But either both men are in court or neither is. Make that case, and it’s up to Sinn Fein and their supporters to make the next move.

His is a murky affair. After leaving office earlier than expected, Cameron scooped up a number of lucrative jobs. As well as accepting a role in a new $1 billion Chinese investment fund, he was signed up in 2018 by Greensill Capital. The finance firm was run by the Australian financier Lex Greensill, who had worked for Cameron during the time he was at No 10.

Last year, according to the Sunday Times investigation, Cameron attempted to lobby members of the current government to give Greensill access to state-backed pandemic loans. This included texting the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, arranging a private drink with Greensill and Health Secretary Matt Hancock to discuss a new payment scheme, and contacting a number of ministers at the Treasury about Greensill’s business.

Cameron’s lobbying was a spectacular failure: Sunak and others remained unmoved by Cameron’s pleas; Greensill was denied the government-backed loans and the company ultimately collapsed. The whole sorry saga appeared to be another demonstration of the former prime minister’s negotiation skills.

It is hard not to conclude that, while the fall-out of Greensill’s collapse will no doubt affect thousands of investors, Cameron is the biggest loser. For although it seems he neglected to inform his former colleagues, Cameron held significant share options in Greensill. And he reportedly boasted to friends that he stood to gain up to $60 million from his share-options, a figure he has since disputed.

But whatever the rough number, it seems Cameron expected to become very rich off the back of his involvement with the firm. Today that investment is worthless — and the former PM has proved himself not just incompetent, but also greedy, lazy and somewhat entitled: someone used to the idea that he can somehow make money easily without having to do much more than lift a finger and dial.

Yet as so often with scandals of this type, it is what it reveals about an underlying culture that is of more importance than simply one person’s behaviour. And that picture is even uglier.

In recent days, a number of Cameron’s predecessors have been careful to come out and highlight the importance of “integrity” in public life, particularly when it comes to former prime ministers cashing in on their connections. John Major, for instance, seems to be revelling in Cameron’s downfall, publicly calling for an overhaul of the ethics rules that bind former prime ministers.

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What's David Cameron hiding?

By James Hanning

It’s not clear why we should pay the slightest attention to what John Major thinks when it comes to post-prime ministerial ethics. He may have been one of post-war Britain’s worst and weakest prime ministers, but he has still managed to spend the recent decades quietly going about the business of self-enrichment.

It is surely undeniable that this enrichment has come as a result of the office that he held. If Major had not been able to make use of contacts that he made while in Downing Street, why, for instance, would he have ever been made European Chairman of the Carlyle Group, a global investment firm? For Major, as for others, his market-value after leaving No 10 came not just from his judicious insights but from the fruitful introductions and door-openings he could offer.

It is the same with Major’s successor, Tony Blair, who blighted his own legacy after leaving office by deciding to become as rich as his high-flying circle of friends. Like Major, Blair took up numerous lucrative roles after leaving politics. From the US to the Middle East and Kazakhstan, Blair and his entourage have made considerable fortunes from his Downing Street “expertise”.

And now Cameron. The cronyism and corruption of public life are obviously worrying aspects to this sorry saga. But there are other fears which are less often noted. The concern, for instance, that those who have held high public office in our country think that they are somehow “owed” for the service they have done. This may seem like an understandable instinct. But it is also an ignoble one — for the simple reason that it suggests that public service at the highest level in the land is not an honour or a duty, but rather some sort of burden. That after holding such an onerous position there is something not only right but justified in senior politicians finally being rewarded for their sufferings.

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And then there is another, deeper, fear; one which is rarely spoken about. It is the fear that when former prime ministers behave as Cameron appears to have done, it is because they know something that the rest of us do not.

The prime ministerial salary is not small, and while it is true that the heads of many companies earn more than £150,000 a year, most British families can only imagine earning that kind of money. It is the same with the lucrative book deals that Cameron, Blair and others have received once they left office. Most people could be forgiven for thinking that after receiving a nest-egg of a few million for writing your memoirs, it should be possible to sit back for a bit, stretch your legs and retire.

Of course, one of the reasons that these scandals seem to descend on our recent political leaders is that in recent decades Britain has been subjected to a spate of youngish senior politicians, thrown out of office relatively early when they still have another act left in them. Nick Clegg, for example, chose to sell out by going to enrich himself at Facebook.

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But a deeper, more disconcerting problem looms over a question about why, given there are so many ex-leaders knocking about, our recently departed politicians feel the need to be so rich. After all, David Cameron comes from a particularly well-off family, while the others were certainly never going to struggle. So why do they need so much money? What exactly is it that these ex-politicians think that they are escaping from?

Certainly these are turbulent times; the global economy, ravaged by a pandemic, has never looked so vulnerable. If a financial crisis were to occur, it hardly needs saying that one way to avoid it would be to pole-vault into a stratosphere of extraordinary wealth. There, one’s standard of living isn’t so dependent on day-to-day trivialities like the survival of Britain’s high-street banks and the introduction of negative interest rates.

Obviously we ordinary voters can never know Cameron’s true motivation. But either way, the Greensill affair seems to confirm a suspicion held by many: that a disturbing number of our former political leaders are willing to destroy their reputations simply in order to escape the rest of us.

Last year, for instance, we had the diaries of Sasha Swire. She was the first member of the Cameron circle — her husband being former MP and Cameron chum Hugo Swire — to spill its secrets. The serial rights for her diaries were bought by the Sunday Times, and inevitably the newspaper was eager to make comparisons with leading diarists of the past. Indeed, the paper’s publicity shot for the first serial — printed on the cover of its magazine — showed Swire sitting in bed, surrounded by the day’s newspapers, pen in hand, glasses and diary at the ready, with a volume of Alan Clark’s memoirs on the bedside table.

Yet the comparison harmed more than it helped; it merely made the thinness of the material on offer look  thinner still. Swire’s revelations changed nothing and illuminated nothing. They showed the Cameron circle to be exactly what we thought they were: fairly entitled, noticeably cliquey and slightly lazy. Apart from a throw-away sexual reference that Cameron once made to Sasha Swire, all that was on offer was the startling revelation that Conservative party politics is replete with jostling, resentment and failure. Swire distinguished herself only in being the first of her tribe to betray the pack-leader.

Now, less than a year on, we have another contender for “great diarist of the decade”: Sir Alan Duncan. In a similar format to Swire’s, Duncan’s new book was bought for serialisation by the Daily Mail, which grandly described Duncan’s efforts as “the most explosive political diaries ever”. Inevitably, they also ran with “Alan Clark, eat your heart out”.

Poor Alan Clark. If anything, Duncan’s efforts are even more tedious and less revelatory than Sasha Swire’s. He “reveals”, for instance, that his old Oxford contemporary Theresa May was not a very good people-person; that the special advisors around her had rather too much influence and power. He also “reveals” that he has a great dislike for Boris Johnson, describing him as a “buffoon” and as a “selfish, ill-disciplined, shambolic, shameless clot”. Yes, it was quite the scoop.

Perhaps the situation would have been different had the shots come from someone who had hitherto displayed the discipline and restraint of a Trappist monk. But Duncan has never been quiet about his dislike of the Prime Minister: just two years ago, he could be found in every newspaper criticising Johnson for his “fly by the seats of his pants, haphazard” style. To be fair to Duncan, back then he could also be found telling the BBC that he felt no personal animosity towards Johnson, and indeed “wanted him to succeed”.

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But as his diaries make clear, Duncan never wanted Johnson — or, for that matter, any of his colleagues — to “succeed”. Indeed, it is hard to find a single politician who Duncan admires: Priti Patel is a “witch”, Andrea Leadsom “despicable”, Andrea Jenkyns “ghastly”, Steve Baker “useless” and so on.

But tedious as they are, his witless insults shed some valuable light on why diaries such as Duncan’s often fail. For in order for a diary to be great, it must first give the reader a window on to a world we would otherwise never have seen. Second, the diarist must be able to write with some degree of self-analysis or self-knowledge. Alan Clark, for instance, was extremely aware of his flaws: as a womaniser, a snob and an otherwise often unlikeable figure.

Duncan, like Swire before him, illuminates nothing, while his vanity makes self-reflection impossible. For example, in his book he is dismissive of those who he believes supported Brexit for opportunistic reasons — without any reference to his own opportunism. There is, for instance, no mention of reports that, at an early stage in the EU referendum, Duncan met with the heads of Vote Leave to discuss taking a leading role in the campaign. When it became clear that Vote Leave might have more senior politicians than Duncan to call upon, he went to the other side. What can be said of such behaviour? Is it principled or opportunistic? Duncan — unlike Clark — is unwilling to say.

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It is the same whenever Duncan seeks to find explanations for jobs he wanted but was not offered. During the 2016 reshuffle, he hoped to not only get the junior portfolio at the Foreign Office, which he was given, but also the job of Minister for the Middle East. His explanation? That the Conservative Friends of Israel went ”ballistic”; that people didn’t want him because “I believe in the rights of Palestinians and it’s quite clear that they don’t. They just want to belittle and subjugate the Palestinians.”

What Duncan does not seem to understand is that it is precisely for statements like that one that he was so unfit for the role he so desired. Put to one side the fact that he made his money in oil deals in the Middle East before entering politics. Or that his analysis of the landscape was even more unsubtle and unnuanced that his diaries portray them to be.

The main reason Duncan could never have been made Minister for the Middle East is that he had a history of sounding-off in unusually partisan terms against a country which is a major ally of the United Kingdom. It is because he spent years saying things that were undiplomatic that Duncan was never made the UK’s top diplomat. Not a surprise, really.

Somehow, the more we learn of the generation of politicians that has just left us, the less you want to know. At one point in his diaries, dated May 2019, Duncan confides that he has just had breakfast with David Cameron: “He is so glad not to be in the middle of everything that is going on at the moment.”

They are just as we thought: shallow, vainglorious, entitled and unremarkable. If they are glad not to be in the middle of “everything that is going on at the moment”, suffice it to say that the feeling is very much mutual.

For Christians, this week is the most important of the year. And this year’s Holy Week is, around the world, unlike any other. With churches shut, and services either cancelled or streamed online from all-but empty buildings, people will have to find their own space for contemplation. And that goes for non-believers, and lapsed or non-practising Christians, as well as the unambiguously religious.

For my own part, whether I have been in or out of faith, this week has always presented the richest musical opportunities. And though we can’t gather together these days, we can at least swop sources online; so I thought I might share some of the music which for me makes up Holy Week, and which can be heard for free. It is a feast rich enough to fill the long weekend, if not a lifetime.

St Matthew Passion, Bach — performed by Willem Mengelberg and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

Normally in this week I would try to go to a performance of Bach’s St John or St Matthew Passion. I’ve heard some wonderful performances — and a few average ones — over the years, but in some ways the performance doesn’t matter because absolutely nothing can diminish the power of these works.

Of course, both have been recorded more times than can be counted. But this week I have been listening again, as I have most years, to a performance whose style is out of fashion, but which has an extra depth that never fails to move me.

This is the recording of the Matthew Passion broadcast on Dutch Radio on Palm Sunday 1939. The annual performance at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam goes on to this day. But the conductor on this recording is the great Willem Mengelberg (1871-1951), who had been conducting the event since 1899.

While the circumstances of the performance should not overshadow the music, from the first bars of the opening chorus (“Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen” / “Come you daughters, help me to lament”) there is a portentousness that makes you breathe differently for a moment. The performance is moving in so many ways, particularly because we now know what that audience — whose occasional coughs you can hear — were about to go through.

Naturally I would recommend listening to it all, but if you must skip, then wait until the end of the opening chorus, then move on to the great Dutch soprano Jo Vincent sing the aria ‘Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben’ (‘Out of love my saviour is willing to die’) which starts at 2:00:59. The whole performance is miraculously available on YouTube. Just listen to those repetitions of the words ‘Aus Liebe’, with those flute notes tumbling down.

Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae, Thomas Tallis — performed by the Deller Consort

Period recordings are always a fraught issue. And in general I listen to modern recordings. But sometimes a particular performance is the one you’ve been brought up with or heard first — or has some other quality which keeps it high above all others.

The Lamentations of Jeremiah by Thomas Tallis is one of the jewels of the Holy Week musical liturgy. There are several great recordings, but this one by the Deller Consort from 1958 is the one I listen to most often.

The voice of the countertenor Alfred Deller is not to everyone’s taste, and there are those weird gear-changes in his voice that a modern counter-tenor wouldn’t get away with. But he was a pioneer and it is the fragility of Deller’s voice soaring above the others that makes this recording so special. His voice sounds as though it is going to crack at any moment and in a way it is the sense of how nearly it could go wrong that makes it so clear that it is right.

The full Latin text (beginning “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people”) can be found online. For me the first rendition of “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum” (“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return unto the Lord thy God”) at about 7 mins in here, is the demonstration of Tallis’s — and Deller’s — greatness.

The Lamentations, Edward Bairstow — performed by the Choir of York Minster

Whilst we are on Lamentations, there is one other setting from the English choral tradition which I must flag up, because it is much less well known than the Tallis. This one from Edward Bairstow was composed in 1942. I had never heard the piece until I started attending the Good Friday service at St Paul’s Cathedral some years ago: a great service, during which the choir always sing Tallis’s Litany in procession, the Allegri Miserere and this piece from Bairstow.

This is a recording from York Minster, but you can imagine the effect of those organ chords each time the choir sings ‘Jerusalem’ in St Paul’s. It isn’t a masterpiece, but it is a magnificent setting of the words and there is something deeply moving about a piece written so firmly in the Anglican choral tradition.

Versa est in luctum, Alonso Lobo — performed by the Tenebrae Choir

One piece that most certainly is a masterpiece — and from a very different choral tradition — is this work by the sixteenth century Spanish composer Alonso Lobo. In my experience, Lobo is one of those composers who, whenever you hear anything by him, makes you immediately wonder why you don’t listen to him all the time. The recording of his magnificent ‘Versa est in luctum’ here is sung by the wonderful ensemble Tenebrae, and was recorded last year in the church of St Bartholomew the Great in London.

The Latin words have been set by many other composers, including Victoria. But I know no setting as intensely moving as this one.

Versa est in luctum cithara mea, et organum meum in vocem flentium.
Parce mihi Domine, nihil enim sunt dies mei.

[My harp is turned to grieving and my flute to the voice of those who weep.
Spare me, O Lord, for my days are as nothing.]

Officium defunctorum: Parce mihi Domine — performed by the Monteverdi Choir

Incidentally, some people may know the setting of the last of these words by the slightly earlier Spanish composer Cristobal de Morales. The Hilliard Ensemble made it famous again some years ago in a setting with saxophone improvisation on top, but the sparseness of the original saxophone-less version remains my favourite. Here it is courtesy of the Monteverdi Choir.

Tenebrae responsories: O vos omnes, Tomás Luis de Victoria — performed by the Cambridge Singers

I could go on, of course. Anyone thinking I unfairly skirted over Victoria earlier might be placated by the fact that I don’t think any Holy Week should be gone through without at least one listen to his setting of ‘O vos omnes’ (the words are “O all you who walk by on the road, pay attention and see if there be any sorrow like my sorrow”). Any choristers reading will know that every phrase in this piece (especially ‘Attendite’) is as beautiful to sing as it is to hear.

Here is a recording (with score, for anyone who wants to sing along) by the Cambridge Singers.

Apparition de l’Eglise éternelle, Olivier Messiaen — performed by Olivier Latry

Of course, all of these works are works of mourning and lamentation, composed to fit the dejection and desolation of the Holy Week story, leading up to the crucifixion on Good Friday. Easter Sunday of course changes everything, including the music. But that is to get ahead of ourselves. Perhaps I might finish this Holy Week playlist with a rather different final piece.

One of my favourite composers is Olivier Messiaen, the great expander of the organ repertoire, and one of the searing religious visionaries of the twentieth century. One piece of his which is worth turning the volume up on (especially if you have some good bass speakers) is this short work from 1932, ‘Apparition de l’Eglise éternelle’ (‘The apparition of the eternal church’).

I select it not just because it looks forward to what is to come, but because this recording (with score) was made on the great organ of Notre Dame in Paris. Perhaps one Easter soon it will be played in that great cathedral again. It will be very much in the spirit of the Easter story if it is.

*

As an addendum, I might just say: these are tough times for many musicians, like everybody else. Huge amounts of work have been lost. So if these recordings or others that have been made available on YouTube do appeal to you, please do buy the artists’ albums, or those of other groups, and think about booking tickets for their next concerts. We will get back the joy of hearing live music again.

In recent decades, this law has held firm nowhere so much as in the business of “race relations”, where one hammer in particular has been on very public display: the casual accusation of “racism”. Allegations of racism have for decades been among the most serious accusations that can be made against a person; likewise, since the publication of the Macpherson report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, an allegation of “institutional racism” has been the most serious accusation that can be made against an organisation.

With this in mind, it was perhaps inevitable that, by virtue of their potency, such accusations would end up being wielded as a substitute for evidence. And so for years, to set up an investigation into an institution on matters to do with race was to pre-ordain the outcome: the institution always had to be found guilty.

So the list of institutions that have been subjected to accusations of institutional racism has come to encompass almost every corner of British public life. The Church of England has been described as “institutionally racist” by no less a figure than the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is in good company, along with the The National Trust and the entire “British countryside”.

Of course, the problem with these accusations is not just their inaccuracy or predictability. The problem is that they distract from any genuine, meaningful attempts to investigate the complex issues of race in Britain. It is, therefore, fortunate that a new report ordered by the British government following the Black Lives Matter protests last year has shown it is possible to buck this trend.

Indeed, the report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, published yesterday, is proof that we can do without Maslow’s hammer. Its findings are nuanced and well-researched; it concludes that while Britain is not an entirely “post-racial” society, the success of much of the ethnic minority population “should be regarded as a model for other white-majority countries”. It also details how certain ethnic minorities are driving high educational achievement for children, and that this in turn is creating fairer and more diverse workplaces.

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All in all, despite its acknowledgement that more work needs to be done, the report paints an encouraging portrait of race relations in Britain. And yet, predictably, this news has not gone down well in all quarters. While conceding that he had not yet read the report, Labour leader Keir Starmer said that he found it “disappointing”, because there is still “a reluctance to accept that that’s structural”. For his part, Starmer has invested heavily in the “racism is institutional” narrative, and so of course it must be deeply unsatisfying for someone to suggest that any remaining issues cannot simply be solved by, for instance, “taking the knee”.

The same applies to Rehana Azam, the national secretary of the GMB trade union. Before the report was even released, she did what any campaigning union leader might be expected to do. Fulsomely quoted in the headline of a Guardian report, and elsewhere, Azam managed to accuse the Commission’s findings of “gaslighting” and “ignoring black and ethnic minority workers’s worries and concerns”, of being “cynical”, “irresponsible”, “immoral” and more. “Institutional racism exists,” said Azam, and is “the lived experience of millions of black and ethnic minority workers”. Her evidence? That ethnic minorities are dying in greater numbers from Covid.

Her allegation, like the question of educational attainment, is a fine example of the problem of the hammer approach. For if it is the case that specific demographics are disproportionately likely to die from Covid, then there might be a variety of reasons for that. It could have something to do with underlying health conditions in those communities; or with the type of jobs members of that community disproportionately perform; or even with their household arrangements and social habits. Members of Britain’s Orthodox community, for example, have been accused of flouting lockdown rules by continuing with mass-participation events. If the statistics show a larger uptick in Covid-related deaths in the Orthodox community, then might such social factors be at least a part of the explanation? The answer, of course, is “yes”.

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But if you have only one tool — and that tool is “institutional racism” — that can never be the case. If you have already decided on the explanation for the problem, any attempt at sensible analysis is impossible.

Nowhere are the effects of this doctrinaire approach more pernicious than in the area of educational attainment. In the past, differentials in educational attainment were put down by some to genetic factors; the outperformance of a particular racial group was explained by making reference to the genetic superiority of one group over another. For reasons to do with inaccuracy as much as unpalatability, this explanation has declined in popularity. But if someone today were to enter a discussion wielding the hammer of genetic traits, we would all be able to see what they were doing: rather than being interesting in discussion, their conclusion had already been decided.

Today, with its emphasis on “institutional racism”, a new all-purpose tool has come into existence. But as anyone can see from the evidence provided in the Commission’s report, certain groups do outperform other groups — but this doesn’t necessarily point to “racism”. It notes, for instance, that “the average GCSE Attainment 8 score for Indian, Bangladeshi and Black African pupils were above the White British average”. It is the same with the issue of an alleged “pay gap” between ethnic minorities and the white majority population. The Commission’s report says that this pay gap did exist, but that it has shrunk to 2.3%. It further concludes that in 2019, among the under 30s, there was no significant pay gap between any ethnic minority group and the white majority in work.

This is in line with what a range of sociologists and commentators have tried to point to in recent years: namely, that where disparities do still exist in Britain, they might be explained by a whole range of factors, including social class and family structure. As the Commission concludes, “some of the disparities we examined, which some attribute to racial discrimination, often do not have their origins in racism”. And so it’s no wonder that so many self-proclaimed “progressives” have responded to the report with such fury. After all, the one tool that they have wielded to solve every problem, both real and imaginary, is in the process of being prised carefully from their hands.

As the leaders of the EU’s member states prepare to meet tomorrow for a European Council meeting, I suspect few believe it will be another “touching moment of unity”. For the truth is that the “European success story” has been anything but.

Even at the last meeting of the European Council, roughly a fortnight before Von der Leyen’s victory lap, the mood was hardly buoyant. During the all-night session, the representatives of the member countries failed to agree on everything except for the fact that a no-deal scenario was the most likely outcome of the Brexit process — another EU prophecy that has since unravelled.

Yet there remains a sense of solemnity to these European Council meetings. They are, after all, often convened in times of crisis. And whether it’s the collapse of the Eurozone, the sudden wave of migrants or the emergence of a new deadly coronavirus, if the past decade has taught us anything, it’s that the EU has never been short on crises.

Of course, not all of these disasters are of the EU’s own making — though some certainly have been. But throughout each of them, a remarkable trend has emerged: that no matter how bad the situation is, the EU always finds a way to make it worse.

When, for example, the Eurozone crisis hit in 2010, the federalists were intent on showing that only the EU could save the Mediterranean countries from economic collapse. Far less important for Brussels was the fact that Greece, in particular, would not have been in this mess if it had not been accepted into the Eurozone in the first place. Similarly, when the immigration crisis peaked five years later, Brussels insisted that only a unified block could respond to such a challenge. Predictably, it failed to take into account that it was failures at an EU level — in particular its unilateral approach to migration policies — that had exacerbated the problem in the first place.

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And now we are seeing the results of the EU’s botched handling of the Corona crisis. Despite Von der Leyen’s promise of vaccine success, Paris has just gone into another lockdown and Germany is set to implement nationwide restrictions over Easter. Meanwhile, the vaccine roll-out across the majority of the bloc remains calamitously slow.

Yet while it’s easy to criticise individual governments and leaders for mistakes in their countries, we must not lose sight of how the EU’s decision-making has often amounted to nothing more than a catalogue of errors.

First there was the whole issue of vaccine development, with French and German companies both being protected by their respective governments even as they preached a message of unity. Then there came the procurement disaster, in which Franco-German protectionism once again delayed production. Then there was the disaster of the roll-out, where the bloc’s efforts to ensure that nobody raced ahead meant that every country advanced at the slowest rate possible. In the meantime, the Commission still found the time to order raids on laboratories and threaten to seize AstraZeneca manufacturing plants.

The Commission has, of course, apologised after every misfire. But on no occasion has it looked as though it has learned its lesson. At present, the EU seems more focused on the bloc’s “bad boys”, notably Hungary, for going their own way and acquiring massive quantities of the Russian and Chinese vaccines. Yet in Hungary, the country’s vaccination rate has raced ahead with around 16% of its population having received at least one jab, as opposed to a mere 9% average in the bloc as a whole.

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In the face of these facts, one would expect tomorrow’s Council meeting to be a sombre if not sobering affair. But as those who have attended previous Council meetings can attest, they rarely are any such thing — for the simple reason that the Council is incapable of absorbing criticisms which cast any negative light on its own direction of travel.

Evidence from around the world suggests that countries which are limber and independent — such as Israel, Singapore and Britain — have been able to act swiftly during the pandemic, particularly with regard to vaccinations. Indeed, there is no logical reason why EU countries could not have been allowed to pursue independent vaccine development, procurement and roll-out. Except for the fact that any such conclusion runs counter to the heart of the EU’s fundamental principle: that its members must act in concert.

In Brussels, it has already been decided that an EU-wide approach is always the only approach. And as we are seeing, it will doggedly remain committed to the wrong answer even when that answer has been proved wrong. There are, of course, issues on which a multilateral approach are needed, as there are issues on which unilateral policies are required. But once you have decided that there is never — and never will be — an alternative, you are bound to encounter problems which you cannot solve.

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In recent years, critics of the EU have repeatedly noted that while there was much criticism in Brussels of the UK for leaving the bloc, there was no self-reflection over why we might have chosen that decision. There were none of the procedures in place that would normally allow a political entity to consider criticisms and adapt accordingly. Why is this? Because if you believe that the answer to everything is an “ever-closer union”, then contemplating the benefits of a more relaxed arrangement is an impossible task.

All of which grates somewhat, given how the EU repeatedly asserted that it was Brexiteers who were the immovable ideologues; when, as Brussels’s recent behaviour has shown, in reality it is the EU that is riddled with blind obstinance. So when the European Council meets tomorrow, expect it to blame everyone but itself. And as a result, when the next crisis comes around, expect it to fail yet again.

The first belonged, to Piers Morgan, who was forced to quit Good Morning Britain after six successful if noisy years for daring to express disbelief at a number of the Duchess’s claims. The claiming of the second scalp, however, has attracted far less attention — even though it serves as an equally, if not more, damning parable for our times…

Do facts still matter? On the face of it, that question appears to have a straightforward answer: of course facts matter; fact-checking is a divine skill and the best defence we have against so-called “fake news”. But in today’s troubled climate, you’re increasingly likely to be given an altogether different response: “Facts? Why are you demanding facts. Don’t be racist.”

Just ask Ian Murray, who until this week was the executive director of the Society of Editors, but now finds himself jobless. The Society attempts, in its own words, to “fight for media freedom”. But as Mr Murray (no relation) has discovered, media freedom is just as elastic as almost every other freedom in this freedom-less age.

In this regard, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s interview with Oprah Winfrey was something of a litmus test. In a free society, people would be able to watch it and draw a number different, but acceptable, conclusions. In an unfree society, however, only one permissible opinion would be allowed. If the past days have taught us anything, then surely it is clear that we have failed this test. The second reality has been borne out, and, as a result, Mr Murray has been forced to end his career.

One of the most disturbing accusations levelled by both Harry and Meghan during their interview concerned the toxicity of the British press, in particular the British tabloids. But a claim does not become true simply because a Duke or Duchess says it. Indeed, it is striking that while the comments made by the Sussexes on the Royal Family have been heavily scrutinised in recent days, their accusations against the British press have managed to slide by, accepted as though they were simply fact.

It didn’t matter that their claims — presented, it should be noted, more as assertions — were particularly egregious: that the reason why Meghan and Harry had come in for criticism from the British press was because Meghan identifies as black, thus implying that the British media is racist.

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How Meghan won

By Douglas Murray

In the face of such damning charges, it is striking that much of the media has chosen to keep its head down; the Guardian proved a notable exception, predictably endorsing the Sussexes’s worldview. As for the others, I suspect their silence come from a simple and understandable desire not to get in the line of fire.

In the end, the only person brave enough to stand up for Britain’s newspapers turned out to be the since-departed executive director of the Society of Editors. In a statement issued after the Sussexes’s interview, he rightly pointed out that the British press “is not bigoted and will not be swayed from its vital role holding the rich and powerful to account”. It continued: “It is not acceptable for the Duke and Duchess to make such claims without providing any supporting evidence.”

In itself, such a statement should have been unremarkable. But as the fall-out from the past few days has shown, demanding “supporting evidence” can you turn you into a pariah.

In this instance, I suspect that’s probably because when the Sussexes and their supporters talk about racism towards Meghan, genuine examples are never forthcoming. For example, at one point during the interview, Oprah launched into a monologue detailing how Meghan “became the target of unrelenting, pervasive attacks” when she joined the royal family.

To illustrate her point, a selection of allegedly racist headlines from British newspapers appeared on screen. Pretty damning stuff, you might think. Except for the fact that a significant proportion of the headlines were taken completely out of context. More than a third of the articles shown during the interview were from American and Australian publications. And in the case one of the most egregious headlines — “Meghan’s seed will taint our Royal Family” — Oprah failed to mention that the purpose of the news story was actually to expose racist comments made by a model.

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Point this out to the Sussexes, though, and no doubt they’ll respond that their treatment has still been particularly unpleasant. But such a claim wrongly assumes that other members of the Royal Family have managed to avoid intrusive or negative coverage from the media; or that, when they have, it hasn’t amounted to much. When Meghan, in her Oprah interview, acknowledged that the Duchess of Cambridge had been branded “Waity Katie” by the media for waiting so long for Prince William to propose to her, it was telling that she went on to conclude, with Oprah’s encouragement, that Kate’s unpleasant experience didn’t compare to her own.

As it happens, I find it rather telling that Meghan chose this particular example to illustrate media intrusion into Kate’s life. For when it comes to intrusion, is there anything more intrusive than the publication of photos, in the French press, of the Duchess of Cambridge topless? Unpleasant as it may be, it’s the simple truth that the world’s press is intensely interested in every aspect of the Royal family, and that they are interested in it because their readers — the public — want them to be.

That’s why Ian Murray was entirely right, as the head of a body representing editors, to push back against the unsubstantiated claims made by the Sussexes; to say that if high-profile figures such as Harry and Meghan are going to accuse the press of singling them out, let alone being racist in the process, then they should show proof.

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In a reasonable age that would be a reasonable demand. And that was the only mistake Murray made: forgetting that this age is far from reasonable. The Society of Editors was soon targeted by the usual online activists and Murray was forced to resign, announcing that he had to “take the blame” for his initial statement. “While I do not agree the society’s statement was in any way intended to defend racism, I accept it could have been much clearer in its condemnation of bigotry and has clearly caused upset,” he said.

A new statement from the Murray-less board made the necessary confession, acknowledging that there is “a lot of work to be done in the media to improve diversity and inclusion”. The society went on to promise that it “will reflect on the reaction our statement prompted and work towards being part of the solution.”

So another person finds themselves without a job and another institution bends towards the dogmatic orthodoxies of the time. There are ugly winds in the air. And with evidence and facts unable to save us, I fear Mr Murray’s scalp will not be the last.

Typified by its remarkable tendency to sound both sincere and insincere simultaneously, this Sussex-ese appeared again in a separate news story this week. “[We are] saddened by this latest attack on her character, particularly as someone who has been the target of bullying herself and is deeply committed to supporting those who have experienced pain and trauma,” the author wrote. “She is determined to continue her work building compassion around the world and will keep striving to set an example for doing what is right and doing what is good.”

No doubt you will have guessed by now how Sussex-ese was given its name. Both of the above statements come from the House of Sussex, specifically from the spokesperson for the Duchess of Sussex and/or the Duchess herself. And I suspect that they won’t be the last — by all accounts, Sussex-ese is here to stay.

As tempting as it may be, it is not enough to dismiss the House of Sussex’s latest statements as bland, sub-Obama pabulum. They almost always have a certain twist of their own; a style which suggests that Harry and, more importantly, Meghan are not only surprised, but almost amazed that anybody might think ill of them. Excerpts from the couple’s upcoming interview with Oprah Winfrey only confirm this.

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History is, of course, rife with examples of princes and their spouses expressing their distaste with the lèse-majesté of their critics. But what’s different about Sussex-ese is that it is a creation born not from the Duke’s blue blood, so much as the couple’s unquestionably golden intentions. And as a result, a very modern form of deference is demanded: do not criticise me, for I am doing much good in the world.

Take the first quote above. It relates to the Duchess’s recent successful privacy case against the Mail on Sunday, which published excerpts of a private letter sent by Meghan to her estranged father. Now you could be forgiven for thinking that, even if she weren’t a former actress, the relationship between the wife of the person sixth in line to the British throne and her father is a matter of public interest. You would, however, be wrong — at least that’s the implication of the judge’s decision to halt the trial before witnesses could be called.

But even if you agree with Lord Justice Warby, it is hard to see how “we all won” because of it.  For example, you may not approve of the type of prurient Royal-watcher who wishes to know every detail of the Duchess’s life, but clearly those people don’t view the verdict as a “win”. More importantly, though, there is something deeply unsavoury about the attempt to extrapolate Meghan’s personal victory into a universal one, particularly since most people will never be in a position remotely analogous to the one in which the Sussexes find themselves.

The same can also be said of their response this week to accusations that Meghan bullied two royal aides out of Kensington Palace. Perhaps anticipating that the Sussex’s Oprah interview will show everyone but Harry and Meghan in a bad light, the bullying story may well have been a pre-emptive defence of sorts from London.

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Either way, the nature of the Sussexes’ response — talking about how “saddened” they are — was entirely in fitting with the sanctimonious language used by so many public figures today. What is uncommon, however, is for a person of such power as Meghan to deflect the harm caused to her alleged victims by stressing her own victim-credentials.

This is exactly what the Duchess does by saying that she has been “the target of bullying herself”. And, of course, this Sussex-ese makes almost no sense. There is no reason why someone who has been bullied cannot themselves be a bully; in fact, we’re constantly told the opposite. Yet it isn’t until the claim at the end of the statement that the Sussex-ese becomes completely overpowering. We must assume that the Sussexes have some idea, at least, of statements put out in their name. So how could they possibly allow a statement that claims Meghan “is determined to continue her work building compassion around the world” to be published? Try it for yourself. If a person asked if they could describe you as a person who is busy building “compassion around the world”, would you not turn around and suggest that it could be toned down a bit?

That isn’t to say that the Duchess has had an inconsequential career. But appearing in Suits, marrying a Prince and starting a podcast are eccentric ways to make the world a better place — let alone “set an example”. Indeed, what kind of person honestly believes that everyone should look to them as a beacon “for doing what is right and doing what is good”? Even the Archbishop of Canterbury wouldn’t claim such moral authority.

Unfortunately, the rise of Sussex-ese suggests that the Sussexes have drifted away not just from the world that created them but, particularly in the case of Harry, from the world that grounded them. The type of service embodied in both the army and the Royal family is such that you should not have to say that you are saving the world.

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And as we can now see, when you do bestow that authority on yourself, your inevitable failure is made all the more bitter. For if the latest bullying allegations are true, they will serve as very public proof that the Duchess of Sussex has failed at her own self-appointed mission. You cannot spread love, compassion and understanding around the world if you are cruel and bullying to the people around you — especially those who are, in hierarchy terms, unquestionably below you.

And that is why the creation of Sussex-ese was never going to be convincing. People do not like being told what to do, think or feel by people they do not admire. As working royals, the Sussexes accumulated a certain amount of respect — but that all vanished when they gave up a life of duty for one that enables them to preach from a number of well-remunerated platforms.

If anything, all Sussex-ese does is allow Harry and Meghan to remain blissfully unaware of their fall from grace. It means that the Sussexes can continue to tell us how to “all win”, how to be good and how to save the world, oblivious to the fact that the further away from royal life they drift, the less moral authority they have. And therein lies the irony of it all: that in trying to escape the Firm, the Sussexes have ended up demanding more deference and behaving with more grandiosity than any British royal for generations.

The recent cancellation of Professor Gregory Clark at the University of Glasgow is a case in point. Yesterday, it was reported that Clark — a professor of economics at the University of California and visiting professor at the London School of Economics — was last week unable to give a lecture in Glasgow because of its title: “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: A Lineage of 400,000 Individuals 1750-2020 Shows Genetics Determines Most Social Outcomes”. The reference to John Donne’s poem, later appropriated by Ernest Hemingway, was not the problem. The allusion to the work of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein clearly was.

The Bell Curve, a 1994 book by Murray and Herrnstein, remains one of the most controversial pieces of analysis in the modern era. Though its critics tend not to have read the work, they insist that it not only argues for but positively rejoices in the idea that intelligence is largely determined by a person’s race. It is a misunderstanding that has rumbled on for over a quarter of a century, and every discussion of the book usually ends in acrimony. And so when Professor Clark hinted at the work in his lecture’s title, the university asked him to change it.

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In some ways, this was to be expected. The University of Glasgow had recently published a new report titled “Understanding Racism: Transforming University Cultures”, which sets out an action plan to make the university “an inclusive space for all”. As Clark himself put it: “My talk was regarded as a provocation in this situation. I had a half-hour Zoom meeting with the dean. He would reschedule the talk if I agreed to change the paper title to not have any reference to ‘bell curve’. I have refused.”

As soon as the disagreement was publicised, the online mob did what it always does and swiftly became an expert on a person previously unknown to them. Clark was slandered — just like Noah Carl and other academics before him — as a “eugenicist”, with one critic suggesting that the talk was due to be “a thinly disguised piece of book promotion by an economist who manipulates and misrepresents genetics to advance his pseudoscientific opinions”.

Indeed, the claim of Clark’s critics to know not only the content of his undelivered talk but also his intentions is all too characteristic of contemporary pile-ons. Today, it is not enough just to claim foresight, it is also necessary to pretend that you have complete insight into the motivations of those with whom you disagree.

No doubt this row will continue to roll on, with the university continuing to deny that it had “cancelled” Professor Clark’s lecture; its administrators claim that they will “continue to be in discussions” with him about finding “a suitable event” for his talk. Meanwhile, critics of cancel culture will add his name to the growing list of academics who have been uninvited from events due to their views.

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Yet it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect that, following this most recent incident, a pattern in the cancel-culture conflict has started to emerge.

If today’s censors only attempted to cancel events about one particular subject or historical individual, it would be easy to discern their motivations. But because the prevailing ethos of the age is so all-pervasive, we appear to be less able than we should be to discuss it and dismantle it in turn. However, as Professor Clark’s treatment shows, that ethos has become increasingly clear. It goes something like this: human beings are born with equal abilities, and any sub-optimal outcomes in their lives are caused by societal factors beyond their control but which can be adapted with enough collective effort.

The fact that this mantra prevails goes a long way to explaining why transgenderism has become such a focal point in the culture wars in recent years. For if you are able to move between the sexes at will, then it’s only natural to conclude that nothing about the situation we are born into can or should limit us. You may have been born with male chromosomes and have male genitalia, but if you wish to become a woman any day then you can. And vice versa. Whether you are male or female isn’t determined — it’s something you can choose.

And this is where Professor Clark’s cancellation is extremely revealing. Given we know little about his speech beyond its title, you could be forgiven for thinking that the university’s fearful authorities were simply scared about the prospect of activist pressure and a toxic fall-out.

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But this approach fails to explain why a talk that references Murray and Herrnstein’s book would inspire such vitriol in the first place. The university was not simply concerned that the content of Clark’s lecture may have been racist. It is about something far more profound: the fear that he would touch on another aspect of the The Bell Curve’s thought that goes against the emerging ideology of the time. The reason why so much energy is dedicated to shutting down any discussion of the issues addressed by Murray and Herrnstein in their book is that, just like with transgenderism, it raises an undeniably fearful spectre — the possibility that our life-outcomes are to a great extent reliant on factors over which we have no control.

Of course, there are dangerous avenues in discussions over the relationship between race and IQ. Eugenics poses one of the worst moral nightmares imaginable. But there are only two things you can do to tackle it. The first is to shut down all debate; a prospect incompatible with modern democracy. The other is to allow responsible discussion of it, along with many other uncomfortable subjects. And if this cannot take place in a university, it is hard to know if it can take place at all.

Still, Professor Clark’s cancellation reveals there is also a deeper discussion that we need to have — one that questions what our attitude should be towards the situation we are born into. The ethos of our era holds that if we organise society well enough, everyone can be whatever they like. And ultimately, the fact that the counter-position — that we are all to some extent dictated by factors outside of our control — is so little heard is an ominous sign. For if it is false then we need not be troubled by it. But if it is true, surely it is better that we find out now, while some semblance of rational discussion is still possible.