I’m on Andrew Doyle’s side – for now

I’ve agreed to interview the author and journalist Andrew Doyle about his new book at the Conservative party conference – on stage, no less – so I thought I’d better read it. It’s about the inexorable rise of the social justice warriors, whom he regards as a danger to the survival of free speech and, by extension, the institutions and traditions that our liberal democracy depends on.

My first reaction was one of irritation. The book is called The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World and it’s annoyingly similar to the title of a book I’ve been working on – Salem 2.0:the Return of the Religious Police to the Public Square. I’m not accusing Andrew of nicking the idea of comparing woke zealots to the witch-hunters of 17th-century Massachusetts – it’s pretty bleedin’ obvious – and fair play to him for actually writing his book. I’ve been working on mine since 2018 and I’ll probably never finish it. But I was irritated nonetheless.

Then it got worse. The book is very, very good. If someone’s going to beat you to the punch with a great book idea, the least they can do is write something crap. Not Andrew. Which shouldn’t really come as a surprise, since the little bastard is prodigiously talented. As many Spectator readers will know, he created the sublime Titania McGrath character on Twitter and, along with Andy Shaw, set up Comedy Unleashed, which gives a platform to politically incorrect comedians. He’s also a gifted stand-up in his own right and presents a weekly two-hour show on GB News called Free Speech Nation. Oh, and he has a PhD from Oxford in romantic poetry. How he found the time to write this 374-page book, I have no idea.

I suspect the reason it’s so good is because, for Andrew, there’s something personally traumatic about the emergence of this cult-like ideological movement. The book opens with an awkward encounter in a pub between the author and the husband of one of his oldest friends. After a few vodka martinis, he suddenly accuses Andrew of being a Nazi. Why? Because he’s defended free speech against the new generation of political activists who prefer to cancel their opponents than argue with them and, in the eyes of this man, that makes Andrew a ‘fascist’. It’s one of several topsy-turvy moments in the book which prompts the author to recall the words of Humpty Dumpty in Alice Through the Looking Glass: ‘When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’

As a conservative, I’m used to being smeared in this way – Polly Toynbee called me a ‘eugenicist’ in the Guardian. But Andrew is a lifelong left-winger, so it’s a comparatively new experience for him. In the book he says he supported the political correctness movement of the 1980s, seeing it as a way of introducing some much-needed courtesy into public debates about immigration and homosexuality, and he backed Jeremy Corbyn in the 2015 Labour leadership contest. In other words, Andrew is an apostate, someone who’s been cast out by his own tribe, and that means he has a personal stake in understanding the left’s embrace of this new authoritarian creed.

His overarching hypothesis is that this quasi-religious political crusade – which he calls the ‘Critical Social Justice’ movement – has its roots in the rejection of the liberal values embodied in the Enlightenment in favour of something more radical and utopian, whether that alternative is being promoted by the far left or the far right. The culture war, according to him, is not a battle between two equally extreme points of view, but between those who believe in human and civil rights, free speech, scientific inquiry, individualism and the rule of law – the good guys – and those who think there’s no such thing as truth or objective reality, that speech can be a form of violence, and that we are all products of systems of power and privilege revolving around group identity. This creed is a combination of post-modernist ideas and a nihilistic yearning to tear down western civilisation, which turns out to be a pretty toxic cocktail. The people we’re up against are not the usual collection of students and malcontents, but a cabal of dedicated revolutionaries determined to end our way of life. This book is a call to arms in an existential battle.

I am on Andrew’s side, obviously, and cannot wait to jump in the foxhole beside him. Indeed, my only regret on reading this book is that if we win this war – as we eventually will – Andrew and I will go back to being on opposite sides of the political divide. For the time being, though, it’s thrilling to be led by such a brilliant commander.