Douglas Murray | The Spectator columnists & writers

Twenty-two-year-old Hadis Najafi does not look like a foot soldier in a revolution. In the last film of Najafi alive, it is night and she’s walking down a road in Karaj, her home town, smiling and scrunching up her hair into a ponytail. She is young, blonde and on her way to a demonstration. Najafi reminds me of my own daughter, tying up her hair in the same casual, no-nonsense way. Thirty minutes later, she was dead, shot six times in the face, hand, neck and heart. Her crime? To go to a protest and not to wear a hijab. Iran is locked in a clash between its medieval Islamic theocracy and the TikTok generation. The killing of young women like Najafi and Mahsa Amini in late summer has brought the students out on the streets and now there have been thousands of arrests: rappers, actresses, writers, musicians and sport personalities – even the producer of a football podcast.

Fifa has scored a spectacular own goal

Unlike some fair-weather fans I maintain a fairly constant interest in the workings of Fifa. Not because I especially care for football, but because I consider myself something of a connoisseur of corruption. I do not spend all my time studying the matter, but I do take an interest in corrupt people and entities. They form a sort of hall of fame in part of my head.Top of my list is probably Abdalá Bucaram. For anyone who failed to follow Ecuadorian politics in the 1990s, that is the period when Bucaram was elected to office in his country. Known as ‘El Loco’ (‘The madman’), the president had a colourful period in power. Among other things, he released a pop single trying to adopt his nickname in a positive light (‘The madman who loves’).

The delicious fall of Sam Bankman-Fried

Dame Edna Everage says one of life’s most precious gifts is the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others. You may lament this instinct, yet we all harbour it. New Yorkers are especially prone when it comes to property envy. Every couple of years, it feels like, a skyscraper goes up in the city that is significantly taller than the previous very tall new skyscraper. Each time one does, the only thing that goes higher than the tower’s residences is the cost of purchasing them. So with what rapture do New Yorkers read about the misfortunes these buildings go through. Oh, the thrill of learning that they sway in the wind, that people get seasick in the penthouses, that when owners put their garbage in the rubbish chutes the noise on the lower floors is like a tactical nuke.

The weaponisation of ‘bullying’

Bullying appears to be suffering from inflation, like everything else. Certainly as an art form it seems to be in decline. As exhibit A I should like to present the ‘bullying’ recently ascribed to Gavin Williamson MP. Williamson is a hard man to defend. He has not excelled in any of the portfolios he has been given. The principal reason he sticks in the memory is that he does quite a good impression of someone doing an impression of someone sinister. The figure he most resembles is of someone who, at a young age, read the tiniest amount of Machiavelli and experienced feelings of arousal that they had not previously felt. ‘Haha, yes,’ I imagine a young Williamson saying. ‘It is indeed better to be feared than to be loved.

The negligence of ‘not in my lifetime’

It is sometimes said, correctly, that conservatism is more an attitude than an ideology. And for me there have always been certain individuals who embody that attitude. The late and much-missed Tessa Keswick was one such person, and for some reason a remark of hers has recently been in my head. A few years ago we were at a friends’ house for dinner, with an eclectic group. At one point we were all debating something or other and one slightly left-wing woman at the table said: ‘Well, it’ll all be after my time, so I don’t see why I should care.’ If my eyebrows raised, Tessa’s positively shot up. After the meal the two of us debriefed. ‘That is one of the most shocking things I’ve ever heard,’ Tessa told me. I agreed.

The West’s uncivilised euthanasia policy

So much is happening on the surface at the moment that it can be difficult to notice certain undercurrents. Since the following story has gone almost unheeded in the Anglophone press, let me point at one especially suggestive current which could be glimpsed on the Continent this month. Cast your mind back to March 2016 and you may remember a co-ordinated set of suicide bombings in Brussels: two at the airport, one at a metro station. The three Isis-inspired terrorists managed to kill 32 people that day. But you may, understandably enough, have forgotten about it. The attacks came after the even larger ones in Paris, and people didn’t really have much to say about them. My principal memory is of being asked on to Radio 4’s The Moral Maze the following evening to discuss the question of whether there are tensions between security and privacy – or some such bilge – and losing what remained of my patience.

How to protest the protestors

These are bleak times in our land, and we must take our pleasures where we can. Personally I have been able to find a great deal of consolation over recent days in watching members of the public confronting protestors from the Just Stop Oil movement. There is some especially pleasing footage of van drivers in south London hauling protestors off the roads by the scruff of their necks. The colourful language which accompanies these acts is an additional delight, for the irate British public is not always immune to using words that polite people might deplore. All the videos bring some satisfaction. This week a strange-looking man-child with a comb-over sprayed orange paint on to the Aston Martin showroom in central London.

Is what Conor Burns did really so appalling?

There are times when I feel like certain rakes must have done when they realised that the Regency period was suddenly morphing into the Victorian one. Not that I feel especially rakish. Just that there are times when you see the new rules of sex and think: ‘Well, I guess there’ll be none of that from now on.’ Take the allegations made against Conor Burns MP. Last week, Burns was fired from his ministerial job and had the Conservative party whip suspended. There are efforts to take his name off the list of people put forward for a knighthood in Boris Johnson’s farewell honours list. What is the cause of all this? Here is the allegation in its full, disgusting detail. According to all national newspapers, Burns was fired because he was seen at the bar of the Conservative party conference putting his hand on another man’s thigh.

Things can always get worse

As I was saying, way back in July, it is hard to love the Conservative party. Every time it tries to navigate another bend in the road it ends up causing a disaster even its most ardent critics could not have foreseen. ‘Things can’t get any worse,’ said rebels in the party while Boris Johnson was still PM, before the summer. Then we were introduced to Liz Truss. Now, within weeks of her taking office, you can hear members of the parliamentary party saying with vigour: ‘She has to go.’ At which point I feel the country wanting to place our collective heads in our hands, yell and walk away. Does anyone have time for all this? Does the Conservative party just plan to hold endless leadership contests in perpetuity while the country looks on? At such moments it is easy to wish the whole thing gone: the whole inefficient, complacent, forever infighting party.

I’m in trouble with the police

There is almost nothing I like more than a running battle. As my friend Julie Burchill also says, when a really good row comes along it gives you this warm, cosy feeling inside. So it was not with disappointment that I received a noteworthy response to my column of last week. For those who were sleeping on the job (or only read Rod’s column), I made some pertinent comments about community relations in the Leicestershire area. Community relations, you may recall, have essentially broken down, with Hindu and Muslim gangs facing off in the city and some of the surrounding area. In passing I noted the number of female police officers stuck between the two phalanxes and said that I wasn’t sure if there were any trans police in the thin yellow line, or for that matter any gay cops busily dancing the macarena.

Leicester and the downside with diversity

As I have said many times in recent years, if you import the world’s people you import the world’s problems. Which is not to say that you do not also get some upsides. The upsides of ‘diversity’ are focused on all the time. But we have a curious habit of downplaying the downsides. Just one of which erupted in the city of Leicester last week. The origins of the disturbances are disputed, but what is agreed on is that they initially broke out between local Muslims and Hindus in the last days of August. During the India-Pakistan cricket match on the 28th, local fans of the Indian side began shouting ‘Pakistan Murdabad’ (‘Death to Pakistan’). A Sikh man was attacked and before long both sides were chanting slogans against the other on the streets of the city.

A hereditary monarchy is good for politics

I suppose it was inevitable that with the death of HM the Queen certain floodgates would open. During her reign it often felt as though there were forces that she was single-handedly holding back. As Lionel Shriver has noted elsewhere, they have come in particularly malicious form from parts of the US. But there is one part of the republican critique of monarchy that has returned which is too little addressed, and which I have found myself countering in recent days. Not, I might add, from the sort of people who are simply hostile to our country and its past, but rather from people who wish us well but are somewhat baffled by the sentiment that surrounds the monarch. Speaking to American friends and media this past week, I have found myself explaining that for us in Britain, the Queen or King is something like the living embodiment of the flag.

Who cares about Liz Truss’s ‘diverse’ cabinet?

‘Great offices of state set to contain no white men’ was the way one national newspaper reported the formation of the first Truss cabinet. In addition to Liz Truss, the positions of Chancellor, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary would respectively be held by Kwasi Kwarteng, James Cleverly and Suella Braverman. Of course, all this was presented as something incredibly new and exciting: real progress at work. In fact it isn’t remotely new. As Chancellor, Kwarteng follows those two famous white men Rishi Sunak and Nadhim Zahawi. As Home Secretary, Braverman succeeds Priti Patel and Sajid Javid. And now that Truss is Prime Minister she is the first woman to relieve us from male-dominated rule for a full three years.

Green parties are facing a reality check

How pleasant it is to watch an idea fall apart. Especially when it is an idea held by people you don’t particularly care for. In recent years all of the democracies have been plagued by green parties. The kindest interpretation of them is that they provide a wake-up call of some sort: a reminder that we should be kind to our planet, that sort of thing. But in every country they got too free a ride. They ended up preaching catastrophism to a supplicant media. And they ended up demanding that we all get off fossil fuels yesterday without any satisfactory explanation of how we were meant to keep the lights on today. That pleasant period for them came to a halt this year, when that old friend of conservatives – reality – kicked in.

Salman Rushdie and a question of power

Whenever a terrorist attack occurs, like the recent attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie, our society falls into the usual platitudes. The attack gets condemned, by most people. The ideology behind the attack is fudged so that it becomes as non-specific as possible. What almost never gets any time in the discussion is the question of answers. It is easy to say ‘We must never give in to terror’ or ‘We must defend the right to free speech.’ But personally I like to get more specific than this. Imagine if you were the UK government, say, and had some power actually to do something about it. That brings me to the matter of Sayed Ata’ollah Mohajerani. Mohajerani was a radical student involved in the 1979 revolution in Iran that overthrew the Shah and ushered in the Islamic Revolutionary government that still benights the country today.

The best response to Salman Rushdie’s stabbing

The attack on Salman Rushdie on-stage in New York is deeply shocking and sadly not surprising. People have been calling for his death for over three decades, ever since the publication of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. That novel led to a fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran and the Iranian government putting a bounty on the British author´s head. They were encouraged in this by Muslim leaders in Britain. The repercussions for Rushdie were swift. Rushdie himself went into hiding, protected by the security services of the British state at the behest of Margaret Thatcher´s government. He stayed in hiding for many years, during which time there were numerous attempts on his life, including from an Iranian agent who blew himself up in London.

A strange kind of recession

It’s possible that I owe Joe Biden some sort of an apology, however mealy-mouthed it might be. Last week I mentioned here the weird prevarication from the US government and its supporters over whether or not the US is technically in a recession. It arose from the news that the US had two successive quarters of negative GDP growth. Biden’s critics – myself included – leapt to declare the US in recession. According to the Bank of England, the UK is heading for a recession too, so there should be no especial shame in accepting the fact and then trying to deal with it. But then last Friday the US jobs figures landed and it became clear that the situation in the country is curiouser than we might have predicted. Everybody was expecting a contraction in the economy.

Biden’s victories look a lot like defeats

Joe Biden’s week did not get off to a good start. When running for office in 2020 he repeatedly boasted that he was going to ‘shut down the virus’, not the country. And then in the space of a few days last week it looked as if he had managed to achieve his promise, just the opposite way around. The President appears to have shut down the economy while suffering from the virus. Despite being endlessly vaccinated, the President recently tested positive for Covid. And then last week he tested positive again. So he had a double dose. At the same time America had a double dose of something else: negative GDP growth. People started talking about the ‘R’ word: recession. Until recently two successive quarters of negative GDP growth was a common enough definition of an economy in recession.

Why should straight white men ‘pass the power’?

If you happened to be walking through Southwark this week you might have been accosted by a big public sign. ‘Hey straight white men’, the billboard bellowed, ‘Pass the power!’ Similar billboards apparently cropped up in other, equally squalid, parts of London. They are by a black artist from Marseille called Nadina. It will not come as a surprise to anyone who has seen her work to learn that Nadina is self-taught. Her other street art includes posters saying ‘Never forget George Floyd’ and ‘Nobody is free until Palestine is free’. It is brought to us by a gallery run, so far as I can see, by two white males. Perfectly normal instruction, spotted in Southwark London. Anybody else spot a backlash coming…? pic.twitter.

Spectator Out Loud

Hamish Badenoch, Martin Vander Weyer, Aidan Hartley and Douglas Murray

30 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Hamish Badenoch, Martin Vander Weyer, Aidan Hartley and Douglas Murray

30 min listen

On this episode of Spectator Out Loud, Hamish Badenoch says he's married to his political hero. (00:32) Martin Vander Weyer asks whether we should fire the boss of Heathrow. (05:57) Aidan Hartley looks at why country music is so popular in Africa. (14:14) Douglas Murray wonders if the Tory party has a future. (22:03)

The ruthless inefficiency of the Tory party

It is hard to love the Conservative party. But one reason it has at least always commanded a certain amount of respect is thanks to its reputation for ruthless efficiency. Personally I have found that reputation to be only half true. It is true that the party can be ruthless, but only in being ruthlessly inefficient. Look at the mechanism by which it removed the Prime Minister who brought it its largest majority since Margaret Thatcher. True, Boris Johnson had his faults. But did the party not know these in advance? Why was it not able to add the stabilisers so obviously needed to keep a rickety, not to mention rackety, figure in the top job once it had placed him there? It should cause no surprise. For this is of course the party that gave us John Major, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith, elevating each in turn only to discover each time that a knifing was sadly necessary.

Shouldn’t we feel sorry for Hunter Biden?

Scandal is such a wonderful driver of human emotions. Just think of the number of things you get to feel in one go: horror, disgust, relief, superiority, guilt and glee, to name just a few. All these flooded through a portion of the American public again this week when a new video emerged of Hunter Biden. Hunter is the sole surviving son of President Joe Biden and it is uncontentious to say that he is a tortured soul. His mother and his one-year-old sister died in a car crash in 1972. Hunter and his older brother Beau were injured but they survived. Beau died of cancer at the age of 46, and soon afterwards Hunter started a short-lived relationship with his elder brother’s widow. In between he also developed a serious drug and prostitute addiction.

Who’ll stop the art attackers?

One problem of being mugged, I am told, is not just the event itself but the dreams of violence that follow. If a thug relieves you of your wallet and you hand it over without a fight, for some time you will keep dreaming about what you might have achieved had the mugger confronted you when you had a gun or chainsaw to hand. Or if you had studied martial arts and could do over the punk in the style of Jackie Chan. I must admit that similar dreams now haunt me whenever I see the Just Stop Oil protestors. Needless to say, their cause is wrong as well as irritating. Everyone in this country is suffering a cost of living crisis. Everyone looks at their energy bills and wonders ‘How did that happen?’ The one thing that would be a dead cert to make things worse would be to ‘Just stop oil’.

Spectator Out Loud

Douglas Murray, Katja Hoyer and Lara Prendergast

20 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Douglas Murray, Katja Hoyer and Lara Prendergast

20 min listen

On this week's episode: Douglas Murray on Hispanic Conservatives in US politics (0:26). Katja Hoyer on East German sentiment towards Russia (08:32) and Lara Predergast on the rise of the sex bore (13.13). Presented by Natasha Feroze.Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Will Hispanic conservatives transform US politics?

If you had to take a guess on which American political party would produce the first Mexican-born Congresswoman, which one would it be? The Democrats? Or the party of Donald Trump? As though to prove that nothing in American politics today is predictable, it is indeed the latter. Two weeks ago Mayra Flores flipped a Democrat-friendly Texas Congressional seat in a special election and became both the first Republican Latina representative from the state of Texas and the first Mexican-born member of the House. She even thanked Trump for her victory. Everything about her win bucks the expectations of the country that now exist outside its borders. For instance, consider the campaign against her. For the foreign press, the Democrat party is presumed to be the party of anti-racism, right? The party that wouldn’t fall into any nativist traps and start talking about ‘us and them’? Well, here is what Flores’s Democrat opponent in the upcoming November elections said about her last week.

Is America about to break apart?

Here’s a fun fact: almost half of Americans believe that there will be a civil war in their lifetimes. Less fun fact: they could be right. To observe the United States today is to watch a country that cannot get on with itself. Some people say that it has always been like this – that there was never any chance of a country as wide and big as America being able to agree on things. These people then point to the genius of the federalist system, and the way in which different states could have different arrangements within the union. But as you may have heard, there have been occasions in America’s history when states were forced to do things they didn’t want to do. Two centuries ago a civil war was fought over the issue.

Our shifting definition of shame

In this most holy month of Pride I have been making my observances by thinking about shame. After all, shame is the reason that ‘Pride’ has taken on the meaning it has in recent years. If gay people were once made to feel shame for their sexuality then the counterbalance was apparently to encourage them to feel pride in it. A preferable countermove for some of us would have been simple equality, making sexual preference morally neutral: neither worse nor better. But no, somebody decided on pride, and pride it now is. However, there are several things that this leads to – not least a turn against the use of shame. In recent years, ‘shaming’ people has become something which you should never do, and not only in the realms of sexuality.

The January 6 hearings are partisan political theatre

Is it possible to hold two ideas in our heads at once? If so, I should like to put forward a case study. That Donald J. Trump did something that makes him ill-suited for public office, and that the current January 6 hearings in Washington are partisan political theatre. For anybody who was in outer space at the time, it is worth recalling that 6 January 2021 was the day Trump urged his supporters to join him in Washington to ‘Stop the steal’. The outgoing president could not accept that he was outgoing. He did not agree that he had lost the election two months earlier, and though it is now clear that some of his advisers told him that he had lost, he chose not to believe them. Instead he went down the path of believing that he had won and, with a dwindling number of his advisers, tried to prove that claim.

A win for the film critics of Bradford

As a general rule, you should never talk about a film you haven’t seen. But The Lady of Heaven is proving a tricky film to catch. Plus whole crowds of people are talking about it without having seen it, so perhaps my joining in won’t do too much harm. Although it sounds like it might be some work of Vatican kitsch, The Lady of Heaven is actually about another religion. A boy in modern-day Iraq loses his mother and through doing so learns the story of Fatima, one of the daughters of Muhammad. And here is where an apparently sweeping historical drama enters tricky terrain. For not all cinema audiences have taken the film to heart. The citizens of Bradford, for instance, turn out to include a surprising proportion of film critics.

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