Ed West | The Spectator columnists & writers

Farewell then, Boris Johnson, and to paraphrase another leader who had rather lost the support of his front bench, what an artist dies with him. Johnson was the most amusing prime minister in living memory, but also the most historically aware. The first British political leader since Harold MacMillan to read classics, he was hugely influenced by the ideas of the ancient world, in particular Fortuna. And as Tom Holland reflected in last Friday’s The Rest is History podcast, this obsession with the classics guided his career. Classics, Holland said, had once been a ‘how to do politics’ course, from the time of Machiavelli to the aristocrats of the 18th and 19th centuries, seen as a guide to ‘how to behave morally and politically’.

What is the point of Boris Johnson?

However badly Boris Johnson’s career ends, it will surely be a better finale than that of his great-grandfather, the Turkish journalist, editor and liberal politician Ali Kemal. Almost exactly a century ago, following the trauma of defeat and the end of the Ottoman Empire, Kemal was attacked by a mob of soldiers, hanged from a tree, his head smashed in with cudgels before being beaten to death. I can’t imagine that the Tory backbenchers will go that far. There is something charming and colourful about Johnson’s background, the mixture of Turkish, Russian, Jewish and even a Circassian slave just a few generations back (according to Boris Johnson, and if you can’t trust his version of events, who can you trust?). Just like David Cameron, he is also descended from George II, the last king of England to fight in battle, via a mistress.

Why the Vikings are winning the culture war

The young woman’s screams were drowned out by the sound of drums. No older than her teens, she had been drugged and raped before being tied down and strangled by four men, while repeatedly stabbed by the older woman in charge. This was the scene in perhaps the most famous accounts of life among the Vikings, written by a traveller and diplomat called Ahmad ibn Fadlan after his mission in 922. Sent by the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, ibn Fadlan was part of a delegation to deliver a message to the ruler of the Volga Bulghars, and along the way he had spent time with a people he called al-Rusiyyah, known to historians as the Rus’. These were the eastern Vikings who settled along the rivers flowing into the Black Sea, drawn to the riches of Constantinople and the Islamic world.

The Edition

The phoney war

39 min listen

The Edition

The phoney war

39 min listen

In this week’s episode: Will Putin invade Ukraine? For this week’s cover story, Owen Matthews argues that if Putin is going to invade Ukraine, he will do so later rather than sooner. He joins the podcast, along with Julius Strauss who reports on the mood in Odessa for this week’s magazine. (00:42)Also this week: Is Brexit working?This week marks the second anniversary of Brexit. But how successful has it been? Joining the podcast to answer that question is Lord Frost who was Chief Negotiator of Task Force Europe from January 2020 until his resignation in December last year - and the journalist Ed West, who runs the Substack, Wrong Side of History (13:12)And finally: What is the allure of a classified ad? In the age of Google, classified adverts have become something of a rarity.

The mind virus killing academia

We lost a giant last month with E.O. Wilson’s passing. A man who stood on Darwin’s shoulders, Wilson had that rare distinction of inspiring a whole discipline in the form of evolutionary psychology. The great sense of loss did not seem to be shared by Scientific American, however, which soon afterwards put out a piece reflecting on the ‘complicated legacies of scientists whose works are built on racist ideas’. Among the ‘problematic’ aspects of Wilson’s work, the author argued, was the ‘descriptions and importance of ant societies existing as colonies’. This was ‘a component of Wilson’s work that should have been critiqued’ because ‘context matters’. Scientific American is not Teen Vogue; it’s a journal dating back to the early Victorian period and as august as they come; former contributors include none other than Albert Einstein, with his hugely influential articles on relativity, the geometry of spacetime and ‘10 Badass Girl Bosses Sciencing the Shit out of 1920’.

What really matters in the Covid culture wars?

During the grimmest days of the First Crusade in 1098, the western Christians found themselves besieged by the Turks in Antioch. They had travelled more than a thousand miles from France, and countless fellow believers had died in the almost impossible trek across the known world; now running out of food and water, they were tired, hungry and desperate. At their lowest point, and ready to give into despair, Christian spirits were raised by the arrival of one Peter Bartholomew, a poor man from Provence who claimed he had been visited by the Virgin, promising them victory. The noblemen in charge were suspicious, as Peter was not only an illiterate farmhand type but also quite shifty, yet soon momentum built around his cause.

Brought to book | 15 November 2018

‘The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two means of death we are either drowned or killed.’ So wrote the British monk Gildas in his 6th-century proto-polemic On the Ruin of Britain, recording the arrival of the hated ‘Germans’ to the island. Bad news for the Britons, but fantastic for visitors to the British Library, now running perhaps the most significant exhibition of recent times, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms. Historians dislike the term ‘Dark Ages’, but by any measurement western Europe saw a collapse in living standards, literacy, population, trade and significant cultural output from 500 ad. Yet that only makes the flame that appeared all the more striking, and the exquisite art so inspiring.

Only a British Rudy Giuliani can rescue the Tories in London

Our road was closed last July so that pipes could be installed underground, a mundane bureaucratic procedure that, for my children, led to the most memorable summer of their lives. For weeks they played in the street with friends while our front door was left open, strangers instinctively smiling at kids being able to run around with the freedom of the city. It felt so much like the 1950s that I thought about sending my eight-year-old down to the shops to buy me some Woodbines. We even organised a street party but – predictably – the great British rain god rose up in anger and stopped it. Just five minutes away our high street more resembles 1980s New York. The local area Facebook group some time ago became a daily litany of woe chronicling the muggings and bag-snatchings committed by north London’s tireless moped gangs.

Will Britain stand up to Russia?

A Russian man convicted of spying for Britain has mysteriously been taken ill due to an ‘unknown substance’ – I wonder who could be responsible? Of course one can’t assume at this point, and the Russians will express bafflement as to why they’re being accused of poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. No doubt the London Embassy’s perky Twitter feed will make light of western paranoia in that surreal way international politics is conducted these days. But then the Russians are suspected of 14 assassinations on British soil, the most bizarre case involving the expert who discovered the poison that killed Alexander Litvinenko, who himself died after apparently ‘stabbing himself repeatedly with two knives months after a trip to Russia’.

Citizenship is dead

Once in a while some Socialist Worker people set up a stall outside my local Tesco to shout slogans at the progressive middle-class folk who make up much of the local demographic. One of the phrases I’ve heard them use is ‘Refugees welcome! Tories out!’ which is great and everything, except – what if the refugees are Tories? But then there are Sacred Groups and Out Groups, and each has their role to play in the modern morality play that is leftist politics. Ideological tribalism is the subject of a new book by Yale’s Amy Chua, who argues that politics has replaced national or religious identity as a source of division. Chua has written about this subject before; although she is best known for the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mum, before that she wrote World on Fire, about how market dominant minorities are always vulnerable to less privileged majorities – something I think we’re going to be reminded of in the near future.

Children’s cinema is conservative – and brilliant

The Oscars promise to be truly unbearable this year, with vomit-inducing levels of sanctimony followed by the usual gibberish from the commentariat. The results and speeches and even clothes will be subject to endless politicised scrutiny, and whatever the film industry does to stay Woke, the Buzzfeed headline will inevitably be ‘and people aren’t happy about it’. I’m not sure actors really appreciate how their moralising, once simply tedious, is now grotesque; how there’s something almost darkly funny about members of the film industry presenting themselves as an ethical authority on anything, now they’ve been exposed as modern-day Borgias. But even before the Weinstein scandal broke there was something quite sad about how the entertainment industry tried to present itself as a sort of Confessing Church against the Trump presidency, the moral conscience of America, with Robert De Niro, Lady Gaga, Madonna and Miley Cyrus as modern-day Martin Niemöllers.

A tale of two Brexits

At one point during Boris Johnson’s speech today he asked the audience: ‘We all want to make Britain less insular, don’t we?’ Silence. Media-training experts use an initialism to try to get journalists and other talking-heads to come across well on television – BLT. Does the audience believe you? Do they like you? Do they trust you? The Foreign Secretary has never had a problem with the middle one, perhaps the most important of the three, but during the EU referendum there was certainly an issue with belief, since some of the more nationalistic rhetoric of the campaign clearly sat ill at ease with this ‘esoteric product of millennia of Eurasian toff miscegenation’, as Rod Liddle once described him. Today’s speech was very much more plausibly Boris’s worldview, a Whiggish, liberal international vision in which Brexit is ‘not about shutting ourselves off; it’s about going global’.

Children’s cinema is conservative – and brilliant | 14 February 2018

Why is porn ok but grid girls aren’t?

I guess there comes that time in every man’s life when he realises he is in fact a dinosaur and he’s never going to keep up with social mores. May as well just get use to your children’s gritted teeth every time you open your fat, opinionated mouth on anything. I find myself reaching that point in regards to the abolition of Formula One grid girls, a tradition that is no longer ‘relevant’ to the sport and how it wishes to be portrayed; which is presumably as an egalitarian, environmentally friendly and incorrupt cultural event which does not at all attract the worst rich people on earth. James O’Brien, the sort of conscience of 25-44 middle Britain these days, came up with a strangely conservative and paternalistic argument for why they needed to go: https://twitter.

The Bayeux Tapestry is coming home at last

The Entente Cordiale is alive and well, it seems. It was announced today that, thanks to the benevolence of Emmanuel Macron, the Bayeux Tapestry will leave France for the first time in nine centuries, and be loaned to Britain. Strictly speaking, though, you could say the tapestry was coming home, since it was almost certainly made in Kent, by English women toiling under the Norman patriarchy. It tells the story of the most famous battle in English history, an event that helped to define not just Anglo-French relations but also England’s ingrained class differences. I was being facetious when I made the comparison in 2016 between Anglo-Saxon Leavers and Norman Remainers, but our relationship with France in particular has always defined us as a nation (much more than any ‘British values’).

Is political correctness speeding up?

One of the most influential and popular ideas of the post-war era was that of the Authoritarian Personality, which linked fascism with a number of personality traits, including conventionalism, anti-intellectualism and prudery. Conservatism, in other words. It has become popular to believe that being right-wing is synonymous with being authoritarian. Society may have no common culture or religion or body of literature, but everyone knows who the Nazis are. So as Nazism has pushed out everything else in the collective memory, it has become an attractive weapon against conservative ideas. And yet authoritarianism is probably found both equally on the left and right; it just manifests itself in different forms. One example is the way progressives tend to see deviant political views.

Does alcohol make us more right-wing?

Although I wrote in my last post that social media makes people miserable, Twitter is also a fantastic resource for acquiring knowledge from experts and specialists in different areas. One of my favourite accounts is Rolf Degen, who daily tweets a number of scientific studies into human behaviour. Just before Christmas he linked to a story concerning the impact of alcohol consumption on politics, suggesting that booze makes us more right-wing. According to the paper ‘alcohol strips away complex reasoning to reveal the default state of the mind’ and drunkenness therefore encourages ‘low-effort, automatic thought’ and so promotes political conservatism. Similarly, as this study of the anti-anxiety drug lorazepam shows, ‘anxiety exerts a general inhibitory effect on harmful acts toward other humans regardless of whether the motivation for those harmful acts is selfish or utilitarian.

Get off social media for 2018

Was 2017 that terrible? Everyone feels like they’re losing and the world is going to hell, and in many ways it does feel like a dark cloud is approaching. This article, about a sex robot conference being moved after a threat from Islamic extremists, did strike me as the sort of thing one of the more pessimistic of 20th century writers might have predicted about our age. People are so depressed about the year they even got angry about Taylor Swift being happy, because how dare she. And yet despite this being such a terrible year medical progress continues in a miraculous way, worldwide poverty continues to tumble and while the planet is more violent than at the beginning of the decade, it has nothing like as many wars nor as many casualties as the 70s or 80s.

The boredom of living through ‘interesting times’

Robert Tombs, author of the majestic 'The English and their History', has written in the latest Spectator about how Brexit has become the trigger for a new culture war in Britain. He likens it to the sectarian arguments of the 18th century, pointing out that: ‘When I hear prominent Remainers unquestioningly supporting the demands of the EU Commission, however incoherent and excessive, I cannot but remember the opposition leader Charles James Fox happily admitting during the Napoleonic Wars that ‘The Triumph of the French government over the English does in fact afford me a degree of pleasure which is very difficult to disguise.’ ‘Is this just coincidence? There does seem to be a sectarian strand in our political culture whose natural home is in what the French call ‘internal exile’.

Christmas markets without armed police are now a thing of the past

I love the Christmas season, so friendly and wholesome and filled with evocative memories – but don't the machine guns and anti-terror bollards seem to go up earlier each year? Look at the touching festive scenes in Manchester, and Edinburgh, and we'll see the police and barriers across the country from Liverpool to Lincoln. It's not quite Bedford Falls is it? I've noticed these 'diversity bollards' popping up everywhere, without a word spoken about it; a few weeks ago I spotted them at Hyde Park Corner opposite the Duke of Wellington's house. How would one explain that to Old Nosey? Well, Britain has nuclear warheads that could literally obliterate any country that threatened us, but we now have medieval style walls within our city to stop threats from religious extremists.

All conservatives should support Michael Gove’s green crusade

'The sea is in my blood. My father made his living as a fish merchant, as did his father before him. Generations of Goves have gone to sea, harvested its riches and fed families with the healthiest — and most renewable — resource on the planet, our fish.' So begins Michael Gove's passionate call to arms, inspired by Blue Planet II, to save the oceans from mankind. Gove is one of the most intellectually original people in politics, and a very likeable man. But if British politics is a box set series, he also has the best character arc of any politician – like Jaime Lannister after he loses his hand or Prez in The Wire when he becomes a teacher, Gove always seems to be developing and surprising the audience. Maybe it's all just PR but since his appointment in June he has transformed into a 'full-throated environmentalist', banning ivory sales, taking renewed action on plastic bottles, making plans for CCTV in slaughterhouses and increased penalties for animal cruelty.

The marriage gap

Whatever their views about the monarchy, most people will warm to the news of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s engagement. Sentimental as it sounds, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the last royal wedding and how happy I felt for Prince William and Kate Middleton, as she was then. It was one of those rare events when you felt lucky to live in a good country with a bright future. A marriage is, after all, the ultimate statement of confidence in the future — and God knows, we could all do with that right now. Marriage is not easy and never has been, as Harry will know from his own childhood. Nevertheless, people have always accepted that marital unions and stable families make society healthier, happier and more prosperous.

How much is immigration to blame for the housing crisis?

I'm never going to be able to own my home, that's why I'll vote Labour; also the Tories are horrible to immigrants and they don't think animals are alive or something, my friend Molly shared it on Facebook. That's basically the crux of the argument I'm hearing, obviously a reductio one, and I sense the frustration. I've argued before that house-building is an existential issue for the Tories and that we need to allow people to build the sort of beautiful homes neighbours will not object to. (Even if you don't like it, traditional architecture neutralises NIMBYism). And yet last year 150,000 homes were built in Britain, which on paper, for the third most densely populated non-microstate in Europe (and England is first), and for a country well below sub-replacement fertility, should be enough.

Stop Appeasing Stupidity

I've always thought of the Daily Mail as catering to a sort of Roundhead English tradition, the inheritors of low Protestantism, the solid middle class, high in conscientiousness and below average in openness. That's not my tradition, personally; I identify with the Cavalier inheritance, more Catholic, more reactionary-but-in-a-jokey-way (or is it?), represented by the Daily Telegraph, a long line of heroes from Prince Rupert to Michael Wharton. So it's not my paper of choice, but it's good at what it does and people I know and care for read it – almost all of them women, unsurprisingly, considering it has the highest female readership of any newspaper. Indeed what I dislike about the Mail is the same thing I dislike about much of the British left, which also stems from that low Protestant tradition - the sense of perpetual outrage and the moral superiority.

It’s nonsense to claim Russia influenced the Brexit vote

Q: How many Remainers does it take to fix a light bulb? A: Why should we fix it? It's Russia's fault it's broken An old joke; I think the original concerned Arabs and Israel, but then there are numerous parts of the world where all manner of events are attributed to historic enemies. I remember a few years ago, after reading an article about how Poles tended to think the Russians were behind everything bad, a journalist explaining that this is the historic result of being ruled by tyrannical regimes, low social capital and little trust in government. That's eastern Europe for you; luckily we north-west Europeans, with our long history of open government and self-rule, were not susceptible to such second-world paranoia.

In praise of Prince Charles

Giles of Rome, the great 13th century author, once noted: 'Considered in absolute terms it would be preferable that the King be elected; but the corrupt desires of men and their manner of acting must make heredity preferable to election.' There's little that would dissuade him of that view today. Britain's politics are in a worse shape than they have been for at least a generation. None of the mediocrities making up the current government seem capable of exercising authority, or of seeing past the next election cycle. In contrast, the Queen and her descendants at least seem interested in the long term, in that strangely alien concept 'posterity'. Her son Prince Charles is 69 years old today, and is long past winning the honour of being the eldest man to ascend the throne (William IV, at 64).

The Tories are getting behind all the daftest progressive causes

One of the strange things I keep on hearing about this feeble government is that it has been spurred by Brexit to launch a culture war and reverse the Cameron-era detoxification of the party. They're taking us back to the 50s, or the Victorian era, or maybe 1065. It's one of those things one sees being written so often that it must surely be true – except if you actually read what government ministers say, or study their policies. Just this week, for example, it's already been announced that prisoners could now get the vote, and that returning jihadis might get priority in social housing. Earlier last month the Tories brought out a new report aimed at pursuing the utterly unachievable goal of racial equality of outcome, a debate that no conservative is ever going to win.

The wisdom of children isn’t all it’s cracked up to be

Here's an uplifting story from the vanguard of the culture war. As the New York Times reports: 'At the Advent School in Boston, Erina Spiegelman, who is an instructional coordinator, recalled that a teacher last year asked a group of students the big question: 'What is gender?'. The first answer came from a second-grader: 'It’s a thing people invented to put you in a category.'' I have a daughter that age (second grade is the equivalent of Year 3) and I love her as much as any human has loved another, but she's not an evolutionary biologist, and for me to present her very vague understanding of such a fraught, difficult and controversial subject as some sort of font of wisdom would be sheer self-indulgence. Other people's children are like other's people drug stories: they really mean a lot more to you than anyone else.

Warnings of a Romanian migrant surge were right

Remember when Keith Vaz got himself down to Luton Airport a few years back to greet new Romanian arrivals getting off the plane, declaring in his rather pompous way that: 'We've seen no evidence of people who have rushed out and bought tickets in order to arrive because it's the 1st of January'. This was in January 2014, when Romanians and Bulgarians were granted free movement to Britain for the first time, and on that day there was widespread guffawing among right-thinking people about how we were going to be 'swamped'; Twitter, even more so than usual, was filled with humour that was ill-disguised class contempt and status competition. We were told by numerous publications, think-tanks and other bodies that the likes of MigrationWatch and Ukip were just scaremongering, and there would not be a huge influx of migrants from the A2 nations.

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