The Spectator columnists & writers

Spectator Out Loud: Isabel Hardman, Matthew Parris, Graeme Thomson and Caroline Moore

This week: Isabel Hardman asks how Ed Miliband is the power behind Kier Starmer's Labour (00:57), Matthew Parris says we've lost interest in our dependencies (05:03), Graeme Thomson mourns the loss of the B-side (11:57), and Caroline Moore reads her Notes on... war memorials (16:51). Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.

We’ve lost interest in our dependencies

Let nobody say Liz Truss achieved nothing in her mayfly days at Downing Street. She gave away the vast British Indian Ocean territory, the islands and the sea around them, known as the Chagos Islands. To be more precise, in talks with Mauritian officials while in New York, she set in train negotiations with Mauritius over a handover next year. Exempted from any such agreement will be the island of Diego Garcia, nominally British but for all practical purposes under the control of the United States, who maintain a huge and important military base there, probably torturing people – but we wouldn’t know or, if we do, wouldn’t be so impertinent as to complain. The Chagos decision is more melancholy than tragic: a complete capitulation by Britain in the face of repeated rulings against us in international law.

What everyone knows but no one says about Brexit

Theresa May’s premiership is now a memory. Boris Johnson’s time in office assumes the status of a rather brief, if often embarrassing, interlude. Liz Truss has gone in short order. The threat of a comeback by Johnson has been lifted. What a rollercoaster. Each of these events, in its time, took centre-stage in our politics and each prime minister became for a while the object of contempt, suspicion and rage. I called Mrs May the death star of British politics; I called Mr Johnson a moral toad; I called Liz Truss a planet-sized mass of over-confidence and ambition teetering on a pinhead of a political brain. Invective comes easy and, though I’ve been at the shriller end of the range of media wrath, I was far from alone among British media observers in the energetic expression of reproach.

The joy of tuning in to the night

‘That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency,’ wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it.’ Her thought extends beyond ‘compassion fatigue’ in the face of global suffering on a scale beyond our homely ken, but to life itself in its unfathomable abundance: the dramas, the joys and the sorrows and the sheer activity that surrounds us and would engulf us if we paused for long enough to think about everything. We screen almost all of it out. We have to. Our Derbyshire home is on a hillside in the middle of fields and woods. I have sunk an ordinary bath into the earth near the outdoor coal shed: the kind of cast-iron thing that farmers turn into makeshift drinking troughs for cattle.

Maybe Nanny does know best

Not least among the shivers down my spine as I listen to Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng pump up the rhetoric on their economic revolution is the evocation of myself – myself when young. Like Ms Truss, I too joined the Liberal party as an Oxbridge fresher. I too believed in the power of personal choice. I too had a dream of unhindered competition liberating the animal spirits of enterprise and individual genius. I too told myself that we liberals must grit our teeth and keep the faith when sink-or-swim left some to sink. I too thrilled to the metaphor of ‘tall trees’ being allowed unencumbered access to the light. And when (as with Truss) it dawned on me that the Liberal party was not serious about power and I joined the Conservatives, I, like her, carried my liberalism into our new political home.

Must Charles change?

When something starts to be said with such frequency that it fast becomes the conventional wisdom, one should pause, step back and give it a second thought. In almost every ‘Advice to King Charles’ column I’ve read, and in broadcast commentary too, the same piece of wisdom is being repeated: the new King must now distance himself from his own strong opinions on a range of subjects, and assume an air of neutrality on anything remotely controversial or ‘political’. He must forget, and we must forget, that he once had beliefs. ‘You can do it, Charles,’ we’ve been saying. ‘You can wipe your personal software of all that clutter, empty your personality of its guiding beliefs and passions, and achieve a zen-like absence of commitment to anything but being a dignified and regal blank slate.

Which artists will define our age?

It glows. The whole painting glows. Glows not just with the way the light from a fire unseen beyond the artist’s frame reflects in his glistening eyes; reflects in the moist redness of his almost girlish lips; reflects in the folds of his turban and silky grey sash. It glows too from an inner radiation, glows from his character. We have in Britain some arcane tax legislation that can bring a harvest that’s anything but arcane. The recent acquisition of Joseph Wright of Derby’s ‘Self-Portrait at the Age of about Forty’ (c. 1772) has been made possible ‘in lieu of inheritance tax… under a hybrid arrangement and allocated to Derby Museums… with further support from the National Heritage Memorial Fund’. Private individuals like Robert M.

This is no way to pick a prime minister

‘Truss’s campaign to be Britain’s next prime minister,’ wrote one political commentator this week, ‘seems to have unstoppable momentum. She has won the backing of heavyweights Tom Tugendhat, Brandon Lewis and the Chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi.’ Across a range of commentary you will see that word ‘momentum’ used in this sense in the weeks ahead. I am uncomfortable about what drives it. You may realise that if I were still a member of the Conservative party I would be voting for Rishi Sunak this month. Of the two candidates he is plainly less likely to win. So you may well think my discomfort with the procedure by which Liz Truss has been pulling ahead is sour grapes. Perhaps it is – we are seldom the best judges of our own motives.

Coffee House Shots

Why does Thatcher loom over the Tory leadership race?

13 min listen

Coffee House Shots

Why does Thatcher loom over the Tory leadership race?

13 min listen

Isabel Hardman speaks to Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Matthew Parris about the influence Margaret Thatcher exerts over the Conservative leadership race.

Liz Truss is no Margaret Thatcher

The late Senator Lloyd Bentsen was 26 years older than the young Senator Dan Quayle when in 1988 they crossed swords in a debate in Omaha, Nebraska. Their exchange became famous. Quayle had been comparing himself with the late John F. Kennedy. Old Bentsen hit back: ‘Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.’ As it happens, I’m 26 years older than Liz Truss. So it’s a temptation to which I yield to quote that exchange, now that Ms Truss, explicitly, both in her wardrobe and the photo opportunities she contrives, is inviting comparison with the late Baroness Thatcher. I can’t quite mimic Bentsen’s claim. Only in the technical sense did I serve with the then Mrs Thatcher when she was prime minister, and I cannot boast a personal friendship.

The truth about life as a gay Tory MP

Male Tory MPs molesting young men? Buttock-squeezing and groin-fumbling at a private members’ club? A middle-aged politician slipping into a dressing-gown ‘like a pound shop Harvey Weinstein, with his chest and belly hanging out’ to massage the neck of an Olympic rower? Such are the allegations. ‘What,’ you may think, ‘is the world coming to? It was never like this in my day!’ How wrong you’d be. It was very much like this in the 20th century. There is in fact something tragically old-fashioned about the whole story. This is how it used to be for many when I was an MP, and there were dozens of other gay Tories at Westminster, and nothing was said, and everything was steeped in alcohol, and little was off-limits so long as it could be denied, and sex was quick, loveless and panicky.

In defence of Carrie Johnson

One is not usually surprised by opinions volunteered to parliamentary hopefuls by voters on whose doors the candidate has knocked; but last week, dropping in on the Tiverton and Honiton by-election, I was taken aback by a subject that came up a number of times. It seemed so relatively unimportant. The door-knocker in this case was Richard Foord, the Liberal Democrat candidate in a safe Conservative seat that looked in imminent danger of falling to his party. I was following him around as he canvassed in the Devon town of Honiton. You may know by the time you read this whether the Conservatives clung on, but you don’t need reminding that they were up against it. I should say at once that my sample of opinion was minuscule: I had perhaps an hour with Mr Foord.

Boris Johnson is my great white sperm whale

‘Steady on, old chap. You’re a bit hard on the boy.’ The arm around my shoulder was that of Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley. I remember where we were standing – it was outside the entrance to the Birmingham International Convention Centre – and I remember the occasion: a Conservative party conference. But which one? All I can say is that this was a long time ago. It was after Johnson minor had become Mayor of London – he was speaking at that conference – and it must have been after (and probably responding to) a column I wrote in the Times more than six years ago: ‘Tories have got to end their affair with Boris.’ I’m proud of that column – seeing it no doubt conceitedly as a significant piece of journalism amid a waste of routine other stuff in the 6,000-odd articles I’ve written in my career as a columnist.

The close friend I never really knew

I have just read an extraordinary new book. It’s by a close and old pal whom I’d count as one of my best friends. He was my lodger in London for ten years. His book is autobiographical. And I now realise I never knew him at all. In Don’t Ask Me About My Dad, Tom Mitchelson charts a life story that is entirely strange to me, and shocking. And yet the weird thing is that I know many of the people in it – or thought I did. His late father, Austin, who helped launch the Sunday Sport, I met and thought a likeable if flaky chap, and good company. He turns out to have been the most appalling wife-beater, liar, drunkard and debtor. His mother, whom I’d also met and who struck me as a kindly soul but a sort of ‘someone else’s mum’ character, turns out to have been the victim of a monster, in and out of women’s refuges, and someone of almost heroic fortitude.

What Rishi Sunak could learn from George Osborne

I was walking last week from Canary Wharf tube station to my flat in east London – not far, little more than a mile, and the walk follows the Thames on the north side, away from traffic: lovely. But as I headed for the river, I saw trouble. A thick curtain of rain had descended over Blackheath across the Thames, and the wind was blowing strongly from that direction. The storm had not yet reached Greenwich, still clear, but the curtain was moving. After Greenwich the rainstorm would cross the river – and hit me. Umbrella-less, I quickened my pace. Few others seemed to have noticed. People were ambling around, some sitting at outside tables at restaurants, some chatting on park benches. Others in smart business clothes were leaving their offices and heading off outdoors without a care.

In defence of healthy opposition

Glasses chinked. From massive chandeliers, lights glittered beneath the high vaulted ceiling; heroic statuary around the carved stone walls stared eyelessly down; heraldic flags draped from brass rods; and a sense of history and of – how shall I say? – consequence hung in the air. We were dining at the Guildhall in the City of London, and from my place at the top table, flanked by judges, eminent barristers, our host Lord Grabiner QC of One Essex Court chambers, and the justice minister Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, one could survey the whole hall: perhaps 400 of the brightest and best in the English legal world. These were not, for the most part, old men. The occasion was the Times’s annual law awards: an essay competition for young lawyers.

Nobody will forget what Russia has done

At the heart of the West’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sits an ambiguity that it is convenient, perhaps even necessary, for our political leaders to maintain. If we can turn the clock back on Putin’s foolish endeavour – if he can be persuaded to withdraw his troops, disavow Russia’s territorial ambitions and return to the status quo ante – then, with Ukraine again an autonomous and independent country, does the West also return to the status quo ante in our own dealings with Russia? The answer to this question matters enormously, because if we’re holding out to Moscow an opportunity to return to the same footing as in former times, resuming (as it were) normal service, then we can offer a much more attractive reward for its retreat from Ukraine.

I’ve found a little Eden in London

I’m not one of life’s early risers but an exception had to be made on Wednesday last week. In an event organised by Lord Chadlington (Peter Selwyn Gummer), Michael Gove was talking about ‘levelling up’ to an invited audience at the Corinthia hotel in London. This was a breakfast meeting, doors open at 7.45, and I wanted to hear Mr Gove, a politician I know and admire. So I was there. Gove was impressive. But in the end neither he nor the breakfast were what I’ll always remember about that morning. Around nine o’clock we tipped out on to the pavements by Embankment Tube station. It was a glorious morning, fresh and clear in the winter sunshine. I’m trying to prolong my life by doing more walking these days, so why not amble along to Temple station through the Victoria Embankment gardens – a long, narrow strip of London greenery parallel with the river that, oddly, I’ve never walked through before – and enjoy the morning air? The distance was hardly epic and time did not press.

Taking Ukraine would finish Putin

‘Never interrupt your enemy,’ said Napoleon, ‘when he is making a mistake.’ A Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine would prove (perhaps, by the time this Spectator is published, ‘will’ prove) a terrible mistake. Were it not for the death and despoliation such a mistake would bring — an outcome one could never welcome — the response to Vladimir Putin’s implicit threats should surely be: bring it on! When we told Russia they’d only be hurting themselves, did we not mean it? For the free world, an invasion would be a dark cloud; but, though I hate to speak of silver linings, the ultimate downfall of Putin, the severing of prospective Russian gas supplies to Germany and the kicking of Westminster into finally squaring up to the City’s dirty trade in money-laundering would be a silver lining.

The Chancellor’s horrible task ahead

Whether Rishi Sunak is prime minister or still chancellor this spring, fate is handing him a poisoned chalice. Looking back, I cannot remember a time when the British people were readier to believe that responsibility for their welfare lies in the hands of the state. Looking ahead, I see a time fast approaching when the state will appear unusually powerless to help us. The gap between what people have come to expect and what government can deliver has never been wider. And at least in part, it’s a virus that’s to blame. The pandemic from which we’re emerging has elevated the role and power of the state, reliance upon the state, the moral justification for state intervention, and trust in the state, to levels unprecedented since the second world war.

Good things can come from guilt

I do not know anyone in the Sackler family. I wouldn’t even have heard of them were it not for recent reports of their return to the large-scale philanthropy with which their name was once associated. These reports have led to criticism of institutions that accepted Sackler charity: the well-worn argument being that the family’s businesses made a fortune from aggressively promoting the use of opioids in America, and opioids have caused serious addiction problems for millions of Americans. Sam Leith wrote thoughtfully about the controversy on the Spectator website last week (‘We should be thankful for the Sackler family’s philanthropy’). His — to me — most arresting argument is that whatever view we take of how the super-rich made their fortunes, we should be pleased when they’re parted from some of their money to the benefit of mankind.

The Edition

The collapse: how Red Wall MPs turned on Boris

39 min listen

The Edition

The collapse: how Red Wall MPs turned on Boris

39 min listen

How to wrongfoot an anti-vaxxer

The headline looked promising: ‘How to argue with a Covid anti-vaxxer.’ And, yes, a Times colleague had put together a good, informative feature assessing some of the bogus arguments flying around in this pandemic. But it was not what I was looking for. Since undergraduate days I’ve been fascinated by the category of mental imbalance we call paranoia, believing its milder manifestations to be present to some degree in all of us. Mass paranoia is plainly a strand in the anti-vax movement, and I’ve been listening to a powerful BBC Radio 4 and podcast series researched and presented by Jon Ronson, Things Fell Apart. Ronson looks into the rise of the weird and shocking ‘QAnon’ phenomenon in America — a movement persuaded that the United States is in the grip of a vast, hidden paedophile conspiracy, in which powerful figures from the country’s ruling elite are believed to be complicit.

The conflict at the heart of the migrant question

A friend, a Cambridge professor, passing my old college last week, was startled to encounter a young lady standing outside shouting something and carrying a placard exhorting Mathew [sic] Parris to [expletive deleted] off. He wondered if I knew what this was all about. I don’t, but suppose it relates to my Times column arguing (about asylum seekers) that we do not have an equal obligation to all, but rather concentric circles of obligation at the centre of which we stand, the first circle being to self and family, the next to close friends, neighbours and community, then to nation and, finally, to all mankind. The conclusion to this argument (I said) is that our duty (for example) to accept and care for asylum seekers or indeed economic migrants is not negligible but must stand in line behind other duties.

Anticolonialists have their myths too

Much is now being made of the evils of empire. As a child of empire I bridle. I acknowledge the wrong and injustices of colonialism, the racism, and the greed too. I accept that a re-balancing of history was due. It’s good that the darker side of the picture has now moved into the light. But from my own boyhood experience I know that mixed among the aims of empire there were also idealism, principle, and a belief in the betterment of those we governed. And success: there were things to be proud of. The roots of my mix of pride and shame about empire are the impressions a white boy in Africa formed of the continent on which our forefathers had landed. I cannot ignore, as some anticolonial opinion does, the situation they came to.

Why can’t we remember our first few years?

I begin this column on a train from Paris to London. Opposite me are a mother and baby. I don’t know them and will probably never see them again. The baby is nine months old and called Gabriel. A genial and relaxed child, he is grinning at me and waving his soft-toy giraffe. He’s wearing bootees, white socks polka-dotted with little red hearts, pale burgundy trousers and a grey top. He seems uninterested in northern France flashing past our window, though his mother has held him up to look; but he is taken with this new stranger, your columnist. And I reflect: is it not very odd indeed — does it not require explanation — that Gabriel will never remember any of this? It preoccupies him now. Why does a curtain come down between our memories, some very distinct and strong, from childhood after the age of three, and what happened to us before that age? Why does our infancy go into the dark, never to be illuminated again? This, after all, was the time when the world was fresh and new and amazing, when misery was most miserable and happiness happiest, when surprise was sharpest and disappointment most intense.

Do you really need to see the GP in person?

Only later, perhaps even a decade later, as the pandemic of 2020-22 shrinks in our rear-view mirror, may we be able to assess its enduring consequences. So I am only speculating when I suggest that one of these may be the beginning of the slow death of general practice in the United Kingdom. And, no, this will not be a column attacking Britain’s GPs, whom I think to be mostly dedicated and hard-working men and women whose careers are demanding, whose work is difficult, and who are not paid excessively for the hours and expertise they bring to their vocation. Rather as with the class for which we use the generic term ‘politicians’, public discontent about ‘GPs’ is felt towards the generality. Local doctors whom we really know, like local constituency MPs we know, we tend to respect.

The case for road pricing

Thornton Wilder remarked that there are individuals who fall in love with an idea long before its appointed rendezvous with history. We hurl ourselves against the indifference of the age. It is now four decades since one of my first columns was published in London’s Evening Standard. In it I proposed an idea of which (if you read on) you’ll hear more. I got no response. It’s nearly 20 years since I wrote essentially the same piece as a whimsical side column for the Times. Labour’s Alistair Darling had called for debate on the idea. It never happened and my column attracted little notice. Fifteen years later, excited by a competition the Wolfson Foundation ran for the best proposal for implementing the idea, I wrote a serious 1,000-word column for the Times.

We should never have been in Afghanistan

Two important studies have been published this autumn on the apparent failure of our almost 20-year war in Afghanistan. In the Times Literary Supplement my friend Rory Stewart has been reviewing The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock; and last week I went along to the launch at the Frontline Club in Paddington of the BBC correspondent David Loyn’s The Long War, my copy of which has just arrived. Both look like brilliant accounts of what went wrong, both will surely prove useful guides to a lamentable episode in modern statecraft, but both — and Rory too in his own TLS assessment and recommendations — appear to me to be missing the point. These three writers have become so close, so engaged, for so long, to a knot of truly Gordian complexity, that they have missed the Gordian solution.

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