The Spectator columnists & writers

Andrew Doyle and Ian Leslie: How do we disagree?

The public conversation - especially on social media - is widely agreed to be of a dismally low quality. In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by two people who have ideas about how we can make it better. Andrew Doyle’s new book is Free Speech: And Why It Matters; Ian Leslie’s is Conflicted: Why Arguments Are Tearing Us Apart And How They Can Bring Us Together. We talk free speech, tribalism, cancel culture - and how we can learn to disagree more productively.

Cancel culture is nothing new

Spectator contributors were asked: Which moment from history seems most significant or interesting? Here is Andrew Doyle’s answer: The Synodus Horrenda of January 897 is one of many bleak episodes in history that the Catholic Church would probably rather we forget. This is when Pope Formosus was put on trial for perjury and violating canon law. The twist is that by this point he had been dead for eight months. The trial was an exercise in score-settling by his successor, Stephen VI. He had the corpse exhumed, dressed in his sacerdotal garb and propped up in the papal court. Pope Formosus was even provided with a defence council, but the outcome was never really in doubt. After hours of interrogation, during which Pope Stephen hurled abuse at the cadaver and tauntingly challenged it to reply, a guilty verdict was reached.

The ‘anti-racism’ movement is sowing deeper divisions

Have you ever claimed to be ‘not racist’? If so, sorry, but you’re a bigot. Should this seem incoherent, then you’re clearly not well versed in critical race theory: a once niche academic field that has gone mainstream and popularised concepts such as ‘white privilege’, ‘white fragility’ and ‘systemic racism’. According to Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, ‘the claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism’. Alana Lentin, author of Why Race Still Matters, takes it a step further, arguing that to be ‘not racist’ is ‘a form of discursive racist violence’. If you declare yourself not racist, it’s an unequivocal sign you’re an unrepentant white supremacist. Confused yet? It gets worse. To be truly committed to racial equality, theorists argue, one must be ‘anti-racist’.

The Edition

American meltdown: November’s democratic disaster

40 min listen

The Edition

American meltdown: November’s democratic disaster

40 min listen

Is this week's presidential debate a taste of the chaos to come? (00:55) In defence of 'wokeness' (15:10) and are male-only spaces immoral? (30:25)With Matt Purple, Senior Editor at the American Conservative; Karin Robinson, host of the Primarily: 2020 podcast; Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor; Andrew Doyle, the writer behind Titania McGrath; and Emily Bendell, the entrepreneur who is bring a lawsuit against the Garrick Club.Presented by Cindy Yu.Produced by Cindy Yu and Max Jeffery.

Spectator Out Loud

Joanna Lumley, Lionel Shriver, Andrew Doyle and Jeremy Clarke

27 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Joanna Lumley, Lionel Shriver, Andrew Doyle and Jeremy Clarke

27 min listen

On this week's edition, Joanna Lumley recalls her meeting with Mongolia’s former champion wrestler – now the country’s president – and reflects on the joys of eating birdseed (01:14). Lionel Shriver argues that the true novelty of coronavirus is just how scared it's made us all (07:14). Andrew Doyle suggests that the SNP's hate crime bill could lead to the criminalisation of the bible (15:34). And Low Life's Jeremy Clarke shares his sadness at seeing an old neighbour and friend moving on (20:14).

Could possession of the Bible become an offence in Scotland?

For the Scottish National party, the phrase ‘nanny state’ is not so much a criticism as an aspiration. This is the party that wanted to assign a state guardian to every child born in Scotland through its ‘named person’ scheme, only to be thwarted by the Supreme Court. Under Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership, there have been repeated attempts to regulate the eating and drinking habits of people, including proposed bans on two-for-one pizza deals and minimum pricing on cheaper alcoholic drinks. It makes sense, then, that the party’s paternalism should extend to the question of free speech. Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Bill was ostensibly proposed to repeal outdated proscriptions against blasphemy, but will instead usher in a range of new blasphemy laws by stealth.

We are living through a frenzy of conformity

Reality seems thinner these days. As I walk along the high street, passers-by drift apart as though afraid of crossing auras. Three months of lockdown has made this repulsion of human contact a matter of instinct. I can’t help but see this tendency reflected in the escalating intolerance and hostility on social media. So at the start of the week I decide to spend a few days away from Twitter. It’s not the ideal forum for civilised debate at the best of times, but even some of those I respect are now behaving like poorly socialised children who’ve just learnt some flashy new expletives. J.K. Rowling is bombarded for holding views about biological sex differences that would have been considered self-evident only a decade ago.

Trump vs Twitter: the battle begins

When Tony Wang, general manager of Twitter in the UK, described the company as the ‘free speech wing of the free speech party’ he was expressing an ideal that would soon collapse. This was in 2012, long before the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency was anything other than a flippant punchline in The Simpsons. Six months after the 2016 election, Twitter’s co-founder Evan Williams expressed his regret for the part they played in securing Trump’s victory. The implication – that the decisions of the general public are shaped by bad actors who prey on their malleability, and it is the responsibility of technocrats to do something about it – is one that has since become depressingly familiar. Trump’s new executive order, which seeks to remove legal protections from social media companies to encourage political neutrality, has been a long time coming.

The vocal minority celebrating Boris Johnson’s coronavirus diagnosis

What does it tell us that so many left-leaning individuals took to social media this week in order to celebrate the news that Boris Johnson has tested positive for coronavirus? Others stooped even lower and openly yearned for his death, complete with triumphal emojis and GIFs. It would simply never occur to most of us to revel in the illness of a fellow human creature simply on the grounds that he or she represents a political worldview that we find repellent. So why does this instinct come so naturally to those who, barely a few weeks earlier, were hectoring their followers about the importance of compassion and peppering their tweets with the #BeKind hashtag? I’m not the only one to have noticed the increased level of vitriol on social media since the lockdown begun.

That's Life

With Andrew Doyle

17 min listen

That's Life

With Andrew Doyle

17 min listen

On the latest episode, Andy and Benedict talk to comedian and author Andrew Doyle, the brains behind the Twitter persona 'Titania McGrath'. Andrew explains just why he's so suited to self-isolation, the politicisation of coronavirus, and which quarantined celebrities he feels most sorry for.

Laurence Fox and the curdling of rational minds

I start the week by going through my iPhone to delete the numbers of former friends. It sounds depressing, but it’s actually quite cathartic. I suppose it all started with Brexit. I’m not a confrontational person, so it was surprising to find so many friends turning against me over their newfound devotion to a neoliberal trading bloc. Since then, I’ve watched the ongoing curdling of rational minds with a growing sense of incomprehension. So many on the left appear to have surrendered to a collective fantasy in which the slightest point of political disagreement is interpreted as evidence of fascism. Someone I’ve known for more than a decade went all Mr Hyde on me in a pub one night, barking that I was a ‘Nazi’, which is about as antithetical to my worldview as you can get.

Andrew Doyle: I may have to kill off Titania McGrath

Ricky Gervais: why I’ll never apologise for my jokes

There’s a moment in Ricky Gervais’s 2018 Netflix stand-up show Humanity when he talks about buying a first-class air ticket, only to be informed that nuts would not be served on board due to a fellow passenger’s serious allergy. ‘I was fuming,’ he says. ‘If being near a nut kills you, do we really want that in the gene pool? I’ve never wanted nuts more. I felt that she was infringing on my human right to eat nuts.’ A member of the public tweeted him directly to complain after hearing him tell this story on The Tonight Show, but instead of apologising Ricky wrote a routine about it. As he points out, when someone is needlessly offended, ‘it makes it funnier’. Contrary to those who argue that political correctness is killing comedy, he insists that it is driving it.

The problem with calling Sam Smith ‘they’

Singer Sam Smith has announced that from now on his pronouns are ‘they/them’, sparking an overdue conversation about the social justice movement’s ongoing efforts to influence the way we speak. Of course Smith is free to make his request – just as we are free to decide whether or not to accede – but with such attempts to skip over the natural process of language evolution, where does that leave the teachers whose job it is to uphold basic grammatical standards? The expectation that ‘they’ and ‘them’ should be adopted as singular pronouns in formal speech and writing presents its own set of challenges. We are all aware of the common colloquial usage of ‘they’ as singular in the case of one whose gender is unknown.

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