Leah McLaren | The Spectator columnists & writers

Where does a mother’s history end and a daughter’s begin?

In the grim locked-down winter of 2021, I drove three hours to Wales where I sat in an isolated cottage and wrestled with a memoir I could not figure out how to write. While I was there, my mother sent me a link to a two-page personal essay she’d published in a tiny but venerable magazine called the Canadian Literary Review. It was entitled ‘This Story is Mine’. After a preamble about feminism and #MeToo, she cuts to the chase: ‘In June 1964, a few weeks before my thirteenth birthday I was raped by a man old enough to be my father.’ My mother then went on to tell her life story, or the story she understands to be her life. It’s a story I’d heard many times before, one she’d published other versions of in other places.

Spectator Out Loud

James Heale, Leah McLaren, Nicholas Farrell

22 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

James Heale, Leah McLaren, Nicholas Farrell

22 min listen

On this week's episode, we’ll hear from James Heale on the Zac Goldsmiths’ secret shadow cabinet. (00:49)Next, Leah McLaren on Covid in Canada. (07:20)And finally, Nicholas Farrell on the march of the Italian Wolves. (13:58)Produced and presented by Sam HolmesSubscribe to The Spectator today and get a £20 Amazon gift voucher:www.spectator.co.uk/voucher

Trudeau vs truckers: a head-on collision

Two-and-a-half centuries ago in 2015 I had a video call with a Canadian friend who lives in my hometown of Toronto. As we spoke, she was putting together a Middle Eastern spice box for the Syrian refugee family she’d sponsored through her daughter’s school, carefully printing the labels in Arabic. Canada had recently committed to accepting 25,000 refugees, compared with the UK’s 10,000, which we both agreed was stingy. I explained to her that although there were lots of charities and refugee initiatives here, the public attitude was different. Not xenophobic, I insisted, just less precious. None of the parents at my son’s school, as far as I knew, were organising welcoming committees for the Syrians, let along putting together spice boxes.

Justin Trudeau’s election gamble is backfiring

In 1966, a year before Pierre Elliott Trudeau first blazed to power, the bard-poet Leonard Cohen published his second and final novel, Beautiful Losers. The book is a hallucinogenic, stream-of-consciousness steam bath of Catholic allusions, French separatist indignance and extra-marital forest porn with hot indigenous chicks. Needless to say it’s basically unreadable. Back home in Canada though, the book is still widely taught and read. Over half a century on it still sells thousands of copies each year. The reason, as one early critic noted, is that the book, while being an obvious failure, is nonetheless ‘an important failure.’ Which brings me to the matter of our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. Having called a snap election, Trudeau is now flailing in the polls.

The Canadian election is turning into a comedy of cringe

Next week my compatriots will cast their votes in what has arguably been the worst Canadian election ever. By ‘worst’ I don’t mean allegations of voter fraud or political corruption or scenes of civil unrest but a collective release of hot prairie wind followed by a vague sinking sensation — the feeling of a prosperous nation of decent people settling into a new low of political disillusionment. The campaign kicked off with a bang, as Time, a US magazine, humiliated the Canadian press by breaking the story of the year: yearbook images of our dreamboat PM — the thinking non-gender-binary person’s gluten--free crumpet — cavorting in blackface back when he was teacher at a private Vancouver high school. Since then the spiral has continued.

Parent trap: WhatsApp groups are feeding our fears

The mother of a little girl in my son’s year at school recently committed suicide. On the surface she was a radiant person, smiling and full of light. Devoted to her daughter, successful at work, always good for a laugh at the school gates. No one — save those loved ones who knew her private struggle — saw it coming. For days, waves of confusion and sadness emanated out through our patch of north-west London. This is the way of suicides in social groups. I’ve seen it before. They ripple and reach well beyond where they have any right to. But the peculiar thing about this tragedy was the way the news was disseminated — namely through the popular social media service WhatsApp. Founded by two former Yahoo employees and purchased by Facebook in 2014 for a staggering $19 billion, WhatsApp is now the preferred form of communication for people in my demographic, by which I mean middle--class professional London mum-types.

Parent trap

Too good to be Trudeau

An Italian friend who lives in Rome texted me to ask about the current political crisis in Canada that is threatening to topple the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. ‘I honestly can’t see what the “scandal” is,’ he said. ‘Is it all just because Justin forgot to say “please” when asking his attorney-general for a deferred prosecution agreement?’ No and yes — and that is also what makes this scandal so uniquely Canadian. In Britain, good manners are often an act of passive aggression, while Canadians are pathologically earnest in their civility. We tend towards well-mannered moderation both in life and politics. Unlike in Westminster or Washington — where the rituals of government act as window dressing to a partisan fight — in Canada, our national identity is built on seemliness.

Class war

One thing I love about my adopted country is the widespread cultural contempt for dullness. Unlike North Americans, intelligent British people rarely drone on in a witless or self-aggrandising manner. They deflect, make jokes and generally aim to please. But there is one boring subject no one here ever seems to tire of and that is schooling. ‘So where do your kids go?’ I’ve learned is just as loaded and inescapable a London dinner party question as ‘What do you do?’ or ‘Where are you on Brexit?’ If you choose private, you’d better have a plausible explanation (e.g. ‘We just didn’t want to make our child the social experiment’). And if you choose state, you’d better mention how ‘absolutely brilliant’ the school is, lest anyone think you didn’t put years of thought and research into the decision.

What I learned from arguing about gun control with my Texan uncle

Whenever there’s another mass shooting in America, like the one in Florida yesterday, I think immediately of my Uncle Bill in Texas, a retired military man, practising Catholic, Republican, NRA member, community volunteer and civil libertarian who lives in a gated community with my Aunt Bev (a retired nurse) on the outskirts of Houston. Uncle Bill likes to email me redneck jokes in the hope of getting my progressive Canadian dander up. Here’s a recent one: The premier of Ontario is jogging with her dog along a nature trail. A coyote jumps out and attacks the premier’s dog, then bites the premier. She calls animal control. Animal control captures the coyote and bills the province $200 testing it for diseases and $500 for relocating it.

Sticking to his guns

Whenever there’s another mass shooting in America, like the massacre in San Bernardino last month, I think immediately of my Uncle Bill in Texas, a retired military man, practising Catholic, Republican, NRA member, community volunteer and civil libertarian who lives in a gated community with my Aunt Bev (a retired nurse) on the outskirts of Houston. Uncle Bill likes to email me redneck jokes in the hope of getting my progressive Canadian dander up. Here’s a recent one: The premier of Ontario is jogging with her dog along a nature trail. A coyote jumps out and attacks the premier’s dog, then bites the premier. She calls animal control. Animal control captures the coyote and bills the province $200 testing it for diseases and $500 for relocating it.

Alice Munro won’t let her Nobel go to her head — that’s why she’s a true Canadian writer

Canadians, like the English, are known for our tendency to apologise. The difference is, we actually mean it. Our modesty is not false. Our inferiority complex is not a polite, self-deprecating joke. We really do feel inferior. And we really are sorry. Sorry for taking up so much space for so few people. Sorry for being so dull and functional compared with our glitzy neighbour to the south. Sorry about Celine Dion. And above all, sorry for failing to produce much of anything great apart from Niagara Falls and the Rockies, which we can’t take credit for anyway. So when Alice Munro, our most quietly adored author, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature last week, the entire nation gave a collective whoop and then glanced furtively over our shoulder as if to say, ‘Are you sure there hasn’t been some mistake?’ Munro is the most unlikely of Nobel laureates.

Congratulations, Rob Ford: you’ve finally made me despise you

The first thing you see after leaving the baggage carousel at Toronto’s Pearson airport is an enormous photograph of Mayor Rob Ford. In it, the former high school football coach grins in his blingy regalia, teeth yellowed, one eye squinting in a semi-wink. His scalp is flushed and shiny through a receding blond hairline and his excessive girth spreads well beyond the frame. The overall effect is of a bloated albino lab rat on the wrong side of a thyroid drug trial. I always felt a bit sorry for him looking at it. Not any more. Last week details of a video emerged that features the mayor, shirt unbuttoned, apparently smoking crack cocaine. In the 90-second film he reportedly sniggers, pants, catches his breath, calls Justin Trudeau, leader of the federal Liberal party a ‘fag’, declares himself ‘fucking right wing’ and proceeds to light up a glass pipe and get high as a Georgia pine.

My battle with Britain’s mean, ineffective immigration system

When I first came to this country nearly a decade ago, Britain wanted immigrants like me. Back then you could get a visa just for being creative. It was called the ‘Artist, Writer, Composer Visa’ — a Blairite flight of fancy if there ever was one — and all you had to do was fill out a form proving that you’d made a name for yourself in your country of origin in one of those three disciplines. The application, as I recall, made a point of including conceptual artists and sculptors. I’d published a novel in Canada, so I was in. It was that easy. Thinking about it now makes me want to weep. Back then, Britain was more upbeat. There were jobs in the media and journalists still had expense accounts. Pizza Express was a place in which you might like to eat a pizza.

Newborn Notebook

Looking back, it’s baffling that someone like me — a lover of pleasure and loather of pain, a woman who pops Nurofen like breath mints and cannot sit on the sofa without six cushions wedged in at strategic angles for maximum telly-watching comfort — would have deluded myself into believing I was going to give birth gracefully in a state of natural bliss. Regular readers of this magazine may recall I’d decided on a home birth. In preparation for the big event I lined up two community midwives, scented candles, a self-hypnosis CD, a full-bodied Barolo and a birthing pool, which by 40 weeks, Rob could unpack and inflate in our living room in six minutes flat. Needless to say it didn’t work out like that. After seven hours of spectacularly painful labour (people who say it doesn’t hurt if you ‘breathe’ are lying or insane or both) the midwife informed me that my baby was breech and I would have to be rushed to hospital immediately to avoid a grisly scene from a Victorian period drama playing out in the middle of our flat.

Natural born cheaters

Daisy was my first midwife at the London hospital where, upon finding out I was pregnant, I’d planned to have a straightforward, perfectly average birth with lots of euphoria-inducing drugs and expert medical attention. That, of course, was before I knew anything about the NHS and its methods. My 12-week appointment was arranged through my GP. After sitting close to three hours in a waiting room filled with sweaty pregnant women who looked as if they might kill each other for a sandwich, I was shown into an office by a large 60-something woman in a blue smock holding a clipboard with my notes on it. She wore a name tag but did not introduce herself. First she instructed me to stop taking Pregnacare antenatal vitamins, the bestselling supplement on the market, as they were, in her opinion, ‘complete rubbish’.

Englishmen rule

I discovered I was pregnant the same day I met the Queen. It was one of those lightless December afternoons when the sky clamps down on London like the lid on a cast iron pot. I went straight from my doctor’s surgery in Shepherd’s Bush to a media reception at Buckingham Palace where I was ushered up the stairs into a large drawing room hung with Old Masters and rammed with journalists sucking back free champagne, trying to look blasé. The courtiers gently herded us all into a queue, prised flute glasses from sticky fingers and prodded us one by one into the adjoining room. And suddenly there she was: Elizabeth II, tiny and smiling beatifically in a mint-green skirt suit and gloves. She was paler and prettier than I’d expected, gave off a whiff of perfumed powder and had an extraterrestrial glow I have only ever seen in one other mortal up close: the teenaged Scarlett Johansson.

Resetting the clock?

A Canadian doctor may have found a natural way to extend women’s fertilityDr Robert Casper, gynaecologist, reproductive endocrinologist and Toronto-based fertility guru, is telling me a bunch of stuff I really don’t want to hear. ‘The ageing female reproductive system is like a forgotten flashlight on the top shelf of a closet,’ he says in his flat, matter-of-fact Canadian bedside voice; a voice, incidentally, that reminds me of my father’s. ‘When you stumble across it a few years later and try to switch it on, it won’t work, not because there’s anything wrong with the flashlight but because the batteries inside it have died.’The ‘batteries’ he’s referring to in his miserable metaphor (I understand the need to make a scientific point, but is it really necessary to evoke the image of lonely death in the dark?) are a woman’s eggs, or ‘O-sites’ as they are called in medical reproductive lingo.

Brush up your Shakespeare

‘William Shakespeare was the most influential person who ever lived,’ is the audacious opening line of Canadian writer Stephen Marche’s recently published book, How Shakespeare Changed Everything. It’s the sort of bold claim that makes you immediately think of other contenders: Jesus? Muhammed? Newton? Freud? Oprah? And while we’re at it, how exactly should influence be measured? Is it counted in literary references and Google hits — or is it something less tangible, more magical than that?Marche suggests the latter but conveniently skips over the criteria for determining his thesis. As far as the author is concerned it’s obvious that all of history’s luminaries are pretty dull compared to Stratford’s son, who, he writes rather ecstatically, ‘makes the world shiver’ and ‘everyday things vibrate’.

Know your onions

James Wong may not yet be a household name but he does have trouble getting through the checkout line at Sainsbury’s. As the presenter of BBC2’s Grow Your Own Drugs, the 28-year-old’s fame is fast on the rise. In a nutshell, he is the Jamie Oliver of plant-based medicine: affable, competent, with a cheeky glint in his eye. While Oliver can inspire even the laziest housewife to whip up a simple Italian supper, so too Wong possesses the telegenic power to make a sceptical, black-thumbed gal want to heal herself naturally. After watching his latest series, I found myself out on my rainy terrace furiously pruning a shrivelled potted rosemary for clippings to mix with organic wine, thus creating a foolproof tincture to improve short-term memory and ward off dementia.

There’s nothing cute about a Canuck

Next week, when the Winter Olympics come to Vancouver, the eyes of the world will be on Canada, the sprawling, frigid nation of my birth. It doesn’t happen often, so when the international spotlight swivels our way, we Canadians do our best to hog it. We don’t go in for patriotism and self-belief like our American cousins, but like the shy wallflower who ends up closing the karaoke bar with a lampshade on her head, Canadians are compelled to make fools of ourselves if we are flattered into thinking anyone might notice. So brace yourself in the coming weeks, Britain, for a gushing torrent of maple-flavoured praise for all things Canuck. You are going to hear about our glowing social democracy, our courageous war record, our unparalleled health and welfare system, and our ability to maintain trim waists and white teeth despite an insatiable appetite for honey lager and harp seal (which is exceptionally nutritious and a boon to the Nordic economy, no matter what Stella McCartney might say).

Don’t worry — drink and be merry

The government acts as if booze is the root cause of all our social problems, says Leah McLaren, but it’s not. Drinking is an important part of British culture, the pub is the hub of the community, and health warnings can even be counterproductive‘No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.’— P.J. O’RourkeHappy new year! But don’t pass the bubbly. Haven’t you heard? We are all in danger of losing our souls to the demon liquor. According to the government, alcohol expands your liver, distends your pancreas and turns your brainstem to jelly.

Why do we long to be Nazis and tarts?

As the fancy-dress party season begins again, Leah McLaren wonders why the British are never more themselves than when they’re pretending to be someone elseThere is a popular urban legend about a British couple in New York who attended a black tie gala dressed as a pair of pumpkins. Turns out they had misinterpreted the host’s instruction to ‘dress fancy,’ as an invitation for fancy dress — something Americans only do once a year on Halloween. Did they burst into tears and run home? Not a chance. Being Brits, they put on brave faces, pulled their orange foam bellies up to the bar, and proceeded to get shamelessly drunk as the Manhattan glitterati swirled around them.It might sound like a ludicrous story, but having experienced the cultural flip side, I believe it.

The Aussie who saved our flag

A cowboy name. Heavy on the consonants and crudely clipped, the first three letters doubling as an instrument of discipline, it is as solid and unpretty as the man it refers to. Given recent challenges, a perfect moniker for a captain of the British aviation industry. 'I've been an airline chief executive for over ten years now and it is a stressful job,' Rod Eddington is saying, fixing me with a crap-cutting, High Noon look. 'But you have to be able to accept that it's stressful. I won't pretend for a moment that it's been easy.' We are sitting in a windowless, over-furnished boardroom in the Park Lane Hotel in Piccadilly. Eddington, who starts work each day shortly after 7 a.m., has been here conducting meetings since early this morning.

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