Hello,
Obligatory shilling. This month I wrote for my Substack subscribers about Jeremy Corbyn and rude journalists, learning to love existential risk, what makes right-wingers angry, Elon Musk’s unfunniness, the third anniversary of THE ZONE, what Christopher Hitchens thinks about modern politics, the suffering of farm animals, online pile-ons, discourse and reality and an encounter with Jehovah’s Witnesses.
I wrote for The Critic about the MP-to-media pipeline, the decline of the charismatic criminal, conservative clichés, our friends on the left and Dominic Raab and bullying.
I wrote for the Spectator World about Vince McMahon.
And so suddenly. I’m not sure I’ll ever write as well in good health as Jeremy Clarke is writing on the verge of death. It’s important not to let the weight of the subject matter intimidate you into acting like a piece of prose has value. That’s how the James Freys of this world end up being published. But Mr Clarke’s deathbed reflections are really beautiful.
Abolish me. This profile of idealistic radical political commentator cum amoral political operative Sean McElwee is rib-strainingly hilarious. The pig who wants to be eaten from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy comes to mind as McElwee drops self-incriminating after self-incriminating quote.
You can’t trust people who really like politics. Politics, inevitably, is lies and compromise. You can accept that but if you enjoy it there’s something wrong with you. It’s like being a drainage expert who really loves shit.
The retired informer. Peter Hitchens writes brilliantly about John Le Carre:
He was a man who had a unique understanding of two things—the secret world and human betrayal—and he used them to write some of the most enduringly good novels of his time.
Too big for midges. Simon Evans writes brilliantly about Barry Humphries:
If the young doctor who took over a certain GP surgery in Hyde, Cheshire, had decided to honour the previous occupant, perhaps with a photo montage of his media highlights; or if whichever hardware store had supplied a certain truck driver with his hammers had decided to keep his “customer of the month” certificate over the till — well, you could understand the outrage.
This is not the situation with Barry…
Tsarist bureaucrats. J Sorel incisively reviews Matthew Goodwin’s Values, Voice and Virtue:
Goodwin keeps insisting on the intelligence and savvy of this class, but, reading these pages, the overwhelming parallel in my mind is with the Tsarist bureaucrats. Here we find the same paranoia, the same despair, the same feeling of permanent siege. Britain’s governing class believes that society is in a process of violent dissolution, and that an iron hand can alone save it — hence the screams, the tantrums, the calls for press censorship, the lawsuits, the appeals to mental health, the bludgeoned foxes.
Splendid uselessness. Joseph Keegin argues that living well does not always mean living usefully. I’m a big fan of his examples — JA Baker (author of the peerless The Peregrine) and the DIY punk band The Minutemen. Still, I have an awful suspicion that when he says “living well and living uselessly” he doesn’t mean browsing Twitter.
Quotidian mayhem. Heather Mac Donald writes about the horrors of violent crime in the USA. It would be great to see someone who disagreed with her presentation deal with the data.
Jolyon mourns. Yuan Yi Zhu reviews a new book by bumbling leftist lawyer Jolyon Maugham. Maugham thinks he’s being targeted because he’s a threat to the system but I disagree — I think it is because he’s really funny. I couldn’t have written a really vicious hatchet job of the books I’ve read by Richard Seymour or Owen Hatherley — because they are very eloquent and knowledgeable. That’s not to say a hatchet job cannot be unfair. But one must at least ask oneself, “Is it me?”
A grim prophet. Happy 75th birthday to John N. Gray! What a good time to read Straw Dogs, or Black Mass, or Enlightenment’s Wake, or, well — anything really.
Have a great month. I should be casting an eye over the National Conservatism conference in London if you happen to be there, so do say “hello” or “fuck you” or “how do I convert a free subscription into a paying one”.
Thank you for reading,
Ben