In Absentia?

As Peter Mandelson is fined for having urinated outside George Osborne’s house, Mandelson’s handpicked MP for Hartlepool, one Jonathan Brash, is to host on Monday the Awami League of the overthrown Bangladeshi dictator Sheikh Hasina, who was in November sentenced to death in absentia for crimes against humanity. The following month saw the conviction in absentia for corruption, with a sentence of two years’ imprisonment and a fine, of Sheikh’s niece, Tulip Siddiq, who is the Labour Member of Parliament for Hampstead and Kilburn, and who is thus a constituency neighbour of Keir Starmer, under whom she previously served as Anti-Corruption Minister.

As yet another of their councillors and parliamentary staffers, Connor McGrath of Stevenage, is convicted of child sex offences, Labour right-wingers are normally very sniffy about the Labour Left’s ties to what were not officially “sister parties”, nominally Socialist parties from the same mould as they were. Plus the American Democrats, who would not thank anyone for calling them that, but who are in fact the mould.

Yet the Awami League does not even pretend to be anything like that. If Campaign Group MPs were wrong to host, say, Yanis Varoufakis, because he was not a member of PASOK (who is anymore?), then what does that make Brash? Or Siddiq, in addition to her being the only British MP subject to an Interpol Red Notice? She rejects her conviction because it was delivered by a judge without a jury. Think on.

We See You

The Epstein Class lost the Iran War, so here comes Russia again. How stupid do they think we are? There is in any case no grounds for sanctioning Russia for having pressed (not very successfully) its claim to Ukraine east of the Dnieper, although there are people at or near the very top in Russia who openly want all of it, but not for sanctioning Israel for pressing its claim to Lebanon south of the Litani, although there are people at or near the very top in Israel who openly want all of it. There are at least some people in Eastern Ukraine who would want it to be in Russia, but Israel could annex Southern Lebanon only by expelling or exterminating its inhabitants. That is what it is doing.

Yvette Cooper is "deeply troubled", though not so deeply troubled as to stop arming Israel, or to stop the nightly reconnaissance missions from RAF Akrotiri for which we did not even charge the Israelis. She stands so little chance of holding her own seat that it will be next month or never for her to become Prime Minister. In power or out of it, the North East remains a major centre of the right-wing machine within the Labour Party, so Cooper kept me in prison twice as long as I should have been. I cannot imagine that that made me anything special. That is just what she is. Be afraid. Be very, very, very afraid.

Rogue Scholars

Historically, the right wing of the Labour Party was split between vicious anti-intellectuals and figures, such as Denis Healey, at the opposite extreme. But it chose anti-intellectualism permanently when it chose Tony Blair over Gordon Brown. From Charles Clarke to Bridget Phillipson, we have seen the consequent attitude to, say, Classics, or Theology, or Medieval History, or anything else that might shed light on the war in Iran, or on the Epstein Class, or on the conflict between Donald Trump and the Pope. As for “cancel culture”, some of us have never not been cancelled, and those who have moaned the loudest over the last decade had no objection when they were the ones doing the cancelling. When only they did it, then there was not even a name for it. It was just the way that things were. Such normal service is being resumed, as Edmund King and Thomas Prosser write:

At the beginning of Lexi Freiman’s 2023 novel, The Book of Ayn, New York City-based novelist Anna writes a satire of the American opioid epidemic and is promptly canceled for classism. After her book receives a catastrophically negative review in The New York Times, Anna is dropped by her publisher, blacklisted by media outlets, and ghosted by her friends. Realizing how badly out of alignment she was with the progressive mood of the early 2020s, Anna muses that “there were so many new rules — all set by college students paying $200,000 for their humanism.” 

Anna’s cancellation story does not stop there. Her new outsider status gains her an invitation to a fashionable “dissident soiree,” at which canceled scenesters and edgy podcasters privately sympathize with her plight. She is courted by a publicist who wagers that “cancellation was about to become cool.” Above all, she becomes comically obsessed with the writings of Ayn Rand, raving about the ultra-libertarian author’s crap prose and ghoulish ideas with all the intensity of an extroverted teenager who has just found God. If Anna had previously been an orthodox member of the literary mainstream, her subsequent revolt against orthodoxy ends up being no less conformist.

Academia, too, has lately witnessed a similarly conformist revolt against conformity. Over the last decade, a new and vigorous “heterodox” movement has emerged, with its own scathing diagnosis of the failures of mainstream academe. Beyond advocating greater viewpoint diversity within existing institutions, heterodox figures have established new institutions that aim to compete with the traditional university system, and launched new fields that attempt to challenge progressive ideologies. These efforts are now a few years old, and assessment of their record is timely.

As to their success, there are reasons to be doubtful.

The heterodox critique points at an undeniably real set of problems. In the current ideological climate on campus, scholars can feel pressure to distance themselves from texts, authors, and arguments that could be seen as “problematic.” Ideas once confined to the activist fringes of the social sciences have spread to the humanities and hard sciences writ large. And as the ideological climate on campuses tilts ever more progressive, so, too, has the makeup of the people who teach there. Conservative scholars now make up an ever-tinier share of the academic teaching workforce, vastly outnumbered by those with liberal, progressive, and Left-wing views. Public confidence in the value of universities is declining sharply, in part reflecting the sense that academia refuses to even consider the opinions of half or more of the electorate.

Of course, there are many ways to be heterodox. On an administrative level, one may advocate for greater pluralism within existing academia. Parallel to established academic structures, organizations like the Heterodox Academy work towards this goal. On a scholarly level, one may produce work that investigates developments in progressive ideologies through the lens of established disciplines and fields. In recent years, several excellent books have taken such an approach, including the groundbreaking work of Jonathan Haidt, Yascha Mounk’s 2023 book, The Identity Trap, and Musa Al-Gharbi’s thought-provoking 2024 book, We Have Never Been Woke. At its best, work like this can demystify developments inside academia, both for those on the outside and also for those within, who have been quietly searching for explanations for the rapid ideological changes of the past 10 years.

But the heterodox movement hasn’t focused simply on fixing what is broken. At its most ambitious, it has aimed to put academia back on track by creating whole new institutions. The most prominent example is the University of Austin, or UATX, conceived by the hawkish journalist Bari Weiss and the tech billionaire Joe Lonsdale, among others. Announcing the new school in 2021, its founding president, Pano Kanelos, observed that “many universities no longer have an incentive to create an environment where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized.” (Kanelos has since departed the institution, as have a number of faculty and advisers.)

If other universities were no longer in the business of seeking the truth or promoting a diversity of ideas on campus, then UATX would do this. Newly founded scholarly outlets like the Journal of Controversial Ideas work in parallel to the new institutions, playing host to key debates within the community. There have lately been attempts to establish new academic fields to hold mainstream scholarship to account. The University of Buckingham’s Centre of Heterodox Social Science, for instance, aims to incubate what it terms “critical wokeness studies.”

These new developments pose an existential question: if mainstream academia has been “captured,” does the future of real scholarship lie beyond the established institutions? But actually creating these new institutions — rather than merely sloganeering about the dire need for them — is proving more difficult.

The first obvious challenge is that of scale, resourcing, and critical mass. Compared to established brick-and-mortar universities, “heterodox” startups like UATX and the Jordan Peterson Academy are tiny. They can’t offer anything approaching the range of courses or the in-person research facilities of a traditional university, nor indeed can they provide secure employment for academics. Even when the seriously rich invest in heterodox institutions, as in the case of UATX, these kinds of disparities persist.

The diffuse focus of the heterodox community compounds these challenges. The Journal of Controversial Ideas has a much wider subject remit than traditional academic journals — after all, there are controversial ideas in every discipline. But this diluted focus makes quality assurance difficult to achieve. If one has a controversial idea about (say) geriatric psychiatry, one needs to engage with other experts in the field to assess its validity. Heterodox scholars in other fields simply don’t have the knowledge to comment fruitfully on such an idea. One can be “heterodox” in relation to other scholars in one’s field. That “heterodoxy,” though, has no automatic relevance to heterodox work being done in another field. “Heterodox studies,” in other words, isn’t a coherent concept.

To succeed, modern academic fields need to have a critical mass of scholars working in specific areas. Without this, expertise is too thinly spread. Even in areas in which heterodox expertise is more concentrated — for example, the study of Left-wing authoritarianism or the new “critical wokeness studies” — this problem still rears its head. What if expert reviewers can’t be found? What if the field lacks researchers who are expert in specialist research methods? All new fields face challenges, but they are easier to navigate within established institutions with adjacent expertise and generous funding. Potentially, heterodox startups might work with existing academia to develop capacity, but burned bridges and skepticism about the worth and relevance of traditional academic networks can make this more difficult.

To be fair to those in the heterodox movement, one might regard the issues of scale and resourcing as inevitable growing pains along the path to maturity. Traditional academia, after all, is centuries old, and the task of building alternative institutions will take more than a day. While it is true that the heterodox movement’s resource base may well expand in the future, deeper questions remain about its foundations and likely trajectories.

In the best academic fields, incentive structures promote careful and rigorous scholarship. To achieve standing, one must convince expert peers of the value of one’s work. What about the scholarly foundations of the heterodox movement? Owing to its weakly institutionalized profile and the popularity of anti-woke writing on platforms such as Substack and X (formerly Twitter), the field can end up being dominated by the attention-economy logic of those platforms. Often, thinkers pioneer new ideas on Substack (rather than academic journals) and publish heterodox or “anti-woke” books with popular rather than academic presses. This is consistent with the movement’s zeitgeist. After all, they say, traditional academia is broken.

But what about these new platforms? Audiences on Substack and X aren’t experts; they yearn for anti-woke red meat. In the heterodox community, the surest way to advance is to provide this (and to do so often). In turn, this skews incentives within such networks and gives excessive influence to “anti-woke” celebrities with slim academic credentials but undeniable skills in self-promotion and churning out repetitive content.

In the heterodox space, Gad Saad, with his 1.2 million X followers and more than 360,000 YouTube subscribers, is hard to miss. Saad is a genuine academic, a marketing professor at Canada’s Concordia University. However, the kind of work for which he is best known, such as 2020’s The Parasitic Mind, simply doesn’t meet the same standards of evidence that would be demanded of him in academia. The Parasitic Mind claims that “an epidemic of idea pathogens are spreading like a virus and killing common sense in the West.” It is hard to know where to start with such a claim. What is an “idea pathogen”? Is it a virus or just “like” a virus? Is this not all just a simile or an analogy masquerading as a scientific concept?

A reluctance to gatekeep and a desire to maintain a “broad church” mean that heterodox conferences and festivals can end up being dominated by these sorts of figures. This, in turn, can have a detrimental effect on the reputation of heterodox scholarship within mainstream academe. Any movement that can’t find a way of excluding figures who produce consistently low-quality work — no matter how popular they might be on social media — is going to face uncomfortable questions. Historians of science use the term “rogue scholars” to refer to academics who attempt to port their credentials from their actual areas of expertise to fields in which they are decidedly not experts. Without proper standards, the problems of rogue scholarship can proliferate, undermining scholarly credibility.

Funders can present similar problems. Whatever the issues with publicly funded research, such a model guarantees neutrality (at least, in theory). When funders are rich individuals or conservative political foundations, however, this breaks down. What if heterodox scholars take positions contrary to those of funders? There may be formal guarantees of independence, but these can disintegrate in the heat of the culture war.

Recent developments at UATX are instructive. Following President Trump’s return to power in 2024, management has made extremely aggressive attempts to position the university on the Right — including enforcing compulsory oaths in anti-communism, anti-Islamism, and anti-identity politics; and dissenters have been pushed out or left of their own accord.

These developments gesture to wider problems of coherence. Who is in, and who is out? Does heterodoxy actually represent an independent political position, or is it implicitly an anti-progressive (and thus, for all intents and purposes, conservative) force? Trump’s proposed new “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which would effectively compel universities that receive federal funding to comply with his administration’s policies, illustrates the dilemma. The compact draws on some of the language used by the heterodox movement in directing both universities and their employees to adopt a strict position of viewpoint neutrality in relation to “societal and political events.”

Superficially, recognition at this level looks like victory of sorts for the heterodox movement. However, such a strict and all-encompassing definition of neutrality would obviously impede the academic freedom of those who want to speak out on these issues. This is a problem compounded by the controversial actions currently being taken by the Trump administration. Some of these actions — such as ICE detentions of international students pursuing graduate degrees in the United States — are highly relevant to contemporary academia. These are surely issues that it is appropriate for universities and their staff to take a public position on. Academic freedom, in other words, cuts across party political lines. Enforced viewpoint neutrality can look very much like an attempt to preemptively muzzle critics.

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, there was much talk about an “ideological realignment” as figures from the Left and Right came together in common cause against perceived illiberalism in progressive-dominated institutions. However, as the case of UATX shows, these coalitions have proved hard to sustain. Temporary Left-Right alliances tend to be unstable. Some associated with the heterodox movement have been unable to withstand the various pressures and incentives at play and have ultimately aligned themselves with the wider establishment Right, rather than maintaining their own independence. Others have taken their contrarianism in extreme and conspiratorial directions. Many scholars who entered heterodox circles in the late 2010s did so in protest against what they saw as the politicization of their fields by the progressive Left. Now, they face a heterodox movement that increasingly seems to have trouble distancing itself from a different brand of politics.

Ironically, the heterodox movement is now characterized by some of the same problems it once took issue with in activist and mainstream academia. In heterodox circles, cancellation has become its own form of “lived experience,” and researchers make regular appeal to their own experiences of it, with these accounts having their own wounded and subjective character.

Naturally, scholars will have private views on politics, but the airing of these subjective traumas merely brings us back to the heterodox movement’s own objections to “grievance-studies” disciplines and subjectivity-centering concepts like standpoint epistemology. When such complaints begin to dominate the literature and overshadow analytic and empirical motivations, one has simply adopted a new flavor of the subjective and politicized “woke” academia one claims to be rejecting.

In both Britain and the United States, the recent political success of Right-wing populist parties hostile to universities poses its own challenge to the heterodox movement. When it emerged in the mid-2010s, the movement was able to raise a credible challenge to what appeared at the time to be a progressive stranglehold on the institutions. But time has moved on and progressives are no longer in the ascendancy. As we have seen, the second Trump administration has targeted American universities on unabashedly ideological lines. In Britain, Reform UK promises to reduce undergraduate places in British universities and, mirroring Trumpian policy in America, proposes to cut funding to universities that undermine free speech. The heterodox movement needs to ask itself whether it is prepared to offer critiques of these sorts of policies. Has the movement been offering a sincere and constructive internal critique of academia, or has it simply served to provide a set of talking points that could ultimately justify Right-wing cuts to university funding and attacks on academic independence?

Lexi Freiman’s Anna rejects woke orthodoxy only to fall victim to the new moral certainties she finds in Ayn Rand. Contrarianism, in other words, can become its own kind of straitjacket. Similarly, the heterodox movement risks losing sight of its early principled stance against the politicization of academia. This is a shame. Certainly, there is great potential for heterodoxy within existing academia. As heterodox critics have demonstrated, established academia certainly does have major problems with conformity and groupthink. At its best, the movement has worked as an internal check against these tendencies. Scholars associated with heterodoxy have produced genuinely insightful work examining some of the most pressing issues in contemporary academia. A new AI-powered discussion tool, for example, Simon Cullen’s “Sway,” aims “to foster rigorous, evidence-based dialogue among students on controversial topics” and model the kind of free exchanges we all want to see taking place in class.

However, there is reason to doubt that any of this provides a basis for a genuine alternative to academia. Without more, the heterodox movement risks becoming a parody of the academy it decries.

With all of that in mind, does Britain really need another School of Government, named after a donor whom the media described without apparent irony as shy and retiring? There would be far more fun to be had elsewhere. The archetypal Epstein Class academic is Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, although one does have to wonder for how much longer. In 2021, Pinker wrote that, “Oliver Kamm’s urbanity, erudition and compassion are raised to the power of two in Mending the Mind. He put them to work in crafting this gorgeous and urgent book, and on every page they remind us of his moral that enviable gifts are no protection against the affliction of depression.”

Pinker is on the Editorial Board of Evolutionary Psychological Science, which in 2018, a very short time before 2021 in the life of a quarterly journal, published this masterpiece by Edward Dutton, whom I knew at university. He once tried to seduce me after Mass, so I know his little secret. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Mankind Quarterly, which he used to edit. Another member is Dr Adel Batterjee of Jeddah, the founder of the Benevolence International Foundation, which was placed under UN sanctions because it was a front for funding al-Qaeda. Kamm, Pinker, Dutton, Batterjee. Batterjee, Dutton, Pinker, Kamm. Truly, an Axis of Evil.

In the far off days when I used to be sent review copies of books, then I was once sent Kamm’s and Douglas Murray’s as a kind of job lot; as essentially a single work. Murray was a great friend and mentee of Christopher Hitchens, whom Gore Vidal famously named his “dauphin or delfino” before outliving him, and whose dauphin or delfino Kamm comically purports to be. Murray has decided to question Tariq Ramadan on, of all things, his academic credentials. Murray took a Third in English, to this day his only degree, but by then his affected accent and ponderous tone had already established him as a purported expert on, well, pretty much everything. A dozen versions of the same book have made him President’s Professor of Practice at Yeshiva University.

Similarly, as a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Heterodox Social Sciences, Matt Goodwin has links to Aporia Magazine, which is published by the same Human Diversity Foundation that publishes Mankind Quarterly and Dutton’s podcast, The Jolly Heretic, linking it to Pinker, and thus to Kamm. The HDF was founded in 2022 by Emil Kirkegaard, otherwise William Engman, of OpenPsych. Kirkegaard is noted for his calls to legalise child pornography so as to reduce the number of rapes committed by paedophiles, to lower the age of consent to 13, and to make it even lower if puberty had begun. In 2018, he sued Oliver Smith for calling him a paedophile, but in 2020 he had to drop the action and pay Smith’s legal costs, leaving him heavily in debt. The HDF has taken over most of the previous work of the Pioneer Fund, publisher of The Bell Curve and American distributor of Erbkrank. Goodwin has commended Coming Apart, Charles Murray’s follow-up to The Bell Curve that applied its racism to class differences among whites.

It is a big club, and we are not in it. Nor would we wish to be. But Dutton is now Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Asbiro University, although I would be fascinated to know what business Dutton had ever run. Asbiro presents itself is the perfect university for centrists and for right-wing populists alike, run by and for “business”, the Department into which the Coalition even moved higher education out of Education, and neither teaching nor researching anything “useless”. A happy home in Łódź therefore awaits Pinker, Kamm, Batterjee, both Murrays, Goodwin and Engman, joining Dutton as Fellows of the Jeffrey Epstein Institute. Assuming that they could match the scholarly calibre of the ever-expanding Dutton corpus. That latest addition would take some topping.

Chasse du Pape?

While I am not sure how one would "invoke" the Avignon Papacy, I would be impressed if anyone in the Trump Administration really had ever heard of it. But even after that had led to schism, then there were people on both sides who have subsequently been canonised as Saints, since neither side, nor eventually any of the three, held any heretical proposition. One, or eventually two, sides merely erred as to who was the Successor of Saint Peter at the given time. Moreover, that error made nothing like the doctrinal or moral difference that it would today.

By contrast, JD Vance's clear threat to use nuclear weapons against Iran is contrary to everything that the Church has ever taught on the subject, since it was immediately apparent, when such weapons were first developed, that such use could not possibly be reconciled with just war doctrine. That could in fact have been said about the entire war with Iran. As it was. By the Pope. It is no wonder that MAGA wants its own. But who? And seated where? Give reasons for your answers.

Still, by forcing the White House to clarify that there was no American nuclear threat to Iran, a clarification that made sense only as a concession of those weapons' inherent immorality, Vance has effectively and usefully rendered them uselessly ineffective. If "of course" you could never be so wicked as to deploy them, then why have them? Over to Keir Starmer. Over to Kemi Badenoch, Ed Davey, Zack Polanski, and Nigel Farage. And over to each of the Labour candidates to succeed Starmer. Any of the third could be Prime Minister next month. Any of the second could be Prime Minister in 2029, when we are going to pour the present party system into the present electoral system with utterly unpredictable results. And Starmer has his finger on the nuclear button right now. Would he ever press it?

It Is Time He Got The Credit

Peter Hitchens knows that he is unsackable:

The more people go on about the awfulness of Neville Chamberlain, the less I trust their judgment. They generally know nothing about him and use him as a cheap and easy codeword for weakness and failure. But are they so much better?

Poor Mr Chamberlain had many failings. But President Donald Trump has failings too, and when he went on about Chamberlain on Easter Monday, he was rather asking for trouble. And lo, the bellicose President has now himself backed down from a big fight, granting Iran the freedom to charge tolls to ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

You could say Mr Trump is the Neville Chamberlain of the Gulf, appeasing the Iranian ayatollahs rather than fulfilling his promise to destroy them. If he had been around in 1938, Trump might well have praised Chamberlain, perhaps fawning over his ‘deal’ with Hitler. Many others did. 

For Mr Trump’s decision to prefer a ceasefire to terrible war is classic appeasement. Iran seized control of the Strait for the first time, after Mr Trump launched his war against them a month ago. And now the ayatollahs are going to keep that control. Mr Trump has weakened himself through heedless use of force, and has become the very thing he sneers at.

He shouldn’t be too upset. He is in good company. Most major world leaders have done some appeasing in their time, usually for the simple reason that a fight would have been worse.

Winston Churchill helped Franklin Roosevelt hand over Eastern Europe to Stalin, at Yalta in 1945, in the biggest act of appeasement in history. And the peoples of Western Europe have generally been pretty glad about that, as it gave them 50 years of peace and prosperity. 

The President’s latest sneer at Prime Minister Keir Starmer was mainly innuendo. He said the UK had ‘a long way to go’, adding, ‘We won’t want another Neville Chamberlain, do we agree? We don’t want Neville Chamberlain.’

Well, there are some of us who are rather glad Sir Keir has stood up to Mr Trump on this issue. Why should Britain be dragged into his mad war? In my view, Sir Keir should have flatly refused the US any use of airbases in Britain. Instead, he appeased the White House (yes, he did) by pretending that the monster B-52s lurching into the air above Fairford in Gloucestershire, laden with Iran-bound bombs and missiles, are acting defensively.

Reassessing Appeasement and Chamberlain’s Legacy 

There’s a lot of appeasement about, isn’t there? Everybody’s doing it. Perhaps it is time Neville Chamberlain, his wing-collar and umbrella, came back into fashion.

If the unfortunate Mr Chamberlain had hired competent spin-doctors, he would probably now be known as the man who gave Britain radar and the Spitfire, on the eve of war with Germany. For he was.

He might also be known as the man who, once ejected from Downing Street, gave vital support to Churchill during the 1940 crisis, when most of the Tory Party distrusted and disliked his successor, and many also wanted to make a deal with Hitler. In the crucial days after Dunkirk, when major figures such as Lord Halifax were arguing for a negotiated peace with the Third Reich, Chamberlain (after an initial wobble) sided with Churchill in favour of standing firm. This may well have been crucial.

But surely, the chorus will cry, he let us down badly at Munich, by handing over the Sudetenland to Hitler, and abandoning democratic Czechoslovakia to its fate? To which I answer, what would you have done? At that time, we had a broomstick army and a biplane air force. France, bled white by the 1914-18 war, didn’t much want a fight. Prague, the Czech capital, was indefensible thanks to Hitler’s recent takeover of Austria.

What would have happened if we had gone to war? Even Churchill, who described the Munich deal as ‘a total and unmitigated defeat’, couldn’t come up with much of an alternative. Like the political Left, he thought we should have sought the help of Stalin’s Soviet Union. But the Russians at that time had no land border with Czechoslovakia. And Romania and Poland, the only two practical corridors, would not have dreamed of letting the Red Army on to their territory. They feared that, if Soviet soldiers arrived, they would never leave.

They were right to be cautious. As Britain and France found out a year later, Stalin would only help against Hitler if he was given a free hand in the Baltic states and Romania.

Churchill may have thought we should ‘stand firm’ and to rearm more. But the truth was that in 1938 there was no appetite at all in Britain for another war. It is forgotten now, and the film seems to have been lost, but giant crowds streamed to Buckingham Palace in the pouring rain, to cheer Chamberlain on his return from Munich with his supposed ‘peace for our time’.

Public Support for Chamberlain and Royal Endorsement 

They went to the Palace because King George VI had invited Chamberlain and his wife to join him on the balcony there, lit up by one of the very few anti-aircraft searchlights then in existence in Britain. There they enjoyed a four-minute ovation from the enormous, soaking-wet crowd.

The King, like many of his subjects, was a keen appeaser at the time, and in summer 1939 he would tell the Canadian premier Mackenzie King, during a visit to North America, that he ‘would never wish to appoint Churchill to any office’, unless it was unavoidable.

So much of what we now believe is hindsight. We pat ourselves on the back for opposing appeasement most of us would have supported at the time.

Much of the anti-Chamberlain myth, swallowed whole by President Trump, was created by the British Left, the sort of people he despises. They had their own misdeeds to hide.

Chamberlain, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1931, had somehow to find the money for the major programme of rearmament that began soon after the rise of Hitler. This was not popular among the Left. The Labour Party, at its Southport conference in October 1933, months after Hitler came to power, pledged to ‘take no part in war’.

In the same month Labour’s John Wilmot won the Fulham East by-election on an anti-rearmament platform. And the Party kept up that view. In July 1934, Labour’s future Premier, Clement Attlee, opposed the expansion of the RAF. He said: ‘We deny the need for increased air armaments.’

Another Big Beast of inter-war Labour, Herbert Morrison (Peter Mandelson’s grandfather), complained in a speech in Whitechapel in November 1935 that Neville Chamberlain was ‘ready and anxious to spend millions of pounds on machines of destruction’.

Media and Political Opposition to Defence Spending 

In the same year, the Labour movement’s semi-official newspaper, the Daily Herald (ancestor of today’s Sun) condemned increased defence spending, set out in a government White Paper, as ‘an affront to Germany’.

In 1936, after Hitler had marched into the Rhineland, Attlee was still moaning about a supposed ‘ruinous arms race inevitably leading to war’.

It was certainly straining a rusty and wheezing economy, badly short of skilled workers. Chamberlain, as Chancellor and then as Premier, supervised a 1936-39 naval building programme including six battleships, six aircraft carriers, 25 cruisers, 49 destroyers and 22 submarines. Imagine! Sums spent on all three services in that period were the equivalent of many billions now.

Chamberlain, a dove by nature, would certainly have preferred to spend the money on hospitals, schools and housing. But instead he prepared for the war he knew was coming. It is time he got the credit.

Strait To The Bank

A "battlefield victory" over Iran would be "historic" indeed. While the true figure would probably be far higher, at least one third of the population, more than 30 million people, will be ideologically supportive of the regime, or economically dependent on it, or both.

And Iran is like a fantasy novel, walled by mountains even before you had to cross one or more deserts to reach a city the size of London in a metropolitan area twice as populous as Libya. How did Libya work out?

Having declared total victory, you could hardly go back to war a fortnight later. But before this war, the Strait of Hormuz was not only open, but toll-free. Yet now there are not only tolls, but they have to be paid in yuan, adding up to $60 billion per annum, or even $80 billion.

And Donald Trump, who closed the Strait in the first place, has done a deal to get a cut. He calls that a victory. So it is. For him. Next up, the vast reserves of coal in North Korea. You read it here first, as you often do. Of course, there are also vast reserves of coal in Britain. Think on.

Iron To Rust, Rust To Dust

Tonight, the last of Sunday’s wine will go to a good home on this blog’s twentieth birthday. But being of the old school, I am saving the best for its twenty-first. That will begin next year’s long and glorious summer, which will climax on 23 September 2027, when at 50 I shall have doubled the maximum age to be a bus user without being counted a failure in life, if not in the exact words of the former Prime Minister who died 13 years ago today, then certainly according to her ideology and her followers. She did not coin it. Tellingly, that was Brian Howard, a poet who wrote for the New Statesman, since Tories may be better born, but Liberals are born better. It was popularised by Howard’s friend, Loelia, Duchess of Westminster. But who says that Margaret Thatcher never said? Beyond doubt, she thought it.

Yet the only organisation that ever succeeded in getting rid of Thatcher was the Conservative Party. If it loved her in life as much as it loves in her death, then it had a very, very, very strange way of showing it. In her memoirs, the extremely bitter chapter on the Poll Tax makes it clear that she laboured under no delusion that she had been removed because of “Europe”. That was the cover story, but “Europe” had not been the reason why scores of Conservative MPs had been on course to lose their seats. The content, rather than the tone, of that policy did not change under her successor. By contrast, the Poll Tax was abolished completely, with a reversion in all but name to the previous system of domestic rates. The Conservatives then unexpectedly won the General Election of 1992, when Thatcher retired from the House of Commons.

Thatcher’s humble origins are greatly exaggerated. She was the daughter of a major local businessman and politician who ran most of the committees and charities for miles around. Even the people who love her can see why the people who hate her do so; they just do not agree. But why the people who love her do so is, in their own terms, a complete mystery. She gave Britain the Single European Act, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the Children Act, the replacement of O-levels with GCSEs, the destruction of the economic basis of paternal authority in the stockades of male employment, the massive increase in benefit dependency, the rise of Political Correctness, the general moral chaos of the 1980s, the legalisation of abortion up to birth for “severe fetal abnormality” that did not have to be specified, and that is just the start.

Thatcher’s only Commons defeat was when she tried to make Sunday just another shopping day. The basis of the lockdowns was the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. Who was the Prime Minister in 1984? For having publicly set fire to the Quran, Martin Frost and Hamit Coskun were both charged under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. Who was the Prime Minister in 1986? Three years later, Thatcher’s supporters wanted to use that provision against those who had publicly set fire to The Satanic Verses.

Thatcher knew about Cyril Smith when she arranged his knighthood. Jimmy Savile’s knighthood was rejected four times by the relevant committee, but she insisted upon it for the man with whom she spent every New Year’s Eve, and on whose programmes she was so obsessed with appearing that her staff had to ration those appearances. Her closest lieutenant was Peter Morrison. Smith was a highly eccentric and largely absentee MP for a tiny party, but he was a Thatcherite avant la lettre, who had left the Labour Party when he had started to see cars outside council houses. Thatcher’s father was a Liberal until that fell apart between the Wars, and never a member of the Conservative Party. He, she and Smith were politically indistinguishable.

That the Radical Right put out pamphlets demanding the legalisation of paedophile activity was mentioned in Our Friends in the North. That Thatcherite MPs were likely to commit sexual violence against boys with the full knowledge of the party hierarchy formed a subplot in To Play the King, the middle series of the original House of Cards trilogy. The Thatcher Government secured a judicial fiat that, without bothering to ask Parliament, abolished the age of consent altogether. Gillick competence ought instead to be called Thatcher competence. The Major Government did write Thatcher competence into the Age of Legal Capacity (Scotland) Act 1991. But it is applied in Northern Ireland on no apparent authority. Even in England and Wales, it has never been subject to a parliamentary vote. Let there be one now.

The stockades of working-class male employment were destroyed, and a new ruling elite of middle-class women funded and empowered by the State was created, by the politician who proclaimed the self-made man and the self-made woman, a proclamation of which the inexorable logic is gender self-identification. Just as Thatcher emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and Dick Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show, so a comparable figure, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman. Thatcher has already been played by a drag queen at least once on British television, and specifically on Channel 4, which she created, meaning that one of her most abiding legacies is that Britain has two state broadcasters, one of which nevertheless carries advertisements. Thatcherism in a nutshell, as has always been clear from the output.

Was Thatcher “the Iron Lady” when, in early 1981, her initial pit closure programme was abandoned within two days of a walkout by the miners? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she had Nicholas Ridley negotiate a transfer of sovereignty over the Falkland Islands to Argentina, to be followed by a leaseback arrangement, until the Islanders, the Labour Party and Conservative backbenchers forced her to back down? Was she “the Iron Lady” when, within a few months of election on clear commitments with regard to Rhodesia, she simply abandoned them at the Commonwealth Conference in Lusaka? Was she “the Iron Lady” when, having claimed that Britain would never give up Hong Kong, she took barely 24 hours to return to Planet Earth by effecting a complete U-turn? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she took just as little time to move from public opposition to public support of Spanish accession to the Western European Union?

In the Budget of December 1976, Denis Healey and Jim Callaghan had delighted Thatcher by blindsiding the critics of monetarism on the Conservative benches, but was she “the Iron Lady” when she gave up monetarism completely during her second term? Thatcher’s continuous contact with the IRA, universally assumed at the time, has long since been confirmed. Four of the Hunger Strikers’ Five Demands were granted on 6 October 1981, and by 1983 even the right not to do prison work had been conceded. The Lady was as Iron about that as she was about most other things, namely not at all.

Thatcher was, though, true to her assurance in 1979 and in 1983 that, although until 1985 the Ulster Unionist Party remained affiliated to the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations, there would be no return to office for Enoch Powell. But then, when told that Thatcher professed to have been influenced by his books on economics, Powell replied that, “She couldn’t have understood them, then.” He baffled her by telling her that he would have fought in the Second World War even if Britain had had a Communist Government. He would still have fought for his country. With no Tory roots, that was beyond her. With deep Liberal roots, she thought that wars were about “values”. That wider conversation was about what was then the recent Falklands War. While Powell had supported it on his own principles, Thatcher had seen it as an example of her dictum that, “If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values.” Many years later, when asked her greatest achievement, she replied, “New Labour.” Quite. Thatcher has been named as her political heroine by Shabana Mahmood, who would issue us all with digital ID, and who would make people who had lived here for at least 10 years earn indefinite leave to remain by performing both paid and unpaid work to her satisfaction.

In 1981, Thatcher did impose an absolute ban on all government work for Andersen in view of its role in the DeLorean fraud, a ban that lasted until the General Election of 1997, when Patricia Hewitt was made Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, having only just entered Parliament from her position as Head of Research at Andersen Consulting. And in 1988, Thatcher and Nigel Lawson did correct the taxation of wealth at a lower rate than earnings until, in 1998, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown put the clock back to the Chancellor of the Exchequer who had gone on, as First Lord of the Treasury, to introduce monetarism to Britain and vice versa. But if those moves made Thatcher a better social democrat than New Labour, then their reversal made New Labour better Thatcherites than Thatcher or even Lawson.

The middle classes were transformed from people like Thatcher’s father into people like her son. She told us, and she really did, that “there is no such thing as society”, in which case there cannot be any such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation. Even more damagingly, and that is quite a feat, she endorsed the vugar illiteracy that the currency-issuing State had no money of its own, and could therefore “run out of other people’s money”. All in all, she turned Britain into the country that Marxists had always said that it was, even though before her, it never had been. Specifically, Thatcher sold off national assets at obscenely undervalued prices, while subjecting the rest of the public sector, fully 40 per cent of the British economy, to an unprecedented level of central dirigisme.

Thatcher continued public subsidies to private schools, to agriculture, to nuclear power, and to mortgage-holders. Without those public subsidies, the fourth would hardly have existed, and the other three, then as now, would not have existed at all. So much for “You can’t buck the market”. You can now, as you could then, and as she did then. The issue is not whether private schooling, agriculture, nuclear power, or mortgage-holding is a good or a bad thing in itself. The issue is whether “Thatcherism” was compatible with their continuation by means of “market-bucking” public subsidies. It simply was not, and is not.

Thatcher’s assault on council housing created the Housing Benefit racket, and it used the gigantic gifting of capital assets by the State to enable the beneficiaries to enter the property market ahead of private tenants, or of people still living at home, who in either case had saved for their deposits. What, exactly, was or is conservative or Tory about that? Or about moving in the characters from Shameless either alongside, or even in place of, the respectable working class?

It is thanks to Thatcher that the Conservatives have been the party of Net Zero for 40 years. Svante Arrhenius first theorised about anthropogenic global warming in 1896, and Thatcher was briefed about it by Sir Crispin Tickell, the then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs at the Foreign Office. Thatcher always credited Tickell with having convinced her, leading to her speech on the subject to the Royal Society in 27 September 1988, the point at which the agenda of his 1977 Climatic Change and World Affairs entered the political mainstream. Tickell’s briefing of Thatcher was in 1984, tellingly the year that the Miners’ Strike began.

Thatcher began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, but she was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. By the time of her speech to the UN on 8 November 1989, she had made Tickell the British Ambassador to it, and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative on its Security Council. Boris Johnson described her destruction of the coal industry as “a big early start” towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for many years.

In 1979, Thatcher had not initially wanted to meet Menachem Begin in London, since her generation remembered what he was, and afterwards she expressed her regret at not having stuck to her guns. In 1980, she signed the Venice Declaration of nine European countries against Israeli settlements on the West Bank. In 1981, she denounced the Israeli bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, calling it illegal. In 1982, she responded to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon by imposing an arms embargo on Israel that remained in force until 1994; when Begin wrote to ask her to reconsider, then she did not even reply. In 1988, she expelled two Israeli diplomats and closed the London Mossad station when one of its double agents had been convicted of terrorism in Britain and when that station had been caught for a second time forging British passports, a practice that was to resurface, with similar but notably less severe consequences, in 2010; no Israeli diplomat had ever before been deported from a friendly state.

While all of that was to her credit, that would not be the view of her flamekeepers today, any more than they would approve of her attitude when visiting Kiev in June 1990, when she said that Britain would no more open an embassy in Ukraine than in California or Quebec. When the Soviet Union did collapse anyway, then she ludicrously pretended to have brought it down merely because she had happened to be in office at the time. But she did make a difference internationally where it was possible to do so, by providing aid and succour to Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and to apartheid South Africa, and by refusing to recognize either the Muzorewa-Smith Government or Joshua Nkomo, thereby paving the way for Robert Mugabe. Known as “the Peking Plotter”, she never saw a Maoist whom she did not like, from Mugabe, to Nicolae Ceaușescu, to Pol Pot. She even sent the SAS to train the Khmer Rouge, putting her in the same boat as Noam Chomsky, but making her worse, since he had no power to deploy Special Forces.

And it was Thatcher who issued what amounted to the open invitation to Argentina, armed by Begin’s Israel, to invade the Falkland Islands, followed by the starved Royal Navy’s having to behave as if the hopelessly out-of-her-depth Prime Minister did not exist, a sort of coup without which those Islands would be Argentine to this day. Until the eve of the invasion, Thatcher had been about to sell the ships that then had to be deployed. At a bargain basement price. To Argentina.