Peerless?

I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday's flypast as I was officially declared Royal David Lindsay. But certain other persons seem to have fallen on tougher times. The Conservative Party has apparently cut of all links to Douglas Murray after a speech made at (not, presumably, to) the Dutch Parliament. Doubtless, he was there as a guest of Geert Wilders.

Wilders stands in the same tradition as the late Pim Fortuyn, a definition of the West in general and of Dutchness in particular in terms of legalised drugs and an age of consent at 12. His real target is not Islam. His real targets are Dutch Catholicism and the small but highly committed “pillar” of conservative Protestants, one of which latter’s political parties, though not the other, has a growing appeal among African immigrants. His natural British allies are those who object to immigration by Polish Catholics and African Pentecostals, not by reference to immigration as such, but out of hostility to Catholicism, to Pentecostalism, and to Christianity either of any serious kind or of any kind at all.

Now that Murray has reinvented himself as a tedious professional atheist and as one of those homosexually inclined people who cannot stop banging on about it, he and the Fortuyn-Wlders Movement have become a perfect fit. The abandonment of any meaningful religious commitment also puts him, at long last, in the mainstream of his beloved neoconservative movement. But he will never now receive a parliamentary nomination by the Conservative Party.

Not that he ever stood much of a chance of such a nomination, not after he wrote in The Spectator that he had voted Labour in the Ealing Southall by-election after a row with Baroness Warsi on Question Time. Likewise, the decision of Oliver Kamm, now the Keeper of the Blairite Flame, to vote Conservative in 2005 and to write about it in The Times because his local Labour candidate was anti-war rules him out for ever from being a Labour candidate.

But do they regard their respective, largely overlapping positions as deserving of the platform that is the parliamentary process? Do they regard themselves personally as capable of participation in that process? I think that we all know the answers to both of those questions. So, why do they not apply to become People's Peers? Seriously, why not? Doubts about their views? Doubts about their own abilities and distinction? Or what?