The Platform Ticket?

I am taking this opportunity to repeat here an offer which I have already made both under a blog post of Cristina Odone’s about Douglas Murray’s, and under a Coffee House post of Murray’s own.

By all accounts, Murray will never now receive a parliamentary nomination from 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 forever from being a Labour candidate.

When my next book, Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory, is published next year by a publisher to which even they could not object, then I shall be applying to become a People’s Peer in order to give a parliamentary voice to the position that it will articulate. On one condition, namely that Murray and Kamm both also do so, in order to give a parliamentary voice to the positions articulated by their own respective published works.

So, 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?

Jointly and severally, over to them.