All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 27, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:13:12
Delingpod 58: David Starkey
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I love Danny Paul.
Go and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
I love Danny Paul.
I'll listen another time.
Subscribe with me.
I love Danny Paul.
Go and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
I love Danny Paul.
I'll listen another time.
Subscribe with me.
Welcome to the Delling Pod with me, James Dellingpah.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest.
But behold, the mighty Starkey.
I am so excited.
Do you know what?
I've been wanting to get you on this podcast, I think, for over two years.
And I played terribly hard to get.
You did play hard to get.
Yeah, yeah.
It was at the spectator party.
As it is always.
It varies, yes.
It was.
And, yeah, whatever.
Actually, I think this is one of the things you've got in common with me.
You're not necessarily perfect at replying to emails on all occasions.
No, I'm quite good.
Yeah.
Quite good.
Quite good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Maybe you were just trying to make yourself just more special.
Maybe I just forgot about it.
Maybe I was in America.
I tend to, I've got an American house, and when I'm there, I tend to live in a different world, and Britain retreats to its tiny little island self.
Yeah.
You know, everybody on it being a tiny little island or a very long way away.
So the email, I can't remember.
Yeah, whatever.
Even less flattering, I can't remember, but there we are.
It's happened.
Here we are.
And what I'm hoping is that, You're one of the few people out there who can really analyse just why we are so messed up.
Give me a bit of historical perspective.
And I think you probably share my view that the world is going to hell in a handcart, but you may be able to tell me that it was ever thus.
I think this is going to be, you'll be very disappointed to hear, on the one hand this and on the other hand that answer.
I think there are many things that are infinitely good about our world.
I was born severely crippled.
I had, so it's not the regular rock sob story.
I never make any fuss about it.
But I had club feet.
I had polio.
I was born into a deeply poor family.
And yet I had the miracles of what was then developing modern medicine.
Which is why I have been able to walk and to lead a perfectly normal life.
If we look at medicine, I remember my grandmother's horror of the agonies of dentistry, which I never knew.
If we look at things like medical care, if we look at levels of Nutrition, if we look at levels of comfort.
I was born in a 30s council house.
There was a single coal fire.
This is a deeply modern house of the 1930s, which also was the only source of cooking because it fired a back boiler.
With a cold flue.
Can you imagine the filth that this thing generated?
Every morning in winter, there was about a quarter of an inch of ice on the inside of the windows of one's bedroom.
If you were at boarding school, you may well have experienced something very similar.
Ice on the inside of the windows.
That's right.
When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, before I moved into a modern college, in my first two years, I was in digs.
Exactly the same thing.
One barely washed in the winter.
It was so cold.
So all of these material conditions of life have transformed.
The big questions are over what matters.
The questions of values, human relations, and whatever.
And here there are very, very big question marks.
On the other hand, there are many pluses.
I mean...
What I think, and what we should really be talking about and concentrate it from the vast global to the addressable, even in a discursive conversation of an hour, I think it is the collapse of the liberal enterprise.
And I think that essentially is what's gone wrong.
I mean, if you look at the year of my birth, 1945, the end of the Second World War, the first steps to the founding of the United Nations, the Labour government of 1945, the end of Roosevelt, And the, as it were, the handing on of the New Deal.
Yes, of course, the breakdown of relations with the Soviet Union and the beginning of the Cold War.
But other than that, there's this extraordinary level of hope in the solutions of big government, in universal peace, in a universal rule of law.
All of these things, most of which have bit the dust.
In a rather dreadful way.
And we've discovered, you know, even the wonderful name Mr.
Fukuyama has discovered that, I'm sorry, history doesn't end.
Hegel was wrong.
He was wrong.
The cussed nature of humanity, and I'm afraid we are experiencing that, and we're experiencing that cussed humanity when the old rules have broken down or been deliberately destroyed.
Yes.
Well...
Would you agree that, as per Matt Ridley's books, you mentioned at the beginning all the wonderful advances in technology and medicine which have enabled you to live a much better life than you would have done earlier?
Probably able to live.
Yeah, exactly.
Probably able to live.
This is a given.
But these things have happened...
Almost everything that's good in the world seems to have happened despite government, despite...
No, I don't think that's true either.
And it's a mistake to leap completely in that direction.
The enormous advances...
The reason that the Second World War sees these gigantic advances of science, which it does in all sorts of areas, is precisely because in total war, governments throw infinite amounts of money.
The web, which of course is a highly ambiguous thing, is an offshoot of military expenditure.
Though, again, in the form that it assumes under Tim Berners-Lee, it's an exercise of absurd Rousseauian idealism, you know, believing in the natural goodness of man.
I think that governments can perilously get in the way.
I think that, again, to try to conjure up a world in which government is simply a nuisance is a miscellaneous.
Let me be confidential with you.
Well, you probably know a little of my intellectual voyage.
If we've been having this conversation in the 1990s, when I was the height of the great David Starkey, kind of, I hope, with many quotation marks and much irony, in the 1990s I was well known, maybe even famous perhaps, in this little island for my appearances on The Moral Maze, where I took an absolutely all-over libertarian life.
In other words, I would have basically agreed with you about government.
I now no longer think that is true.
I do not think libertarianism is the answer.
I don't think that merely small government is the answer.
I don't think universal...
I don't think there's a single set of problems, a single set of solutions to human problems.
That's an absurdity.
I have, I think, like many people, gone back to the notion that Although we are a common species, we exist because of highly specific societies with their specific religious, political, social traditions.
In other words, one has to believe in a kind of Edmund Burke rootedness, belonging to the soil, and a recognition of the intense diversity of human beings.
So would you say that your path has been from libertarianism towards conservatism?
Yes, towards either, I think I got where Boris might be, I'm not even sure if Boris is there at all, but to a kind of one-nation, Disraelian, Burkean revived Toryism in the course of the last decade.
I'm very friendly with people like Rod Little and whatever.
We meet up in Kent.
We have a little society that we call the Burkean Club.
And of course, Rod is in some ways, oddly, even more oddly than me on the political light.
He's oddly on the political left.
And we find ourselves actually sharing an enormous amount in common, I suppose, that's fashionably described now as either blue labor or, to an extent, Yeah.
And I do think that the great perceptions of Burke on the one hand and Disraeli, who isn't normally put in the same breath, but I think should be, are really central.
I mean, what's important is they're both addressing great revolutions.
You have Edmund Burke writing his great reflections on the French Revolution.
You have Disraeli writing his bizarre novels in the first real wave of the Industrial Revolution of 50 years later of the 1840s.
And in many ways, they're dealing with very, very similar sorts of problem.
Let me just try to explain.
Book's reflections on the French Revolution were, even by English aristocrats, even by the Prince Regent, when they were first published, were dismissed as the Prince actually sent him.
This is a load of old stuff.
It's ridiculously exaggerated, whatever.
And yet, of course, it turns out to be this astonishing exercise of prophecy.
He writes in the immediate aftermath of the march on Versailles when the royal family, when the bodyguards around the king are murdered and the royal family is captured and marched in triumph, largely by the women of Paris, from Versailles to captivity in Paris, which to the Which eventually finishes on the scaffold of all the horror that we know about.
But what Burke realizes is what the fundamental problem of the French Revolution was.
It's ideas.
It's the belief in abstract reason.
It's the belief that you can simply look at the world and decide, probably for the very, very best of motives, that there are things wrong with it, and that you can simply change it according to the laws of reason.
So we have this quick thing called 24 hours in a day.
Absurd!
Ten.
We have ten in everything.
We have ten days in the week.
Why seven?
Why twelve months?
We have ten.
And of course you produce this insane calendar.
You produce this insane metric system.
You try to divide France into exactly the same tiny little areas of government and so on.
And it turns of course into a reason that destroys itself.
This kind of reason, this kind of reason that knows no limits, that respects no history, that runs completely against the grain of human nature, is the foundation of liberalism.
Liberalism arises directly from this.
All modern politics is created by the French Revolution.
There are echoes of earlier things going on into modern politics, but modern politics is really the creation of the French Revolution.
In other words, you choose which side you're on.
Essentially, it's Gilbert and Sullivan.
You remember in Iron Man, every boy and every girl that's born into the world alive is either a little conservative or is either a little liberal or else a little conservative to rhyme with a lie.
Well, that is Edmund Burke in a nutshell.
Nicely sung.
And if you're a conservative, you believe in history.
You believe, like the late, great Rogers Groupon, that we are a product of history, that we are a product of rooted culture, that society, again, this most uncomfortable notion that society precedes the individual, that the individual doesn't give his consent to society.
This is always an absurd idea.
The very idea of being born free is preposterous.
You're not.
You're born squalling, shitting, and put in a nappy.
You're not free.
Yeah.
No, but it's very important.
You see, you have all these wonderful Rousseauian abstractions, which is the foundation of untrammeled reason.
And they do bear a second's interrogation.
We're not born equal, preposterous.
Yeah.
Good.
I was worrying there.
I was worrying where you were going for about five of those minutes.
You were thinking, why are you here?
Why am I bothering?
Why am I letting you down?
Yeah, that was kind of it, actually.
But now I'm relieved because you're essentially taking a sort of Scrutonian line.
Sort of.
I mean, again, there are aspects of Scruton that I'm less keen on than others.
I think the...
Remember, the reason that Roger, despite his very greatness, had so little impact, which is really true, let's actually face it, and that even the Conservative Party could dump it in the disgraceful and scandalous way they did, was of course his thought was profoundly un-English.
It wasn't actually really...
If he'd rooted himself in Burke, it might have worked.
Instead, he was profoundly influenced by Hegel and by German idealism, which on the whole doesn't cut very much ice in the Anglo-Saxon world.
And I think the ideas need a reformulation in the terms of, first of all, Burke on the one hand, and then also very, very definitely Of Disraeli.
Because Disraeli, of course, is, and Burke was a politician too, but Burke is a failed politician.
He is writing in agony and isolation, effectively, the reflection of the French Revolution.
Disraeli is the inventor of the modern Conservative Party.
He is arguably the most successful politician of the 19th century.
Which is an age of real, real grace.
And he, of course, took the same issues.
He took the issues of gigantic universalist change, which was, of course, not the French Revolution, but the Industrial Revolution.
And his point is that the Industrial Revolution does something very similar to the French Revolution.
You reduce everything to money.
In other words, you're going to hear echoes of Marx.
You reduce everything to mere money value.
You dissolve traditional relations.
You sell your soul for freedom of trade.
You do all of those kind of things.
You know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
So are you dissing the Industrial Revolution?
No, I'm saying that the Industrial Revolution has these wonderfully good concepts.
Things aren't good and bad.
And the Industrial Revolution is the thing that transforms The conditions of material existence, but also risks destroying the entire earlier system of human values.
Sure.
And you nod your head as though that was a bland observation.
It's not.
It's the reason for the mess that we are in.
That on the one hand, you have a world which delivers infinite material possibility.
But at the same time, To use a language which is nearer to Montesquieu than the one that I would naturally employ.
Infinite spiritual impoverishment.
And it's this paradox.
And Disraeli worked on this.
And he came to the conclusion that politics, the politics of the nation state, the politics of party, and particularly of a country like England, where you have a politics which is absolutely rooted in history, is...
A way that you can address this.
In other words, that you've already got a series of historically rooted procedures.
And you see, I think these really understood very early something that I think we've seen repeated with Boris, we saw repeated last year, this astonishing longevity of English, and they really are English, The British Parliament is just the English Parliament with a few class of Scots thrown in.
The astonishing longevity of English institutions, 800 years, right back to Magna Carta, is a thing of...
It's not simply a historical accident, a historical curiosity.
It's a thing of absolute...
Fundamental and central value.
Because what Israelis spotted was that the English way of doing things has a durability that could resist even the French Revolution.
Whereas everywhere else in Europe, the mood to The mood to first to 18th century notions of reason and liberty, and secondly, the reform that's entailed by the gigantic upheavals of the Industrial Revolution.
Everywhere else in Europe, it led to the destruction of the existing ways of doing politics.
It didn't in England.
The structures of parliament, of party, of the way we were governed, proved sufficiently tensile, sufficiently elastic to accommodate the change.
So, whereas everywhere else in Europe, you know, the rising classes, the rising commercial middle classes first, then the working classes, we've got to destroy, we've got to pull down The years of revolutions, the French Revolution, the years of revolutions and so on.
In England, they do something completely different.
They say, we want representation in Parliament.
We want to become part of the historic fabric.
And this seems to me to be the great hope that Scruton's idea, Burke's idea of a historic rootedness of community and all the rest of it, somehow, bizarrely, In England, and particularly in England, continues actually to work.
It looked, didn't it?
I mean, let's just leap about in time, because when you're having these conversations, you have to.
It looked, following our joining of the EU, Common Market EU, The deliberate liberal reforms, in other words, going to doctrines of liberal universalism of the Blair government, the attempted imposition of the separation of powers on a constitution that is founded on absolutely fundamentally the opposite.
When you have the executive, the government, in the legislative, you can't have a separation.
But the Blair government tries to introduce it.
You destroy the great historic office of Lord Chancellor, which leads to the complete devaluation of our legal system, as we've seen.
Well, yeah, let's just pause there.
No, no, no.
Let me finish, because it really is important that we understand this.
All of this looked as though the...
Britain was finished.
It was over.
It was perfectly clear that the forces of liberal universalism, aided by the judiciary, by the common market, by the EU, by the industrial elites, would sweep away all this historical baggage.
And then what happens?
The British people or the English people, whatever you like, rise up twice in two referenda.
The first one on AV, the rejection of the alternative vote, and the insistence on first-past-the-post, in which, remember, Matthew Elliott and Dominic Cummings both cut their teeth.
That was the first time I met them.
And then the second referendum on our membership of the EU. And then finally, the verdict in the general election, which was only possible, of course, because precisely we had stopped with first past the post.
And it's an extraordinary...
I mean, is it going to last?
We are the first country to turn back the liberal times.
Yes.
Well, that's got to be good, hasn't it?
Well, of course it has to be good.
But is it going to last?
Do you actually have a government that understands what it's done?
Do you have people who are prepared to take advantage of it?
Well, yeah.
But what I'm trying to get at is, this is why I'm rather more optimistic than I would have been a year ago.
I think that we are extraordinarily fortunate to live in a society, and of course, we're not the only, England is unique, but it's not, because it spawned other areas.
It spawned New Zealand and Australia and Canada, even still in America.
In which, I think, and remember, Burke was a supporter of the American Revolution, a passionate component of the French world, in which it may be these processes of a real political social renewal within an existing framework of institutions is possible.
Since you mentioned America, do you see the Trump revolution as being analogous with the...
There are elements of it which are, but of course it is taking place in a very, very different kind of constitutional settlement and a wildly different...
Why are they a different country?
I think it's a response to the same phenomena which distrusts the excesses of this universalizing liberalism, which of course is now just disappearing of its own ass, which is the only possible description you can give of the whole bizarre trans- Trans movement and all the rest of it.
It is denying absolute external reality.
The latest gem from Dawn Butler, that babies are born without sex.
Derangement.
But it is like the derangement of the French Revolution.
It is exactly the same.
It is exactly the same phenomenon that the world is what you want to believe it to be, in which there is no test of external reality.
You simply remake the world.
And what I'm trying to say is that the proper conservatism, the Disraelian conservatism, the historically rooted conservatism, recognized It recognizes the world as it is.
It recognizes progressive change, alteration and whatever, but it's got a rootedness with which it can cope.
And again, Disraeli had this genius throughout the famous Times editorial in the days when the Times was a decent newspaper.
The famous Times editorial on Disraeli's death describes him as being like an Italian sculptor who saw in a malformed block of marble that was the working class The conservative voter.
It's the Israeli who recognizes the working-to-man phenomenon.
It's the Israeli who recognizes the natural affinity between, if you like, people like us, people who wear your clothes and my clothes, and the kind of families that I came from.
In exactly that area of the north of England, if you want to patronize and send him off the salt of the earth and all the rest.
Well, wasn't it one of the great things about Brexit?
Of course it was.
But this is the point.
We've been here before.
Disraeli understood it too.
And I think that what we need, you know, you're trying to get a sort of sense of breadth and depth.
This is a continuing phenomenon.
Right.
As I said, Roger Scruton, Burke, in their very different ways, both have this idea of a politics of, indeed, Steve Bannon, the notions of a politics of rootedness, the politics of, if you like, national conservatism.
We're seeing different versions, which may be rather more highly seasoned with paprika in Hungary and in Poland.
But it really does work.
It is actually part of our culture.
Common sense, you could call it.
No, you see, common sense gets it, James, precisely wrong.
In the sense it suggests that it's common to all human beings.
There is no such thing as common sense.
There's cultural sense.
We are very different.
This is why all the attempts at liberal interventionism in the Middle East.
Remember, we intervened in Afghanistan to enable female equality and ladies to play netball.
And we had the Ferris wheel, which we financed.
Which we financed out of our lunatic aid budget.
The whole absurdities of Tory modernisation, which was designed to make the Tory party the natural home for readers of The Guardian.
The derangement.
Of all of that.
So it's not common sense.
It's English-British sense.
Bloody-mindedness.
Another word for which is bloody-mindedness.
For, again, It's easy to mock, the spirit of 1939.
The determination, no, I won't be pushed around, which is a point of this version of it.
There's another one which is much quieter, much calmer, and is...
We have a right, as David Norris, in putting forward the government's new negotiating position with the EU, we have a right to govern ourselves.
You see, I think that this is what it has finally to be about.
I'm not concerned about making Britain great again.
It sounds far too Trumpian.
But human beings We need a sense of self, of value, of responsibility, of a degree of control of their lives.
Some of it has to be fiction.
We live, to a large extent, by fictions and by narratives.
But we don't work very well otherwise.
We really do not.
And I think that the historic nature of the Anglo-Saxon institutions, as I said, as they were percolated via the two British empires around the globe as they are here, to my immense surprise, I mean, I remember when there was the first referendum, when there was a referendum on the EU in 2016.
I remember preparing my lecture, which was going to be called The Real Death of Henry VIII. Because, of course, this high assertion of parliamentary sovereignty and national sovereignty is the great powering force of the Reformation.
I was saying that there are indeed echoes of a pre-French revolutionary world at certain points in the politics.
And I thought, you know, because it seemed to be so absolutely clear that the verdict in the referendum would be for constitutional, I thought, right, there's going to be that lecture which is saying, finally, after 500 years, we've laid the old bugger to rest.
And then he proved that he was still walking around in Winslow.
That This declaration that the channel was the widest strip of water in the world, that you do things differently on either side, it actually turned out to be true.
Yeah.
It's good to know that this is all the fault of the French.
Oh yes, but you see, there's an extra specially dangerous version, which you see what's going on in universities now in English or whatever, which is when you combine American radicalism with French thought, and then it's really genuinely lethal.
I mean, that's the origin of, you know, the wasting of the American mind and all the rest of it that we're seeing at the moment.
The extraordinary triumph in American universities of ultra-wokeism, of also...
Of the work of Derrida, again, this terrible Frenchman.
I once heard him lecture an hour and three quarters in Woodland in the summer in New Hampshire.
It was like Haydn's farewell symphonies.
Everybody drifted off.
Did it make any sense?
It was complete, complete, total...
It's the triumph of the unmeaning.
It's the deliberate destruction of meaning.
And the argument, of course, that meaning is meaningless and that authors have no meaning.
But of course, at the same time, if you challenge the structuralists, they get immensely defensive about what their meaning is.
But the whole question of structuralism, of the destruction of meaning of classical literature and classical art in general, which has happened especially In American academic life, fortunately, it's affected much of British too, is this combination of French thought and a particular type of American radicalism.
Because you see, again, what is striking is, you may have noticed, the worst excesses of woke only happen in the Anglo-Saxon world.
The French are not subject to anything like the same degree.
Feminism is not rampant.
Hairy armpit feminism is not rampant in the same way in a country like France, because one of the driving forces of all of this, and why it's so prominent in America, it's essentially one of the elements of it.
It professes to be reason, but it is driven by religion.
It is a mistaken religious impulse.
All of these things Are powered by Puritanism, which is this peculiar Anglo-Saxon, especially American phenomenon, the great curse that we sent out there, along with freedom, English law and all sorts of good things.
We sent out bloody Puritans.
This is the origin of so many disasters.
Ecology is funded, the modern ecological movement.
There are two aspects to it.
There is whatever climate science is.
I do not know enough about the thing, nor I suspect you, to form a genuine judgment one way or another.
But the ecological movement is nothing to do with science.
It's a new religion.
It's a new religion of self-sacrifice.
I mean, you've only got to look at who its heroes are, the ridiculous greater.
She's a child saint.
Or you get David Attenborough, some ancient sage, a modern Simon Steinbeckes, perched on his column, calling down destruction upon the world.
And this idea, again, the loons in my own university in Cambridge at the moment, they all want...
As to live in sackcloth and ashes.
Again, we've actually had a woman, and I can't remember which university she was, but apparently she's a goth.
But she proclaimed the only way of saving the planet is to stop having children and to extinguish the human race.
This is early Christianity.
These are more like one of the madder sects in 19th century America.
Some of the offshoots of Quakerism and whatever, and of the Shakers, decided the same thing.
That the world was fundamentally wicked and it was actually wronged along it.
Is it a form of mental illness?
You could...
Rob is rather interesting on this point, isn't it?
Is religious extremism just a form of mental illness?
I think it becomes a kind of collective mental illness, a collective delusion.
But I'm sorry, it is deeply rooted in our culture.
And it's, again, it's a cultural form.
See, what I'm trying to get at is countries are...
Are genuinely different.
I mean, if you look at the hopes of the Charter of the United Nations, we were saying back there, we're all really the same.
No, we're not.
We all have these wildly different histories, customs, religions, geographies, whatever, which produce intense local variation, which I think is one of the great wonders and richnesses of the world.
But it makes us even more cussed as a species.
Yes.
And even harder to understand.
You must have seen, as a historian, lots of precedent for this putting children on pedestals and...
Well, it's child saints.
In the same way, in many ways, one of the things that I think is most disturbing now, wearing the hat of gloom and doom, as opposed to one of the other hats that I've been wearing, it does seem to me that we're going back, at the same time we're going forward into this astonishing future.
It's astonishing future.
Abundance.
Again, economics has stopped working because economics was supposed to be the science of shortage.
That's why it's called the dismal science.
It's the science of shortage.
It's founding fathers like Malthus and all of them.
There ain't going to be enough food.
But it turns out we've got too much.
We've got too much capital, which is why we can't do anything with it, which is why I'm sure neither you nor I are great savers, but you know why you get the one P in a thousand pounds interest at the moment.
But alongside this astonishing leap into the future, it seems to me there's an equally gigantic leap into the So many aspects of life are New Middle Ages.
As I said, things like ecology strike you as being a bit like Savonarola in Florence with his Bonfire of the Vanities and all the rest of it.
Diana's funeral, the vast waves of emotion that we first really saw around a kind of sudden death of a celebrity with Diana, these were like a medieval saint's cult.
I mean, the whole business of, you know, do you remember Kensington Palace Gardens stuffed with teddy bears and rotting bunches of supermarket flowers?
It's like a medieval shrine.
And again, the A member of a royal family that undergoes a sudden and unexpected and violent death is effectively instantly made a saint.
It's a bit like the murder of Richard II or Henry VI and whatever.
This same thing.
And again, I think that the ecological movement, we actually use words for it like a crusade.
Yes.
And the same sort of people seem to get very heavily involved.
Who are those people?
Well, the very young, huge numbers of ranting women.
Yes, lots of them.
But also the affluent.
Well, of course, they can afford it.
Traditionally, if you actually look at the most extreme forms of medieval religious observance, people like the observants, the Franciscans, the current Pope is a Franciscan, a very dangerous thing, who actually tried to follow the rule of St.
Francis, their patrons are the richest people.
Because, of course, they have this deepest sense of guilt.
They're so completely absorbed in the things of this world.
We're looking at Mike Bloomberg.
He's an obsessive greenie.
In fact, all the Democrat candidates are...
Yeah, yeah.
The same thing.
So I think there is this...
And again, the...
We've actually turned dissent, something which you and I are both very fond of, we've now turned it into heresy.
The proceedings on Twitter, the kind of Twitter storms and whatever, these are like medieval mobs hastening a heretic to being burned alive, which they would undoubtedly do if they were allowed to.
Well, you were quite an outlier of this.
Mm-hmm.
2011, I think, was when you got isolated, point swarm isolated.
These are the Alinskyite methods.
And they singled out you for making an innocuous remark.
It wasn't innocuous.
It was a very carefully calculated remark, which has been absolutely my remarks on the whole.
I wouldn't be here if my remarks were innocuous.
It was a very...
That doesn't mean it was designed to be harmful.
It was designed to be an accurate analysis.
And again, it's an area that people refuse to talk about, which is the question of black-on-black violence and so on.
And the fact that I was treated as I was in 2011, that the riots in 2011 were the subject of a lying and deliberately lying report which claimed that race had nothing to do with it.
Of course, manifestly it did.
You recall the amazing moment when Kay Burley said to a chap, you know, who was complaining, you know, this load of blacks have burnt my business.
Weren't any whites there?
And this man said, no.
She said, aren't you racially prejudiced?
He said, no, I'm describing a fact.
This bizarre world.
And the fact that we decided to ignore it, the fact that we listened to that disgraceful report by that woman who should never be allowed to report on anything, I knew her as a student.
Did you what you taught her?
I did indeed at LSE. Shall we not break the seal of the tutorial?
But the report was a disgrace and a scandal.
It is why in the earlier part of this year the headlines were all about Knife crime.
Knife crime.
Knife crime in London.
And these awful, destructive, miserable lives that centre on drugs and violence and rap.
Which, of course, we are supposed to treat as a high art form.
I mean, the degree you need, again...
As a white man, you're not supposed to say anything because, of course, we have the movement Black Lives Matter, don't we?
But the truth is we all know black lives only matter if they're taken by a white.
Yes.
Yes, that's true.
Or they're taken by an honorary white who is a policeman.
And I actually believe in a very old-fashioned way in the genuine movement.
In a law which treats all lies as equally valuable and all crimes as crimes, real crimes, crimes that involve murder, stabbing and so on, not the fictitious crimes of hate crimes and whatever.
And again, this is one area where we've gone down this absurdist route of It is a quasi-religious denial of reality.
Well, this is a theme, I think.
Religion perverted.
Going back to, briefly, to the French Revolution.
Trying to destroy religion.
Where you decide that there is no truth, but thinking makes it so.
So you can shape reality.
It seems to me that one of the problems with the modern liberal left, and it's probably always been there...
Is that it's always about the narrative, never about the truth.
They can just completely avoid it.
Well, what is so remarkable, of course, you know, is the actual great ceremony of the French Revolution, where you enthrone the goddess Reason in this extraordinary parody, this scandal.
She's an actress of a rather dubious reputation in the Comédie Française, and in the ultimate blasphemy, she's draped on the The altar of Notre Dame as the goddess of reason of this new national cult.
That shows you immediately.
And I am deeply irreligious.
Deeply irreligious.
I was brought up a Quaker and I found it an absurdity.
Quakerism involves people being moved by the Holy Spirit and rising to utter their thoughts in meeting as a...
Boy, aged 10 and 12, I realised it was quite astonishing that the Holy Spirit had always read The Manchester Guardian.
And I'm afraid it was a bit like seeing through Father Christmas.
I was very early to suspect Father Christmas.
I can still remember on the few occasions I've heard my father swear when God knows how old I was.
This little voice piped out, is that you, Daddy?
Anyway, so I saw through Quakers and I saw through Father Christmas.
But it's a great G.K. Chesterton remark about, you know, when you stop believing in God, you don't believe in nothing, you believe in anything.
This is the profound danger that we have now.
The grotesque excesses of the left are imbued with religious certainty.
Corbynism was manifestly a religious movement.
Look at them all.
Glastonbury, J.C., Jesus Christ.
And it is this weird displacement of religion.
Yeah.
The enthranement of this goddess of reason, of course, she's actually the goddess of anti-reason.
Of course.
She is the goddess of mad hysteria.
And again, you see, reason has got a terrible habit of disappearing up its own bottom, as we see again in the trans movement and all the rest of it, for which, you know, you can, on the handshake, I'm gay, you can construct a kind of logic of liberation, you know, Homosexual women, trans and all the rest of it.
But it's a false reasoning.
And it's an absurdity.
We have this terrible problem.
And this is another reason why I began quite hesitantly and deliberately ambiguously.
Because, of course, liberalism isn't wholly bad.
The old world was not wholly good.
There is this terrible difficulty Of what is proper reform?
How to do proper reform?
What are its limits?
And you see, this seems to me to be the most fundamental task.
I mean, this is a deliberate paradox.
This is the most fundamental task.
...of the conservative politician is to handle proper reform.
Disraeli again talks about it very, very clearly.
He sees the dangerous form of reform is the one that invokes general principles, these universal principles of human rights and liberalism and whatever.
He sees proper reform as As being built on the existing traditions and institutions of a specific country.
And I think, again, the way events have played out in Britain, particularly in England, in the last two or three years, demonstrates that the Israeli may actually be on to something.
And we are going to have to see.
Again, you see, the way in which we...
In many ways, I think, have handled immigration very well in this country, though there are many other aspects that have been handled very badly.
In many ways, we've handled it rather well.
I suspect it is because we already have a model in the peculiarity of Britain not actually being a single nation.
The reason that the French have such a profound problem with it is, of course, that the revolution deliberately created a single France and laïcité, the moment for the laïcisation of society, which I think?
Assimilation, or what I prefer to call biculturalism, in which the immigrant can be both themselves and the new country.
And I think you can be both.
I don't agree with Norman Tevitt that you have to have a cricket test.
I think you can support Pakistan if you're a Pakistani and still be a good Brit.
For the simple reason, look at the Six Nations.
Look at the fact that the first international is played between England and Scotland.
In other words, that we took a very different route, the creation of Britain in the 18th century.
There were sort of moments when it looked as though it might turn into a single, very aggressive country.
Rule Britannia, Britain never, never shall be slaves and all the rest of it.
But in fact, we didn't do that.
We remained English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, and we had dual identities.
And I think that the extraordinary irrationality of the British state, because that's what it amounts to, It has actually enormously facilitated a problem that nobody could have conceived of in the 18th century.
Because despite all the pretense that we've always been a country of immigrants, there has been nothing like the immigration experience of the post-60s.
I mean, I experienced it in a very interesting way.
I mentioned briefly in my days of the moral maze, and I became Friendly is probably too strong a word, but matey with Rabbi Hugo Grimm, if you may remember him.
And we had a rather wonderful exchange on air in which Hugo, one of these moments of kind of slight tempering of our relationship, said to me, you know, David, you're not half as nasty as you are.
To which I responded, do you know what Hugo did?
Well, my father's nice either.
Which is a very nice one.
But what Hugo did, and it was very touching, he took my late partner and I, James, a bit under his wing.
We dined with them.
We actually shared the Passover with them.
And I was staggered at this sense of a man with these two radically different faces.
One The outward face into Britain, a public figure, a performer on the public stage, behind the microphone and whatever.
And then within his own home, I know there are no priests, but performing what are essentially priestly rituals of an ancient religion.
And that strikes me, that extraordinary biculturalism to hearts.
I think we're seeing all of our successful movements We're seeing, you know, with Sikhs, with Hindus, with Chinese, this extraordinary double, this ease in both.
I was talking at a country house a while ago, and of course they all depend on weddings now, and there was a description of an Indian wedding, you know, in which there were at least three weddings.
There was a Christian wedding, there was a Hindu wedding, there was a civil wedding.
And you just saw them all layering.
And they changed clothes for them.
When she was performing the Christian and the civil wedding, she wears white.
And then when she's having the Hindu one, she's in Sarit, whatever.
And that, I think, is, again, it's a very British way of doing it.
Yeah.
And again, it's what, Disraeli would deeply approve of that, because of course, in so many ways, Disraeli was exactly that, you know, this converted Jew, and yet wildly proud of his Judaism.
Yeah.
You know, throwing it in the face of members of the Commons.
There was a famous moment when somebody mocks him as a Jew, and what does he do?
He rises in the Commons and says, indeed, I am a Jew.
Two thousand years ago, when the ancestors of the right, honorable gentlemen who intervened now, were wearing skins and living in mud huts.
Mine were priests of the Temple of Solomon.
You know, magnificent.
Magnificent.
Yeah.
But if I could drag you away from your general sunny uplands, back to...
Back to Denningpole dismalism.
Denningpole dismalism.
Denningpole dismalism.
Okay.
So you invite Disraeli and one-nation tourism.
I think that...
When I hear One Nation Tourism, I reach for my browning because it seems to me just an extension of Tony Blair's Third Way.
It's just a meaningless phrase.
I mean, maybe it had meaning in Israel's time, but I look at what Boris Johnson is doing now and I think what he's doing is saying, we hear what you say, you little working class people who lent us your vote.
What you want is a massive amount of government borrowing and tax and spend.
And we're going to build all these wonderful bridges and nonsenses for you.
And you little people, it's what you want.
And they don't want that at all.
They actually want to keep more of their money from taxation.
They want...
They actually want a kind of, I think, a sort of fiscal responsibility.
So I was wondering whether you could tell me whether you share my pessimism about Boris, whether you think he's a good thing or a bad thing.
I'm going to say only time will trough.
I'm sorry.
But that really is true.
But what I think is, I'm not sure, you see, whether...
They don't just want Thatcherism.
They don't just want fiscal responsibility.
They certainly don't want the catastrophe that austerity was.
Austerity was a catastrophe.
I had a major confrontation with George Osborne on this at Crosby Hall, the horror of my host.
Osborne The way in which austerity might have been necessary was certainly necessary to bring under control the absurd levels of expenditure of the Blair Brown era.
On the other hand, there were different ways of doing it.
To introduce 20% cuts across the board was insane.
It is why there's been the collapse of law and order that has.
It's why our prisons are in the state that they are.
If you look at the precedents of other countries like Sweden and Canada that similarly rained back enormously on public expenditure, they took a strategic view of areas which are to be protected and areas which the government has just to pull out of completely.
We characteristically refused to do that.
So we did it badly.
I think Thatcherism is dead.
And I don't hugely mourn its passing.
I think that if we do go into merely a Blair era of tax and spend, there will not be a second Johnson government.
I agree with you.
I think more is wanted.
But what I see as being really wanted is what I think People voted for.
What they voted for was they didn't like, they both voted for and against.
They loathed Corbyn's lack of patriotism.
They loathed the kind of liberal woke culture that was being thrust upon them.
They're not hugely enthused about environmentalism.
If it means that they can't run, they're not terribly new and perhaps not very environmentally friendly cars.
And I think they are looking to a signal of, if you like, a little bit of the rolling back or limitation of the triumph of liberalism.
And this is what really does disturb me.
Boris is a natural liberal.
Yes.
He's a natural liberal.
Cummings is not, but I'm not sure how genuinely popular his touch is.
And yet, on the other hand, again, I'm sorry, it's on the one hand, he showed genius in the referendum campaign, the referenda campaigns.
He showed genius in the general election.
I mean, can I just put it to you a different way around it?
The political transformation that was carried out in Britain in the last month or two of last year is like a transformation scene in a baroque opera.
If you think where we were Describe it, go on.
In October, we had the ghastly burko presiding over a commons that looked as though it was going to take over the government.
The entire political establishment seemed to have the absolute rooted determination to reverse the result of the referendum.
And then, with extraordinary chops, with classic seizing of the political initiative, classic deceit, the stupid vanity of Swinson and the Liberal Democrats, the insane opportunism of the Scott Nats, of the terror, of course, of the evidence of what Mr.
Salmon was up to in his idle moments in Butte House, and so on.
They...
Sign their death warrant.
The turkeys did indeed vote for Christmas.
They voted for a general election and look what happened.
So there has been, we have seen an astonishing display.
I mean, really, bravura display of political skill.
I think, similarly, David Norris' statement about the new British negotiating possession to the EU. Again, it's a transformation scene.
When you actually think of Ollie Robbins, you know, meekly following along.
I mean, the only thing that he had to say was yes and yes.
Yes, Monsieur Barnier, because of course, it would be we, Monsieur Barnier, he wouldn't even dream of speaking English.
Suddenly, you actually get a British government saying, I'm sorry, we are an equal power.
We may not be as big as you, but we are an independent sovereign power, and we will do things in our independent sovereign fashion.
There are these signs, and there are equally, unfortunately, a lot of signs in another direction.
Yes, yes.
When you say that Boris is, oh fault, a liberal, just tell me what the key facets of being a liberal are, liberal thinking.
Well, I think maybe to talk about liberal thought in the case of Boris, maybe, what was it?
Somebody was asked, it was Christopher Hitchens, wasn't it?
He was asked, what would he think of David Cameron?
He said, David Cameron doesn't provoke thought.
In a sense, Boris doesn't either.
I mean, Boris is a bundle.
He's a bundle of enthusiasm.
Yeah.
Which, of course, was an enormous strong point against the miserably Puritan.
We talk about Puritan again, Corbyn, you know, the allotment, the bicycling, the general sense of Margaret Beckett-like caravanning.
All of that.
So, Boris is about bounce.
Boris is about trying to make people feel happy.
Boris likes Grand Projet.
Yes.
Very much, you know, in almost a French fashion.
God help us.
And of course, HS2 is absolutely classic Grand Projet.
He also is, despite all the attacks on him, he has very liberal views on immigration.
He is multilingual.
Despite his rude remarks about burqas and all the rest of it, he has been a great champion of integration.
Almost a champion of multi-countries.
Because Boris is not a thinker, you can find evidence What we need, of course.
In other words, he is the strangest figurehead for what we actually need at the moment, which is an intellectual counter-revolution.
And what, in an odd sort of way, I think the North actually voted for was an intellectual counter-revolution.
It's a sort of thing, again, with Trump and Bannon.
And you can see, in many ways, a very similar pairing with Cummings and Boris.
You have a leader who is profoundly unideological, is not in the least, though Boris is highly intelligent, not lingual, classicist and all that, he's not in the least intelligent.
intellectual has no structured thought, but you are in a situation which does actually demand structured thought, does demand structured response.
Again, one has hopes if the commission, which is to look at the relationship of parliament, the executive, the legislative and the judiciary, if that actually takes place, if it Debates properly.
If you repeal things like the fixed term parliament, if you cut back on the judicial activism by following the Australian model and limiting judicial review.
But you see, that will be very contentious.
Will Boris want to take the flack for that?
Will he actually understand I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be patronising, but he's got a mind that works in a very different kind of way.
You see, what is striking?
The last time we tried to do something like this, which of course is Thatcher, The deliberate reversal of the post-war Keynesian consensus.
Thatcher wasn't an intellectual, but she was highly intelligent.
But she was fascinated by ideas.
She took ideas seriously.
We know from Charles Moore's wonderful books on her.
We know how she engaged with serious intellectuals, some of whom she understood and some of whom she didn't.
I don't know whether I'm not part of the circle.
I have no idea.
Is this going on with Boris?
If it isn't, we're lost.
An intellectual counter-revolution.
But I'm looking at your alma mater and my alma mater.
Oh, a mess.
And I'm not finding much hope.
For example, history courses.
I got a copy.
My father-in-law was at Cambridge, read history.
And I got the Cambridge History magazine.
And it was about this undergraduate's main achievement at Cambridge, doing history.
She came from an underprivileged background, etc, etc.
Her boast was she decolonised the curriculum.
And you've got today, in the papers, you've got Oxford considering dropping Virgil and Homer.
Now, obviously, they're minor figures, but Virgil and Homer from their...
Declassicising classics.
Declassicising...
Now, give me your take on that, because I find it very worrying.
It is.
It's fair.
But you see, again, James, we have been here before...
Is it perhaps just that that extraordinary explosion of creativity from the 15th century, you know, the Renaissance and beyond, is it finally just playing itself out?
One of the most, I've been saying very high things about the 19th century, one of its more absurd aspects was the belief in universal progress, that everything gets better all the time.
I don't believe it does, as again, which is why I had the on the one hand this and on the other hand that, and deeply distressed you, and pointed out that, generally speaking, things have good aspects and bad aspects.
But I agree with you.
I'm deeply depressed about what's happening at Cambridge, a place which I hold very dear, which, along with my grammar school, made me.
I am an absolute classic case of the Renaissance phenomenon of the poor boy made good by education, what all these institutions were designed to do.
And I find the current Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, this extraordinarily second-rate figure who Before he ran Cambridge, was the Vice-Chancellor of the University of British Columbia.
I'm sorry, I don't regard the University of British Columbia as a logical next step to the University of Cambridge.
One of his predecessors, Alice Richard, had been the Provost of Yale.
I do regard Yale as a next step to Cambridge.
And I'm afraid he exemplifies all the follies Of liberal universities, as so often I'm afraid Canadians do.
Yes.
It seems to me to be a country which has absorbed this, because I suspect of its bilingual elite, which is a natural way of...
Oh, but the French influence, you think?
It's bilingualism.
It means it's the perfect foundation for an arrogant elite.
If you've got two monoglot populations with over them a bilingual elite...
Like the Russians.
Indeed, or indeed, what's happened?
In Europe, where you have this polylingual bureaucracy, providing over a series of largely monogamous populations.
Or, again, you know, the superior have access to this weird international form of English and so on.
But I agree with you.
I think what's happening at Cambridge, now apparently at Oxford, I thought Oxford, under its vice chance, had been relatively immune.
Is dreadful.
But then you see, I console myself.
Universities in Britain have never been the central institutions of thought.
The central institution of thought in Britain isn't an institution at all.
It's London.
This astonishing city where we both are now, where I see sides of the most wonderful intellectual life and creativity.
It's in the continental tradition that universities are so essential, that for most of the existence of Oxford and Cambridge, Well, his first 400 years, all Cambridge did was turn out East Anglian Archdeacons.
When I was leading along with Stephen Hawking in California, the celebrations for our 800th anniversary, I caused shock horror by saying for the first 400 years, nobody had thought original thought in Cambridge.
The first 400 years of the existence of Cambridge could be wiped out.
We've got faintest consequence for human thought at all.
We didn't necessarily go down well, but then I explained that they had a moment of revelation under the Tudors and the world changed.
But, but, but, but, the good thing is, and then Oxford and Cambridge have become finishing schools for the rich.
Yes.
And it's London.
It's the city.
It's commerce.
We don't have a court theatre in England.
We have this wonderful commercial theatre.
We don't have the equivalent of the Grands Écoles of Ancien Régime or Napoleonic France.
What we have is this astonishing commercial culture of London, which isn't susceptible to regulation.
Which isn't susceptible to cutting off funding because, you know, Professor X dislikes what you do.
In which you are in a free market.
A free market of ideas.
And I think an awful lot of that is in rather good repair.
There's an interesting article talking on the subject of history in, I think it's the Telegraph either today or yesterday, by my friend Andrew Roberts on the fact that the Elgin marbles now feel much more at home.
home in England than they do in Greece.
And one of the things he points out is that history may be dead in the universities, but it's flourishing because of people like A. Robertson, D. Starkey, and my dear former Cambridge student, Dan Jones.
The flourishing of history in the marketplace, in books that people buy, read, debate.
Again, I see as the universities are closing their minds, I see so much of the public opening I don't know whether you do, I travel around a lot, I lecture commercially, and you get in the most ordinary, obscure places, some hundreds of people turning up, they want to listen to a serious lecture, and they want a jolly good half hour of Q&A at the end.
There is this appetite.
I think the liberal intelligentsia may finally be disappearing up their own bottom.
It may well be the best solution.
It spares at the trouble of a concentration camp.
They all amure themselves within the walls of Oxford and Cambridge and disappear up their own bottom.
There's a world outside.
Yes.
And again, this is the other good aspect of all the things we haven't really talked about, the problems of the web.
It's one of the few things we haven't talked about.
But the world of the podcast, what we're doing now, it liberates us from the ghastly liberals of the BBC. We can have a proper conversation.
You're not interrupting.
Well, I won't let you.
You're not interrupting.
You're not doing a Nick Robinson podcast.
And I think these are very good things.
And they show an appetite, an engagement, a degree of dissent, an eagerness for debate and openness.
Yes, you're absolutely right.
I'm going to share briefly your optimism.
Mr Denningpole, have I converted?
This could be the moment.
I don't think you're going to get another TV series, are you, on Channel 4?
Absolutely not on Channel 4.
I think it infinitely unlikely on the BBC. I'm male, pale and stale.
Exactly.
And I want to talk about serious things.
I don't want to dress up.
I don't want to agitate about vaginas or whatever is the latest thing that we've got from Mary, whatever she's called.
But the people are still really hot for you.
They still want more snarky.
Well, what I gather is, but of course, see, there's this entire world now in which television programmes have third and fourth lives.
They go on.
My agent tells me that my old television series, and indeed many other people's, are more or less continuous loops on different channels.
And I think there is an appetite, there is a desire to learn and to know, as well as the other appetite, the desire to unknow and destroy.
To destroy.
Like children.
Well, so much of it is very childish.
But remember, that is also Puritanism.
That is also the Reformation.
The Reformation was about destruction.
It was about tearing down art because it was wicked and because it was idolatrous.
Yes.
And we are...
The great phrases in the Bible, you know, there's a time to build up and a time to tear down, a time for peace and a time for war, a time to make love and a time to hate the Book of Wisdom, which is a very appropriate note on which to end.
Yes, we've been here before.
Well, thank you.
▲
Export Selection