Media Matters
A man with very strong opinions once had distinctly different views
One of my absolute favourite journalists in the world is Matthew Parris. Every Saturday I turn eagerly to his column in the Times. When he discourses in shorter items on Wednesdays, my fingers flick the pages towards the hallowed print with equal urgency. Matthew (whom I have barely met) is a lucid, elegant and civilised Tory writer. Oh, how I have enjoyed his pieces over the years.
And yet I confess in recent months I have been relishing them a little less. The reason is that Matthew Parris is angry. In particular, he is angry about Brexit. Those who voted to leave the EU are characterised by him as unrealistic, ill-informed, brutish, silly or just plain daft. Since I am a member of the tribe that he dismisses with such contempt, I now turn to his eruptions with a measure of trepidation. I am beginning to fear those Saturday mornings.
The other day he threw down the gauntlet in what I thought was a rather harsh way. You might say he attempted a political character assassination of those who supported Leave. ‘The shadow of right-wing populism,’ he wrote, with something of a sneer possibly playing on his lips, ‘does fall across the Tory Brexiteers as a political community. If you are angry about the EU, you’re more likely than other Tories to be angry about (say) softer sentencing, early parole, drugs liberalisation, gay marriage, defence cuts, squandered overseas aid, social security scroungers, “political correctness” and a host of other issues that we might pile into a lumpy string bag and label “Harrumph!” ’
I naturally asked myself whether I was guilty of the sin of ‘right-wing populism’ in Matthew’s eyes. Was I cross about softer sentencing? Yes, if violent and dangerous criminals are not punished. Early parole? Certainly if, as in the recent case of the ‘black cab rapist’, John Warboys, the public are put at risk. Drugs liberalisation? I’m against. Gay marriage? Fine for the state but not for the C of E. Defence cuts? We live in a dangerous world. Squandered overseas aid? Wasting billions in an age of austerity can’t be a good thing. Social security scroungers? They are guilty of fraud. Political correctness? Surely no one is in favour of that.
Well, I realised with a heavy heart that in Matthew’s mind I must be a knuckledragging, swivel-eyed, right-wing populist. You can imagine how depressed I felt. It is hard to be so out of step with one’s hero. But then I thought to myself, aren’t lots of people – and not all of them Tories – on the same side as me over most of these issues? Perhaps we are a nation of simple-minded populists. And then I had another thought which raised my spirits more than I can say. Hadn’t Matthew himself – remember that I am a devoted student of his oeuvre – from time to time expressed support for the beliefs he now loftily sweeps aside?
So I turned to my computer and spent a happy afternoon re-reading some of Matthew’s greatest works. I found memory had not played me false. There he was in the Times, on 10th January 2009 angrily – the word is apt – inveighing against the squandering of overseas aid. ‘Here is a bloated budget ripe for swingeing efficiency savings, and I simply do not believe that Mr Cameron and his Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, can be unaware of this.’
On defence spending, Matthew argued on 2nd December 2006 against renewing the Trident nuclear deterrent, but instead ‘beefing up our conventional defences, supplying and supporting our existing armed forces properly [my italics]’. As for gay marriage, he suggested on 7th December 2002 that it should be left to the Church. He favoured state civil partnerships – and indeed entered one with the journalist Julian Glover in 2006.
Perhaps my most bracing rediscovery was that this passionate European and scourge of half-witted Brexiteers once harboured profound philosophical misgivings about the EU. In a column on 20th March 1999 he wrote: ‘I have always doubted the European project, even the single currency, not because it seemed technically impossible, but because the democratic side of the account looked so thin.’ What joy to be reminded that there was a time when he and I held the same beliefs!
We can all of us change our minds, of course. I am certain that a brief survey of my own outpourings would quickly establish the most ludicrous zigzagging. (I should also say that on some issues such as the legalisation of drugs Matthew has cleaved to a constant anti-populist line.) No, my purpose is not at all to chide my hero for jettisoning beliefs that he now regards with contempt. It is rather to make an appeal to him. If a man of such refinement could once entertain views that he dismisses as populist, could he possibly summon up a little sympathy for us lesser mortals still stuck in our intellectual swamp? Once we were a little like him, and perhaps one day we will see the light.