The Sunday Times - UK (2022-04-24)

22 V2 The Sunday Times April 24, 2022

NEWS REVIEW

published in his second year at univer-

sity, was a far cry from his recent output:

a biography of Lord Alfred Douglas,

Oscar Wilde’s lover. He won the Lambda

award for gay biography.

(Murray himself is gay.)

He founded the think tank the Centre

for Social Cohesion and published a

defence of neoconservatism, but it was

The Strange Death of Europe that cata-

pulted him into the limelight and made

him the controversial figure he is today.

So how did he get here? “I’m attracted

to sort of difficult subjects. I think that’s

definitely true. I suppose I’ve always had

that kind of instinct of, if people tell you

not to look at something, then I look at it.

“When I was at university, the Balkan

wars were going on. That was pretty

alarming, and a sort of awakening. Then

9/11 came along.” After that, he says,

there was a divide between those who

thought America had it coming and

“those of us who have felt no, no one has

a right to do that, to hell with that ... I felt

that mixed up among many reasonable

claims were people who were really sin-

gle-minded in a hatred of the society that

I was from and the culture I loved.”

Most would categorise Murray as right-

wing, but he says he has voted for all the

main parties at some point, though “gen-

erally reluctantly”. “I don’t find Starmer

impressive. I thought Boris had the

potential for greatness but he keeps wast-

ing it, and frankly the laughter has died.”

For readers already entrenched on

one side or another, this book is unlikely

to change minds. But though alarmist, it

is also optimistic. Murray paints a com-

pelling vision of the West as it is and as it

could be. We are lucky to live here, Mur-

ray tells us, but we have not got lucky by

chance. We reap the benefits today of

centuries of progress and thought.

What does winning the culture wars

look like? Murray looks rather surprised

by the question. A good outcome, he

says, “would be for a country like Britain

to have a reasonable attitude towards

ourselves and our past. Neither sugar-

coated nor acid-coated. It would be to be

allowed to say and to celebrate things

about ourselves that are good without

being embarrassed about it.”

As mission statements go, it is an ano-

dyne one, broad enough that anyone

reading it might agree with it. But deep in

the culture wars, things are never quite

that simple.

The War on the West, by Douglas Murray,

is published on Thursday

(HarperCollins, £20)

Books, Culture, page 30

Douglas Murray,

with podcaster

Joe Rogan, is

used to shaking

off criticism

the gallery has commissioned a new

work to be exhibited alongside it “in dia-

logue with the mural”.

“We have to accept that almost all of

our cultural institutions are ashamed of

our culture,” he says. “They’re intimi-

dated because they sense we’re in the

midst of a cultural revolution, of a kind,

and they don’t know what to do about it.

“I think that very ideologically moti-

vated people with bad intent can go an

awfully long way, by bullying people and

making them believe that the cost of get-

ting this wrong is total reputational

destruction. These cultural and other

institutions, they basically decided that if

they put one step wrong, by standing up

for themselves or their collection, that

they will lose the prestige and the esteem

which they care about so much.”

Murray looks like a PR executive who

has stopped by for a glass of wine on his

way back from the gym. He is just about

part of the millennial generation that is

said to be driving the culture wars, rather

than the older generation that runs most

of the cultural institutions he derides. He

peppers his speech with references to the

philosophers John Stuart Mill and David

Hume, as well as Karl Max and the Ameri-

can writer James Baldwin.

But there is a religious sense of mission

to Murray, although he says that he is now

less concerned than he was about con-

verting others to share his beliefs. “As you

mature... you think, ‘Well, this is my

view, I don’t really care if anyone agrees

or not.’ To be challenged when you’re

younger is harder. When you’re a bit

more experienced, it’s not so difficult.

I suppose I was angry in part in my twen-

ties because I thought there were things

going on which I couldn’t believe people

weren’t identifying. And now I have a cer-

tain peace with

that.”

That’s not the

impression you get

from the new book.

In Murray’s world,

there is a war on,

and he wants you

on his side.

His was not a

political upbring-

ing. Born in Lon-

don, he and his

elder brother were

raised by an English

civil servant

mother and a Scot-

tish, Gaelic-speaking father, a teacher. He

says his parents “didn’t really have any”

ideological views. He went to Eton on a

scholarship, then studied English at Mag-

dalen College, Oxford. His first book,

“retrain their minds”. He abhors the term

“cultural appropriation”, which is, in

Murray’s words, the idea that “western

culture can be best understood by inter-

preting it as some act of grand theft”. Kew

Gardens comes under fire for changing

display boards to “reflect their links to

slavery and colonialism”.

Indeed, much is an exhaustive docu-

mentation of the organisations that Mur-

ray feels are failing to stand up for west-

ern values: the British Library, the British

Museum, the Church of England. “I have

a particular jihad against the trustees of

the Tate,” he says on a video call from

New York, where he lives. The gallery

folded in the face of a petition calling for

the removal of a 1920s mural by Rex

Whistler from its restaurant in Tate Brit-

ain because of its depiction of child slav-

ery. It will remain out of public view until

Boris Johnson

at the wheel

in 2008

First it targeted

the phones of

terrorists. Now

Pegasus spies

on the planet

Jeff Bezos, El Chapo and No 10 have all

fallen victim to a controversial Israeli

intelligence tool, writes Anshel Pfeffer

From left, Jeff Bezos, Dubai’s Sheikh Mohammed, Cherie

Blair, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and Jamal Khashoggi

They knew

what I was

dreaming of

before I even

dreamt it,

said a suspect

I

t is the must-have

eavesdropping system for

the world’s autocrats — as

well as many democratic

governments. Last week it

was reported that some

officials at No 10 and the

Foreign Office had had their

smartphones “infected” with

Pegasus, a powerful Israeli-

developed cybertool. Not

only does it give spies access

to the phone’s data but it

hacks the camera and

microphone, turning it into a

watching and listening

device.

President Emmanuel

Macron and Jeff Bezos, the

billionaire founder of

Amazon, have been previous

targets. In the latest case,

according to the Canadian

research centre Citizen Lab,

UK government officials had

been targeted by the United

Arab Emirates (UAE),

possibly linked to the divorce

proceedings between Sheikh

Mohammed bin Rashid al-

Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai,

and Princess Haya Bint al-

Hussein, who has found

sanctuary with her children

in Britain. The sheikh was

found in a High Court ruling

to have used Pegasus to track

his ex-wife and her lawyers.

Pegasus was not developed

by the Israeli NSO Group to

help spouses in divorce cases.

It is marketed as a key tool in

fighting terrorists and

organised crime and counts

the FBI and Germany’s

federal police as customers. It

is credited with helping the

Mexican authorities to

capture the drug baron El

Chapo and has allowed Isis

operatives to be arrested

before they carried out

attacks in Europe. One

Palestinian would-be terrorist

said in his interrogation that

“the Israelis knew what I was

dreaming of before I even

dreamt it”. But uses have

been more sinister, such as

Saudi Arabia’s tracking of the

dissident journalist Jamal

Khashoggi before his

gruesome murder in Istanbul.

Pegasus is not your average

hack or phishing scam. It

makes “zero-click” attacks:

phone users don’t need to

click on a dodgy link to get

infected. It targets system

vulnerabilities unknown to

the developers — known as

“exploits” or “zero-days” —

and leaves no trace. Zero-

days are hard to find — and

can be sold for large sums.

“There’s a black market in

zero-days, which are found

and then sold by criminal

syndicates,” says an expert in

a western government. “But a

government which doesn’t

want to work through

criminals and wants to have a

tool like this at its constant

disposal doesn’t have many

places to go.” Which is where

NSO, a firm founded near Tel

Aviv in 2010, comes in.

It is ostensibly a private

non-governmental software

company operating under

Israeli law. It is majority-

owned by Novalpina Capital,

a London-based private

equity fund that has Cherie

Blair on its advisory ethics

committee. But it is no

ordinary private company.

NSO develops surveillance

software used by Israeli

intelligence and its ties to

Israel’s government and

security establishment are

the secret of its success.

NSO’s main profits come from

exports — controlled by the

Israeli state. It cannot sell

Pegasus only to governments

approved by Israel.The list of

clients ends up looking like a

map of Israel’s foreign policy

interests. It includes

countries such as Mexico and

Panama, which in recent

years relinquished their pro-

Palestinian voting patterns at

the UN. Then there are the

populist governments of

Poland and Hungary, which

have become Israel’s most

strident defenders in the EU.

Over the past decade

Pegasus has also helped Israel

build an anti-Iran coalition in

the Middle East. The UAE,

which used Pegasus against

dissidents at home and,

reportedly, the British

government, has become

Israel’s closest ally in the

region along with Bahrain

and Morocco.

Saudi Arabia does not have

diplomatic relations with

Israel but is a key member of

the anti-Iran alliance.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the

former prime minister,

personally authorised the

sale of Pegasus to the Saudis.

But there is a fightback.

Citizen Lab, based at the

University of Toronto, has

developed software that can

detect Pegasus on infected

smartphones, and with a

consortium of newspapers

has published reports of

misuse, including the No 10

attack and the targeting of

Catalan activists, probably by

the Spanish government.

NSO is being sued by Apple

and Meta, the owner of

Facebook, for breaching their

security and in November the

US put the company on a

trade blacklist.

Some Israeli tech

executives have accused NSO

of going too far in pursuit of

profits, and turning a blind

eye to what customers were

doing with Pegasus. Others

accuse the US and tech giants

of hypocrisy in taking on a

relatively small company that

challenged their dominance.

A promised Israeli

government inquiry has

failed to get off the ground.

“NSO knows too many

secrets of too many

governments,” said one

Israeli government official.

“Even if they force the

company to break up, it will

be resurrected in one way or

another. There’s too much

demand from governments

for these capabilities and if

they don’t buy them from

NSO, there will be others

offering similar services.”

‘I

don’t know what other peo-

ple think I believe,” says

Douglas Murray. This is sur-

prising, because other peo-

ple have been rather vocal

about what they think Doug-

las Murray believes. The

42-year-old intellectual’s

detractors will tell you his

writing is xenophobic, Islam-

ophobic, chauvinist, racist. They will

point to his tweet, sent on Thursday

night, about meeting his “friend”, the

controversial right-wing American pod-

caster Joe Rogan. But his legions of fans

will tell you he is a great defender of free

speech, a man who says the things that

everyone else is thinking but dare not

speak aloud.

Murray’s new book, The War on the

West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unrea-

son, will no doubt serve to solidify the

views of both sides. Published this week,

it looks set to join his previous books —

including 2019’s tract against identity

politics, The Madness of Crowds — on the

Sunday Times bestseller list. The Strange

Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity,

Islam spent almost 20 weeks there when

it was published in 2017. “Gentrified xen-

ophobia” was The Guardian’s verdict.

“I have endless contempt for the dis-

honesty of The Guardian,” says Murray.

“In my view, they and others of their ilk

would say that about anyone tackling

these issues. Such criticisms became

water off a duck’s back a long time ago.”

That attitude is a requirement in his

line of work. To stop terrorism, he told

LBC radio: “We need a bit less Islam.” On

immigration: “You’ve got to massively

slow down the flow.” On the transgender

debate: “Trans has become something

close to a dogma in record time.”

Murray, a writer for The Spectator, The

Wall Street Journal and The Sun, was talk-

ing about the culture wars long before

they became a cliché. The War on the West

is his latest contribution to the fight. That

its chapter titles include “Race”, “His-

tory”, “Religion” and “Culture” gives a

sense of the book’s scope, as well as Mur-

ray’s ambition and fearlessness in the

face of controversy.

In all these areas, Murray sees enemies

of the West seeking to talk down its suc-

cesses — the Enlightenment, great works

of art, progress on social issues — and

dwell morbidly on its failures, from his-

torical wrongs such as the slave trade to

present inequalities. This is his attempt

to defend the West against its detractors.

Few “woke”causes are spared. Murray

turns his fire on books published in the

wake of the Black Lives Matter protests

that told white Americans they needed to

I love the

western

world. Is

that such

a thought

crime?

Ignore the culture warriors. We

should take pride in our way of

life, the writer Douglas Murray

explains to Charlotte Ivers

ROB DEMARTIN

It was a wizard idea to hire

Boris to write about cars.

Then came the tickets...

was so funny that I thought

he could give Jeremy

Clarkson a run for his money.

In a car, that is.

And he was funny.

There soon appeared to be

something of a problem,

however, as the managing

editor started to get sent

rather a lot of parking tickets.

And when I say a lot, I mean a

lot; in Boris’s own words,

they started accumulating

“like drifting snow on the

windshield”.

Every month they’d arrive

— often earlier than Boris’s

invoices — and every month

we’d pay them. They were

collateral damage, I thought,

like a speeding fine, a traffic

altercation or a dink in the

hubcap. Nothing to get too

worked up about.

But then the accounts

department started to

complain. And in my

experience, when the

accounts department starts

to complain, you need to

start taking notice.

So I called Boris to a

meeting at Claridge’s (he

arrived on his bike) and told

him he had to start taking a

bit more care when he drove

our cars for review, and I

asked would he mind, in

future, parking them a little

more, well, legally?

Some have compared the PM’s party fine to nothing worse

than a parking ticket. Well, he racked up £4,000 of those

working for me, writes the former GQ editor Dylan Jones

I hired Boris for two very

good and very pertinent

reasons: he was not only a

very erudite writer but a

funny one too. I’d read a

piece he had written in a daily

broadsheet about driving an

Audi for a weekend, and it

I

hired Boris Johnson to be

my motoring

correspondent in May

1999. I took him to Le
      Caprice for lunch and
      offered him £1 a word for a
      monthly 1,000-word column
      in the magazine I’d just
      become editor of, GQ. We sat
      at the corner table, the one
      Princess Diana always used to
      have, and as Boris furiously
      made his way through the
      bang bang chicken, he
      accepted like a shot.
      “What a wizard idea,” he
      said, looking, rather
      alarmingly, like Doc Brown
      from the Back to the Future
      films. “This is going to be a lot
      of tremendous fun.”
      Which it was, until it
      wasn’t.

Boris did his Boris thing

and said, “Sorry boss, bad

Boris” — and then promptly

asked for a pay rise.

But of course it didn’t stop,

and the parking tickets kept

arriving. Which made the

accounts people so cross that

they said they were no longer

going to pay them. Which

meant I then had to get the

features team to pay for them

and claim them back on

expenses. Which worked like

a dream.

I once worked out that,

over the decade he worked

for GQ, Boris had cost us

about £4,000 in parking

tickets. But then he’d also

written more than a hundred

incredibly funny motoring

columns, so I figured it was

worth it.

Interestingly, Boris never

got any speeding tickets. And

I’ve got a pretty good idea

why. When the cars were

delivered to his house in

Islington, the car company

always made a note of the

mileage, something that is

standard practice. The

mileage would also be noted

when they came to pick

them up again. And on more

than one occasion — OK,

on many, many, many

occasions — the mileage was

precisely the same. So I leave

you to draw your own

conclusions.

I only have one regret

concerning Boris’s tenure as

our motoring correspondent.

Once, towards the end of his

time as the editor of The

Spectator (the bounder

was multi-tasking), I

commissioned him to test

drive a tank, but the wheeze

was stymied by the cobbled

streets that surrounded the

Speccie’s offices. Shame.

Clarkson review,

Magazine, pages 66-67

‘Sorry boss,

bad Boris,’

he said over

lunch at

Claridge’s

— and then

asked me

for a pay rise

e a t s m a h b o a