Douglas Murray
I
have never met Donald Trump, but I
knew his parents. A fact that makes
me feel about 100 years old. Which was
actually nearer the age Fred and Mary
Anne Trump were when, as a teenager,
I made my first trip to New York. I
remember riding backwards in their
limousine on the way to lunch with the
extended Trump clan and the lovely Mary
Anne apologising that her son Donald
would not be joining us. ‘You know about
Donald?’ she inquired. I nodded, and
recall her adding rather wistfully, ‘He’s
always been the outgoing one.’
O
ne of the great pleasures of
life, I now realise — and a fine
compensation for slowly greying hair — is
watching other people navigate the slalom
of their careers. The other day I turned
on the television to watch a friend who
is competing in Strictly Come Dancing. I
was briefly detained by another channel
on which a former employee was being
interviewed about becoming the next
leader of Ukip. I returned to Strictly. After
all these years I have become strangely
interested and am lobbying my friend
to be taken backstage. Partly to show
support. Partly to see the stars up close.
And partly to continue an argument with
Ed Balls about an Islamist sect which
kicked off during his time as education
secretary. I somehow feel that Balls is
more likely to finally concede he was
wrong if I can catch him in spandex.
M
y soon-to-be-completed book on the
migration crisis has entailed even
more travel than usual. This throws up
its own juxtapositions. A couple of weeks
ago I was in a meeting at the Bundestag
with one of Angela Merkel’s supporters.
He was trying to persuade me that it was
all going fine. Then why were the Paris
suburbs I was in the day before filled with
tents? Why had a Greek refugee camp I
was at in the summer just been burned
down by some of its occupants? Each time
I return to Britain I find the debate here
ever more idiotic. Celebrities and other
grandstanders make out that if we just
took in the 6,500 occupants of the Calais
camp everything would be solved. They
seem to have no conception that 6,
people is an unexceptional day’s arrivals
into Italy alone. Last week a single
backbench MP (David Davies) tweeted
that dental checks might be necessary in
order to check the age of some of the Calais
‘child migrants’. The whole nation seemed
to go into a frenzy. To demonstrate her
virtue, Stella Creasy MP claimed to feel
shame at sitting in the same parliament as
Davies. The man himself was invited on to
morning television to be harangued by — of
all indignities — Piers Morgan. Before long
the British Dental Association felt impelled
to come out and denounce tooth checks as
‘unethical’. All of which compels me to ask:where precisely have all the adults in
Britain gone? When did we become this
nation of preening cowards? One solution
for getting out of this mess is for those
who think there is no cost to behaving in
such a way to experience the downs as
well as the ups of moral culpability. So
next time Benedict Cumberbatch effs
and blinds to laud the evaporation of
borders, his audience might point out how
lucky he is that he was performing at the
Barbican in London last year rather than
the Bataclan theatre in Paris.T
wice in the last week Sky have
asked me to come on to discuss
this issue, and twice paired me with the
same strangely ill-informed ‘human
rights’ barrister. Aside from having the
now-common social justice warrior,
schoolmarmish manner (‘I’m shutting
you down’, ‘How dare you?’ etc), she
appeared to believe that anyone in the
world who wants to come to Europe
should come here. When I point out that
our continent is in a crisis, she corrects
me that ‘the world is in crisis’. Just one
strange thing about such people is that
they think it outrageous to have a special
interest in protecting one’s own home.M
y cat — an exceptionally beautiful
ragdoll — has taken to urinating
on the floor beside the lavatory. At
first I took this to be a touching act of
(approximate) imitation. However, the
vet informs me that tests may be needed.
After expensively proving that they were
not, he suggests that she may be suffering
from stress. This strikes me as remarkably
unlikely. My cat’s days are filled with
sleeping, snuggling, eating somewhat
better than I do and the occasional foray
to stare dementedly at a fly. However,
according to the vet — who recommends
a feline behavioural therapist — cat stress
can be caused by a range of things. It is
true that my ragdoll met a dog for the
second time the other week. But I am now
informed that other variations in the life
of a cat can also cause stress, including,
apparently, seeing their owners packing
a suitcase. I am racked with guilt and
have taken to packing my travel bags in a
locked room.Douglas Murray is an associate
editor of The Spectator.