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The Spectator and its Editor Fraser Nelson are in a corner over a columnist who any reasonable person could conclude encouraged violence towards Muslims and migrants – and you can tell that because they cannot defend themselves.
The columnist is Douglas Murray, who has never made a secret of his loathing for Islam, and who, it has now emerged, explicitly endorsed the idea that the public should take the law into their own hands and “sort out” Muslims and immigrants.
After the racist violence of recent weeks, it was natural for attention to turn to the question of where it came from. Who radicalised the racists? Who suggested that they should attack Muslims and refugees?
Murray’s statement, naturally, attracted attention and Nelson, who employs him as Associate Editor of the magazine as well as a columnist, was asked to sack him or to at least condemn his remarks. He did neither.
Instead, he wrote an article: ‘In Defence of Douglas Murray’.
Strikingly, nowhere did Nelson find room in this to remind his readers of the remarks complained of, which were, with reference to British Muslims involved in protests in London against the Israeli war in Gaza: “If the Army will not be sent in, then the public will have to go in, and the public will have to sort this out themselves and it’ll be very, very brutal.”
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Nelson made no attempt to defend or excuse these words – presumably because they are so obviously inflammatory.
Instead, in his second paragraph, he resorted to disinformation: “An interview he [Murray] gave months ago has been selectively edited and republished to misrepresent him and, in effect, make out that he was encouraging riots.”
If this was a denial that the words were spoken, you might think that Nelson would show the detail. What form did this selective editing take? How exactly was Murray misrepresented? And, if he wasn’t encouraging riots, what did he say?
The truth is that Murray spoke exactly those words in a YouTube interview last November, and the full context does not make them appear innocent: it makes them worse.
The remark is made about an hour in, when Murray discusses what he calls a “crux point” that he claimed would come in Britain on Armistice Day, 11 November, last year. He predicted: “They [Muslims] will again defile the Cenotaph and the statues of our dead and our war leaders… I believe that the British people will not take this lying down.”
Of the British police, he said: “Clearly, they’ve lost control of the streets. Now, is it time to send in the Army at some point? Probably yes. But, if the Army will not be sent in, then the public will have to go in, and the public will have to sort this out themselves and it’ll be very, very brutal.”
So when the Editor of the Spectator wrote of misrepresentation, he is the one doing it. And that was the best he could do – because to say that his subsequent arguments were weak would be to flatter him.
Nowhere in his article did Nelson address the question of whether the Spectator endorsed or condemned Murray’s statement. Nowhere did he consider whether the public expression of such opinions by the Associate Editor of the Spectator might have contributed, even in a small way, to the explosion of hatred seen this summer – whether, for example, it might be seen by violent racists as lending legitimacy to their views and actions.
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Instead, we were given distractions. A good deal of space in the piece was devoted to discussing Elon Musk‘s X (formerly Twitter) in tones which made clear that, to Nelson, at least for present purposes, it is nothing better than a domain of excitable ruffians.
“I don’t follow [Alastair] Campbell,” Nelson informed his readers loftily, “but it seems that he has been telling me that, unless I condemn Douglas, then I myself would apparently ‘stand condemned’.”
Not only does Nelson not follow Campbell, in fact, he won’t even sully his keyboard by checking what was actually said. That’s a job for the Spectator butler, no doubt – or perhaps for Nelson’s boss, Andrew Neil, who shows every sign of relishing the medium.
“Andrew Neil has rightly pointed out that hell really will freeze over before a Twitterstorm makes the Spectator turn on a star columnist who has brought so much to the magazine over so many years,” Nelson continued. “The idea that we would do so now, at Campbell’s behest – or that of his fellow trolls – is laughable.”
This was just padding, irrelevant to the title of the article (‘In Defence of Douglas Murray’) or to the central question – which is, to restate it more bluntly: does the Spectator share Murray’s view that “the public will have to go in and it will be very, very brutal”?
In the article, Nelson published part of a letter he received from a reader, who expressed his “unwavering support for Douglas Murray”, praised his contributions to public commentary, and denounced “attempts by political figures like Campbell to silence him”.
“Amen to all that,” Nelson wrote, going on to laud Murray in particular for an article in which he defended the reputation of Roger Scruton by allegedly getting hold of original interview footage that made clear Scruton had been misrepresented. How curious that, with this shining example before him, Nelson could not do the same for Murray.
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If all of this was not sickening it would be embarrassing. Try as it might, the Spectator cannot defend Murray and yet it won’t sack him. And one of the reasons for this slipped out as Nelson rambled on.
Praising a recent Murray article, he said it was “thoughtful, original, and generated more subscriptions than any other article we published this year”. There it is: hate sells. And since Murray’s opinions sell, sacking him would be bad for business. Those are the priorities.
The other reason the Spectator won’t sack Murray is because it is difficult not to conclude that it agrees with him. The track record of Muslim-hating and Muslim-baiting at the magazine is far, far too long for that to be a matter of doubt.
Douglas Murray’s words sound dangerously like incitement to racial hatred and violence. No respectable, law-abiding publication would stand by them. But that is what Fraser Nelson’s Spectator has done – and it is fitting that his ‘defence of Douglas Murray’ should be such a shabby piece of journalism.