The truth about Andrew Neil

Bentley explained that Sunak’s boast, based on figures from the Office for National Statistics, excluded fraud or computer misuse offences, which accounted for 4.4 million out of 9 million total offences in 2022. He added, quite correctly, that ‘If you take crime actually recorded by police forces, that’s actually gone up.’ 

Similar statistical sleight of hand had already seen Boris Johnson face rebuke from the then head of the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) in February 2022. Johnson had claimed that crime had fallen by 14 per cent over a two-year period, prompting Sir David Norgrove to respond: ‘If fraud and computer misuse are counted in total crime as they should be, total crime in fact increased by 14 per cent between the year ending September 2019 and the year ending September 2021.’ (The room for these deliberate misinterpretations exists because the ONS only started counting crimes of fraud and computer misuse in 2015.) 

Bentley’s conclusion, that Sunak was technically just about entitled to make the claim but was nonetheless playing fast and loose with the numbers, was beyond reproach. A straightforward, evidence-based analysis of a government claim.

The next day’s newspapers were united in outrage. Not, however, at the mischievous misrepresentations of Rishi Sunak, but at the student activities of Oscar Bentley. ‘BBC is accused of “obvious bias” as it emerges new political fact-checker is Labour activist’, bellowed the Daily Mail, before revealing a catalogue of alleged offences including the revelations that Bentley had canvassed for the Labour Party while at the University of York, that he had once uploaded an image of a terrier to his social media with a caption endorsing ‘dogs for Corbyn’, and even, perish the thought, ‘shared advertisements for Veganuary’. 

They were still fulminating the following day when journalist Guy Adams demanded: ‘How impartial is the BBC’s “impartial” fact checking unit?’ Rather than trying to critique his actual analysis, Adams instead informed readers that ‘the 25-year-old Bentley is actually a dyed-in-the-wool Labour supporter who canvassed for the former party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and who has said you should “never trust a Tory”.’

The Daily Express reported the ‘story’ as if Bentley had been somehow hiding in his own office: ‘BBC caught in bias row as Labour activist found working as political fact checker’. Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV, where genuine bias is a business model, raged: ‘BBC fact checker canvassed for Jeremy Corbyn and smeared Conservatives’. The Daily Telegraph was initially a little less excitable, preferring the headline: ‘Claims of bias as BBC hires Labour activist who said “never trust a Tory” as political fact-checker’. But by the next day they were fully on board with the hysteria, asking: ‘How can we trust the BBC, if its political “fact-checker” is a Labour activist?’ The Telegraph’s stablemate in the Barclay family’s media empire, the Spectator, reported ‘BBC hires Corbynista political fact checker’ and asked: ‘Can the BBC ever get it right?’

The answer to that final question, incidentally, is a resounding ‘yes’. The very media outlets ostensibly disgusted by the student activities of a very junior 25-year-old recent recruit to the BBC had previously spent the best part of three decades supremely untroubled by the fact that one of the Corporation’s most senior political broadcasters – a former presenter of Politics Live no less – was one of the most obviously and proudly opinionated individuals in the British journalistic firmament.

The difference, inevitably, was that the biases and prejudices displayed by Andrew Neil at every stage of his long and illustrious career fit perfectly with those of the Daily Mail, where he currently writes a column, the Barclay family, for whom he was editor-in-chief of the Press Holdings newspaper group and later chairman of the Spectator, and Rupert Murdoch, for whom he edited the Sunday Times and was the founding chairman of Sky TV.

If Murdoch and Dacre were the chief architects of a media ecosystem in which the most basic truth could be abandoned on the altar of commercial or ideological interests, Neil is perhaps the finest example of the sort of journalist best placed to flourish within it. Vain beyond parody, his late-night Twitter rants and disastrous attempt to launch a new television station, GB News, perhaps blind younger generations to his once fierce intellect and erstwhile excellence as an interviewer of politicians. He remains of interest to us here for three reasons.

First, as we have already glimpsed, he embodies the epic double standards of the disproportionately powerful print media’s attitude to BBC employees. This will remain important long after his departure from the broadcaster in 2020.

Years of bullying and abuse of journalists perceived to be unsympathetic to inter alia, neoliberal economics, Brexit and populist race-baiting masquerading as ‘immigration concerns’ have left the Corporation cowed and in many ways corrupted. We will see that Neil helped more than anyone to usher in an era where blatant Tory affiliations among staff go unremarked, while the vaguest hint of anti-Tory sentiment sees professionals effectively hounded out of their jobs. It also means, of course, that the BBC is fast becoming a place where anybody with a prior history of political engagement will think long and hard before applying for a job there. Unless, of course, that engagement was with right-wing politics.

Crucially, throughout this period of unprecedented vilification of BBC staff, Neil signally failed to speak up for the idea that if someone as obviously possessed of pungent opinions as him can leave them at the studio door, then so could a colleague holding very different views. Instead, as we have already seen with the case of Oscar Bentley, writers on his payroll would enthusiastically side with the bullies.

Second, because Neil’s tenure at the Spectator magazine saw him champion a coterie of spectacularly racist and gratuitously divisive commentators. Masters of the unhinged ad hominem, they leeched effortlessly into Murdoch’s and Dacre’s empires while Neil’s patronage afforded a patina of respectability to Islamophobes, ethno-nationalists and other conspiracy theorists. All while Neil was supposedly abiding by the BBC’s strict impartiality rules.

Third, because of the integral role he played in giving GB News credibility. These later misadventures in broadcasting show that far from being happy with a media landscape where opposing views are barely represented and where the BBC has been hollowed out from within, the right-wing billionaire class he represents is still not satisfied. They want even more domination and monopoly, and while Neil would humiliate himself trying to deliver it for some of them, the broader mission continues apace.

Keeping the response to Bentley’s student activities in mind – and the clear implication that they should prevent him from working for the national broadcaster – consider just some of Neil’s own pre-BBC positions. As a student at Glasgow University, he regularly attended the Federation of Conservative Students conferences. 

The former Tory minister Ann Widdecombe, who would end her career as part of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party freak show, remembered those days fondly in 2002: ‘Andrew chaired things terribly well,’ she told Ben Summerskill of the Observer on 28 July. ‘He was evidently ambitious, but he worked well with others. Young people behaved respectably then and Andrew was responsible for late-night “noise and morality” patrols.’ 

Upon graduating in 1971, he joined the Conservative Research Department (CRD). Founded by Neville Chamberlain in 1929, the CRD is effectively a ‘think tank’ operating within the Conservative Party to explore and formulate policy positions. Alumni include David Cameron, George Osborne and Enoch Powell. Two years later he joined The Economist and began his ascent up the greasy pole of journalism, culminating in the editorship of the Sunday Times in 1983. There, by his own account, he was soon ‘urging a market revolution more complete than even Margaret Thatcher was contemplating’.

On 26 November 1989, Neil published an article in the Sunday Times magazine by the American political scientist, Charles Murray. Entitled ‘Underclass: the alienated poor are devastating America’s cities’, it warned that UK was shortly to be swamped by a ‘population of working-aged, healthy people who live in a different world to other Britons … whose values are contaminating the life of entire neighbourhoods’. Today, Murray’s article reads like a template for the demonisation of the unemployed that would typify right-wing tabloid journalism in the following decades. 

He was paving the way for David Cameron’s ‘austerity’, which left the UK woefully unprepared for the COVID-19 pandemic, and swingeing cuts to the benefits payments of society’s poorest and most vulnerable families. Particular opprobrium was directed at single mothers and their children. Neil lapped it up. A Sunday Times editorial, ‘The British Underclass’, lambasted a social class ‘characterised by drugs, casual violence, petty crime, illegitimate children, homelessness, work avoidance and contempt for conventional values’. By 1993, Murray, a researcher at a virulently right-wing ‘think tank’, the American Enterprise Institute, was calling for single mothers to be stripped of all state support and their children to be placed in ‘well-equipped, carefully staffed orphanages’.⁴

Murray’s work was regularly reprinted in pamphlet form by the IEA, the British ‘think tank’ that would later claim credit for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous ‘mini-budget’. Indeed, the first such collaboration boasted an introduction by David Green, the ‘Director’ of the IEA’s ‘Health and Welfare Unit’ (remember the predilection for grandiose titles in these outfits). The relationship between the secretly funded pressure group and the Sunday Times was deeply symbiotic. Neil would regularly report its activities in his newspaper and reprint its polemical pamphlets. In 1993, he was the keynote speaker at its annual conference.

These collaborations set the tone for one of the most damaging developments the British media has ever endured: the presentation of pressure groups dedicated to promoting the interests of their anonymous plutocrat sponsors as somehow independent or academic. The idea that one of their most enthusiastic cheerleaders and facilitators could become an ‘impartial’ BBC presenter is challenging. 

As we shall see, by the time Neil rocked up at the Corporation, this network of shady and deeply ideological outfits had infiltrated almost every corner of the British media, with its representatives enjoying more columns than the Acropolis and season tickets to every broadcast studio in the country. The basic requirement that anyone calling for cuts to state spending or a reduction in the regulation of industry should, at the very least, disclose the identity of their own sponsors has never been observed. In many ways, Andrew Neil set this discourse-disrupting ball in motion.

In 1994, Murdoch relieved him of his newspaper editing duties and brought him to New York, where he hoped his protégé would play a major part on the network that would become Fox News. That did not come to pass but Neil later told Martin Walker of the Guardian that he had wanted to challenge a ‘great soggy liberal consensus on the big three networks’. In the same interview he also expressed a desire to ‘expose the myth of AIDS’. This despite having already offered the Sunday Times’s support to an ill-fated campaign to prove that HIV was not the cause of AIDS. 

‘At a time of moral panic,’ wrote Summerskill later, in his 2002 Observer article, in a waspish reference to personal conduct that would likely have fallen foul of Neil’s ‘noise and morality patrols, ‘it was a reassuring viewpoint for many heterosexuals with colourful private lives.’

None of this presented any obstacle to Neil becoming a BBC politics presenter in 1998 or staying there, in an array of high-profile roles, until 2022. And he is not alone. Nick Robinson, a former political editor of both the BBC and ITV, currently presents BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme. He is also a founder member of Macclesfield Young Conservatives and a former chairman of Cheshire Young Conservatives. At university, he was president of the Oxford University Conservative Association and, later, the chairman of the party’s national youth wing, Young Conservatives. 

Whether or not this influences his work at the BBC is immaterial. The point is simply that Robinson, like Neil and anyone else at Broadcasting House with historic Tory loyalties, will never have their CV publicly picked over by powerful media forces dedicated to attacking anyone in the same building with historic Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green Party or Scottish National Party (SNP) loyalties.

In an article for the New Statesman magazine in April 2018, Robinson inadvertently highlighted another facet of this ‘impartiality’ problem. ‘BBC programmes are not required to give equal airtime or weight to pros and antis in any debate,’ he wrote in response to an article by the author warning that ‘false equivalence’ and a genteel reluctance to call out liars was leading the Corporation and the country into very dark places. 

‘Our rules make clear that we have to deliver “due impartiality”. That word “due” makes clear that programme teams can and do make judgements on the validity of stories, challenge facts and figures and acknowledge that different people speak with different levels of authority.’

More through complacency than malice, Robinson missed three crucial points. First, employees of the ‘think tanks’ described above are presented as honest brokers without any reference to their provenance or qualifications. With the right (secret) funding you could set one up tomorrow, crown yourself ‘Director of Lifestyle Affairs’ and be booked for an interview on the BBC by teatime. The abject failure to examine credentials or establish credibility drives a coach and horses through any notion of genuine ‘impartiality’.

Second, the manufactured necessity of ‘balance’. The former BBC presenter Emily Maitlis put it best when she described the ‘Patrick Minford paradigm’. Referring to EU referendum coverage, she described how ‘it would take producers five minutes to find sixty economists who feared Brexit and five hours to find a sole economic voice who espoused it’. For the BBC viewer or listener, the representative of, say, 1 per cent of expert opinion is presented as an equal and opposite force to the spokesperson for the other 99 per cent.

During a brief period of presenting Newsnight on the BBC, I once found myself poised to interview Pascal Lamy, a former director general of the World Trade Organization (WTO), about the remit and responsibilities of the WTO. It was during the post-referendum period when Brexiters were scrabbling around for anything to camouflage the idiocy of what they had ushered in, culminating in a demonstrably ludicrous claim that the UK would flourish with no free-trade agreements or trade deals ‘under WTO rules’. 

Nobody on the planet was better qualified to examine this claim than Lamy but a BBC editor informed me that we would also need to interview someone else ‘for balance’. The Conservative MP and Brexit-supporter Andrea Leadsom, who had no experience of international trade or knowledge of the workings of the WTO, accepted the invitation and proceeded to tell Lamy that his analysis of ‘WTO rules’ and the organisation he once ran was wrong. That Robinson, like Neil before him, cannot or will not see the absurdity that was so obvious to Maitlis (and, less importantly, me) might explain why he remains at the Corporation while she does not.

Robinson’s colleague and successor as political editor of the BBC, Laura Kuenssberg, has also managed to escape being targeted by the Murdoch press. On 19 February 2023, she provided a helpful clue as to why that might be. When the SNP’s Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn, explained that Brexit-induced problems in Northern Ireland had taken Westminster by surprise ‘because Boris Johnson lied’, Kuenssberg immediately interrupted him, saying: ‘That’s quite a charge.’ On the contrary, it was a statement of simple fact. Johnson had not only campaigned on a bogus claim that his ‘deal’ was ‘oven-ready’ but was also filmed telling business leaders in Northern Ireland that ‘there will be no border down the Irish Sea – over my dead body’.

I don’t know whether Kuenssberg felt the need to challenge a statement of incontrovertible fact because it made her uncomfortable or because, consciously or otherwise, she feared repercussions for not doing so. But, and this is quite a charge, it is a clear and characteristic dereliction of journalistic duty.

Speaking of derelictions, in his Daily Mail column on 24 June 2023, Neil himself would claim that before the referendum Remainers did not ‘spend any time confronting the fact that Northern Ireland and its open border with the Republic of Ireland would constitute a major stumbling block to any clean break with the EU’. In fact, Sinn Fein had used the slogan ‘Brexit means borders’ during their campaign, and on a visit to Northern Ireland in June 2016 the then chancellor George Osborne explained that ‘There would have to be a hardening of the border’ if the UK was outside the EU. 

In the same month, former prime ministers John Major and Tony Blair both referred to the inevitability of an ‘Irish Sea border’ during a visit to Derry. In a public statement, Blair said there ‘would have to be checks between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, which would be plainly unacceptable as well’. If, as Neil was still contending unchallenged in June 2023, there had been no mention of this ‘stumbling block’ one wonders why Arlene Foster, then first minister of Northern Ireland, referred to ‘deeply offensive’ scare stories from the Remain campaign and Theresa Villiers, then the Leave-supporting secretary of state for Northern Ireland, described any suggestion that Brexit would have a negative impact on the peace process as ‘deeply irresponsible’.

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For all the double standards and hypocrisy his employment there embodied, Neil’s work at the BBC was often impressive. As we have seen, the problem he highlights here is the impossibility of somebody possessed of opposite opinions enjoying similar success. This came to pass even as Fleet Street’s chorus of critics shrieked endlessly about the Corporation being in the grip of unidentified ‘leftists’. And yet Neil’s greatest contribution to the creation of an ecosystem n which the United Kingdom could hobble herself came not at the BBC, but through his chairmanship of the Spectator magazine.

Ever since he appointed the hapless Fraser Nelson as editor in 2009, Neil’s magazine deployed a phalanx of favoured scribes to violently coarsen discourse about immigration in general and Muslims in particular. They did so under the cover of the magazine’s almost 200-year-old reputation for respectability. Indeed, until Nelson came along, Spectator editors would often quickly move on to become senior Conservative politicians (Nigel Lawson, Boris Johnson) or to edit national newspapers (Charles Moore, Dominic Lawson).

One of Neil and Nelson’s favourite columnists, Panagiotis ‘Taki’ Theodoracopulos, became briefly infamous for publishing various paeans to the Greek neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn. On 8 August 2015, he wrote:

“Migrants are the latest nuisance to invade Europe … The only thing that stands between them and utter anarchy in the poor neighbourhoods are the youths of Golden Dawn. Golden Dawn is referred to as a neo-fascist political party, instead of a nationalist one, because it will not play ball with the people who have reduced the country to the state it’s in today. A few of Golden Dawn’s followers have made some extremely unfortunate remarks, which has made it easy for the jackals of the media to paint the third largest party in Greece as neo-Nazi. Take it from Taki: the party’s strength lies in its youth movement and its incorruptibility, and it’s as neo-Nazi as Ukip.”

Perhaps apart from the unwitting truth of this last phrase, Theodoracopulos’s assessment of the harmlessness of Golden Dawn didn’t hold up to wider scrutiny. Prior to the publication of this piece, Greek media had identified several instances of Golden Dawn members appearing to give Nazi salutes. The party’s campaign slogan during elections in 2012 was: ‘So we can rid this land of filth’. 

In a picture taken on 14 September 2012, Panagiotis Iliopoulos, a Golden Dawn MP, showed his ‘Sieg Heil’ tattoo. Another Golden Dawn MP, Artemios Matthaiopoulos, was previously the lead singer of a Nazi punk band called Pogrom, whose repertoire included a song called ‘Auschwitz’ with lyrics including ‘fuck Anne Frank’ and ‘Juden raus’ (‘Jews out’). Yet another, Ilias Panagiotaros, had described Hitler as a ‘great personality, like Stalin’. He also expressed opinions that, as we shall see, could easily have come from at least one of Neil’s writers, describing most immigrant Muslims to Greece as ‘jihadists; fanatic Muslims’, and offering support for the notion of a one-race nation, stating, ‘if you are talking about nation, it is one race’.

On 10 January 2019, the journalist Owen Jones appeared on Neil’s This Week programme and stated that the Spectator had ‘defended Greek neo-Nazis’. A visibly rattled Neil responded: ‘No, it hasn’t.’ The next day, however, he tweeted: ‘For the record: I don’t think Golden Dawn are neo-Nazi. They are totally Nazi. I think Taki was totally wrong. But I don’t read him for political analysis. And it’s the editor’s decision what is published, not mine. I protect editorial freedom. Even when I profoundly disagree.’

Just two years later he would accidentally give the lie to the ludicrous notion that the magazine’s editorial policy has nothing to do with him. On 8 October 2021, the Financial Times journalist Janine Gibson suggested to him that, of all his media interests, the ‘Spectator has always been [his] favourite. “Yes! It’s … well, I’m in overall charge,” he says, laughing loudly and pointedly. “The editor reports to me and the commercial [side] reports to me, so if things go wrong in the end it’s my responsibility.”’

This self-confessed responsibility is why Jonathan Portes, professor of Economics and Public Policy at King’s College, London, prefers to refer to Neil as ‘editor-in-chief’ of the magazine instead of simply ‘chairman’. He has spent years chronicling Spectator contributors’ endorsements of ethno-nationalism and flirtations with far-right politics. He told me: ‘With Andrew Neil as editor-in-chief and Fraser Nelson as editor, the Spectator has – by Neil’s own admission – published an open endorsement of a Nazi party. 

But that’s not all – it continues to employ not just well-known anti-Semite and Nazi sympathiser Taki, but also the self-confessed racist liar Rod Liddle, and white ethno-nationalist Douglas Murray, and has published assorted far-right provocateurs, from Gavin McInnes of the Proud Boys to [Dutch far-right politician] Thierry Baudet. While the Spectator also publishes many competent and professional journalists, it’s impossible not to see this as a deliberate strategy to legitimise the far right, for both ideological and commercial reasons.’

Liddle and Murray, both ‘associate editors’ of the magazine and both prolific contributors to Murdoch and/or Mail and Telegraph titles, are perhaps the best examples of precisely the kind of Neil-sponsored journalists who now prosper in the UK. I want to take a little time to look deeper at each of them in turn.

After deciding against a career in teaching because he ‘could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids’, Liddle rose through the BBC ranks to become editor of the Radio 4 Today programme and a columnist for the Guardian. Somewhat surprisingly for someone who would end up all over right-wing media (he has columns in the Sun and the Sunday Times), his position at the BBC became untenable after he used his Guardian column to lampoon members of the pro-hunting Countryside Alliance. The incident Portes refers to above relates to the revelation that he had contributed to an independent Millwall Football Club message board using the username ‘monkeymfc’. On 17 January 2010, the Mail on Sunday, following up an investigation by the Liberal Conspiracy website, reported that: ‘Liddle initially claimed any controversial remarks left by monkeymfc had been placed by a hacker. However, he admitted last night to making most of the comments.’

In October 2009, Liddle joined a debate about whether the BNP should admit non-white members. He wrote: ‘There’s thousands of organisations catering exclusively to black and Asian minorities. **** ’em, close them down. Why do blacks need a forum of their own? As a power base and cash cow for ****s and in order to perpetuate the myth of widespread discrimination.’

 Later that month, ‘monkeymfc’ contributed to a thread entitled ‘Channel 4 claiming blacks are thick’. The Mail reported: ‘In comments Liddle strongly denies writing, the contributor says: “On average a little under 10 per cent thicker than whites; 15 per cent thicker than east Asians. I thought everyone knew, too. Some argument about cultural bias of tests, but same results come up in US.”’ Sunny Hundal, the editor of Liberal Conspiracy, later commented:

“Liddle denied making racist comments, saying that others sometimes logged in under his account and posted comments with his username. Oddly though, we couldn’t find any comments complaining about others doing this, though. Must be an oversight … BUT we did find DOZENS of racist/sexist comments made by ‘monkeymfc’ on that Millwall site. We asked Rod Liddle if he had made these comments, and how hackers had gotten his password. He didn’t respond.¹⁷

By 13 June 2014, the ‘strong denials’ and the claim that he had been ‘hacked’ were forgotten. In an interview with Simon Hattenstone of the Guardian he insisted that his comments had been ‘taken out of context’. Asked about saying that black people have lower IQs than white people, he replied: ‘It’s true that 97 per cent of intelligence tests put whites 7 per cent ahead of black Africans, and that we’re behind Asians and particularly east Asians. And I then said there’s a greater division in races than between races. And you can’t trust any of them because they’re culturally determined. I’m merely being accurate.’

Other comments posted by ‘monkeymfc’ included: ‘Someone kick her in the cnt’; ‘Fcking outrageous that you can’t smoke in Auschwitz’; ‘the correct term would be niggermeat, rather than wogmeat? You’ve got to get your terminology correct’ and ‘Semi-house trained Muslim savages’. Two months after the ‘monkeymfc’ scandal, the Press Complaints Commission upheld a complaint about a December 2009 Spectator blog in which Liddle, under his own name, had written: ‘the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community’. This claim was, to use a technical term, bollocks. The PCC adjudged that the article ‘contained inaccurate information in breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice.’ But even now he’s still at it, revealing in a recent column: ‘I have spent the morning trying to draw a cartoon of a black person without it being racist. It’s bloody difficult. Especially the lips.’

Of all the opinion engineering that made the UK ripe for the rhetoric of a pound-shop demagogue like Nigel Farage, perhaps the most outrageous was the idea that racism or its euphemistic cousin ‘legitimate concerns about immigration’ were somehow ‘working class’. If Liddle’s language hadn’t been so toxic, his desperation to see himself as somehow of the ‘street’ would be almost endearing. 

Referring to the sort of journalists who dream of editing the Today programme or writing a column for the Guardian, he told Hattenstone: ‘I thought about my mates at Millwall Online, God I respect them so much more than these other people, these ghastly fucking people.’ In reality, the anti-immigrant animus that would drive so much of Brexit and do so much lasting damage to social cohesion was much more ‘Home Counties’ than ‘Red Wall’. 

If Paul Dacre’s Daily Mail provided the brawn, Andrew Neil’s Spectator cast itself as the brains, dressing base bigotry in the clothes of academia and using flowery language to mask the ugliest rhetoric. Unfortunately for British Muslims, and perversely because no EU countries are majority Muslim, Islamophobia would prove to be the most effective way for right-wing media to persuade voters that we could not ‘control our borders’.

Few British commentators have done more to inflame Islamophobia than Liddle’s Spectator colleague, Douglas Murray. Another denizen of the incestuous ‘think tank’ network, Murray’s Centre for Social Cohesion (CSC) was set up in 2007 with funding from Civitas, which had itself been formed from the remains of the IEA’s Health & Welfare Unit. An erstwhile colleague of Murray’s at the CSC, James Brandon, wrote in January 2009: ‘My time there was a constant struggle to “de-radicalise” Murray and to ensure that the centre’s output targeted only Islamists – and not Muslims as a whole.’ It’s fair to say that Brandon was not entirely successful.

In 2008, the CSC was incorporated by yet another think tank, the Henry Jackson Society (HJS). On 18 February 2017, one of the original founders of the HJS, Matthew Jamison, wrote of being ashamed at what the organisation had become: ‘The far right anti-Muslim racist nature of the HJS has helped to lay the intellectual groundwork for much of what President Trump and his Breitbart reading “alt-right” movement is attempting to do against Muslim people and immigrants in the United States.’ Breitbart London, the British iteration of Steve Bannon’s online hatefest, was founded in 2014 and headed, inevitably, by yet another Spectator regular and Andrew Neil protégé, James Delingpole. But it was for Murray that Jamison reserved particular disgust:

“Its Associate Director, the white supremacist, racist anti-Muslim bigot, Douglas Murray is the most ugly and offensive example of this vicious, racist anti-Muslim campaign. Mr. Murray is full of venom and hatred for Muslims. He seems to have a perverse and deranged obsession with all things Islam related. In a ghastly speech in the Dutch parliament in 2006 Murray stated: ‘Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder,’ and ‘all immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop.”

Unsurprisingly, Murray would later offer support for Donald Trump’s so-called Muslim ban, which very deliberately targeted ‘Muslims as a whole’.

If the ‘white supremacist’ accusation seems a little strong, it is worth noting something Murray wrote in 2013: ‘To study the latest census is to stare at one unalterable conclusion: mass immigration has altered our country completely. It has become a radically different place, and London has become a foreign country. In 23 of London’s 33 Boroughs, “white Britons” are now in a minority.’ I’m not sure how this can be read as anything but an implicit insistence that non-white Britons are somehow ‘foreign’ and therefore not properly British.

According to Paul Goodman, then the shadow communities minister, Murray was offered an opportunity to disown his Dutch parliament comments but refused, prompting the Conservative front bench to sever relations with him and the CSC. Goodman later wrote:

“The solution seemed to me to be obvious. Murray should disown his remarks. He could, for example, say that ‘I realised some years ago how poorly expressed the speech in question was’, and confirm that ‘my opinions have also altered significantly’. The Conservative front bench would then be able to enjoy normal working relations with his Centre for Social Cohesion, which my colleagues now demanded should be curtailed altogether – reasonably enough. I went to see Murray and put this suggestion to him. He would have spared himself a great deal of time and trouble if he had taken it. And such an apology would have been a sign of strength, not weakness. But in this case strength was wanting. Our meeting ended without agreement.”

There would be no such schism at Andrew Neil’s Spectator, where Murray continued to delight readers with insights boasting headlines such as ‘Donald Trump won’t be as bad as you think’ (9 November 2016); ‘Why do politicians refuse to tell it how it is on immigration?’ (25 March 2018); ‘Turning the tide: how to deal with Britain’s new migrant crisis’ (31 July 2021) and ‘The cost of mass migration’ (6 May 2023). Or, over at the Telegraph, ‘American and British voters are being failed by the same big immigration lie’ (19 May 2023); ‘It’s in the UK’s national interest for Trump to triumph’ (28 August 2020) and, my personal favourite, ‘Of course Donald Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize’ (10 September 2020). 

There is clearly an audience for this stuff. In addition to his Spectator and Telegraph duties, Murray writes books describing Enoch Powell’s (him again) ‘prophetic foreboding’ and warning about the imminent immolation of white-majority countries as well as regular columns for Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, Times and New York Post. Inevitably, he also pops up in the Mail.

Admiration is not confined to Neil, Murdoch, Dacre and their acolytes. The following appeared on the now defunct website of the English Defence League, a viciously Islamophobic and racist movement once euphemistically described by Murray as ‘a grassroots response from non-Muslims to Islamism’:‘Luckily there are a few members of the middle and establishment classes who believe that the EDL at least deserve a fair hearing. One of these is the British writer and former director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, Douglas Murray. It’s a pity there aren’t more public figures like Douglas Murray. Thank you for being right Mr Murray.’

Appreciative audiences can sometimes cause problems of their own, even for veteran purveyors of what is best described as ‘gentrified xenophobia’. In London in May 2023, basking in the warm embrace of the creepily titled National Conservatism Conference, Murray issued a heartfelt plea for more British nationalism, explaining, ‘I see no reason why every other country in the world should be prevented from feeling pride in itself, because the Germans mucked up twice in a century.’ 

Referring to the First and Second World Wars, and by implication to the state-sponsored murder of 6 million Jewish people, as well as disabled, Roma and LGBTQ+ people, as Germany having ‘mucked up’ prompted understandable disgust in some quarters. On 16 May, Professor Tanja Bueltmann, a professor of migration and diaspora history at the University of Strathclyde, tweeted a clip of the speech with the following commentary:

“79 years ago today, the Nazis began the main phase of extermination of Hungarian Jews. Three trains arrived in Auschwitz that day in 1944 with 9000 deportees murdered in gas chambers. 79 years later, NatCon speaker Douglas Murray refers to Nazism as a ‘mucking up’. Minimising the Holocaust in this way and conflating Nazism with feeling pride in one’s country – it is as ahistorical as it is shameful. The deliberate Nazi policy of exterminating those deemed unworthy is not a ‘mucking up’. It is genocide.”

Inevitably, the outrage barely dented Murray’s popularity with commissioning editors. Two months later he was back in the Telegraph, writing about racism in English cricket under the satire-proof headline: ‘The left now wants the utter abolition of Britain as we know it’ (1 July 2023). It was an accidentally insightful, though wholly unoriginal, sentiment. The previous week, Richard Littlejohn’s Daily Mail column had rejoiced in the headline ‘These days only one world view is permissable [sic]: Ultra-woke, pro-migrant, anti-Brexit and anti-Boris.’ 

By the middle of 2023 both Murray and Littlejohn, along with most of their fellow members of the Brexit/Johnson/Trump fan clubs, had realised that the gig was up and begun the laborious business of trying to blame the inevitable failures of their heroes on the people whose warnings about those failures had gone unheeded. As we have seen, they will not be short of platforms from which to do so.

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On the evening of 13 June 2021, Neil launched the channel that he hoped would finally deliver him media-mogul status, saying: ‘We are proud to be British – the clue is in the name.’ Chairman and chief presenter of GB News, on a contract reported to be worth £4 million, he had been characteristically dismissive of anyone suggesting that the project looked like a bid to become a British Fox News. It would not, he insisted, ‘slavishly follow the existing news agenda’. Instead, it would cover ‘the stories that matter to you and those that have been neglected’ and deliver ‘a huge range of voices that reflect the views and values of our United Kingdom’. 

It was, to be kind, an unmitigated disaster. Neil’s penchant for wearing a black jacket (to mask, apparently, his proclivity to perspire profusely) against a black background left him looking like a disembodied head on screen. Technical problems abounded and his promise that it would not be an ‘echo chamber’ withered a little more with every appointment of a contributor with a long history of hating, in no particular order, immigration, Meghan Markle, footballers taking the knee and the EU. 

Neil lasted just eight shows and resigned entirely from the network in September 2021, saying he did not want to be a part of a ‘British Fox News’. In an interview with the Daily Mail about the experience, he started crying and confessed: ‘I came close to a breakdown’. It was a very sad career culmination for a man who once used one of his countless BBC programmes to ask: ‘Are we raising Generation Snowflake?’

GB News did not fall with Neil’s tears. On the contrary, despite making monumental financial losses (£31 million in its first year on air) it went on to become precisely the sort of ‘echo chamber’ that Neil and his fellow right-wing commentators claim to despise. It is bankrolled by hedge fund manager Paul Marshall, a Brexit-backing Tory donor, and Legatum, a Dubai-based investment fund founded by New Zealand-born billionaire Christopher Chandler. 

Like Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV, their schedule is packed with right-wing politicians and self-styled ‘anti-woke’ presenters, plucked from the pages of the Sun, Mail, Telegraph and Spectator, dedicated to ensuring that right-wing talking points are amplified to deafening levels. Tory MPs are regularly to be found interviewing Tory MPs and while the audiences remain negligible, the attention they receive from right-wing newspapers is unsurprisingly disproportionate. It is as if a dangerous new front has been opened in the war against the fractured but precious impartiality of the BBC. Andrew Neil fired the first shot.

Extracted from How They Broke Britain by James O’Brien (WH Allen)