I HAVE five nominations and one winner this week. I am not going to emulate the ‘all must have prizes’ judges of the Turner Prize or the self-denying woke philosophy of its finalists. How thoughtful of them to save the judges from having to choose between their indistinguishable ‘forms of social or participatory practice’ that they delude themselves counts as art.
Jane Kelly’s report on this no-longer-art non-contest is the first of my commendations. Her characteristically clever ‘Judge not the Turner Prize lest the woke judge you’ is not to be missed and can be read here.
My next is James Delingpole’s Election Diary, not least for the pathos in his observations about this terrible disappointment of an election. All hope dies here, he might as well have written, as we return inexorably to the depressing Westminster establishment default. You can read it here.
If this was ever the goal of that so-called spinmeister genius Dominic Cummings, what a deeply cynical man he must be. There will be consequences, however. Be assured that The Conservative Woman will rub his nose in his determination to dispatch any threat to the prevailing metropolitan left liberal default. The swamp is not to be drained.
And it will come back to bite. It has already: witness the onslaught Boris Johnson came under last week for stating the utterly obvious that terrorist sentencing needs toughening, that had Usman Khan had not been released early, the horror at Fishmongers’ Hall wouldn’t have happened. Does Cummings believe the price of power is continued capitulation to the Left’s sedulous politicking and bullying naivety that has landed us in this jihadi mess, as Robert James so brilliantly sets out here. His essay, ‘The Left shrugs off terror attack – until the next time’ is my next nomination.
As Bruce Newsome explains, this is the bitter price for the establishment’s fakery over jihadi terrorism – here and across the EU. His detailed and informed account is my final runner-up.
The prize goes to Paul Wood for his quite wonderfully written essay on France’s migrant revolution, which in my opinion had its way paved by those earlier soixante-huitards student revolutionaries. His evocative comparison of the past Paris with the Paris he has just revisited in its new Muslim incarnation took me back to those past geniuses, Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, that so few today have the education, let alone the ability, to reproduce. Do read and appreciate.
