The Bluestocking 376: Rainbow and crescent
“I’ll give him credit for some good videos, for trying hard"
Happy Friday!
I had a long chat with Bari Weiss about genius. Watch on YouTube here.
Helen
Where Is Robert Jenrick Going? (New Statesman, £)
Multiple people involved in the Cameron project 20 years ago see something in Jenrick. It is a mistake to look on him in bewilderment as a formerly “full-fat subscriber to David Cameron” who has since betrayed that cause by straying towards Faragism. The truth is that the party itself is moving: Cameron would not be as liberal today as he was in 2005. “A tougher world needs a tougher Tory message,” as one former cabinet minister put it to me. “Circumstances have changed.” Cameron is known to respect Jenrick’s passion and energy for the arduous, years-long fight of opposition.
Nigel Farage also recognises Jenrick’s vim. “I’ll give him credit for some good videos, for trying hard,” Farage told me, before adding: “But he can’t get away from the record of the last 14 years.”
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Harry Lambert profiles Robert Jenrick, who is openly auditioning for the role of Tory leader and future prime minister. I’m torn on Jenrick—I’m not sure he will be as deft at managing the line between “he says what we’re thinking” and “ugh that’s racist” as Nigel Farage has been. He lacks Farage’s boozy bonhomie, which gives him a meaner vibe, and that’s a problem when your big cause is immigration.
Aside from just Jenrick himself, there’s lots of good stuff in here about the Online Right, which has basically replaced the old Conservative party at this point—whether that’s Neil O’Brien and Nick Timothy posting in straightforward ethnic terms on X, Paul Marshall buying the Spectator, Lawrence Newport and friends cleaning the Tube, or the network of conferences such as NatCon and ARC.
The Cambridge theologian James Orr is a more influential political theorist than Dominic Cummings these days, and this sentiment is worth marking: “Orr, who has since become a friend of JD Vance and Peter Thiel, spoke pungently that day of Britain’s ‘cultural disfigurement’, a product, he argued, of an unholy alliance between ‘rainbow and crescent’ – woke culture and Islam – a phrase that is becoming part of the conservative mainstream.” You can see this same accusation in the backlash to the selection of (Muslim, progressive) Zohran Mamdani as the Democratic candidate for New York mayor.
Quick Links
ICYMI: The Salt Path debunk is quite the read. The financial stuff you’re like, huh that’s weird, and then they hit you with the fact that the husband with the “terminal illness” is 18 years post-diagnosis and still seems to be fine (Observer).
I wrote about the Diddy trial (gift link), which should have been about his domestic abuse rather than the more nebulous racketeering charges (it wasn’t because of the statute of limitations).
James Ball has built a perpetual podcast, which is a) staring into the void, and b) a useful insight into the current capabilities of ChatGPT (Techtris, Substack).
Liam Gallagher interviewed by children (X).
Deliberately fair assessment of what DOGE got right and wrong (Substack).
See you next time! Click below to buy The Genius Myth, which this week Ben Goldacre described as “marvelous”.
FWIW I started reading The Salt Path the day after I got my terminal diagnosis. I’m still alive too.
It is a depressing truth, but the majority of people simply do not care about men beating up women. It’s not just Diddy who gets away with it - Chris Brown and John Lennon are other examples where the violence is well-documented and fans do not care.