Peter Bolton from The Canary wrote to us to let us know about his new piece that criticizes right-wing commentators for hypocrisy on the subject of civil discourse. He says Theodore Dalrymple is the most notable culprit:
In a highly competitive field, the prize for the most glaring peddler of wilful bias may go to the conservative essayist Anthony Daniels, better known by his pen name Theodore Dalrymple…
Daniels’ writing often focuses on what he sees as the decline in manners, self-respect, decency, and personal responsibility in both public and private life in the UK. And for Daniels, the blame for this decline lies squarely with Britain’s political and intellectual class, along with their purported embrace of popular culture at the expense of high culture. This criticism, however, is seemingly reserved almost exclusively for those who he considers left of center.
It’s a fairly long piece with many examples, as Bolton sees it, of Dalrymple’s hypocrisy. Read it here.
Bolton asked if Dalrymple would like to reply, and I expect him to reply here shortly.
A few minutes on google will show that Dalrymple has written many, very critical pieces on Trump’s vulgarity.
As for Johnson, I don’t think he’s a particularly vulgar person. Regarding his morality, which is perhaps more to the point, he can hardly be compared unfavourably with a man who gave public support to the IRA, Hezbollah and Hamas. The below article describes Corbyn as leaving the dirty work to others. Given the nastiness his leadership seemed to engender, I can well imagine it.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6686593/Jeremy-Corbyns-40-years-plots-lies-intimidation-chaos.html
Have you seen the cartoons in “The Canary”?
https://www.thecanary.co/cartoons/2020/03/23/coronavirus-is-impacting-us-all-just-in-different-ways/
If they used the same level of “ideological purity over merit” in their articles…
I was not particularly impressed by the article in The Canary. The author makes a habit of misrepresenting events to suit his argument. For example, he mentions that Boris Johnson wrote a dirty poem about the Turkish President Erdogan, as if it were some puerile act of mischief, without bothering to mention that it was part of Douglas Murray’s “Insult Erdogan” competition, to protest the prosecution of a German comedian for insulting Erdogan.