Scruton should tell Brokenshire to shove his apology
Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The housing secretary, James Brokenshire, has at last apologised to Sir Roger Scruton for sacking him as chairman of a government architecture commission. He expressed regret “that the decision to remove you from your leadership role . . . was taken in the way that it was,” after the New Statesman published corrections to an interview with the philosopher.
Sir Roger will be far too gracious but, by rights, he should tell Brokenshire where to shove his self-serving half-apology. It contained no hint that the minister understands that he bent to the left-wing mob when he fired Scruton or recognises that the dismissal was a dismal, spineless act. There’s certainly nothing to suggest that, in a similar situation, he wouldn’t do exactly the same again.
This scandal erupted in April, when the New Statesman published an interview with Scruton by one of its deputy editors, George Eaton. The magazine’s conduct was questionable in a number of ways, but its chief offence was to tweet and print incomplete quotations from the philosopher that were presented as ‘outrageous remarks’.
Removed from context, these comments were used to depict Sir Roger as a racist, a homophobe and an anti-Semite. As the social media furore escalated, Brokenshire sacked him for holding “deeply offensive and completely unacceptable” opinions.
Scruton’s interviewer responded with glee, posting a photograph of himself on Instagram, swigging champagne straight from the bottle, with the caption, “the feeling when you get right-wing racist and homophobe Roger Scruton sacked as a Tory government minister.”
Last week, the New Statesman finally released a statement agreed with the philosopher – admitting that it used “partial quotations” from the interview – a fact revealed first by the journalist Douglas Murray in The Spectator. “We acknowledge that the views of Professor Scruton were not accurately represented in the tweets to his disadvantage,” the statement reads, “we apologise for this, and regret any distress that this has caused Sir Roger.”
Which brings us to James Brokenshire and his underwhelming apology (timed to coincide with the publication of an interim report by the Building Better, Building Beautiful commission from which he axed Britain’s most impressive living conservative thinker). The housing secretary is eager to claim an “intellectual underpinning” for the document from the philosopher’s involvement.
Whether or not the apology is acceptable to Roger Scruton will be a matter for him personally. As a public ‘mea culpa’ for the minister’s conduct in office, it is woefully inadequate.
It’s not just that, in the particular circumstances, Brokenshire made a bad decision in ridiculous haste, without uncovering the full facts. The New Statesman interview was the culmination of a vicious, personalised campaign against Scruton’s appointment, based on little more than his expression of conservative opinions. These attacks had been going on for months.
Brokenshire, and other Tories who publicly condemned Sir Roger, like Tom Tugendhat, Johnny Mercer (previously skewered in this piece by Benedict Spence) and George Osborne, effectively colluded in a left-liberal campaign, not to disagree with and challenge conservative thought, but to banish it completely. They contributed to an atmosphere that puts certain topics beyond the bounds of legitimate debate, even for a thinker as subtle and civil as Scruton.
Sir Roger understands this process perfectly. Back in 2017, in an article in the Times, he wrote that modern liberalism “is as determined to silence the heretic as any established religion”. “There may be no knowing in advance how the new heresies could be committed, or what exactly they are, since the ethnic of non-discrimination is constantly evolving to undo distinctions that were only yesterday part of the fabric of reality.”
It was a prophetic observation. After his appointment, decades of Scruton’s books, articles and speeches were mined for possible thought-crimes. The denunciations grew louder and shriller, until the mob was in full cry after the New Statesman interview. As TheArticle’s editor, Daniel Johnson, observed at the time, the whole affair was about “how much we value freedom of speech, thought and conscience.”
Nowhere in James Brokenshire’s pallid apology was there an allusion to this backdrop of hostility to Scruton and conservatism, or any reflection on the petrifying effect it might have on free speech, never mind the work and careers of right-leaning writers and academics. He offered no clue that he had thought about the broader trend of mass social-media denunciations, that he was concerned about it or that he worried he may have contributed to an unjust attempt to hound a fellow conservative from public life.
Perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise. Brokenshire gives every impression of being one of the most colourless cabinet members in Theresa May’s colourless administration. He was an unlikely candidate to risk his job in the cause of defending the tradition of intellectual conservatism.
Apart from struggling to count the number of ovens in his kitchen, appointing and then sacking Sir Roger Scruton will probably be his lasting legacy in public life.
