The myth that the British can't abide intellectuals needs busting

Few national stereotypes have been as enduring as the idea that, while the French love their intellectuals, the British cannot abide them. In a thoughtful piece for The Times (unfortunately behind a paywall), the paper’s young deputy Literary Editor James Marriott quotes George Orwell: “The English are not intellectuals.” British attitudes to our intelligentsia may have changed since 1941, when Orwell wrote those words, but in Marriott’s view they have changed for the worse. I beg to differ.

He suggests that the BBC would never employ an intellectual like Orwell now. Whether or not that is true — and if it is, the reason would have more to do with his anti-Communist politics than his highbrow tastes — we shall never know. Orwell has remained a unique figure, not only in English but in world literature, not least because he wrote devastating satires and dystopias about the illusions of his intellectual contemporaries, without ever pandering to their more philistine counterparts.

If Marriott misses intellectuals from British public life today, that is partly because he is looking in the wrong places. He laments the fact that the BBC prefers to invite comedians rather than philosophers onto Question Time or Any Questions. I agree that it would be nice to see many more intelligent panellists on these flagship shows, though I regard Sir Roger Scruton, Jordan Peterson, David Starkey, Charles Moore and Melanie Phillips — all of whom have been recent guests on Question Time — as authentic intellectuals.

Marriott complains that the BBC would now never commission anything like “Men of Ideas”: broadcast in 1978, the series consisted of hour-long interviews by Bryan Magee with the leading thinkers of the day. It is still worth watching on YouTube, though the format now seems rather dated. The modern equivalent is not to be found on BBC2, but online, where the abundance of such material would have amazed previous generations.

It’s the same story when Marriott mentions magazines. He longs to see more of the eggheads he reads “doing exciting things” on TV. But he appears only to read established periodicals: the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. Both are largely written by academics for other academics. That may be why the TLS can get away with paying contributors so badly (its fees have scarcely increased in forty years), while the far-Left LRB gets away with defending the indefensible.

Marriott should get out more. Online he will find plenty of bona fide intellectuals “doing exciting things” on platforms such as Quillette, CapX, UnHerd or indeed TheArticle . This is where the intellectual action is. Today’s men — and women — of ideas are unlikely to rely solely on The Times (behind a paywall) and the BBC (funded by a poll tax).

It’s actually easier to build communities to debate ideas using social media platforms. That’s why TheArticle is about to become a social media platform as well as a publishing one. It’s also a matter of paying writers properly. Unlike older magazines, we at TheArticle pay our contributors the lion’s share of our advertising revenue. And unlike some online competitors, such as the “slow news” platform Tortoise , we don’t charge readers £250 per annum. Hiding behind a paywall excludes readers who can’t afford expensive subscriptions.

So: is it true that the British are much more hostile to their best and brightest than the French? Marriott calls as his star witness the French novelist Leïla Slimani, who writes about “child murder and sex addiction”, but is also a minister in Emmanuel Macron’s government. It may have escaped Marriott’s attention, but Jesse Norman is also a minister in Theresa May’s government. He has written books about Edmund Burke and Adam Smith. As to who is the more serious intellectual, Slimani or Norman, I couldn’t possibly comment.

But Norman is not alone. In recent years British ministers and shadow ministers have included such luminaries as Sir Oliver Letwin (author of Ethics, Emotion and the Unity of the Self ), Tristram Hunt (author of The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels ) and, yes, Boris Johnson, author of The Dream of Rome and a biography of Churchill. No other Parliament in the world has been adorned by figures of the intellectual calibre of Burke and Mill. We should celebrate our cerebral public figures, not belittle them — especially not in comparison with the French.