Douglas Murray arrives for our interview like a pop star. A black car pulls up at Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair; he steps out in a blue tailored suit and baseball cap, as if on the run from fans. Can we take photos? Sure! He ruffles his hair in a dark window, for it takes work to look this effortless, and poses by a Georgian column. “You are famous now,” I say – and he rolls his eyes.
He’s become the pre-eminent conservative social critic of our generation, celebrated for his soft-voiced wit that evokes the late Hollywood actor George Sanders. Murray has given speeches at the O2 arena and more than 1.1 million people follow him on X.
His latest book, On Democratic and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West, is already riding high in best-seller lists, and is endorsed by the president of the United States, who I’m told he’s met. A resident of New York City, he’s in town on a publicity tour.
Over brunch – eggs, coffee, orange juice – I ask what he discussed with The Donald. Murray smiles. “Hm, well…” I guess that the more a talking head knows, the less he can say. On stage he might be a sharp-toothed panther but in private he is a pussycat; playful, cautious, purring so gently one has to push the recorder nearer to catch him.
Anti-Israel protestors “pollute” our society, he whispers; useful idiots cheer for Hamas without realising that “evil exists and there are people who worship death”. The British elite tolerates woke cults while toying with legalising assisted dying. Later, I text to say that while we were eating, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a woman is defined by biological sex under equalities law. “Isn’t it wonderful,” he replies, “that our greatest legal minds have to spend their time trying to work out what a man is and what a woman is? It feels like such progress…”
Murray was born in Hammersmith in 1979. His father was a Scottish civil servant from the Isle of Lewis, his mother a teacher (both are still alive, they are not especially political). After a spell in an inner-city comprehensive, he won scholarships to St Benedict’s, Ealing and Eton, before graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford with a degree in English literature. He is openly gay. His first book, a biography of Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, the lover of Oscar Wilde, was published in 2000 and described by Christopher Hitchens as “remarkable”.
There is a parallel universe in which Murray became a literary doyen and a host on Classic FM (he was a choral scholar and plays the piano). Instead he trolled us in 2006 by publishing Neoconservatism: Why We Need It – establishing his perennial interests in conservative politics, national security and unjust criticism of Israel. Several books followed, including one on Bloody Sunday, but his major breakthrough was 2017’s The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. It was the peak of the Murray style: well researched, forceful, denounced by critics as Islamophobic.
Always a nomad – I once met him, by chance, on a flight from Tel-Aviv – he spent more time in America, writing for the New York Post, the centre-Right tabloid, and being spotted with conservative stars such as Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, and The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, also best-sellers, established him as an acerbic critic of woke.
‘No one is singing God Save the King that day’
Then Israel was attacked by Hamas on October 7 2023. Murray’s writing became even punchier. He was outraged by the assault on an allied country he loves, obviously, but also disgusted by the pro-Gaza protests that broke out with such speed in Britain.
“I care about my country,” he says. “I can’t bear to see the pollution of our society and cities by people who obviously hate us.” They might be Islamists; they could be secular liberals, high on “the theatre of rebellion”; either way, “go to any pro-Israel protest and you will find people flying Israeli and British flags [whereas] every anti-Israel march will carry Palestine flags, Hamas flags, Hizbollah flags. The idea of anyone carrying the Union Jack is preposterous. No one is singing God Save the King that day”.