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Frederick Forsyth, who died in June, deserved a better TV adaptation of his novel The Day of the Jackal to send him off. Eddie Redmayne works well enough in the lead role of an assassin, what with that cruel mouth of his. But the character in the original book is a loner. Here he is a simpering husband. You are asked to believe that someone who walks on eggshells around his in-laws will go out and drive a bullet into a stranger’s forehead for cash.
Forsyth was a francophone and a Germanophile. He reported on the Nigerian civil war (too one-sidedly for some tastes) and was still sticking an oar into politics there in his eighties. A friend of mine who invited him to a literary festival in the subcontinent remembers his savviness about the region. That he was also a Brexit-supporting Tory should surprise me. I can’t say it does.
There is such a thing as a cosmopolitan conservative. When I want to discuss Dubai — and when do I not? — I have to turn to apolitical or right-leaning acquaintances. With liberals, the conversation starts and ends with muttered distaste about human rights in the Gulf. Good. Nice to see a bit of western moral confidence in these otherwise self-doubting times. But applied consistently, this attitude can amount to a scandalised recoil from much of the rest of the world. Until such time as everywhere catches up with European labour standards and sexual freedoms, we are to do what exactly? Visit Provence ad infinitum? Talk about Berlin nightlife again?
In other words, the very unshockability of the right — or their lack of scruple, if you prefer — can lead to more contact with the world, not less.
It isn’t their only advantage as internationalists. Liberal-coded professions, such as media, academia and the civil service, lack huge travel budgets. Whereas you needn’t be very high up in finance, consultancy, commercial law or the extractive industries to be on the constant move, and to have to meet other places on their own terms. There is nothing like queueing outside a Doha hotel suite for a 10-minute slot with an Indian investor to give one a sobering glimpse of where the world is going. My own job became easier when I (accidentally) started mixing with a more corporate crowd. They were likelier to say something column-worthy, from a wider range of geographic reference.
Often, it is fear of causing offence that stops liberal-minded people engaging with vast tracts of the world. And so cultural sensitivity turns into its own kind of parochialism. If Forsyth was a workmanlike writer, he had a grander twin in VS Naipaul, who wrote on a global canvas despite or because of personal attitudes that some call reactionary. (Others have used a different r-word about him.) A modern liberal would not be as cutting about Africa and south-east Asia as Naipaul, it is true. But then don’t assume that a modern liberal would, in either sense of the phrase, “go there” at all.
I even wonder if a small amount of jingoism helps. You have to see the world from somewhere. The branding of this column, Citizen of Nowhere, is tongue-in-cheek: a reference to an old speech by one of our lesser prime ministers here in Britain. The truth is, without a starting point to which one is attached, it is hard to even register cultural differences, let alone comment on them. The result is that weird flattening jargon in which well-meaning people address the world. Rory Stewart remembers some first-class diplomatic baloney during his time in Afghanistan. “Every Afghan is committed to a gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic centralised state . . . ” and so on.
This weekend last year, some of the smartest people I know believed that ethnic minorities would prevent a second Donald Trump term. After all, a comedian at one of his rallies had slurred Puerto Rico in the crassest terms. In the end, Trump improved his performance among non-white voters. What does the right sometimes perceive that liberals sometimes miss? Perhaps that not all immigrants are defensive of the old country. (Whatever country that is.) We left for a reason. Or that no group is somehow immune to populism. It is hard to see people straight if they are on a towering pedestal.
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