‘Wokeness has never been a majority thing’

Christopher Jackson | Issue 2 | Magazine

From the Archive

Photo by Fabio Cimaglia/LaPresse via ZUMA Press/Shutterstock (10528148o)

Douglas Murray discusses the nature of public discourse and Donald Trump's reelection chances

Douglas Murray is already seated at the restaurant table at the National Portrait Gallery when I arrive. A neat, unassuming figure – with even a certain fastidious melancholy – you wouldn’t necessarily pick him out of the crowded room (pre-Covid restrictions) as the person with 280,000 Twitter followers. Murray’s importance as a public intellectual is not in doubt. Since the publication of his first book Bosie: A Biography of  Lord Alfred Douglas (2000), he has attained an enviable readership. The 41-year-old has made a habit of gravitating towards subjects most writers would strain to avoid. His concerns about aspects of the Islamic faith, and his bemused irritation at the perceived hegemony of “wokeness”, culminated in two non-fiction books of striking cultural significance: The Strange Death of Europe (2017) and The Madness of Crowds (2019). These books have earned him an audience, although not always the one he might have liked: the polemical tenor of his work – and the perennial h...

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