The Social World

Author: Matthew Parris

  • Was the BBC’s Trump edit outrageously wrong?

    Was the BBC’s Trump edit outrageously wrong?

    I should begin by making something clear. Splicing together two parts of a speech to give the impression they were one unbroken excerpt is a grave professional error, and would be viewed as such by any broadcaster in the business. The error would be egregious even if there were no suggestion it reinforced the accusation that Donald Trump was inciting riotous behavior, simply because what viewers thought they witnessed did not occur. There is no excusing what the BBC did to Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech.

    Nobody in the senior ranks of the BBC is to blame for not knowing about this at the time; but once it did become known, an immediate and unconditional apology should have been made. Crisply and severely dealt with, the story could have been contained, and it’s for their failure to get on the front foot after a bad mistake that the Corporation has deserved censure. Please, therefore, do not think me an apologist either for misconduct in the making of the Panorama program, or for the BBC’s handling of the scandal.

    But about the effect in practice of this splicing, I’m less sure. I’ve read verbatim the entire speech. It’s peppered with the imagery of battle. “Fight,” “fighting” etc occur throughout, and though the combative language may have been used metaphorically, the effect of the repetition is undoubtedly to stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood. Though Trump did once (and only once) tell the crowd they were going “to peacefully and patriotically” protest, the violence of his language all through the speech, and his repeated suggestion that America itself was under attack and his and the crowd’s mission was to “save” the country – along with sentences like “We fight like hell! And if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country any more!” – can plausibly be interpreted as being calculated (in the legal sense of the word) to inflame the marchers. His later urging of his supporters to “remain peaceful” could equally be interpreted as implicit recognition that he had started a riot.

    I do not myself believe that Trump had a plan to provoke violence, but I do suspect he was careless whether he had that effect. I think too that, on the evidence, the accusation that he did know what he was doing would be fair comment on a matter of intense public interest.

    That, presumably, was the argument Panorama were rehearsing, and entitled to rehearse. And in doing so by splicing, they fell into a type of self-justification that does not infect the BBC alone but can be encountered everywhere in the media – though notably less in newspapers than the audiovisual media.

    Are you familiar with the word “truthiness?” The expression (I read) was invented by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report 20 years ago. He was making fun of media professionals who justify the purveying of untruths by explaining that if the purpose of journalism is to reveal a greater truth, then we may deploy a degree of artifice in our methods. If it feels true, if it conveys a truth without being itself literally true, then never mind the absolute truth: it has truthiness.

    Despicable? Do not imagine that the pursuit of truth through truthiness always feels outrageously wrong. Let me give you the most anodyne of examples, employed by the closest we have in Britain to a television saint: David Attenborough. Sir David once told me that, in a TV sequence showing reindeer migrating across snowfields in Lapland, long-lens cameras were used to zoom in on the herd from a considerable distance. Viewers would be able to see the reindeer close up. No problem with that. But if they were to be seen close up, viewers would expect to hear them close up too. For this, Sir David confided, dry custard powder and a pestle and mortar did the trick wonderfully. The sound, being almost indistinguishable from the real thing, had truthiness.

    I find it hard to get indignant about that. But this is a slippery slope. Attenborough had been criticized for taking us, his viewers, into a snow tunnel to see a baby polar bear nurtured by its mother. Well, mother polar bears do nurture baby bears in tunnels in the snow. But in the arctic, how would you get a camera in to capture the scene? So the program used a constructed maternal scene, viewed through a glass panel in a Dutch zoo, while Attenborough talked about the wild, which viewers thought they were seeing. I feel uncomfortable about this, but I reckon (and TV professionals reckon) most viewers would be fairly relaxed about not being told. The bear nursery we saw had truthiness.

    During the last century, in the depth of John Major’s troubles as Britain’s prime minister, the news media started using a photograph of him, head sunk in his hands. Sir John has told me he was in fact bored, and shielding his eyes from the lights while attempting a limerick on a notepad beneath the desktop. So the image’s implication was false. But it had truthiness.

    Down the slippery slope we go, until we reach Trump in that Save America speech. Its effect was incendiary: to inflame his roaring crowd of supporters (“We love you! We love you!”) they kept chanting. I’d submit that there was nothing dishonest about a documentary arguing that Trump was whipping his supporters into a riotous mood. That is believed by many. And he did shout: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you.” And then at another point in his speech he did shout: “And we fight! We fight like hell!” And if run together, you do get the impression he was at the very least careless about what he was starting. And if that is what the program–makers were arguing in good faith, then to them the splicing had truthiness. I too find the possibility truthy. But beware of that innocent-looking little y.

  • The lost art of the insult

    The lost art of the insult

    Imagine I were to begin this column by remarking that a woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs: it is not done well, but you’re surprised to find it done at all. Dear me, that would never do, even in as cheeky a magazine as The Spectator. Then try instead: “Dr. Johnson was no admirer of the female sex. ‘A woman’s preaching,’ he said, ‘is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.’”

    I could get away with that. An antiquated opinion, safely attributed to an 18th-century writer, enclosed behind quotation marks and decorated with a few cobwebs, can still be sneaked past our 21st-century censors.

    But how about a more recent offensive remark? Imagine that during Hillary Clinton’s run for the US presidency, I had opened a column by joking that she reminded every American of his first wife. No, still unacceptable. So try instead: “Never afraid to offend, the late P.J. O’Rourke remarked that Hillary Clinton was ‘every American’s first wife.’” Fine. Saved by the quotation marks. He may have said that. I couldn’t possibly comment.

    Both quotations are included in my anthology of insult and abuse, Scorn, just republished. The first edition came out 31 years ago and everything in such a collection is, by definition, dressed in those disarming quotation marks. But every entry once came naked into the world. Someone said it. And, in so many cases, couldn’t say it now. It’s quite remarkable how much of the best and sharpest in my collection could not be born today – or, if born, would be strangled at birth by a nervous editor.

    One doubts any mainstream modern journalist would dare be so personal as to describe a US president as, in 1863, the Houston Telegraph described Abraham Lincoln:

    The leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege, which all politicians have, of being ugly.

    And lest you suppose that’s OK because it is “of its time,” here’s Mark Steyn abusing a president still very much with us, Bill Clinton. Steyn was referring to some anatomical speculation following reports of Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky: “If the President’s penis is straight, it is the only thing about his administration that is.” Mark would struggle to find a respectable newspaper to carry this kind of invective in 2025.

    A glorious millennium of gloves-off offensiveness is shrinking fast in our rear-view mirror. An exchange in London’s Palace of Westminster between MP Tim Sainsbury (of the British supermarket dynasty) and Nicholas Soames MP comes from another age:

    SAINSBURY (Seeing Soames dressed in an extravagant tweed hunting outfit): “Going ratting, Nick?”

    SOAMES: “Fuck off, you grocer – you don’t tell a gentleman how to dress on a Friday.”

    I’d like to believe, but cannot, that such exchanges are still commonplace at Westminster. I can quote this one, but woe betide any politician today overheard and reported as engaging in such verbal jousting. We still love cruelty, we still delight in quoting and reading invective both of the stiletto and the sledgehammer variety; but we must take our pleasure vicariously, as audience not practitioners. As with classical opera, we’re not producing this stuff any more; instead we’re replaying material from the past.

    I’ve dwelt above on misogyny, political insult and “personal” remarks. We’ve become even thinner-skinned, however, on race and nationality. My anthology’s chapters here read almost like historical documents. Consider poor old Wales. Only the Welsh are still allowed to be rude about the country, though it must be said they’ve always stepped up to the challenge. “Land of my fathers – my fathers can have it,” said Dylan Thomas.

    And here’s O’Rourke again:

    The Greeks – dirty and impoverished descendants of a bunch of la-de-da fruit salads who invented democracy and then forgot how to use it while walking around dressed up like girls.

    Rereading my chapters on race in particular, I cannot regret the constraints we now place on remarks, both considered and off the cuff, that within memory wouldn’t even have raised an eyebrow. But it does strike me there’s a good deal of insult in these most sensitive areas which today would find critics urging that we shouldn’t even repeat, let alone publish within quotation marks, what used to be commonplace. Were self-censorship to go that far, we would be sealing ourselves off from our own cultural history.

    When my publishers sent me the proof of the new edition of Scorn, and after rereading it with growing surprise at how unacceptable the recently acceptable has become, I asked to insert two sentences at the end of the old introduction: “And a postscript to a new edition in a new age of self-censorship: view this republication as a history lesson too. Over the short years since I put the anthology together, how fast our era’s intolerance of what may offend has grown!”

    Something is gained: courtesy, consideration. But something is lost, too: the sheer exuberance of insolence, obloquy and scorn the English language has brought the world. “If you haven’t anything nice to say about anyone,” Dorothy Parker may or may not have said, “come sit by me.”

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • Zelensky must give way

    Is Volodymyr Zelensky becoming a liability for the West and for his own country? We are entitled at least to pose this question as we (I mean America and Europe) are funding this war. 

    I ask because it is clear, and for years has been clear, that the conflict with Russia must end in a compromise, and the shape of that compromise should not be in doubt. Russia must be given a ladder to climb down and this must involve land. Ukraine must gain what from the start has been the great prize that Moscow has tried to deny it: an unshakeable place in the community of European democracies, with the military and economic guarantees from the West that make that place secure. 

    It was the then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson who first framed the idiotic boast that now threatens to block progress towards such a settlement. “Not an inch!” he cried, to Ukrainian cheers, when he was prime minister. Perhaps he thought this was just the kind of thing you say for an easy headline and the whoops of the groundlings; but even he must have doubted that Russia could realistically be driven from everything it had gained, and Vladimir Putin be forced to grovel. Too many Western minds, I think, have been prey to the illusion that the second world war was a template for future conflict, and Hitler a template for Putin. Most wars, however, end in messy compromises, and that is how this one must end too. 

    Let me start with the issue of land. It would be stupid for a generalist columnist like me to feign the knowledge that will be needed once negotiations over new borders begin, but I will volunteer this: Crimea (it can at least be argued) is not historically part of Ukraine and only got tacked onto Ukraine when the Soviet Union had both of them among its many countries and regions. I spent time in Ukraine last year, choosing to talk not to soldiers, generals or politicians, but to the under-25s. If you seek the point on the dial when many younger Ukrainians’ refusal to contemplate ceding territory begins to waver, that place is Crimea.

    The fact is that neither side seems capable of winning, so let’s park the sermonizing and look for the compromise in which so many wars – just wars as well as unjust ones – have always ended

    Despite official assurances from Ukraine that most citizens are against a land-for-peace deal, other polls (and my own conversations) suggest that people don’t have principled objections to any ceding of land so much as serious doubts about whether Putin could ever be trusted to keep his word once a land-for-peace deal had been signed. 

    That then – the security side of the agreement which I suggested at the beginning of this column – is absolutely the nub of the entire settlement. I’m in no doubt that if the Ukrainian people could be convinced the settlement would be permanent, and backed to the hilt by the West, they would vote tomorrow for a treaty that gave Russia permanent possession of some of what it has already taken. 

    Let me anticipate at this point some readers’ objections. Firstly this: “Nothing agreed with Putin can he be relied upon to honor.” The trouble with this objection is that it is too strong. It means that even if he could be driven back to the old frontiers, and surrendered, he would try again later. I reply that he well might: that is why the security guarantees for Ukraine remain key. 

    Secondly this: “We must never reward Putin’s aggression.” I’m afraid that, ever since wars began, aggression has often been rewarded. This one, in which incalculable numbers of lives on both sides have already been lost, and if it continues many more will be, must not be accorded the status of a moral lesson for the ages. The fact is that neither side seems capable of winning, so let’s park the sermonizing and look for the compromise in which so many wars – just wars as well as unjust ones – have always ended. 

    And finally this: “We owe it to the Ukrainian military dead, brave men and women whose lives were sacrificed for their country, not to settle for less than victory.” Well, if so, does Russia not owe it to the greater numbers of Russian military dead whose lives were sacrificed for their country too? What do we owe the American or British dead whose sacrifice in Afghanistan was also for a noble cause? This logic, applying as it must to both sides of any conflict, leads only to madness.

    None of us should be at all confident that Putin is ready to deal. I suspect otherwise. The greater likelihood is that in any negotiations he will fall back on Moscow’s insistence that “the root causes” of this conflict must be tackled. By this he means Ukraine’s departure from the orbit of the Russian Federation. That is why security, not land, is what may prove the sticking point this time, because Ukraine’s departure from Moscow’s orbit must indeed be made secure. 

    But if not this summer or this year, then next summer and next year, when the West’s military support for Ukraine does not waver, and Moscow grows weary, this – security – must be at the heart of any negotiations. And those guarantees are up to us. 

    Which brings me back to Zelensky. Who can blame him? Perhaps years of war, years of acute personal tension, years of sticking doggedly to your guns, years in the eye of the storm when your whole country’s future rests on your shoulders, jam the flexibility of mind needed, not to fight but to deal. But there’s a real danger now that Zelensky’s apparent stubbornness over this “not an inch” business may so infuriate a temperamental US President that American (and with it European) resolve begins to fray. 

    Zelensky should not be digging in his heels on the question of land, and European nations should not be encouraging him to. Europe probably can’t save Ukraine without the Americans, and the Americans won’t save Ukraine unless there’s movement on conceding land. 

    The Ukrainian President must get off his high horse, and Europe should stop indulging his intransigence. It’s as simple as that.