Something troubling is happening to our girls. I noticed it again most recently at this year’s Battle of Ideas — the annual festival of free speech staged at London’s Barbican by Claire Fox. It’s a wonderful event, where ex-revolutionary communists like Claire rub shoulders with Thatcher-ite radicals like me and we’re reminded how much we have in common. I feel right at home among the bright, engaged, friendly crowds and when I speak I generally get a warm reception.
But there are always exceptions, aren’t there? On this occasion the trouble came from a bloc of teenage girls in the audience for my panel. Judging by their accents and dress and demeanour I’d say they probably came from one of the more selective London day schools. One after another they stood up to denounce me, just like my own teenage female does most of the time when she’s at home and I venture an opinion. Except Girl is away boarding at the moment, so I did rather feel: ‘What did I do to deserve this busman’s holiday?’
My panel’s topic was gun control in the US. More specifically, it was about how since the Parkland, Florida school shooting, the debate appears to have been hijacked by photogenic teen survivors of the atrocity with their #neveragain campaign, their endless appearances on CNN and their nationwide protests featuring bussed-in parties of winsome, placard-wielding kiddies warning that next time it could be them.
Had I really wanted to wind my audience up I could have said — as I more or less believe — that every man, woman and child should be obliged to have a gun from the age of eight onwards. But because I was in an emollient mood, I decided instead to focus on a slightly more nuanced point about the way that, increasingly, kids like the slightly spooky Parkland survivor David Hogg are being used to advance political causes.
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