I stand by what I wrote

Even the most perceptive and brilliant commentators have their blind spots. In the case of Matthew Parris, a giant of modern British journalism if ever there was one, it is an inability to appreciate the true extent of the threat posed by Islamic terrorism. This was demonstrated again by his column in these pages last week, where he attacked a recent Spectator/YouGov poll and my accompanying analysis of its findings. The poll revealed the British public to be remarkably hawkish; Matthew believes this to be a distortion.

Matthew recently criticised in the harshest terms the thesis expounded by Tory MP Michael Gove in his book Celsius 7/7. For Matthew, to argue that ‘the West is blithely unaware of a huge and pressing danger in the form of worldwide Islamist plotting, and that an urgent imperative to foil this should be at the centre of Western foreign policy’ is to be ‘stark, staring bonkers’.