It’s getting lonely over here on the right

In New York last week I was gobsmacked to discover I’d won the Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism. So gobsmacked that I hadn’t thought to prepare a magnanimous, funny victor’s speech, only a halting, rueful runner’s-up one.

No one ever gives me prizes. And it’s not purely because I’m utterly rubbish and can’t write for toffee. It’s also that I happen to live in a culture which would prefer not to reward writers of my political outlook — because, obviously, people like me are au fond baby-eating Nazis whose perfect world would look like a giant oil slick dotted with drowning polar bears and towering golden skyscrapers full of bankers in pashmina suits taking shots at humble, honest working folk with diamond-encrusted Purdeys.

That’s why I’m so heartily grateful to International Policy Network (the free-market think tank which awards the Bastiat) and to the trustees of the Charles Douglas-Home memorial prize (which is the only other prize I’ve ever won). We writers of an evil right-wing bastard persuasion need those little fillips, need them badly, because they’re probably the only two awards in the entire sphere of literature and letters that make us feel loved and wanted and necessary — and possibly even almost human.

Most popular

Brendan O’Neill

The moment in the ‘grooming gangs’ debate that shamed Jess Phillips

‘Aaahh!’ some of you are going, but I don’t want your pity. I want your money. Or, failing that, some acknowledgement that I’m not banging my head against a brick wall here.

Increasingly, I do wonder. I skim the comments below Spectator blogs, for example, and they seem to be dominated by Kool-Aid-drinking Cameronistas who think the coalition is doing a splendid job with its mild singeing of the quangos, its rolling back the frontiers of state by a half an inch, and its ingenious scheme to rid our shores of all those ghastly, wealth-creating bankers and entrepreneurs by keeping the upper band tax rate nice and high and ‘fair’.