The problem with experts

Spectator

06-08-2025

Danny Kruger's brave defence of Christianity in the history of this country, which he recently delivered to an empty House of Commons, has won much praise. His words reminded me of when the same thing happened the other way round. As fourth-century Rome was Christianised by imperial decree, the distinguished senator Symmachus spoke up for the old pagan religion which had been degraded by the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Senate. He expressed his thoughts in the voice of the city herself, thus (Gibbon's translation): 'Pity and respect my age, which has hitherto flowed in an uninterrupted course of piety. Since I do not repent, permit me to continue in the practice of my ancient rites. Since I am born free, allow me to enjoy my domestic institutions. This religion has reduced the world under my laws. These rites have repelled Hannibal from the city, and the Gauls from the Capitol. Were my grey hairs reserved for such intolerable disgrace?' Symmachus did not prevail, and the Senate dethroned Jupiter by a big majority. Given the political pressures, Gibbon writes, 'it is rather surprising that any members should be found bold enough to declare… that they were still attached to the interest of an abdicated deity'. Kruger was showing similarly lonely boldness. There is a difference, however. The old Roman religion was defenceless except on grounds of custom. It did not contain the seeds of its own renewal. Kruger's defence of his country's past Christianity, by contrast, looked to the future. 'A new restoration is needed now, with a revival of the faith, a recovery of a Christian politics and a re-founding of this nation on the teachings that Alfred made the basis of the common law of England…' He ended: 'This is a mission for the Church under its next leader… it is a mission for this place – the old chapel [on the site of whose altar the Speaker's chair now sits] that became the wellspring of western democracy – and for us, its members; and it is a mission for our whole country. It is the route to a prosperous modernity founded on respect for human dignity, responsibility for the created world and the worship of God.' That resonates.
Many say that domestic political motives underlie the cabinet's promise to recognise the statehood of Palestine. Less has been said about its intellectual model. I suggest it is the Good Friday Agreement, coming from Jonathan Powell who, now as then, advises Labour prime ministers on how to deal with terrorists. Such suspicions were confirmed by a letter in Monday's Times from Tom Kelly, the Blair spin doctor who was also involved in the Ulster peace process. He said terrorists rely on a simple argument: 'That violence is the only way to get the world to take their cause seriously.' Disprove that argument and the terror weapon fails: 'That is how we ended the IRA's campaign of violence and that is how Hamas could be stopped too.' 'But politics needs to be seen to work,' Kelly continues, 'and the recognition of Palestinians' right to determine their own future is a first step.' There are numerous fallacies in this reasoning (e.g. Hamas seem to have gained kudos in the West by mass murder), but there is also a key difference between the Northern Ireland situation and that in Gaza. In the first, the British prime minister was the most important player. In the second, he is of almost no account. It is dangerously hubristic to propose what you have so little part in delivering.
We generalists skate on thin ice and often rely on experts to start forming our views. For me, a current case in point is Javier Milei. I have never been to Argentina, and know little about it, so I have no idea whether its President is saviour or charlatan. I naturally turn for guidance to two economic writers whom I admire, Niall Ferguson and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. Both have written about Milei recently. Ferguson hails Milei's 'glorious call to the authentic capitalists in the audience to rise up against their ancient enemy – the state' and says that 'The result of [his] shock therapy has been a stunning recovery'. Evans-Pritchard complains that 'The Austro-libertarian free marketeer is not so free when it comes to the currency. He has allowed the peso to move within wider bands but it is still 30 per cent overvalued'. He has made his country yet more in hoc to the IMF ('479 per cent of the country's quota'). Kemi Badenoch should not praise him: 'His circus-act adventurism has nothing in common with the great tradition of British conservatism.' Oh dear. What am I supposed to think?
I was recently talking to a friend who recalled her childhood drives from home in East Anglia to the Sussex coast. In the early 1960s, there were no relevant motorways and so the journey passed through central London. To while away the time – on similar journeys I remember counting legs in the names of pubs (44 for The Cricketers) – her family would compete for how many black people (a complete novelty to them) they could see out of the car window. A typical total for the journey was eight. This little memory conveys the change more readily than all statistics.
In Poland, they want to build a new deep-water container port at Swinoujscie in the Baltic. This challenges existing German ports. Such disputes used to be settled by force of arms, but now we are all much nicer, and so German economic interests are being surreptitiously advanced through a court case brought by a body claiming environmental motives. Its name, in English, is the harmless-sounding Living Space Pomerania. The original German, however, is Lebensraum Vorpommern, which may help explain why feelings are running high.
'It is 80 years since nuclear weapons were first used,' says the BBC. True, but it is also 80 years since they were last used. So the theory of deterrence has worked, so far.