Ian Buruma interview: ‘Cancel culture won’t last – there will be a rebellion’

There are two urgently topical subjects on which the author, journalist and academic Ian Buruma is well-qualified to speak.

This month he publishes a book about the “Special Relationship” between Britain and the United States, just as Brexit and the presidential election may be about to turn it in a new direction. But there is also another issue he can talk about from more directly personal experience: being cancelled.

Buruma fell foul of “cancel culture” back in September 2018, before most of us knew that the beast had a name. As editor of the New York Review of Books, he commissioned an article by a Canadian talk show host, Jian Ghomeshi, who had been acquitted of five sexual assault charges in 2016. In it, Ghomeshi complained that he continued to be a victim of “mass shaming” on social media, even though he was innocent in the eyes of the law.

The Twitterati were outraged that such a piece should appear in the NYRB, bastion of Left-liberal values, at the height of the #MeToo movement, particularly because Ghomeshi omitted such details as the fact that more than 20 women had made allegations of assault against him. Buruma, who had been the NYRB’s editor for only 16 months, offered a defence that only inflamed his critics and was forced to resign.

If there was a society for editors sacked for running articles that some people didn’t like, Buruma would have been a rather lonely founding member back then. Today, it would be over-subscribed. One consolation, however, is that Buruma has had time to work on his latest book: an opinionated and very witty canter through the ways in which the personalities of various presidents and prime ministers have affected the course of the Special Relationship.

As the title suggests, the influence of one personality lingered long after he had been put out to grass: it’s called The Churchill Complex.

Buruma, owlishly intellectual behind large round specs, recalls being a small boy in the 1950s, and going to see Sir Winston’s daughter Sarah playing the lead in Peter Pan. The former PM arrived in the theatre; Buruma remembers “a pudgy hand emerging from a fur muff to make the V-sign”. But what really impressed him was “the excitement of the audience, and my grandparents almost jumping up and down with enthusiasm”.

On the other hand, he argues, the level of adulation that Churchill inspired has proved dangerous in the long run. “Churchill was exactly the sort of man you needed in May 1940, a kind of romantic showman to bolster the morale of a people who were in dire peril and who realised that any kind of compromise with Hitler would be catastrophic. But I think he’s a disastrous model for a politician in peacetime.

“Whenever there is a question of whether military intervention is desirable or justified or not, Munich rears its head. American presidents have all loved to see themselves as the Churchill of their day and are terrified of being the Chamberlain. And that has led to a lot of foolish and reckless and destructive wars. Not every crisis is 1938, not every dictator is Hitler.”

Buruma thinks that the Special Relationship has brought Britain “more minuses than benefits” – not least, in his view, the fact that “Britain has clung to this wartime relationship which has given it a sense of superiority over the other European nations.” Brexit is partly a consequence of that – a disastrous one, he believes.

Buruma was born in the Netherlands, the son of a Dutch father and an English mother who was Jewish: “I grew up very much in the shadow of World War II, and the idea we’d been liberated by the English-speaking peoples was very current.” Somewhat belying his formidable intellectual reputation, he admits he can still be brought to tears by the D-Day epic The Longest Day.

The old Anglo-American alliance that resulted in the Atlantic Charter was something to be proud of, he says, but today, “our current leaders are doing everything to destroy it. Trump’s evocation of ‘America First’ is of course the slogan of the isolationists of the 1930s – people like Charles Lindbergh, who admired Hitler much more than they admired Churchill or Britain. I think Churchill would have absolutely despised him, as would Roosevelt of course.”

What does he think of Boris Johnson’s cultivated Churchillian air? “Very self-conscious and rather grotesque in my view. The lesson he’s learned from Churchill, to his profit, is that, being a showman himself, he realises that if you’re a toff the best way to endear yourself to people that are not toffs is to lay it on thick. They rather like that. What they don’t like is a toff who pretends to be a regular guy, which is what Cameron was inclined to do.”

One fascinating nugget the book offers is that the young(ish) Senator Joe Biden was one of the few US politicians to back Britain’s efforts to recapture the Falklands from the beginning, telling the UK ambassador: “We’re with you, because you’re British.” Might we soon have an Anglophile in the White House?

“I don’t see in a post-Brexit world a revival of the special relationship in the way that it existed in the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s. If the choice from the American point of view is between the EU and Britain, they’re always going to favour the EU just because it’s a much stronger entity, not militarily – although eventually that might even change – but [because] economically it carries so much more weight than Britain alone.”

There’s a particularly funny vignette in the book of Churchill insisting during the war that the Canadian navy should reinstall Rule, Britannia! as its anthem instead of Vive la Canadienne; the current fuss over the song must have him spinning like a top in his grave. Buruma doesn’t see much sense in banning songs or pulling down statues.

Having been toppled himself, he is worried that cancel culture will lead to “a kind of timidity and fear and caution on the part of people who edit and write. The whole point of being a good editor is having the freedom sometimes to do something that might be provocative, because that helps debate, and debate helps people think. And if you cancel that out, you get a sort of boring and fearful conformity that is inimical to a lively intellectual and artistic culture.”

He sees the new “intolerance and puritanism” as a substitute for religion. “It is particularly strong in the New World, in Australia, Canada and the United States, and Britain to a slightly lesser extent, than in non-English-speaking countries. There is a sort of puritanical zeal that is very strong in America and the intolerance of unorthodoxy may be a secular version of it.”

The point of Ghomeshi’s article, he says, was to explore the question of how we set the perimeters of the length and severity of the punishments doled out by the court of public opinion. “I deliberately did not want the article to be about what he had done, there was no way that I wanted to stick up for that or defend it. I was interested in it because it was a voice that hadn’t been heard, somebody who’d actually had that experience.”

Is there not a danger that his viewpoint might be a bit too detached, I ask? Isn’t there an argument that the many abused women who never even get to see their abuser in court and feel unheard are quite right to be angry that a liberal magazine should give a voice to somebody like Ghomeshi?

“Well that’s probably true, statistically, that most cases of abuse go unreported and therefore we never hear about them. But it would be false to say that the voices of women, or men for that matter, who’ve been abused in one way or another have never been heard – we’ve heard quite a few, maybe not enough, but we’ve heard them. So I don’t think that that is right.”

Has being “cancelled” affected him much? “All I will say is that certain publications I used to write for do not ask me any more because it would upset people – not so much readers but people who work for those publications.

“I don’t miss being in an office, I’m perfectly happy sitting in my own office writing whatever I want, but I miss the job in the sense that I could have done something interesting with [the NYRB] and I no longer can. I wanted to have more voices from South America, more on Africa, Asia. I think the problem with a lot of American publications today is that they look inward too much.”

Whatever one thinks of a cancel culture that guns for Starkeys and Scrutons, it is difficult to believe that young people on the Left are going to achieve their aims by getting one of the world’s most eloquent liberal intellectuals defenestrated over one single disagreement. And Buruma thinks they’re paving the way for something nastier.

“Nothing lasts, and there will be a rebellion against this.” He points to the florescence of “young white men who follow people like Jordan Peterson in Canada, and believe in a certain kind of male authoritarianism. That’s what the first wave of rebellion is looking like, and I don’t like it any more than I do the Left-wing intolerance that we see today.”

The Churchill Complex is published by Atlantic on September 3 at £18.99. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop