In a mutedly lit, wood-paneled, book-lined, teal-colored upstairs room in a converted Victorian house on Old Queen Street in Westminster, Britain’s leading Cassandra is telling a roomful of bright young things a murder story.
The brasserie downstairs and the bar across the landing have emptied, and there’s standing room only to hear former Oxford don John Gray, whom Pankaj Mishra calls “the most prescient of British public intellectuals,” expand on the arguments of his new book, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. The vibe is that of a senior common room as Gray sits back comfortably in an armchair, like a latter-day M. R. James, to give his audience a good fright.
The murder victim? As the subtitle of Gray’s book suggests, he thinks liberalism is dead. “I can’t see how we can get back to a situation where freedom of speech is taken for granted,” Gray tells the crowd.
Whodunit? “A lumpen intelligentsia that is economically superfluous” has set itself up as morality police, as illiberal as Iran’s, to establish status otherwise denied to it.
It’s a copycat crime: the deplatforming and cancel culture of American campuses have jumped the pond and taken over not just Britain’s Academy but also its media and human-resources departments.
Gray is speaking at the UnHerd Club, a year-old London literary salon presided over by Freddie Sayers. A former editor at the polling company YouGov with the enviable good looks of Jude Law, Sayers rules tonight’s soirée as indomitably as Proust’s Madame Verdurin.
The club is the latest venture of a new-media project called UnHerd, begun in 2017 to challenge the Progressive consensus. According to its mission statement, UnHerd is by and for “people and things not given a fair hearing, or even listened to at all.”
A former editor at the polling company YouGov with the enviable good looks of Jude Law, Sayers rules tonight’s soirée as indomitably as Proust’s Madame Verdurin.
Its launch came at a pivotal moment in Britain’s recent history: the no vote in the previous year’s Brexit referendum divided the country into screaming mobs of Brexiteers and “Remoaners.” The conflagration was fueled not just by demagogues such as UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage and future P.M. Boris Johnson, but also by the accelerant of digital media. Twitter pile-ons, fake news, and clickbait sites such as the Canary were making Britain even more toxic and hysterical than it was in the days when tabloids such as Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun and News of the World were in their pomp.
A new, more reflective media was needed as an antidote. Hence a spate of start-ups, of which UnHerd is just the leading example. Drugstore Culture, a news site and bi-monthly print magazine, was launched in 2018 by former Spectator editor Matthew d’Ancona and film producer Charles Finch as “a challenge to the decline of thoughtful analysis of culture, society and politics.” Tortoise Media, a self-styled “slow news” operation established in 2019 by former Times of London editor and BBC News director James Harding, publishes five daily stories on its app plus a print magazine, Tortoise Quarterly.
UnHerd’s founder was Tim Montgomerie, a former Tory speechwriter and Times of London columnist. Announcing the launch of UnHerd, Montgomerie also unveiled “the icon that will top those emails—a cow, who like our target readers, tends to avoid herds and behaves in unmissable ways as a result.”
From its inception, though, the site was derided by some for being not so much UnHerd as UnRead. In a piece titled “The UnHerd and the Whining of the Perfectly-Well-Represented,” Vice’s Simon Childs wrote, “UnHerd doesn’t represent people who have been silenced, it represents people whose ideas are no longer hegemonic.… [It publishes] the kind of people who are generally ‘unheard’ because people edge away from them at parties.”
Montgomerie left UnHerd in 2018. It was under his successors, editor Sally Chatterton and executive editor Sayers, that the news site for maverick cows found a focus. “No longer hegemonic” is right. UnHerd has become a haven for those who feel silenced by what Gray calls “woke religion.” Among the site’s regular contributors are Kathleen Stock, a philosopher hounded from her post at Sussex University for arguing that biological sex is scientific fact rather than social construct, and the former Guardian columnists Hadley Freeman and Suzanne Moore.
Perhaps most emblematically, the poet Kate Clanchy wrote a piece for UnHerd in 2022 about what happened when a memoir chronicling her years as a state school teacher in 1990s Britain, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, was sent to sensitivity readers for assessment following complaints that it was racist and ableist. The readers recommended that her book, which only a year earlier had won the prestigious Orwell Prize for political writing, should not be republished. Clanchy split with Picador, and the book was picked up by the independent publisher Swift Press.
Right now, the site’s most prominent contributors aren’t unheard but overexposed. Giles Fraser, a former dean of St. Paul’s, writes regularly for UnHerd, as does Ian Birrell, who once wrote speeches for David Cameron and served as deputy editor of The Independent. Douglas Murray and Julie Bindel have berths just up Old Queen Street from UnHerd’s office, at the world’s oldest weekly magazine, the conservative Spectator.
Dire Prophecies
UnHerd’s funding comes from Sir Paul Marshall, a prominent Brexit supporter, the chairman of one of Europe’s biggest hedge-fund groups (Marshall Wace), and the chair of Ark charter schools. More recently, Marshall has become a leading backer of GB News, the sensationalist TV station whose hosts include patrician government minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and ex-Sun editor Dan Wootton.
In September, Wootton was suspended over comments made on his show by Laurence Fox, who—after being asked about a female journalist with whom he disagreed—replied, “Who would want to shag that?” Marshall has not commented on the incident, but it hardly fits well with the genteel image cultivated by UnHerd, the purported Thoroughbred in his media stable. (Through a spokesperson, Marshall declined to be interviewed.)
Solomon Hughes, of the socialist Web site the Morning Star, compares UnHerd’s “sugar daddy” to an amateur Rupert Murdoch, with GB News akin to the trashy Sun and UnHerd its posh, Times of London–like antithesis. Marshall is currently leading a consortium, reportedly backed by U.S. billionaire Ken Griffin, to take over Britain’s conservative Telegraph Media Group.
Unlike Murdoch, however, Marshall doesn’t invest in the media to make money, which is just as well because it’s unlikely that UnHerd or GB News will ever make him any. Rather, he seeks to agitate for a revival of Britain’s liberal heritage. Gray may think British liberalism is as dead as Monty Python’s ex-parrot, but Marshall and his editors see it rather as an ailing patient, who can be revived with UnHerd’s journalistic defibrillation.
Back in 2004, Marshall was a key donor to the Liberal Democratic Party and edited a series of essays published as The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism, some of which were written by Nick Clegg, the party’s then leader. The book called for more privatization of public services in Britain than even Margaret Thatcher ever contemplated, and for more competition in the National Health Service. Such free-market liberalism ultimately made the Lib Dems acceptable coalition partners for the Tories in 2010, but after a poor showing in the 2015 general election, its M.P.’s could comfortably hold meetings in a phone booth. Clegg is now president for global affairs at Meta.
Gray may think British liberalism is as dead as Monty Python’s ex-parrot, but Marshall and his editors see it rather as an ailing patient, who can be revived with UnHerd’s journalistic defibrillation.
Marshall jumped ship, too, breaking from the Lib Dems over their opposition to Brexit and seeking other ways to influence politics. He set out his credo in a 2021 article for UnHerd headlined, Progressives have sacrificed liberalism: The mania for political purity is squandering our hard-won freedoms. The great liberals of 17th-century England such as John Milton were imbued with humility and a sense of humanity’s brokenness, he argued, but for Progressives, “humankind’s moral progress is on a perpetual upward curve in parallel with technological progress.” To Marshall, that creed is nonsense on stilts.
Marshall’s son Winston, the former banjo player with Brit-folk combo Mumford & Sons, now often appears as a talking head on GB News, though, as critics have pointed out, without disclosing his relationship to the channel’s owner. Winston is an intriguing figure, and not just because GQ honored him as the sixth-worst-dressed person of 2012. In 2021, he quit Mumford & Sons after tweeting an endorsement for the journalist Andy Ngo’s book, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. Winston had previously arranged a no-less controversial band selfie with conservative Canadian penseur Jordan Peterson.
Since leaving Mumford & Sons, Winston has turned to political commentary, hosting a podcast with The Spectator called Marshall Matters. Like his dad, Winston increasingly seems to believe that Western civilization is in peril and that he can be part of the solution. It’s significant that both father and son are on the advisory board of a group of conservative thinkers, entrepreneurs, and politicians called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, whose number includes not just the ubiquitous Professor Peterson but also Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
ARC launched last month, and its mission statement—“We are at a defining moment in our societies. Growth, at least in the West, has stagnated and there is a growing skepticism and anxiety about the sustainability of human development”—chimes with a recent piece about Marshall in The Guardian, which concludes, “Marshall believes the west is in crisis—but it is a cultural and moral reckoning that is needed, not an economic one.” One part of that reckoning is, no doubt, UnHerd, which postures as an antidote to an Anglosphere gone intolerably illiberal.
Back at the UnHerd Club, Gray has held the audience rapt for nearly an hour with his dire prophecies that liberalism is no match for Chinese-style state capitalism and the woke religion sweeping the West. Sayers, though, is getting restless. What, he asks Gray, do we do about this? Gray suggests that proportional representation might break up the country’s sclerotic, de facto two-party system.
“Weak,” says a man in his early 50s named Barry, who, like not a few people in the audience I speak to in the bar during the break, describes himself as a consultant. “Our problems go deeper than tinkering with electoral systems. Only a professor would think that way.”
There is something inadequate, too, about Gray’s later remark that places such as the UnHerd Club, which he describes as an “enclave,” are antidotes to a political culture turned nasty, brutish, and witless. “We are practicing what remains of liberalism,” Gray says. But that sounds like introverted iconoclasm rather than fighting back against the Progressive morality police this crowd decries.
Sayers, for his part, is “much more optimistic about what UnHerd can do.” When I chat with him after Gray’s talk, he tells me, “We’re not withdrawing at all. We are part of the resistance to a prevailing culture that is becoming illiberal.”
It’s striking that UnHerd’s offices are only a few streets away from the Houses of Parliament and also that Sayers previously worked as the editor of PoliticsHome, a kind of in-house Web site for Westminster politicians. Perhaps UnHerd aims not just to interpret the world but to change it.
At its best, the UnHerd Club is reminiscent of the discussion groups that met in the coffeehouses of 18th-century London. Like Parisian salons and Berlin’s Tischgesellschaften (table talks), these coffeehouses were hymned by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas as examples of the “public sphere” he believed essential for the thriving of democracies worth the name.
True, London’s 18th-century coffeehouses didn’t have Web sites or YouTube channels (UnHerd’s has 372,000 subscribers and millions more view videos of its talks), but if it is to mean anything, UnHerd must emulate that heritage. One worry is that it might ruin its self-image as noble defender of liberal values, not by enabling GB News–style shock jocks but by indulging in knee-jerk contrarianism of the sort evidenced earlier this year by a spate of articles on the site skeptical about the West’s support for Ukraine.
Right now, though, literary salons are thriving in London. Indeed, the week after this talk, Gray was due to speak at the Conduit in Covent Garden, one of many stops on his book tour. Everybody wants to hear from this Cassandra, even as he pronounces gloomily on our fate. His very popularity right now suggests that his reports of the death of liberalism may be exaggerated.
Stuart Jeffries is the author of Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern and Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School
