Instant Opinion: ‘Tories may win the election but lose their soul’

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. Clare Foges in The Times

on the Conservatives

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Tories may win the election but lose their soul

“Johnson and his allies may believe that the ugly tactics of recent weeks are strictly time-limited, that once Brexit has been “done” there will be a reversion to reasoned rhetoric and responsible government; but this feels less like a blip than a sea-change into something coarse and strange. Seeing the party heading to success at the polls with its divisive, two nations shtick, the same words keep floating to mind. ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his soul?’ And what shall it profit a party if it wins an election but coarsens parliament, trashes its brand, undermines our national reputation, loses its soul?”

2. Nick Timothy in The Daily Telegraph

on political divides

Our politics is following the path of America's vicious culture wars

“In the US culture wars, the Democrats want to tear down America’s history and traditions, while obsessing about ancient wrongs and transgender rights. The Republicans want to burn down modernity and pick fights over abortion, guns and religion. Britain’s culture war has not yet plumbed American depths. Ours is fought, for now, over Brexit. But the battle lines are drawn around class, education and geography, and they appear to be here to stay.”

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––For more political analysis - and a concise, refreshing and balanced take on the week’s news agenda - try The Week magazine. Get your first six issues free–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

3. Stephen Bush in the New Statesman

on Boris Johnson’s mounting scandal sheet

Why breaking their silence may be Team Johnson’s downfall

While allegations about what Johnson did as Spectator editor speak to his character, one way or another, people have already made their minds up about Johnson and women. But the allegation of corruption and malpractice at the heart of the Arcuri story has the potential to damage and perhaps even destroy Johnson. Downing Street might find that they've broken their no comment policy at the worst possible time.

4. Peter Wehner in the new York Times

on Donald Trump

What’s the Matter With Republicans?

“That something like the Trump-Zelensky phone call would occur was entirely predictable given what we know about Donald Trump. He is an extreme narcissist, pathologically dishonest, shameless, a man who delights in flouting norms. He has a mobster’s mentality. Mr. Trump’s behavior isn’t governed by moral standards; he doesn’t seem to believe objective moral standards even exist. He can no more understand the language of morality than a person listening to someone speak a foreign language for the first time can.”

5. Mary Harrington in Unherd

on inherited intelligence

Social mobility won’t bring social justice

“Left-wing policy initiatives aimed at helping the disadvantaged generally begin from a central premise: that people are born more or less as blank slates, more or less the same, and only differential treatment since birth explains all the difference in individual outcomes. This approach manages to coexist with the overwhelming evidence that cognitive ability — human intelligence — has a significant heritable component. We are not blank slates, at least not when it comes to our ability to think, yet while the evidence is overwhelming, the Left, in particular, is hostile to the idea, or even discussing it.”