Matthew d'Ancona

Matthew Robert Ralph d'Ancona (born 27 January 1968) is an English journalist and editor-at-large of The New European. A former deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph, he was appointed editor of The Spectator in February 2006, a post he retained until August 2009.

Quotes

• [As of 2023] Universities and employers often subordinate this previously cherished liberty [free speech] to the claims of "offence" (necessarily subjective) and to the risk of "harms" (usually ill-defined).
  One egregious outcome of this cultural shift is that an alarming number of people – especially gender-critical feminists – have lost their livelihoods. In October 2021, for instance, the philosophy professor Kathleen Stock was driven to resign from the University of Sussex by a campaign of intimidation that included the letting off of flares by masked trans activists outside her family's home and the warning: "Fire Kathleen Stock. Otherwise you'll see us around."
  The standard riposte is that [Maya] Forstater, Stock and others like them (though by no means all) have gone on to other forms of gainful employment and prominence in public life. How, then, could they possibly have been "censored"? This is an absurd and infantile argument. The fact that these two women have been sufficiently resourceful and resilient to find new ways of making their ideas known and their voices heard is neither here nor there. Stock should never have been menaced to the point that it was intolerable for her to remain a faculty member; Forstater should not have lost her job.
  • "Free speech does not belong to the right… it’s a precious progressive value", The New European (5 July 2023)

• [On Russell Brand's performances] There was a time when he hid behind the theatricality of high camp; which, as Susan Sontag teaches us, "is a solvent of morality. It neutralises moral indignation, sponsors playfulness". Posturing as a Goth Noel Coward, he was, onstage, remarkably open about his sexual conduct. But it was hard to take seriously a man who looked like the lovechild of Lenny Kravitz and Charles Hawtrey; an explosion in a wig factory. That was his cunning. He sniffed out zones of impunity and crouched within them.
  • "Russell Brand is not a martyr and the claims against him are not a conspiracy", The New European (19 September 2023)
  • Brand was alleged to have sexually assaulted and abused multiple women (including a claim of rape), accusations he denied, in multiple media reports.