Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray (born 16 July 1979) is a British author and conservative political commentator.

Bosie was awarded a Lambda Award for a gay biography in 2000.

After leaving Oxford, Murray wrote a play, Nightfall, about the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.

His books include Neoconservatism: Why We Need It (2005), The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017), The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019) and The War on the West (2022).

Murray's views and ideology have been associated with Islamophobia and linked to far-right political ideologies

and the promotion of far-right ideas such as the Eurabia, Great Replacement, and Cultural Marxism conspiracy theories.

Murray was born in Hammersmith, London, to an English school teacher mother and a Scottish, Gaelic-speaking father who had been born on the Isle of Lewis and who worked as a civil servant.

He has one elder brother.

In an interview with The Herald, Murray stated that his father had intended to be in London temporarily but stayed after meeting his mother, and that they "encouraged a good discussion around the dinner table" when he was growing up but "neither are political."

Murray was educated at his local state primary and secondary schools, before going to a comprehensive which had previously been a grammar school.

In 2006, Murray published a defence of neoconservatism – Neoconservatism: Why We Need It – and went on a speaking tour promoting the book in the United States.

The publication was subsequently reviewed in the Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat by the Iranian author Amir Taheri: "Whether one agrees with him or not Murray has made a valuable contribution to the global battle of ideas."

He founded the Centre for Social Cohesion in 2007, which became part of the Henry Jackson Society, where he was associate director from 2011 to 2018.

He is currently an associate editor of the conservative British political and cultural magazine The Spectator.

Murray is most well known for his criticism of immigration and Islam.

In 2007, he assisted in the writing of Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing Transatlantic Partnership by Gen. Dr. Klaus Naumann, Gen. John Shalikashvili, Field Marshal The Lord Inge, Adm. Jacques Lanxade, and Gen. Henk van den Breemen.

Recalling this experience in 2011, he wrote, "My parents had been promised that the old grammar school standards and ethos remained, but none did. By the time I arrived the school was what would now be described as 'an inner-city sink school', a war zone similar to those many of the children's parents had escaped from."

Murray's parents withdrew him from the school after a year.

He won scholarships to St Benedict's School, Ealing, and subsequently Eton College, taught briefly at a school near Aberdeen, then took a degree in English at Magdalen College, Oxford.

At age 19, while in his second year at the University of Oxford, Murray published Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas, which was described by Christopher Hitchens as "masterly".

His book Bloody Sunday was (jointly) awarded the 2011–2012 Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize.

In June 2013, Murray's e-book Islamophilia: a Very Metropolitan Malady was published.

In 2017, Murray published The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, which spent almost 20 weeks on The Sunday Times bestseller list and was a No. 1 bestseller in non-fiction.

It has since been published in over 20 languages.

In The Strange Death of Europe, Murray argued that Europe "is committing suicide" by allowing non-European immigration into its borders and losing its "faith in its beliefs".

The book received a polarized response from critics.

Juliet Samuel of The Daily Telegraph praised Murray, saying that: "His overall thesis, that a guilt-driven and exhausted Europe is playing fast and loose with its precious modern values by embracing migration on such a scale, is hard to refute."

An academic review in the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs acclaimed the book as "explosive" and "an elegantly written, copiously documented exposé of Europe's suicidal hypocrisy".

Rod Liddle of The Sunday Times called the book "a brilliant, important and profoundly depressing book".

Other reviews of the book were highly negative.

In The Guardian, the political journalist Gaby Hinsliff described Strange Death as "gentrified xenophobia" and "Chapter after chapter circles around the same repetitive themes: migrants raping and murdering and terrorising", also pointing out that Murray offers little definition of the European culture which he claims is under threat.

Writing in The New York Times, Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra described the book as "a handy digest of far-right clichés".

Mishra accused Murray of defending Pegida, of writing that the English Defence League "had a point", and of describing Hungarian politician Viktor Orbán as a better sentinel of "European values" than George Soros.

Writing in The Intercept, Murtaza Hussain criticised what he called the "relentlessly paranoid tenor" and "apocalyptic picture of Europe" portrayed in the book, while challenging the links Murray made between non-European immigration and large increases in crime.

In Middle East Eye, Georgetown University in Qatar professor Ian Almond called the book "a staggeringly one-sided flow of statistics, interviews and examples, reflecting a clear decision to make the book a rhetorical claim that Europe is doomed to self-destruction".

Murray wrote about social justice and identity politics in his 2019 book The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity which became a Sunday Times bestseller.

It was also nominated as an audio book of the year for the British Book Awards.

In the book, Murray points to what he sees as a cultural shift, away from established modes of religion and political ideology, in which various forms of victimhood can provide markers of social status.

He divides his book into sections dealing with different forms of victimhood, including types of LGBT identity, feminism, and racial politics.

Murray criticises the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault for what he sees as a reduction of society to a system of power relations.