Obituary: A Momentous Englishman

Conservatism in the West has long been derailed by a small-minded obsession with the economy. Few have done more to rouse us from this complacent slumber than Peter Whittle, the founder and director of the New Culture Forum (NCF), who died last week.

Peter foresaw as early as 2006, the year he established the NCF, that struggles over religion, identity, and demographics would overtake tax cuts, free trade, and deregulation to become the major priorities of the conservative-minded multitude. He also knew that this shift of focus would appeal as much to disillusioned Labour voters as patriotic Tories. As the NCF’s name suggests, Peter took it upon himself to ready us for a world where culture, not economics, would reign as the defining field in British political life.

We are immeasurably better off for his having done so. Without Peter’s efforts, the battlefield would be even less favourable to those of us intent on defeating the corrosive onslaught, the humourless cult, of equality and diversity.

The NCF began as an arena for ideas, reports, and publications, but by the 2020s, under Peter’s leadership, it had evolved into a formidable audio-visual operation. Now nearing 400,000 subscribers, our YouTube channel is the warm home to a substantial output: forensic documentaries, provocative panel shows, long-form interviews—all devoted to exposing the Left-liberal orthodoxies of our time, as much for what they fail to notice as for what they distort to devastating effect.

Now a Fellow at the NCF, an honour I owe to Peter, I first came across his work as a teenager drawn to counter-cultural ideas. I had happened upon one of the BBC’s usual pseudo-debates about the alleged riches of multiculturalism. It soon emerged that the show’s producers were guilty of a serious oversight: in a pious discussion convened to solve what the BBC framed as Islam’s ‘PR problem’, they had invited into their midst a guest who cared more for unpleasant facts than polite fictions. That man was Peter Whittle.

Everyone else having either deflected or denied the problem, Peter then reeled off a list of fearsome statistics detailing the savage attitudes of many Muslims in Britain, before quipping: ‘Now tell me, how do you intend to put a PR spin on that?’

In the last few days, Peter’s friends have drawn attention to his kindness, his grace, his civility. And it is quite right, of course, that people should do so. I am one of the lucky souls to have seen these qualities up-close, whether in conversations about Woody Allen films at his home in Windsor or on team evenings at the Royal Opera House.

But as Peter’s viral media appearances – not least his immortal takedowns of Sadiq Khan—remind us, he would wish to be remembered as much for being fierce with those he felt deserved it as for being generous with friends and loved ones. His undoubted charms were all the more precious for being attached to a discerning man, full of character and conviction.

Peter understood that the English love of respectability had been weaponised against us to make a virtue of cowardice. Provided the latest ‘progressive’ crusade, be it mass immigration or trans mutilation, has the cunning to brand itself as ‘the civilised thing to do’, we have too often been timid to resist. Still less have we felt any right to reverse the damage inflicted by such reckless experiments. Peter was among the first to give us the courage to get past these blockages, together with the language to fight back in a way consistent with our good-natured, if at times manipulable, national character.

However, he was no fan of rhetoric for its own sake. He was above all a man of action, more interested in detailed plans for restoring the Britain he loved than indulgent laments. This is why he arranged for an NCF trilogy, aimed at addressing the nation’s existential challenges, to be put together at the beginning of this pivotal decade: The Long March (2020), Fighting Back (2022), and State of Emergency (2023).

These will soon be supplemented by Immigration: The Betrayal of Britain, set to come out later this year. In his Introduction to that volume, some of the last words he ever wrote, Peter tells us: “Read these essays not as elegies, but as exhortations. Let them stir you to demand of our leaders this question: How might we yet avert the eclipse foreshadowed in these pages?”

When it came to virtue, Peter cared nothing for appearances. He was interested in the real thing. His last sentence before a public audience leaves no doubt about it: “Never give up.”

The paradox of our age is that, in order to save England, we must be willing to act in ways to which Englishmen are unaccustomed. Civilisation cannot hope to last if its heirs succumb to luxury beliefs that owe their strength to a misplaced desire to seem civilised all the time.

Peter Whittle’s legacy is already secure, but if we follow his brave example in putting national survival before our own parochial status games, we cannot lose. He will then be remembered for what he was and ever shall be, a momentous Englishman.