Douglas Kear Murray (born 16 July 1979) is a British conservative political commentator, cultural critic, author, and journalist. He is an associate editor of the conservative British political and cultural magazine The Spectator, and has been a regular contributor to The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun, the Daily Mail, New York Post, National Review, The Free Press, and UnHerd.Multiple sources:
His books include Neoconservatism: Why We Need It (2006), The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017), The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019), The War on the West (2022), and On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West (2025).
Murray was the associate director of the Henry Jackson Society, a conservative think tank, from 2011 to 2018.
Murray is a critic of immigration into Europe and of Islam. He became better known internationally due to his advocacy for Israel after the October 7 attacks in 2023.
Murray has been praised by conservatives and criticised by others. Articles in the academic journals Ethnic and Racial Studies and National Identities associate his views with Islamophobia and he has been described as promoting far-right ideas such as the Eurabia, Great Replacement, and Cultural Marxism conspiracy theories.Multiple sources:
Early life and education 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. 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 to Eton College, taught briefly at a school near Aberdeen, then took a degree in English at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Publications At age 19, while in his second year at the University of Oxford, Murray's Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas was published, which Christopher Hitchens described as "masterly". Bosie was awarded a Lambda Award for gay biography in 2000. After leaving Oxford, Murray wrote a play, Nightfall, about the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who rescued thousands of Jews from the Nazis.
In 2006 Murray authored a defence of neoconservatismNeoconservatism: Why We Need Itand 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." In 2007, he assisted in the writing of the Center for Strategic and International Studies's report Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing Transatlantic Partnership, written by Klaus Naumann, John Shalikashvili, Lord Inge, Jacques Lanxade, and Henk van den Breemen. His book Bloody Sunday: Truths, Lies and The Saville Inquiry was (jointly) awarded the 2011–2012 Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize and longlisted for the 2012 Orwell Book Prize. In June 2013, Murray's self-published e-book Islamophilia: a Very Metropolitan Malady was released.
In 2017, Bloomsbury published Murray's 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 polarised 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 stating 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. Murray's narration of the book was 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 identity can provide markers of social status. He divides his book into chapters dealing with four different identity groups: "Gay", "Women", "Race" and "Trans." Murray criticises the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault for what he sees as a reduction of society to a system of power relations. Murray's book drew polarised responses from critics. Historian Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph praised the book, calling Murray "a superbly perceptive guide through the age of the social justice warrior". Katie Law in the Evening Standard said that Murray "tackled another necessary and provocative subject with wit and bravery". Conversely, William Davies gave a highly critical review of Murray's work in The Guardian, describing the book as "the bizarre fantasies of a rightwing provocateur, blind to oppression".
Murray's book The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason was published in 2022 and debuted at number one on The Bookseller's nonfiction bestseller list in the UK, having sold 11,673 copies in its first week. It also reached the New York Times bestseller list in the United States. The book was characterised by columnist Gerard Baker as an examination of attempts to destroy Western civilisation from sources within. Robert Colville, writing in the Sunday Times, called it "a convincing and often terrifying case that the barbarians are at the gates", and that Murray argues in the book that "a cultural war (...) is being waged remorselessly against all the roots of the western tradition and against everything good that the western tradition has produced."
Murray's book On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West (2025) dissects the October 7 attacks and the West's response to Israel. This response, in his view, was distorted by global antisemitism. The October 7 massacres are described with their sheer inhumanity which defies comprehension. He does not begin history on October 7 but contextualizes the preceding history. He presents counter-arguments to what he regards as a contemptuous bias with which Israeli affairs have been reported by the mainstream media. By "death cult" Murray means the Hamas goal of annihilation of Israel. This challenge, he says, is not Israel's alone, hence the subtitle is "The Future of the West."Chuck Chalberg (14 July 2025). "On Democracies & Death Cults: Israel & the Future of the West". The Imaginative Conservative, https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2025/07/democracies-death-cults-israel-future-civilization-douglas-murray-chuck-chalberg.html
Career Murray 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. The society refused to disclose its donors to the House of Commons' standards watchdog.
Media career
Murray is an associate editor of The Spectator.
In 2016, Murray organised a competition through The Spectator in which entrants were invited to submit offensive poems about Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with a top prize of £1,000 donated by a reader. This was in reaction to the Böhmermann affair, in which German satirist Jan Böhmermann was prosecuted under the German penal code for such a poem. Murray announced the winner of the poetry competition as Conservative MP Boris Johnson (former editor of the magazine, and former mayor of London, and later Prime Minister of the United Kingdom).
Roger Scruton tapes In April 2019, New Statesman journalist George Eaton published an article based on an interview with Roger Scruton, which attributed a number of controversial and racist statements to Scruton, who was publicly condemned by various members of Parliament and dismissed from his position as a government housing adviser as a result.
Murray condemned Eaton and the New Statesman for "journalistic dishonesty" and urged Eaton and New Statesman editor Jason Cowley to share the original recording of the interview. When the New Statesman initially refused, Murray acquired the original recording of the interview from unknown sources, which formed the basis of his article in The Spectator titled "The Scruton Tapes: Anatomy of a Modern Hit Job" showing that Scruton's remarks had been taken out of context and misrepresented by Eaton.
The New Statesman subsequently published an apology to Scruton for Eaton's misrepresentation of his words, and housing secretary James Brokenshire apologised to Scruton for his dismissal. Shortly before he died in January 2020, Scruton wrote an article for The Spectator in which he called Murray 'brave' and spoke of his gratitude for Murray's 'generous defence' of his reputation.
Political views
Ideology Academic and journalistic sources have variously described Murray's ideology and political views as conservative, neoconservative, far-right, alt-right and Islamophobic. British journalist and broadcaster Peter Oborne described Douglas Murray as an anti-Muslim polemicist. Murray has argued that there is an effort by the left to destroy Western culture, and has argued that criticisms of Western leaders and philosophers are motivated by attempts to hurt the West.