BEYOND PARODY!
The Mail’s peerless sketchwriter has written a satirical novel mocking our new Establishment. The bleakest joke of all? Even HIS powers of invention can’t compete with the sheer horror of our vulgar, witless, puffed-up ‘elite’
ANDREW NEIL’S now celebrated BBC TV polemic against Islamist terrorists last week compared their degraded vision of the future to the magnificence of French culture.
He invoked the painters Monet and Matisse, writers Camus and Zola and composers Bizet, Ravel and Debussy. It was an impressive list, certainly. But it was notable that, apart from the actress Juliette Binoche and footballer Zinedine Zidane, the people he mentioned were all dead.
For when you think about modern France, or for that matter modern Britain, it is less easy to find brilliant talents to champion.
Today’s British public life currently offers: a Poet Laureate who doesn’t know how to rhyme, a Master of the Queen’s Music who has barely written a hummable tune, and a Royal Academy Professor of Drawing who cannot, er, draw.
Elsewhere, we have an Archbishop of Canterbury who used to work in the City yet thinks unsustainable debt a wonderful idea; a Leader of the Opposition who wears a silver shellsuit, employs a Wykehamist communist as his spin doctor and seems worryingly soft on Britain’s enemies; and an Arts Council boss who made his millions in trash television.
Our likely next Queen but one has an uncle who is a tattooed geezer who took drugs in his Ibiza mansion; we have a vegan Shadow Minister for Farming; and a half-pint Speaker of the Commons whose wife is a leggy, bottle-blonde boozer so sophisticated that she posed naked in a sheet and recently had an affair with her husband’s implausibly plain cousin. All this and Russell Brand, too.
All the above are real people, gargoyles gaily cartwheeling down our kingdom’s corridors of influence. These and their ilk are the leaders of our society. They, supposedly, are our elite, totems of the best that our society can manage.
Is it any wonder that Islamist maniacs think Western civilisation is there for the taking? And it is any wonder that we novelists are struggling to keep pace with reality? I say ‘we’ because, for the past four years, I have been penning a political novel, published this week.
THE Speaker’s Wife is set partly in Westminster, partly in the more spiritual English Marches. Its central figure is chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons.
In the book, I try to catch a flavour of parliamentary crookedness and its relation to the lamentable decline of the Church of England. If my novel has a theme, it is perhaps that we need to rediscover pride in our culture and in Christendom.
Although I naturally hope it will go down well with readers, I worry that I have been insufficiently lurid — not cruel enough — in my depiction of our country and the clowns who run it. Today’s fiction, you see, is inevitably hard-pressed to match real life for absurdism.
One of my novel’s characters is a greedy backbench MP called Mears, a short man of sparse charm who boils with sexual frustration. He lusts after a statuesque young woman who seems to be out of his league. But what if Mears can become Speaker?
What if this unattractive little bantam of a man can lower his ambitious buttocks on the great Chair of the Commons and become the occupant of that grace-and-favour Westminster mansion, Speaker’s House? Might the beauty then agree to slide into his bed?
Mears schemes. He plots and flatters. Truth is cast to the winds as he bids to become Speaker. He colludes with white- maned Augustus Dymock, flamboyant leader of England’s secularists, to try to force the Church of England to sell valuable land assets. Actually, this has already started in real life. Several voices in politics and elsewhere want the CofE to flog off some of its churches.
At this point my libel lawyers remind me to assure you that The Speaker’s Wife is fiction and any resemblance to living characters, or indeed living Speakers, is coincidental.
Mears is not John Bercow and the young woman he fancies — a Russian temptress with an hourglass figure and the nose of a questing doe — is certainly not Speaker Bercow’s Venus, the fragrant-as-fag-ash Sally.
But, perhaps, you start to grasp the difficulties of the modern fiction writer. In factual life we have a Speaker and his wife who are practically caricatures, they are so garish. Across public life, nakedly awful pocket-stuffers and favour-mongers and back-scratchers and truth-trimmers prosper.
Crooks and creeps and exaggerated oddities are fawned over as celebrity trumps common sense. And therein, I fear, lies our civilisation’s terrible weakness which is being exploited by Islamist terrorists.
Bizarre Lady Colin Campbell becomes a national ornament on ITV’s I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here! On an international level, we have the freak show of the reality TV Kardashian family. I am still not at all sure how these Kardashians ever won attention in the first place. Now they are emblems of success. How? Why?
I remember, as a young City diarist
in the Eighties, being amazed that investors would support any venture run by eau-de-cologned smarmer Asil Nadir (the Cypriot-born tycoon behind the Polly Peck empire). I knew little about balance sheets but it seemed obvious Nadir was a swindler.
That did not stop expert City fund managers pouring millions of their clients’ pounds into his company. Most of the money was lost. After years on the run in North Cyprus, Nadir now resides at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
Scandals came and went: Tory ‘Minister for Fun’ David Mellor’s sexual frolics; cash for questions; the Peter Mandelson/Keith Vaz/Hinduja Brothers affair (during which the Home Office was pressurised to grant British citizenship to the two Indian tycoons).
Tory millionaire perjurer Jeffrey Archer was in a class all of his own: a self-delusion wrapped up inside a fiction writer, a shameless sycophant whose own life was more fantastic than the plots of his enviably successful books.
The protagonists in these factual episodes were often laughable cliches of greasiness and tomfoolery. It was almost as though they were crying out to be caught. The Establishment never learned.
By its nonchalance, its shoulder- shrugging to such decadence, it weakened us.
This reluctance to ostracise these reprobates was a failure of moral confidence. Such was the madness that ‘ judgmental’ became a pejorative word, used by the Left to deplore ‘nasty’ Right-wingers who were allegedly too mean-spirited in their censure of wrong-doers.
Those of us in the Press who tried to voice warnings about undesirable characters were deplored for being negative — and we often had the libel lawyers set on our tails.
BUT how can it be wrong to urge society to keep clear of palpable stinkers? In this regard, the Church of England has practically disappeared as a force for disapproval. Bishops have become cultural quislings, declining to challenge the fashionable consensus of secularism. Last weekend, the Archbishop of Canterbury wrung his hands and said he had a moment of doubt in God when Paris was attacked. Might I respectfully beseech him to keep his doubts to himself? Show some leadership, sir!
Top Anglicans have in recent years been quick to attack ‘Tory cuts’ as ‘morally indefensible’ (quite how they think it is moral to run up yet more billions of pounds’ worth of debt, only God may know) but cannot see that in saying that, they are demoralising Right- leaning churchgoers.
They are driving our Church into a Corbynist cul-de-sac.
Since the Sixties, the Church of England has dismantled the high aesthetics of liturgy because they wanted to suck up to transient fashion and were more interested in egalitarianism than in worshipping God.
My novel contains an ambitious senior clergyman who is all too eager to be part of Westminster’s amoral political swirl. He may not be based on any particular parson, but he could easily be several members of today’s General Synod.
American humorist Tom Lehrer said satire died the day the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize went to Henry Kissinger, the bellicose u.S. Secretary of State nicknamed the Duke of Napalm because of America’s remorseless bombing of Vietnam. Lehrer saw that when a civilisation’s institutions lose their moral dimension, the citizenry will not so much be fooled as simply assume that morality no longer matters.
What would Lehrer, now elderly, make of recent events in Britain? What would he think of Jeremy Kyle? Telly presenter Kyle has made a mint out of a squalid daytime show which revels in the sexual or domestic disasters of inadequate people — the theatre of cruelty at its most exploitative. Yet when Kyle’s own marriage went phut, he squealed about his privacy and tried to stifle the Press.
What would Lehrer make of the unelected socialist snouts-in-the-troughers (including John Prescott, an ape beyond any novelist’s imagination) who bung up the House of Lords, or the adulterous actors — funded by Max Mosley, son of a wartime fascist and whipper of prostitutes — who have preached against free journalism?
Meanwhile, that oh-so pious premier Tony Blair pretty clearly lied to Parliament to take us to war in Iraq. Is it any wonder that there is worry about us going to war in Syria? And, more importantly, that the people of Britain conclude ‘a plague on all their houses’?
We have radio and television presenters who, in any society with strong ideals, would never be allowed near public airwaves. Jonathan Ross, even after being exposed as a vulgar sexist, juvenile oaf in the scandal over his chum Russell Brand taunting the actor Andrew Sachs, strolls back into the BBC. Lord Sugar, with his bullying braggadocio, continues to front The Apprentice.
This tragically, is what British life has to offer. Where is our sense of shame? In the arts, ideals of beauty have been trashed. Technically hamfisted ‘conceptual artist’ Tracey Emin is hailed as a genius, which she most assuredly is not. F-words are spattered all over our state- subsidised stages. Some composers of classical music regard harmony as pointless.
In Premier League football, foulmouthed cheats are paid millions. Architecture prizes go to designers of the most anti- social eyesores. Big business makes little effort to pay tax. Recently, the Mail brought news of pay and expenses rackets by public- service managers in the police, health service and universities.
We journalists report scandals, yet the Establishment wafts aside objections to corruption as being small- minded. How can fiction outbid real life when real life has become so preposterous?
UNTIL recently it was the novelist’s task to disinter truths that society had tried to bury. The Brontes and Jane Austen described the longings of respectable women at a time when they were repressed. Charles Dickens and D.H. Lawrence did something similar for the working classes.
In 1875, Anthony Trollope wrote The Way We Live Now, a fine novel that concerns Augustus Melmotte, a fat-livered fraudster who becomes an MP and collapses drunkenly in the Commons.
Trollope’s Victorian readers perhaps felt he had gone too far. Oh come off it, they may have said, that could never happen.
Nearly a century later, a certain Robert Maxwell entered the Commons as a Labour MP and went on to become the most notorious swindler of our age. The similarities between Maxwell and Melmotte were uncanny. Was Maxwell the moment fiction was eclipsed as a satirical force?
The problem for the 21st-century novelist is that misbehaviour risks little opprobrium. Bad people do not dread being discovered.
The MPs’ expenses exposé of 2008 was supposedly a great scandal, but what was truly startling was that so few of the fiddlers came a cropper. Most were re- elected. The British electorate is losing hope of decency in public office. Readers’ comments under newspaper articles on the internet are far more cynical than the articles written by the professional sceptics, the journalists.
until recently, there would be an acceptance of the word of a Prime Minister, a judge, a bank chairman. Today, such figures are scorned. The most common phrase you hear from the public is ‘they’re all at it’.
Despite such bankrupt cultural leadership, there remains an important function for fiction — and that is to offer hope.
My book has its despairing and sorrowful moments, but it is not a pessimistic tale. It suggests that good could yet prevail. But for that to occur, our country must rediscover its self-confidence in the values of the decent majority, and its sense of purpose — and correct the moral drift of these dreadless days.
Quentin Letts’s debut novel, the speaker’s Wife, is published by Constable.