Читать книгу The Lost Diaries - Craig Brown, Craig Brown - Страница 24

Swiftian? Come off it. That’s what I thought when I read this week’s obituaries, dripping with a sweaty mixture of vintage port, caviar and Marmite sandwiches, of Auberon Waugh.

I remember it well, the smug old world of El Vino in Fleet Street. Right-wing journalists would mix with left-wing journalists, both drowning their differences in champagne (so much more fizzy than common-or-garden white wine, dontcha know, old chap). It was all just a game – and instead of smashing each other’s faces with their fists, and demanding urgent, much needed social reforms, they preferred to discuss their differences over what they would no doubt call a drinkie-poo. They spent hours ‘debating’, ‘exchanging opinions’, ‘seeing the other point of view’, and so on, in a typical recreation of the toffee-nosed public schools which had, years before, puked them out in their stiff collars, sporting blazers, corduroy shorts and school neckties imprinted with a hundred little swastikas.

To that hoity-toity coterie, all that matters is a joke or two. And it doesn’t matter if the rest of us can’t for the life of us understand it. ‘Knock, Knock,’ they say, and when their victim replies: ‘Who’s there?’ they mention a perfectly ordinary Christian name, rendering us, their victims, speechless. ‘There’s an Irishman, a Scotsman and an Englishman,’ they say.

‘And we are all part of the EEC,’ I correct them.

So what’s so funny about ‘jokes’? Don’t ask me. I’m not someone who likes to ‘laugh’ – especially not at a time when so many ordinary Britons are living below the poverty line in inner cities deprived of inward investment by the self-serving machinations of big business. Laughter is to be distrusted and abhorred, whether it comes from the right or the so-called left. Funny? So funny I forgot to laugh.

Don’t imagine the breed is dying out. Far from it. Boris Johnson, editor of the Spectator, is a writer of just this ‘humorous’ stamp, with mannerisms to match. Charming? If you say so. But how can you describe someone as ‘charming’ who subscribes to a belief in the free-market economy?

The last time I saw him, Johnson asked me to write an article for the Spectator, damn him.

I refused point blank. I told him that throughout my career I have only written for people who share my views. I’m certainly not going to start arguing with people who’ll disagree with me for political reasons of their own.

POLLY TOYNBEE