Читать книгу The Lost Diaries - Craig Brown, Craig Brown - Страница 85

I have often heard it said, and sometimes within earshot of the upper echelons of respectable society, that two and two make four. Yet this is quite plainly not the case. How could two and two possibly make four when it is so obvious to one and all that they make six? To put it simply, if I have two snuff boxes in my left hand, and two snuff boxes in my right hand, the total number of snuff boxes I have in both hands is six. Or to translate the same truth into the characteristically modish and inelegant language of numbers favoured by the more churlish mathematicians:

2+2 = 6

Point proven. Yet our present system of egalitarian government, by which is really meant totalitarian rule by the proletarian hordes (many if not most of whom have dandruff), has convinced generations of citizens (their shoes in grave need of a polish) that the equation 2 + 2 = 4 can somehow be made to hold water. Down this path lies madness. Next, they will be telling us that one and one makes two!!!

This grave mathematical deception, from which floweth the depraved and decadent condition of England today, must needs rightly be placed at the feet of Harold Wilson, who, far from being an aristocrat, was the product of inferior breeding, misusing the adverb hopefully and never learning to hold his pipe in a manner befitting a gentleman.

And, forsooth, how much has changed! When I first joined The Times as an apprentice leader-writer in 1950, all journalists on that newspaper were expected, quite rightly, to don top hat and tails at all times. Nor were we permitted to write our own articles, for it was considered an activity unfit for a gentleman. Instead, the necessary pieces were written for us by uniformed parlour maids, whom we would tip generously (sixpence ha’penny every Christmas) for their troubles. Never let it be said that there was a jot or tittle of snobbery about this. Like slavery, it was valued equally on both sides, allowing them to look up to us and, at one and the same time, us to look down on them.

Nowadays, to my certain knowledge, The Times is staffed almost exclusively by common people, many bussed in from the East End in boilersuits. Even Lord Rees-Mogg is obliged to adopt a flat cap, grubby overalls and a cockney accent before reporting for work. And a certain coarseness has crept into the prose. For instance, leading articles on the situation in Iraq invariably begin with the lamentable phraseology, Fuck this for a game of soldiers. It all goes to show that equality may be a good thing in theory, but, like mathematics, it never works in practice.

SIR PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE