The Joy of Six 1543

"In many cases, lack of coordination and administrative errors in the Home Office cause failed removals. Complications around booking flights, arranging escorts and other practicalities have all been found to prevent deportations, as well as procedural issues such as lack of travel documents. But continued misrepresentation in the media and political rhetoric means the ECHR has continued to be a scapegoat." Sarah Singer argues that the government's new immigration and asylum bill won't work.

"'I’m Northern Irish', I would say with indignation, every time an English person referred to me as Irish. Growing up in Newtownards in the 1990s there was never any question of my Britishness. British passport, Union Jacks on every lamppost, and fully immersed in British pop culture." Yet Claire JC is now campaigning for a United Ireland – she explains why.

Nick Baird thinks the Liberal Democrats' proposed scheme for Defence Bonds is a bad idea.

"Picked up by the stump microphone as England’s batting unravelled at Trent Bridge, the Kiwis summed up what a lot of us are thinking: 'What are they doing?' It was aimed at the batters in front of them. But by the end of what was an extraordinary, shocking and chaotic day, it felt like the question that summed up English cricket from top to bottom." Elizabeth Ammon asks if anyone in English cricket knows what they are doing.

Timothy Ott on Charles Dickens's visit to Washington: "Dickens and an unnamed official, 'having twice or thrice rung a bell which nobody answered,' simply entered the White House and attempted to find the president on their own."

Nigel Andrew on the forgotten genius of Ivy Compton-Burnett: "The critic Norman Shrapnel wrote: 'Of the two candidates for greatness among comic novelists of our time, Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett, it is her prospect that looks the more secure.'"

Satire: "I’m trying to beat you all up and beat myself up too"

"Have you seen that piece on satire by Colin Burrow in the London Review of Books?" asked Lord Bonkers over lunch. "It's Terribly Good."

It turned out to be a review by Burrow of State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature by Dan Sperrin:

The disappointment​ with satire that emerges from this book is in part a product of its method. The alluringly simple-seeming question ‘What is this text trying to do?’ is a much less good one to ask of satire than it might sound. It immediately excludes the possibility that a satirist might be a confused mess of self-censorship mixed with odd lunges for freedom, in which a desire to make a mark on the world as an individual intersects riskily with a desire to make people change their behaviour. 

The question ‘What is this satire trying to do?’ also implies that authorial intentions are clear, and that so long as you know enough about the day-to-day politics of the Walpole administration you can pin those intentions down and label them like dead butterflies in a display case. Many of the most successful satirists – Evelyn Waugh, even dry old Orwell – had a streak of madness and self-contradiction within them which might lead them to answer the question ‘What are you trying to do?’ with something like ‘I’m trying to beat you all up and beat myself up too.’ 

Furthermore, asking the same question of satire that one might ask of a political pamphlet aimed at redressing an immediate political wrong radically restricts the parameters within which satire can operate. It makes satire a mode that addresses a particular moment rather than a mode which might have an afterlife, or even change how people see the world in the longer term. You might say that’s not just a recipe for disappointment with satire, but for missing the point.

Richard Jefferies: The granddaddy of nature writing

This is another of the columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy - you can read more about the JCPCP on the Egalitarian Press site.

I believe this column, on this blog's hero Richard Jefferies, was published a few issues ago.

Richard Jefferies: The granddaddy of nature writers

Nature writers lived for decades in the shadow of Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot, author of the Daily Beast’s ‘Lush Places’ column: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole." But today Boot would get a respectful mention in a Guardian survey of the new nature writing occasioned by Robert Macfarlane’s latest. 

The granddaddy of nature writing is the 19th-century Wiltshire journalist and novelist Richard Jefferies, who died in 1887 aged only 38. He has enjoyed periods of popularity, notably during the Second World War, when there was a widespread sense that rural Britain was somehow ‘what we are fighting for’, but still awaits a full rediscovery. 

When he is rediscovered, we shall find he is far more than just a nature writer. After London, for instance, is an early essay in post-apocalyptic fiction:

The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike.

The meadows were green, and so was the rising wheat which had been sown, but which neither had nor would receive any further care. Such arable fields as had not been sown, but where the last stubble had been ploughed up, were overrun with couch-grass, and where the short stubble had not been ploughed, the weeds hid it. So that there was no place which was not more or less green; the footpaths were the greenest of all, for such is the nature of grass where it has once been trodden on, and by-and-by, as the summer came on, the former roads were thinly covered with the grass that had spread out from the margin.

That may just be the best nature writing Jefferies ever produced. It’s certainly good enough to build a convincing world, even if the action of the book is rarely worthy of living in it.

******

One of the things I value in Jefferies is his ability to surprise. Try his 1885 essay ‘Wild Flowers’:

If you have been living in one house in the country for some time, and then go on a visit to another, though hardly half a mile distant, you will find a change in the air, the feeling and tone of the place. It is close by, but it is not the same.

To discover these minute differences, which make one locality and home happy, and the next adjoining unhealthy, the Chinese have invented the science of Feng-shui, spying about with cabalistic mystery, casting the horoscope of an acre. There is something in all superstitions; they are often the foundation of science.

Fend-shui is mentioned by some 19th-century Western writers, but they tend to scoff where Jefferies sounds intrigued. More sympathetic accounts appeared in the early 20th century, but it was not until the 1990s that it became a vogue.

******

Though it was published as a three-volume adult novel, Bevis: The Story of a Boy is the urtext, the motherlode, of children’s holiday adventure stories. It’s why generations of us grew up on books where nicely behaved kids found buried treasure or rounded up Nazi spies and criminal gangs – a school of fiction that, one critic suggested, began with the agricultural depression of the late 19th century and was killed off by the Beeching cuts and the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy.

I think I know Bevis well, but when I pick it up, the way the action is told entirely from a child’s point of view still astounds. Mark Twain got there first, but you won’t find many other examples in the fiction of this period. 

And Jefferies can surprise with snatches of social history too:

For seventy years he had laboured in that place, and never once gone out of sight of the high Down yonder, and in all that seventy years no one till Bevis and Mark, and now their pupil Jack, had learned to swim. Bevis's Governor was out of the question, he had crossed the seas. But of the true country-folk, of all who dwelt round about these waters, not one had learned to swim. 

Very likely no one had learned since the Norman Conquest. When the forests were enclosed and the commonality forbidden to hunt, the spirit of enterprising exercise died out of them. Certainly it is a fact that until quite recently you might search a village from end to end and not find a swimmer; and most probably if you found one now he would be something of a traveller, and not a home-staying man.

This explanation sounds deeply speculative, but it’s a fact that few young black Americans can swim and that this is often put down to poverty and historic segregation.

And this is a battle now being fought again in Britain. Jefferies was born at Coate Farm, just outside Swindon. Today the town’s Oasis leisure centre, from which a certain Nineties rock band took its name, lies empty and local politics are all about the struggle to reopen it – and in particular its swimming pool.

******

Scoop ends with William Boot home from Africa and writing ‘Lush Places’ again in his study:

“The waggons lumber in the lane under their golden glory of harvested sheaves,” he wrote; “maternal rodents pilot their furry brood through the stubble."

But Waugh adds a chillier observation of his own: “Outside the owls hunted maternal rodents and their furry brood.”

Jefferies was well aware of this. In his Wood Magic, the young Bevis can talk to the animals and understand their speech. The world he discovers through this is far from the pieties of the Victorian nursery – it’s not one where birds in their little nests agree. 

Instead, Jefferies uses a convoluted tale of imperial conquest and political intrigue to make us understand that nature is a Darwinian war of all against all.

It’s not a jungle out there, but it is an English woodland.

BOOK REVIEW Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the Post-War Country House by Adrian Tinniswood

We think we know the history of the English country house in the 20th century. Their heyday was in the Edwardian era, but death duties and then requisition during the second world war led to mass demolition, until the tide turned when an exhibition - The Destruction of the Country House - staged by the V&A in 1974 alerted people to what was still being lost.

The trouble is that, as Adrian Tinniswood shows in this endlessly entertaining book, every part of this version of events is questionable.

By 1900, the owners of large country houses were already finding it hard to maintain the large staffs necessary to run them. You may recall that Nevill Holt Hall, held by many to be the model for Bonkers Hall, had already been vacated by the Cunard family when Suffragettes tried to burn it down in 1914.

Where it remained possible to continue to operate on the 19th-century model, it was often because an American bride brought a new fortune across the Atlantic with her. There's a 1 in 20 chance that the first Lady Bonkers was American.

Death duties were indeed a heavy burden on country estates, particularly during the first world war when more than one set of them might have to be paid, but then we Liberals brought them in precisely to reduce the economic and social dominance of the landed interest.

But before 1950 the solution most houseowners came up with was to sell off part of the estate and perhaps to demolish unwanted wings of the main house - no doubt to their architectural advantage in many cases.

The worst period for country houses was the 1950s, when many were demolished after failing to find buyers. There's a Malcolm Saville story from 1958, The Secret of the Gorge, which pictures the demolition gangs moving in on a country house. 

The same landscape - the Teme Gorge on the Shropshire and Herefordshire border - features in Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape, as does an attempt to demolish a house. That's because both Sharpe and Saville's eldest son were pupils at Lancing, which was evacuated to Downton Castle during the war. This was another indignity that befell such houses at the time, but Downton Castle is very much still with us. 

Around Market Harborough, both Gumley Hall, which became a training centre for agents to be dropped into Nazi-occupied Europe and was then home to Leonard Cheshire's first community for service veterans, and the Lutyens house Papillon Hall near Lubenham were demolished. But Nevill Holt Hall survived by becoming a prep school, which lasted until it closed following a police raid that included helicopters.

The mood of despair at the future of country houses was captured by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited, which was published in 1945. But events moved on, and in his preface to its 1960 edition he wrote that the novel had proved "a panegyric preached over an empty coffin", but who reads prefaces?

They do watch television - or they did in 1981, when the ITV adaptation was screened. I enjoyed it, just as I enjoyed the novel when I went through a Waugh phase at university, but I have never found a more profound message in either than the thought that old money is nicer than new money.

The damage wrought upon a whole generation of Oxford-educated politicians by the TV version, however, is enormous, and the damage they have wrought upon the country as a result probably incalculable.

Yet even in the Fifties new country houses were being built, and their precursors were about to experience a revival thanks to a new phenomenon of the Sixties: the rock god. The Beatles did not live together in four knocked-through terraced houses: they had a country house each. So did several members of the Stones and the Who.

In his own quiet way, Steve Winwood is worth notice here too. He bought a Cotswold house when he was 20, in an area where only rock stars and royalty can afford to live. The result was that one of his daughters married the nephew of Camilla Parker Bowles and his grandson was one of the Queen's pages at the Coronation.

And that exhibition at the V&A? Tinniswood paints it as, in large part, an attempt to ward off Denis Healey's plans for a wealth tax. But then it's often been hard to distinguish where calls for the maintenance of the country house end and calls for the maintenance of their owners begin. 

The current controversy over the National Trust, for instance, must surely be born of impatience with those of us who insist on asking awkward question about where all this affluence came from. Why can't we do the house and gardens, have a scone in the café, buy some out-of-the-way chutney in the gift shop and then leave them in peace?

With so many memoirs and diaries of upper-class eccentrics, Tinniswood had loads of enticing material and made good use of it. What I want to do now is read The Last of Uptake, a 1942 satire by Simon Harcourt-Smith that he draws on. It ends with Titmarsh the gardener burning the old pile down.

Bertie Wooster goes to Russia: How Britain tried to reverse the Russian Revolution

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews Anna Reid's A Nasty Little War: The West’s Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution in the new London Review of Books:

"A really nasty, dirty little war ... Waste of time, money and everything else" was the way Christopher Bilney, who served as a seaplane pilot in the Caucasus in 1919, remembered it in old age. 

He was one of many British veterans whose memories of Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War of 1918-20 were "uneasy, with guilt and a sense of failure lurking beneath surface jollity". The American veterans - who had less reason for guilt, given that their nation’s participation was relatively benign - sometimes retrospectively compared it to Vietnam. 

In the diplomatic world, a Western consensus developed that the intervention was something best forgotten. Indeed, both Richard Nixon in 1972 and Margaret Thatcher twelve years later succeeded so well in this that they were able to assure Soviet interlocutors that their countries had never been at war with each other.

Fitzpatrick makes the book sound a good read:

The novelty of Reid’s approach comes largely from her generous use of participants’ diaries, letters and memoirs, mainly British, which makes her story unusually entertaining and takes us back into a world of British upper-class twits familiar from Evelyn Waugh, Osbert Lancaster and P. G. Wodehouse – at times, it reads almost like 'Bertie Wooster goes to Russia.' 

But its story is a dark one. The White (i.e. anti-Bolshevik) Russians on whose behalf we had intervened had antisemitism as a central plank of their propaganda, and there were pogroms against the Jewish population of Ukraine while British troops were stationed there.

Mention of Ukraine suggests a worrying parallel, and Fitzpatrick concludes:

Perhaps the real takeaway from Reid’s history isn’t so much a lesson as a premonition: that not too far down the track, we could be witnessing a shamefaced withdrawal of Western support that leaves the Ukrainians - like the Russian Whites a century earlier - to sort out the mess with Moscow on their own.

When John Pugh quoted Evelyn Waugh in the Commons

Yesterday I posted my answers to a short questionnaire about some of my favourite and least favourite reading. 

One of the books I mentioned was Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, and today I found this comment on that post:

Waugh's "Decline and Fall" is a good choice. I once used it in the Commons debate on the Academies Bill to general mystification as no-one who would have read it could have missed the irony of that particular proposal. Philistines !

"The Bill suggests that simply calling schools academies without the dosh will work some special magic. I am personally intrigued by this relabelling exercise.

There may be a day when simply calling an institution a "school" might be some sort of insult or an indication of failure. I do not know whether other hon. Members have read Evelyn Waugh's "Decline and Fall" but in it the hapless Paul Pennyfeather seeks a teaching job through an agency having been expelled from Oxford. He is told by the man at the agency:

"We class schools...into...Leading School, First-rate School, Good School and School. Frankly...School is pretty bad".

Interestingly enough, Waugh's unfortunate character Paul Pennyfeather was expelled from Oxford for indecency, having been de-bagged by drunken members of what Waugh calls the Bollinger Club. There is a slight resonance in that.

The comment was anonymous but a search of Hansard revealed that my hunch was correct: the writer was the former Liberal Democrat MP for Southport, John Pugh.

Dickens, T.H. White and Susan Hill

In the October 2019 issue of Clinical Psychology Forum I answered a few questions about my taste in books for its Books R Us feature.

The book you most often recommend

When I tell people they should read Dickens, which is often, it is Great Expectations I recommend. It is of manageable length, extremely good and contains all the Dickensian themes you could wish for.

The book you should have read but didn't get round to

It’s a long list - as, more shamingly, is the list of books I have started but not persevered with - but at the top is War and Peace.

The book you wish you had written

Ultimately, of course, it’s just Cinderella for boys, but I admire T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone inordinately. It is funny and sad, wise and silly, steeped in history and turns anachronism into an art form.

The book you wish hadn't been written

Wishing books hadn’t been written is not so far from wanting to burn them, so let’s talk about books I wish I hadn’t read. Susan Hill’s Simon Serrailler crime novels are a recent example. I tried one and found I was supposed to care more about the careers of the detective’s extended middle-class family than I was about the fate of the abducted child. What really shocked me was the disregard of the rules of the genre. I tried another to see if it was better. It wasn’t.

The funniest book you know

The older I get, the more I appreciate wit employed in writing with a serious purpose. Paradoxically, setting out to be funny for the sake of it feels cold blooded. So let me choose a young man’s book: Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh.

Why is there something rather than nothing at all?

Time for a bit of philosophy.

This lecture touches on the distinction between prescriptive laws (like the law of the land) and descriptive laws (like the laws of physics) that was the subject of my first Philosophy lecture at York 40 years ago.

Its subject reminds me of Prendergast in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall. He had no trouble believing the whole of Christian doctrine, but had to give up being a clergyman because he could not see why God had created the universe in the first place.

Six of the Best 749

"Going to a recent party to remember my predecessor as editor of Liberal Democrat News, my own party's weekly paper (Mike Harskin, who died 25 years ago aged only thirty) forced me to remember the maverick force that the old Liberal Party used to be. 'Obstruct the doors,' Mike used to say. 'Cause delay. Be dangerous.'" But where is the Lib Dem radical, trouble-making fringe now? asks David Boyle.

Jacob Rees-Mogg is emerging as the new face of Russian political interference in the UK, claims J.J. Patrick.

Jennifer Baker interviews Sharon Kaye about her work engaging children and teens with philosophy.

"Russian spies posing as London antiquarian booksellers is like something from the pages of Le Carré." But it really happened in the 1960s, as Calder Walton reveals.

Georgina Day on what's next for the broken brutalist dream of Thamesmead.

"Personal myth-making was important to Waugh: like many a 20th-century literary man, and one or two literary women, he spent a lifetime constructing a new and supposedly better version of himself out of what was essentially the same material." D.J. Taylor reviews a new edition of the collected works of Evelyn Waugh.

Six of the Best 679

"I think a Labour victory is more likely than a Lib Dem one, but I think a Lib Dem victory is definitely not unlikely." Andrew Hickey explains why the Manchester Gorton by-election could be won by Jackie Pearcey and the Liberal Democrats.

Geoff Crocker on the UK's ritual humiliation of disabled people: "The part of the interview which required the applicant to demonstrate capability of physical movement such as bending to touch the floor, or showing knee reflex, was utterly humiliating, as such needs are neither part of the medical condition nor of our PIP application. I am a pretty robust individual but ended the process in tears."

A veteran women's rights campaigner recalls the stark reality of backstreet abortions in the UK to Kashmira Gander.

Edward Woodward's dystopian TV series 1990 was a favourite of mine when I was in the sixth form. Michael Seeley says it's time it was rediscovered.

Life Must Be Filled Up is enjoying the BBC adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall.

Iain Brodie Browne visits the restored splendour of Old Christ Church in Waterloo.

Evelyn Waugh on coaltions

"It is one very extraordinary thing, your British Constitution," said the ex-King of Ruritania. "All the time when I was young they taught me nothing but British Constitution. My tutor had been a master at your Eton school. And now when I come to England always there is a different Prime Minister and no one knows which is which."

"Oh, sir," said the Major, "that's because of the Liberal Party."

Evelyn Waugh Vile Bodies (1930)

Leicester schools replacing caretakers with Group 4 Securicor

From the Leicester Mercury comes final confirmation that the world has gone mad:

A private security firm has taken over caretaker duties in four city secondary schools.

G4S, formerly known as Group 4 Securicor, is being paid to carry out jobs such as maintaining the building, looking after the grounds, ensuring safety and keeping schools secure.

School staff who notice a problem, such as damage in a classroom, now log the issue with a call centre.

It signals the end of the traditional school caretaker, who for decades was an important figure answerable to the head teacher and employed locally.

And don't take comfort in the fact that only four schools are affected. All Leicester secondary schools are expected to change to employing the security firm over the next few years.

If you want to understand the full absurdity of the scheme, listen to Stephen Trebble of the Leicester Miller Education Company, which builds and maintains schools in the city under the government's Building Schools for the Future Initiative:

“The schools now call a free phone number to log a problem and can track the response. We think it’s better because if, for example, a light bulb has blown, teachers can report it and get on with teaching.

“There will still be the opportunity, such as if a pupil has been sick or something has been spilt, when the clean-up work can be carried out urgently.

“But it will still be logged with the helpdesk just to make sure it has been dealt with.”

The security of Leicester schools at night will naturally be ensured by CCTV cameras monitored from Manchester.

Note how Labour's instinct to centralise everything, seen in Building Schools for the Future, combines with the Tory instinct to privatise everything that moves - even authority figures like school caretakers, who are just the sort of authority figures a thinking Conservative would want to preserve.

And note that they combine in a war, not only on common sense, but on the local community provision that Liberals instinctively favour.

I am reminded of the reaction of Guy Crouchback, hero of Evelyn Waugh's Men at Arms trilogy, on hearing of the Nazi-Soviet pact:

The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.

Boris Johnson, David Cameron and Brideshead Revisited

Prompted by the new film version, Peter Bradshaw writes about the effect of the 1980s television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited on a generation of young Tories:

A whole generation of appalling 80s Oxbridge hoorays, culminating in the Bullingdon Club of David Cameron and Boris Johnson, found in it a manifesto for escapist self-love and this came down to the fact that it was a fantasy that was affordable.

Everyone was on grants. Brideshead Revisited was the Full Grant Fantasy Epic, as redolent of the 80s as Beverly Hills Cop. The awful truth was that the predominantly middle-class strivers of 80s Oxbridge were often financially as well off, or perhaps even better off in ready cash terms, than Sebastian and Charles were in the 20s - during university term-time at any rate. Their income was regular, independent of family whim, guaranteed by the state and fees were paid off at source.

He goes on, including a link to that strangely elusive photograph:

That excruciatingly embarrassing group picture of the 1987 Bullingdon Club (Evelyn Waugh called it the "Bollinger" in Decline And Fall) featuring David, Boris et al, striking silly poses, is essentially a picture of tragic middle-class wish-fulfilment.

They and others of similar interests could wear silly tail-coats or other accoutrements and get drunk at local restaurants, and when the vac came - well, it was not a question of motoring to Brideshead, or even to Charles's picturesque and elegant world of loneliness, but in most cases a National Express coach to a nice house in the suburbs, and the stable, uncool family which underpinned the aspirational, exam-passing commitment that got you to the dreaming spires in the first place.

Will Tory triumphalism be their undoing?

Martin Bright writes on his New Statesman blog:

I was sitting on a panel in the Sky News studios at 2.30am this morning when something horrible flashed up on the giant screen in front of us. Not the tally of lost seats or the projections of what the night's results would mean if reproduced at a general election - though these were bad enough.

No. It was the sight of the Tory leader and Francis Maude enjoying a smugfest at their Millbank headquarters, all specially filmed for Webcameron. And this was just the local elections. Imagine what a general election victory would be like.

And there are plenty examples of such smugness about already. Here are a couple.

Iain Dale has floated the idea of Stanley Johnson succeeding Boris as MP for Henley, and Jonathan Isaby at the Telegraph has enthusiastically taken it up:

The man himself does nothing to suppress the idea.

"Put it this way, I'm still on the candidates' list," the 67-year-old grandfather of eleven and former Conservative MEP has just told me.

"Obviously it would be up to the Henley association as to whether they invite me for interview, but I don't see why I shouldn't put in for it."

Johnson Senior stood in Teignbridge unsuccessfully at the 2005 general election and would be a delightful addition to the House of Commons.

Maybe this is all tongue in cheek, but by-elections where the sitting member has voluntarily walked away from the seat are always difficult for the defending party. (That is why I will believe in Boris's resignation when I see it.) Even in Henley, the idea that Stanley should be the next MP because he is a Sound Chap may not go down well.

And over at the Independent Simon Carr, usually so healthily cynical about all politicians, has come over all floppy and Brideshead about the new Tory leadership:

Some years ago, just before the last general election I was watching Boris performing in the Oxford Union, doing well in his natural habitat.

Later, in the street, among the criminal obesity and facial metal, I couldn't see how Boris could ever appeal to such a world. And I wrote that the Conservative Party didn't have a chance of being elected while Boris was a member of it.

I eat those words, and very nice they taste. Whoever wins in London, the ultimate amateur has made a fantastic breakthrough. It must shatter the world view of Ed Balls and other class warriors that the concept "Tory toff" no longer has the power to move mountains.

It's Gentlemen vs Players, and for good or ill, for the first time in a generation, the Gentlemen are in the game.

We must make allowances: Carr was himself a star of the Oxford Union as a young man and we are all entitled to our personal nostalgia. And the idea that describing someone as a "toff" is enough to dismiss their views is pretty silly. Where would it leave Tony Blair, Nick Clegg or Ed Balls himself?

But come off it, Simon. The idea that the self-important pups of the Oxford Union are too civilised for the rest of us is nonsense. Evelyn Waugh may have gloried in the exploits of the Bullingdon, but he never presented them as moral exemplars.

Nor would anyone who has read Andrew Gimson's biography of him easily describe Boris Johnson as a gentleman. There is something shabby about his act in all senses of the word.

Returning to Stanley, one in the 1970s the Johnson family - boys and girls - all had long blond hair. And Stanley's was the longest and blondest of all. Seen en masse, they resembled the Midwich Cuckoos run to seed.

So Tories beware. Your revival under David Cameron has been based upon at least the appearance of modesty. Much more of this nonsense and the public will remember how much it hates what you really stand for.

Bill Deedes dead aged 94

Shadly no mishtake.

The grand old man of British journalism, former cabinet minister and inspiration for the character of William Boot in Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop has died.

It would be fitting to link to the Daily Telegraph's coverage, but the paper's website seems to be disabled by grief.

So here is the BBC tribute instead.

The real Sandy Arbuthnot

In my posting on John Buchan's Greenmantle I suggested that the model for Sandy Arbuthnot was T. E. Lawrence. It turns out that the character owes more to Aubrey Herbert who, amongst many other things, was Tory MP for Yeovil and (posthumously) Evelyn Waugh's father-in-law.

You can read the Wikipedia article about Herbert, and there is a fuller portrait of him in Desmond MacCarthy's introduction to Herbert's Mons, ANZAC and Kut:

No one understood better the internal and external problems of the Albanians. And if it is asked what Aubrey Herbert most notably achieved during his public career, the first answer is that he contributed more than anyone to bringing into existence the modern independent state of Albania.

Then, if you are really keen, you can read the whole book.

Floon! The whole thing collapsed

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

Not as planned

Ted Heath was awkward to the last. This week I had intended to write about the tunnel collapse at Gerrards Cross, reporting a debate called by the local MP.

You may know the story. Struggling to find a site there, Tesco hit upon the idea of roofing over a railway cutting and building their new store on top of it. The council opposed the plan, but the office of the deputy prime minister waved it through.

A Tesco spokeswoman said brightly: “We can see no reason why the store should not be open by the summer.” Then a couple of weeks ago: Floon! The whole thing collapsed. The Almighty has more respect for local planning authorities than John Prescott does.

But when Ted Heath died this debate was shelved so that everyone could say nice things about him instead.

My clearest memory of Heath is his swansong. As father of the house he presided over the painful process that saw Michael Martin elected as the new speaker. Many people suggested saner methods, but he would not hear of them and so the day ground on.

You suspected that somewhere beneath that bovine stubbornness he was slyly enjoying himself. There were echoes of Charles Ryder’s father in Brideshead Revisited or of Evelyn Waugh himself.

Ted Heath’s heyday is now a foreign country. Union militancy, striking miners – working miners, come to that – and the three-day week. Commentators asked whether Britain was governable and retired colonels drilled private armies in case the balloon went up.

Heath’s claim to immortality as the man who took Britain into the Common Market must be seen in this light. He had distinguished himself in a European war and the argument that it must never happen again had real authority when he expressed it.

But for lesser figures it was the West German economic miracle that was the attraction. They hoped a little of its stardust would brush off on us and offer a way out of the mess of the early 1970s.

Now that miracle is tarnished and it is Britain that sees itself as the model to be followed. Yet you wonder how attractive an economy dominated by a few giant supermarkets appears to others. Which brings us back to Gerrards Cross.