Another voice
Fat cats
Auberon Waugh
At Champney's Health Farm, a former Rothschild mansion in Tring, Hert- fordshire, cut off by a blizzard from the rest of the world, one might well expect to hear the howling of wolves from the belt of larches, pine and other specimen trees which surrounds this tasteful estate, its rolling lawns now carpeted in six inches of snow. I find myself here on a week's starvation course after the notorious Spec- tator Winterbottom Dinner, but the other inmates have no such excuse. Could there be anything more exquisitely ridiculous than the sight of 80 or 90 people of all ages and many nationalities cooped up together and paying huge sums of money to be starved?
Perhaps the things we do together make us even more ridiculous. My chief delight, on this occasion, is the Dance Movement Class. We stand in rows on the heavily carpeted floor of the Dance Studio: grotesquely fat Arabs and plump young Orthodox Jewish ladies from North Lon- don, exhausted executives from the Mid- lands and grimly determined Americans with a sort of boy scout trustfulness in their eyes. The walls are made of mirrored glass so that we can see ourselves and our fellow Movers. In front of us stands a wild, pencil-thin young woman in a leotard. When the music starts she begins throwing her arms and legs around, hopping back- wards and forwards and wiggling her bot- tom. We have to follow her movements. By any standards, it is a supremely comical sight, but in a world where it is claimed that half the human race is starving — I do not accept that estimate, and would put it at about three hundredths of one per cent -- it seems to transcend the comic to make a statement about the world in which we live which borders on the sublime.
It may well be the case that corpulence is the Aids of the well-to-do but is this peril a moral problem, as St Peregrine has averred about Aids? I do not think so, feeling it is simply a matter of eating and drinking too much, but I am aware that in an age which increasingly confuses morality with health, physical fitness with a state of grace, I might be in a minority. Perhaps it is an awareness that we are moral outcasts, as well as social castaways, which makes everyone here so friendly to everyone else. This is my fourth visit to Tring and every time I like it more: the , food (though scanty) is better, the staff more obliging, the bed more comfortable and the steam baths more appropriate.
But the pleasantest feeling of all is the sense of fellowship rather like the spirit which people have described as existing in the trenches, and which I always imagined to exist down the coal mines before reading Kit Fraser's excellent book Toff Down Mine (Quartet, £8.95). It is against all reason and common sense to say that these amiable people are responsible for starva- tion in the Third World, or that if they habitually ate less the Ethiopians would eat more. All the food which can get to Ethiopia is being taken there. There is no logical or moral connection between the abundance of food in Europe and the shortage of it in drought-stricken Central Africa, whatever the, communists and socialists and Seventh Day Adventists may claim. We are none of us guilty. The person to blame is called Colonel Mengis- tu, the excitingly left-wing Ethiopian leader.
I was pleased to see that the Observer for once seemed to have grasped this point, with a huge photograph of the fiendish Colonel on page 11 beside the headline: `An act of wanton vandalism'. It was hard to imagine a more sinister countenance, leering behind horn-rimmed glasses, its forehead crowned by a halo of evil black fuzz. But close inspection revealed it was not Colonel Mengistu who was being made the subject of an attack by Melvyn Bragg, but Lord Gowrie. Mr Bragg's intemperate and confused language might, perhaps, have better been applied to Colonel Men- gistu:
He cannot be convincing on the scaffold, pleading for life when he is also the hangman putting on the noose. His present public kickings are those of a man dangling on his own rope.
But on this occasion he has decided to direct our indignation elsewhere. It would appear that like, Sir Peter Hall, he is dissatisfied with the Government's five per cent increase in its grant to the Arts `Mon Dieu! The hatchback of Notre Dame!' Council, and joins the saintly name of Rees-Mogg to his commination against Gowrie: In the past weeks I have spoken to people in the National Art-Collections Fund, to people who run great museums, theatres in country towns, fringe groups in large cities, major and touring companies in London and the regions, film people and book people.. • • Their blame is direct, personal, unerring: Gowrie and Rees-Mogg. Broken promises, failed principles, the disruption of the bung- ler and the ugly debris of demolition: these are the marks of that duo.
So it would appear that the only howling to be heard across the Siberian wastes of Tring, Hertfordshire, comes not from the wolves of the Third World but from the fat cats of the British arts establishment, howling for more cream. I am sorry to say I disagree with practically every word Mr Bragg writes, even from the first sentence. Before describing Gowrie as 'the worst Arts Minister we have ever had', he starts: Lord Gowrie is an exceedingly nice and
cultivated man, better educated in the arts, I would say, than any previous Minister.
On the contrary, I would say, unless Lord Gowrie has completely changed since Oxford, he is an extraordinarily disgusting and uncouth man who knows practically nothing worth knowing about art. But I do not think he is being altogether bad as an arts minister. Perhaps my apparent difference of opin- ion with Mr Bragg can be explained lin- guistically, in the distinction between what he means by 'the arts' and what I mean by `are. 'For the arts have been an immense success in this country over the past 40 years, and the pillar of that success has been the Arts Council,' he writes; and again: 'Between them they are wrecking arts organisation in this country'; 'they are selling the arts down a drain of dogma'; and, best of all: 'The Government, in one stroke, had slit the gullet of arts independ- ence.'
Nobody who is seriously interested in art can imagine that the last 40 years has been anything but a wasteland; nor would many doubt that the Arts Council, on balance, has done more harm than good, encour- aged more idleness than industry, more silliness and pretension than actual achievement. And by what definition of `art' can such expressions as 'arts organisa- tion' or 'arts independence' have any meaning at all? Obviously, our difference is linguistic. By 'are I mean the exalted expression of man's finest skills and best perceptions. BY `the arts' Mr Bragg means that collection of fat cats, pseuds, charlatans and busy coin- mitteepersons which inevitably settles like a swarm of locusts to batten on any government which offers them subsidy. So let the fat cats howl outside. They will not make me feel guilty. I agree that my position among the fat cats within is ridiculous, but it is not so ridiculous as theirs. At least we do not expect the Government to pay for us.
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