DIARY
A.N.
WILSON
Last week's Spectator contained no less than three articles bemoaning the state of the press and wondering what should be done about it. I view the nastier sides of journalism — the sort of thing which has wives and mistresses in tears as they read of their menfolk's misdemeanours — as play- ing an almost ecological part in the scheme of things. So long as there are politicians like Mr Mellor, there will be papers like he News of the World. So long as there are politicians who fiddle expenses or take freebies' from the Arabs, there will be edi- tors who forge letters to get their informa- tion. One does not much like beetles but they eat greenfly. What the politicians and the journalists who involve themselves in these dramas are slow to recognise is that it is quite possible to sit in the garden and not to be aware of the deadly combat in which the beetles and the greenfly are engaged. There is an enormous section of the literate and intelligent population which takes no interest either in newspapers or in politics. To judge from the younger of my friends, this indifference is growing. Many men and women in their twenties and thirties listen to the news on the radio before they set out to work, but never buy a newspaper from one end of the week to another. The decline' of standards in the press is per- haps to be explained by the fact that news- papers increasingly cater for journalists and politicians, and for that bedrock of 'the public' who like reading about scandals and television stars and goalkeepers. Those who call for a more 'enlightened' press are wanting, I suspect, newspapers for people Who might enjoy The Spectator but do not really enjoy newspapers. C.S. Lewis never read a newspaper in his life. It did him no harm, though it led to some confusion — as when he had a passionate political argu- ment with his brother, ruefully admitting at the end of it that he had always thought Tito was the King of Greece.
ou do not read much about Hell these days in the secular periodicals — or the religious ones, come to that; but every so often some zealot graces the pages of this paper with speculations concerning eternal damnation. Mr John Patten began his career as the most disastrous Secretary of State for Education in our history by writ- ing an article in The Spectator in which he suggested schoolchildren should be taught this puerile and vindictive doctrine. And Auberon Waugh once wrote a cheerier dis- patch from the tomb of St Thomas Aquinas entitled 'Why A.N.Wilson is going to Hell'. I have momentarily forgotten the reason, but I remember the headline. As one Would. If I do go to Hell, I suppose that I shall eventually realise my ambition and meet the Princess of Wales. She will proba- bly be under the impression that she has been consigned to the flames for destroying the monarchy, and I shall be able to point out to her that, while this might be the case, an equally good justification for her being damned would be her habit of popularising baseball caps. Since she started to kit out herself and her children in these hideous items of attire, one sees them everywhere. Before she did so, the only public figure in England who liked to be seen wearing them was Robert Maxwell. I hate the things. On my walks about London, I sometimes wish I was carrying a large sack. I would then be able to whisk the baseball caps from the heads of passers-by and scoop the offend- ing objects into the bag, rather as the dis- creet Parisians ladle the excrement of their dogs into plastic containers. I have just had a walk on Hampstead Heath. Every prospect was pleasing — the sodden autumn trees, almost empty of leaves, the distant views of misty London, the dogs, the ponds — but every few yards one passed an idiot in a baseball cap and it almost destroyed the pleasure of the walk. Can't those who wear them see that they look per- fectly ridiculous?
ast month was Fat Acceptance Month. Because the Americans speak a version of English, we tend to overlook the fact that many of them are ethnically German. It explains so many of their rummer charac- teristics — their disgusting eating habits and their obesity, for example. The Fat Lobby, we now learn, is gaining strength in the United States. The Duchess of Wind- sor's famous doctrine that it is impossible to be too thin or too rich has been replaced by the doctrine that Fat is Beautiful. Mem- bership of NAAFA (The National Associa- tion to Advance Fat Acceptance) is grow- ing in membership, and the state of Michi- gan has already banned 'fat discrimination' in the workplace. We shall doubtless follow suit soon. I do not believe there is fat dis- crimination except in jobs where obesity would be a positive professional hindrance. We all know fat lawyers, fat journalists, fat priests. Presumably, there, the new law will bring to pass a generation of 20-stone jock- eys, fashion models with waists of 60 inch- es, and obese tightrope walkers. This will greatly add to the pleasure of life, and I look forward to it.
Ihave often wondered why Charles Moore, when he was editor of this paper, published an article by me urging everyone to vote Labour. Whatever his motive, my support for Mr Kinnock was disastrously ineffectual; no doubt Charles thought he was doing his bit for the Tories. I thought of this lately when Bel Mooney, in charac- teristically flamboyant manner, announced her support for Mr Blair. That has probably cost the Labour Party about four marginal seats. Now, we read that Lord Shelburne believes that 'there is a strange affinity between the more traditional Labour Party and the more traditional members of the aristocracy'. He says that in matters of architectural 'heritage', as it is called, the socialists are more generous with grants and subsidies, whereas 'the contemporary Conservative politician has a certain dis- dain for the aristocracy'. I am sure all this is true, but will it help Mr Blair's chances of winning the next election? What will the floating voters make of the idea that Blair's party has an 'affinity' with the posh? Readers of this paper, many of them posh or would- be posh, might be under the impression that Lord Shelburne's words will make Labour more attractive. For the generality of voters, I suspect this is not the case. It is time that Blair retaliated and asked some real vote- losers — Mr Kinnock, for instance — to pledge their support for the Tories.
all remember the passage where We Johnson's friend Topham Beauclerk divorces his wife through an Act of Parlia- ment, and Boswell feels moved to stick up for her. 'I said he had used her very ill, had behaved brutally to her, and that she could not continue to live with him without hav- ing her delicacy contaminated; that all affection for him was thus destroyed; that the essence of conjugal union being gone, there remained only a cold form, a civil obligation.' Johnson would have none of this and exclaimed, 'My dear Sir, never accustom your mind to mingle virtue and vice. The woman's a whore, and there's an end on 't.' What I had forgotten, until I chanced on the passage yet again the other day, was that the woman's name was Lady Diana Spencer.
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