‘T o my knowledge, in my lifetime three prime ministers have
been adulterers,’ Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1963, ‘and almost every Cabinet has had an addict of almost every sexual vice.’ Another pious Christian put it statistically higher: of the 11 prime ministers he had known, Gladstone said, seven had been adulterers. Mark Oaten’s addiction might have seemed a little outré to the GOM and Waugh, but neither of them was suggesting that private irregularity was a disqualification from public life, and it was Gladstone who had the last word at the time Parnell’s career was ended by the divorce scandal in 1890: ‘What, because a man is called leader of a party, does that constitute him a censor and a judge of faith and morals? I will not accept it. It would make life intolerable.’ He didn’t know the half of it; it has made life intolerable.
Until he mentioned his birthday in a recent Spectator Diary I hadn’t realised how close a contemporary my old chum Hugh Massingberd was. Yes, I too have turned 60, two days before Christmas, and a few other worthies seem recently to have hit the same number. It’s the new 40. It’s also rather good fun. Why, I discover that prescriptions are now free! I find that with my new Railcard I can get a third off fares! (That brings them down to only about half as much again as elsewhere in Europe.) I went to the delightful St George’s on Brandon Hill in Bristol to hear Alfred Brendel, and got £2 off the ticket! The one pity is that none of the phrases for one’s new status — elderly, OAP, oldie — is particular beguiling, although anything is better than ‘senior citizen’. Needless to say the French get it right. Next month I shall be in my beloved St-Martin-de-Belleville, and shall cheerfully present myself for a ski pass as a personne du troisième age.
While it would be nice to add that we are the chaps who put the sex into sexagenarian, I can’t help noticing that there is very little boasting among my coevals about the hot babes we’ve pulled, and that conversation is largely confined to comparison of our respective ailments. I hasten to add that, unlike Hugh among others, I have nothing really wrong with me — as John Gross, another old chum, puts it, I don’t have illnesses, just complaints — but my list of lesser woes was quite long lately, what with backache, tennis elbow and an ear infection requiring more than a dozen visits to the otorhinolaryngology clinic — now called ENT, for some reason — at our local hospital. Until a course of advanced dentistry, my teeth looked as though I had just had a sharp right hook from Joe Frazier, and I was beginning to feel altogether like one of Hemingway’s heroes, ‘a beat-up old bastard’. But the sovereign remedy is talking to others. When I repeated my catalogue of complaints to Alexander Chancellor, one more very old friend, there was a pause before he said, ‘I’m afraid my symptoms are too disgusting to describe.’ I felt better immediately.
Come to think of it, Michael Wharton must have been almost 60 when I first met him. ‘Heartening’ is not the first word that springs to mind about Michael, who was mildly misanthropic and acutely melancholic: his funniest and most dazzling flights of fancy were often written when he was deepest in gloom. But apart from the fact that his ‘Peter Simple’ column truly was touched by genius, it’s cheering to think that he didn’t begin in journalism until he was 42, and was still writing days before his death at 92. As General Nidgett would have said, all you need is vision, initiative, bags of guts, vision, and sheer physical fitness.
Literary prizes are very foolish things, Kingsley Amis used to say, ‘except when you win one’. I shall remind myself of his words next Wednesday when the Channel 4 Political Book Award is announced, having to my gratification and amusement found my latest book on a notably impressive shortlist. Along with Not Quite the Diplomat, another memoir in which Chris Patten makes you think that he actually writes his own books (some Tory politicians give the impression that they don’t read their own books), there is Leo McKinstry’s excellent life of Rosebery, and two sour squints at New Labour, Philip Cowley’s The Rebels: How Blair Mislaid His Majority, and The Spin Doctor’s Diary by Lance Price, which is all the more amusing because Price thinks that he is still a Blairite loyalist and simply doesn’t understand what a hideous portrait he draws of the Downing Street junta. Stuart Proffitt of Penguin Press has the distinction of having published two books on the list (Patten’s and mine), so he’ll have to forgive me if I say that the last is the one I myself would choose, The British General Election of 2005 edited by David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh. Our language lacks a word for a certain kind of savant, but the French get it right once more with politicologue. David Butler is the politicologue des politicologues. Since his first study of the 1951 election before Tony Blair was born, let alone David Cameron — he has turned out more essential books on the subject than anyone else alive. Leave aside prizes, in a just society he would be a baronet and CH by now.
One vexation not soothed by the passing years is unbearable phrases of the moment, which I keep thinking I shall hear reduced to absurdity: ‘The jury’s still out on Lord Haw-Haw’ (no it isn’t) or ‘You don’t need rocket science to get to the moon’ (yes you do). What I did hear the other day was this. I had a hitch or glitch in cyberspace and rang what likes to be called a helpline. After a few minutes my interlocutor admitted she couldn’t cure the difficulty, so I thanked her in weary tones, and she responded brightly, ‘No problem!’ As I put the blower down, I snorted out loud, ‘Yes there bloody well is a problem, my dear girl. Why do you think I rang you?’ And have a nice day, if you must.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s The Strange Death of Tory England is published by Penguin.
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