Spectator New Writing Prizewinner 1971
It has, I confess, afforded your servant no little gratification and amusement to contemplate the pro strations and genuflexions of those selfstyled gentry of the nib, that scato phagous tribe, compliant to their masters as Persian catamites, but veritable yahoos to their appointed enemies, deluging them with the discharge of their foul excrement. Fortunately, ma'am, these chameleons in whom, as in all animals, the strongest instinct is for survival, have readily grasped the • fundamental principle of their existence — which is to assume the political colour of their paymasters. Daily, your servant contemplates with pleasure that army of hacks spilling, in your service, nearly as much ink as your family did blood in the recent, lamentable war.
The gentlemen of the cloth, cognisant as they are of your spiritual and temporal power, have shown themselves no less supine. Is there one of that Impoverished regiment, ma'am, who would reject the philanthropic dispensa tions of your family which, at one and the same time, mollify their consciences and sustain their livings? Moreover, have they not found in your patriarchal records the most splendid and morally edifying examples for the spiritual education of their flocks? It is true that, in these effete and decadent times, some of the incidents of rapine and massacre might be regarded as a trifle barbarous, but these clerics, whose piety is equalled only by their simplicity, find assurance in the fact that each and every deed was sanctified by the Lord Himself. Many a fine moral (they have discovered) is to be drawn from a slit throat or a stoned. harlot.
It might have been thought then, ma'am, that, with all ciraumstances conspiring to bless and favour your fortunes, the arab tribe would long since have sunk from despair into the slough of oblivion. Instead, the importunate ragamuffins grow daily more numerous and obstreperous, deafening the ears of the citizenry with their tinkerish clamour.
The prating of the impotent is, it is true, but a substitute for performance, and of that we have as yet seen but little proof — some minor depredations of your lands, sundry defecations on your footpaths, a few panes broken in the outhouses, and a cockerel or two filched. But the villainous cutpurses threaten now to spread their mischiefs further afield, poaching off others' estates, stealing hay-wagons, defiling wells and the like.
You, Ma'am, have throughout displayed the most admirable steadfastness and fortitude in the face of their flatulent posturings. holding firmly to that unassailable classical precept oderint dum metuant. Let them hate, provided only that they fear. The timorous, however, who, as always,
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