Who needs friends?

Toby Young

0 h dear. I think my forthcoming marriage to Caroline may be in jeopardy. I should never have allowed her father to meet my friend Cromwell.

Cromwell, a 34-year-old CEO of a financial information company, is one of the few American friends I made during the five years I spent in New York. Short, pugnacious and with a warped sense of humour, Cromwell isn't everyone's cup of tea. He comes across like a miniature version of Gordon Gekko, the character played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street, except he's half-joking most of the time. I remember one occasion when two attractive students we were chatting up in a bar told us they were lesbians, hoping to get rid of us. 'Is that right?' asked Cromwell, rubbing his hands together with glee. 'So what are you drinking?' ■

Last week I arranged for Caroline and her dad to stay with a friend of mine in Verbier, not knowing that Cromwell would be in the same chalet. Caroline's dad, Ivo, is a fairly liberal law academic and, according to Caroline, it wasn't long before Cromwell was baiting him with his views on the criminal justice system.

'The quickest way to tackle violent crime is to issue everyone with handguns,' Cromwell announced, his eyes twinkling with mischief. (He once joined the National Rifle Association but only so he could display the bumper sticker on his BMW to annoy his Left-wing neighbours.) 'I'm not so sure about that,' said Ivo. He pointed out that the previous week a teenage American boy had brought a gun to school and shot and killed several of his classmates. Wasn't that a powerful argument in favour of gun control?

'Are you nuts?' replied Cromwell. 'If some of those other kids had had guns in their satchels they could have defended themselves. The reason you get situations like that isn't because we have inadequate gun control in America, it's because not enough of the kids are armed. Issue 'em all with AK47s, I say.'

Cromwell then proceeded to lovingly describe the Gloch he'd bought as a firstyear student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

'But what made you think you needed a gun?' asked Ivo, genuinely perplexed. 'Surely there weren't that many mass murderers around?'

'To shoot Mexicans, of course,' explained Cromwell.

On and on it went, with Cromwell becoming more outrageous at every turn. At first, Ivo was completely shocked, but he gradually began to suspect Cromwell didn't really believe the things he was saying. How could he? How could anyone? In the end, Ivo became quite fond of Cromwell, deciding he was 'quite an amusing little fellow' and not the Right-wing lunatic he'd initially taken him for.

I'm not so sure. No doubt when Cromwell first started spouting this reactionary nonsense back in the Eighties it was purely for the purposes of winding up his fellow students. However, Cromwell has now given voice to these views so often he's ended up half believing them. He's 'kidding on the square', as they say in America. In ten years time r expect all pretence of humour will have vanished and Cromwell will have become the redneck backwoodsman he began by caricaturing.

Exactly the same is true of me. I spent a year at Harvard from 1987-88 when political correctness was at its height and often expressed extremely conservative points of view as a way of demonstrating I wasn't intimidated by the campus thought-police. I didn't so much hold opinions as strike poses designed to rile my Left-wing classmates. But now that the wind has changed I find that, like Cromwell, I'm stuck in these positions. I feel like a man who put on a mask to frighten away a mob of Leftwing martinets and, now that they've dispersed, can't get the damn thing off.

Perhaps this is how most conservatives end up holding the views they do. I remember reading Eric Jacobs's biography of Kingsley Amis a few years ago and being struck by a picture of the Booker Prize winner as a young man making what he described as his 'Evelyn Waugh face'. It was exactly the same face that Amis was making on the cover of the book some 40 years later, only by that time it had become Amiss natural expression.

Does the same fate await Cromwell and me? Witnessing Cromwell's heated exchanges with her father, and noting the similarity between his views and mine, Caroline suggested that I might be better off marrying Cromwell instead of her.

'I don't think you understand,' said Cromwell. 'When I said that I was bisexual, I didn't mean that I like sleeping with men as well as women. I was offering to buy sex, to pay you to have sex with me.'

Thankfully, Caroline refused to rise to the bait.