Another voice
Search for a new monster
Auberon Waugh
Unaware of the drama which had preceded it, I watched Trooping the Colour luxuriating in the strong emotions it always excites. This time I found that they concentrated eventually into fury and loathing against the new Crown designed to celebrate Prince Charles's wedding, photographs of which had been published that morning.
Everything about the design for this coin is appalling. The two heads, one placed over the other in a 50 per cent eclipse, are rotten likenesses as well as being ugly and vulgar in their composition. The legend: HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES AND LADY DIANA SPENCER 1981 would be suitable enough for some plastic medallion given away at a petrol station, but has no place on a coin of the realm. Traditionally, commemorative coins of this sort should show the couple standing, holding hands, under a dove or some other sacred symbol — he in uniform, she in some elaborate wedding gown. An appropriate legend, running to two decks, might be: CAROLVSPRINC: GALL: ET DIANA COMIT: SPENCERIENS: FIL: IN MATRIMON: CONIVNCI': 1981.
• This vulgar, tawdry little object seemed to summarise everything that was ignorant, silly and cheap in modern Britian, everything that was expressly denied in the ceremony of Trooping the Colour. No sooner has one discovered a crime than one looks for a villain. Who could be chastised for this filth? The wretched sculptor was called Philip Nathan, but no doubt he was acting under orders. Chairman of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee is Prince Phillip, but once could scarcely attack a man on his 60th birthday. Among those who sit on the Committee is the abominable Hugh Casson, formerly architectural director of the Festival of Britain and now, to our shame, President of the Royal Academy. I thought I was getting warmer, but something about the hideous banality of the design, the pious simplicity of the legend, told me that Lord Snowdon must have had a hand in it. Snowdon, designer of London Zoo's bird cage, 'Artistic Adviser' to the Sunday Times since 1962, now President of the International Year of the Disabled, which stands to profit from most of the cheapjack rubbish being sold, he, beyond any question or doubt, was the evil genius behind this latest monument to our national degradation . . .
However before I could make any plans to raise a lynch-mob a news-flash appeared on the screen which drove all thoughts of Disabled Britain away. An unemployed 17-year-old youth had been arrested for shooting blank cartridges at the person of Her Majesty in the Mall. I expect many respectable, middle-class London parents had an anxious moment. Were Matthew and Daniel all right, Julian, Rupert and Alexander safely at home?
In fact it was Marcus. No doubt we shall learn more in the days and weeks ahead about why Mr Marcus Sarjeant decided to let off his starting pistol in the Mall at that moment — if, indeed, the police have got the right man. If he was simply trying to draw attention to himself like so many of his generation — uttering a 'cry for help' — it seems an extraordinarily foolhardy way to set about it, as the reaction of the crowd soon showed. Even from the distance of a television camera situated somewhere in Admiralty House, it looked very much as if the crowd — assisted by policemen, ambulancemen and a guardsman — had torn him to pieces. Let 36-year-old Lance Corporal Alec Galloway of the Scots Guards, immediately named 'The Queen's Hero' by the News of the World, describe the moment that shocked the world: was aware of her horse rearing, but I could see nothing but this lunatic trying to kill her Majesty. I felt sheer bloody anger and hatred as I reached with both hands towards his hair. If need be I could have brought him down and killed him. Anybody in my place would have done the same.'
From piecing the story together afterwards it would appear that about 20 people in his place did exactly that. We may be surprised that anything of the unfortunate youth remains. A few minutes before, in my lonely corner of west Somerset, I had been feeling rather the same about Lord Snowdon, on the supposition that he was responsible for the repulsive 'Charles and Diana' Crown — a conclusion I had reached on intuitive grounds rather as Lance Corporal Galloway supposed that the youth was trying to murder Her Majesty. But for a brief, delirious half-hour at least, the nation was united in its loathing of the youth who had let off some bangs in the vicinity of Her Majesty's horse. This was not, .of course, a loathing of Marcus Sarjeant, because we knew nothing about him at that stage, except that he was 17. We did not even know his name. It was a loathing for the whole idea of him — by extension, a loathing for all the less attractive qualities of the nation's 17-year-old males. With this loathing, or so I would maintain, there was a certain element of terror, and the next extension might well have been a loathing of the modern world and all it stands for.
That, at any rate, explains my earlier feelings towards Lord Snowdon, and it is this tendency to personalise the history of our times which must explain what poor Tony Benn finds so hurtful in our reaction to him.
Can he really complain if he is taken to stand for the odious and half-witted policies he espouses? I think so for this reason, that if other policies showed any greater chance of being acceptable to the odious and half-witted electorate whose support he seeks, lam sure he would be happy to adopt them. In other words, when we say we hate any public figure — Benn, Snowdon or the celebrated 17-year-old Marcus Sarjeant — we are in fact merely expressing our distaste of terror for that part of our society which he represents.
Now that Benn has been struck down by the dread Guillain-Barre Syndrome, we feel a sense of desolation. As the Daily Telegraph leader put it, We Miss Him. This is not just Christian or gentlemanly behaviour towards a man who is apparently suffering from disagreeable sensations in the feet. It is also that we need a personalised hate-figure to reassure us that our anxieties are remediable. Take Benn away — at this stage I might even start calling him 'Tony' — and we are left in terror and hatred of quite a large cross-section among our fellow-citizens, which are no doubt reciprocated. Few of us seem able to live with that awareness.
• We now desperately need another hatefigure. I would suggest Mr Moss Evans, who combines many of the necessary qualities, except that I see from last week's correspondence column in the Spectator that he has already succumbed to a burst ulcer in anticipation. This goes to prove once again that human flesh and blood are too weak a vehicle for the purpose. A significant feature of Orwell's Emmanuel Goldstein, Enemy of the People, was that nobody really knew whether or not he existed, or ever had existed. Just as gossip columnists used to invent Society figures to fill their space, it should not be beyond the ingenuity of political commentators of left and right to invent two composite politicians, combining on the one hand all the qualities of Benn, Snowdon, Moss Evans and M.S. Sarjeant, on the other all those of Mrs Thatcher, Enoch Powell, Raine Spencer and Attila the Hun. This would seem the most humane way of proving the obvious point that it is personalities, not policies, which count.
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