ANOTHER VOICE

Now We Are Fifty

AUBERON WAUGH

My own experience was a feeling of liberation. I celebrated the event by not writing a column for The Spectator last week, while recovering from a quiet dinner party for some old friends in Somerset, prepared as a glorious surprise by my dear Wife. It is a pleasant feature of life at this stage, at any rate for many of my contem- poraries, that with our children having grown up and left schools or universities we are all extraordinarily rich. We could spend our money doing good, but common sense rebels at the idea that this is what life is all about, this is what we have spent all the years struggling, fighting and insulting each other for. The great questions re- main: Does life hold any new pleasures? Is there any purpose to life but struggle?

Travel might provide one solution, but over the years I have managed to secure my share of freebies, and I have the impression that in the age of prosperity travel is losing most of its joys. I missed Cambodia and Laos, but have tasted most of the pleasures of Africa and the Far East and am reluctant to believe that those of South America are comparable. Friends with the same problem spend their time trekking through the Himalayas, camping on icy mountain slopes, but I can see no point in that. Discomfort is something one inflicts on the young in the hope that it will be good for their characters, not something one visits on oneself in middle age.

Food and wine provide a constant source of pleasure, but it is hard to find a challenge there. I have eaten snakes in Thailand, crocodile in Cuba, raw horse in Japan, dog in the Philippines. I hoped for a taste of panda in China, but it was not to

be. Similarly, I have missed all the 1945 premiers crus, but I refuse to believe that any claret has ever been made which was better than the 1947 Cheval Blanc I drank a few years ago on my cousin Harry Waugh's 80th birthday, and of which I have a bottle in my cellar.

For years I have been whining on this page about the three cases of the best port ever made — the Quinta da Noval Nacion- al of 1931 — rumoured to be lying in the cellars of the Government Hospitality De- partment under Marlborough House. There seemed only two ways of getting at them. Either I must find out which govern- ment minister runs the Hospitality Depart- ment, become a politician and go for the job, or I must become a highly skilled burglar and dare to tackle one of the royal palaces. Dithering between the two courses of action, I remained a journalist. Then, on Tuesday 21 November 1989, my middle course paid off. A beautiful and charming public relations lady called Catherine Scott (of Catherine Scott Associates, 83 Bushey Hill Road, London. SE5, telephone 01-708 1695, 'Cat litters a speciality') possessed of the rarest genius in her calling, learned that the chairman of Quinta da Noval, Mr Christopher van Zeller, had been similarly deprived, and had a lawyer friend who was prepared to produce a bottle. We drank it beside a regular Noval '31 and a Nacional 1950 at a small dinner party in the Gavroche. Surely, the time has come to sing the Nunc Dimittis and be off.

The poet Walter Savage Landor, con- templating his own demise, wrote some lines which have always irritated me:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art.

I warmed both hands before the fire of life; It sinks and I am ready to depart.

Well yes, nature and art are all very well, but what about the other things, eh? What really irritates me, I see now, is the boast of a strife-free existence. What a wet! Did he never wish to build Jerusalem in Eng- land's green and pleasant land, or to burn down the flat of a neighbour whose Aeo- lian harp was tinkling too loudly?

It is true that the developments of the past few years have proved that there is no point or purpose in any form of political idealism. Not only does socialism do no-

thing to improve the lot of the poor, making it in fact considerably worse, but capitalism also, by scattering plenty o'er a smiling land, creates as much vileness and havoc as socialism creates poverty and oppression. There is no point in making the population any richer or healthier than it is already, outside small and exceptional areas. It is all going to die anyway and already lives quite long enough.

But there is still a struggle which is worth our powder and shot at 50, and that is the class struggle. By this I do not mean we should stand shoulder to shoulder in an effort to drive the workers back to their hovels. Those battles have all been lost. The new class struggle is to reassert the ascendancy of the bourgeois culture in all the fields where it is being crushed by the Murdoch-Thatcher juggernaut: in political and administrative leadership, arts, educa- tion, entertainment, television and news- papers. By 'bourgeois culture' in this con- text I mean the standards of intelligent, liberally-educated people such as still hold the strings of power in most of Europe.

Our opportunity will come when Thatch- er and her yobbish new generation of Conservative MPs are trounced and humiliated at the next election, as they certainly will be if she survives that long. Practically none of the nine million voters in the 18-27 age group will vote for her, because they detest her. Of the 11.5 million voters who, do not normally vote at all, a very large number is going to be politicised in April for the first time by the poll tax. Thatcher desperately needs the yobs' vote of Murdoch's Sun readers, but Murdoch can't deliver them, and might destroy the Sun in the process of trying.

It may well be that a Labour coalition wouldn't last long because all its nostrums are disastrous and the pound would col- lapse within a few months. The class struggle must concentrate first and fore- most on the Conservative Party, always remembering that the yobs are, in fact, a dying breed. There is no earthly reason to surrender to them at every turn and declare the resulting proletarian mess a `classless' party. Let no Conservative candidate be chosen who does not have a respectable Arts degree at one of our better universities. That is a start. But the class struggle should keep us all happily occupied in the years ahead.