THE SPECTATOR?
SOME OTHER ZEIT Edward Pearce explains why he
has long disliked the sight of this magazine
THE IMMEDIATE defect of The Specta- tor is an overdone dandyism. Immured in a corporate fancy waistcoat, it suffers horri- bly from self-love. When Alan Watkins, sorry, Mr Alan Watkins, spoke of 'Young Fogies', the boys hugged themselves and reacted like Nancy Mitford characters 'How we shrieked!'
But it has strengths. It is literate and gives, on its back pages, full attention to the dead white males writing, painting or composing most of what is worth reading, looking at or listening to. It is also solvent and circulating. There may be a connec- tion. At the New Statesman, Bruce Page annihilated superb arts pages, replacing reviews with a single, 3,000-word, testicle- eroding, significant, relevant contribution to the on-going dialogue. Page left the Statesman unprotected at the back when the front took up compulsory homosexual- ity before collapsing into auto-Pilger.
This melancholy descent, despite recent efforts, illustrates the success of The Spec- tator. Nobody interested in books, art, the- atre and music has looked for them in the Staggers since about 1973 — even though its book pages under Boyd Tonkin are now notably good.
But The Spectator has enough eccentrici- ties on its own front to make a regiment of horse fall about rather. Personality arises: Charles Moore is not a bad fellow — the distillation of paleo-Telegraph values picked up at their most high-flown and run with over the edge of the known world. His new editorship affords a grim pleasure.
But his last effusion here about the beau- ties of railway-bombing and hospital-disso- lution must have been written with the intense frown of a fervent, if challenged, student of a new, hard subject, Mandarin perhaps. Architecturally, that was Apache- Baroque; I think of the real Charles Moore as a triumph of Neo-Gothic.
Women clergy in the Church of Eng- land, the issue which made him go authen- tically pop, is a thrilling hand-held scourge for Anglo-Catholics. And the Left will recognise in that sect a riposte, by way of fixated, off-trolley intellectual delinquency, to our own dear Trotskyism, a sort of tea- rose Trotskyism. Now let's not get this wrong. I don't mind The Spectator offending feminists. Affronting 12-stone women in pink shell- suits for whom men are a conspiracy to rape is pleasure as well as duty (and risky with it). The Spectator is welcome to push the little finger it juts out when drinking tea up a nostril of some yammering emblematic Ras.
But stopping women handing out sacra- ments or sounding off about ethics in the watered water fashion of Anglican ser- mons is absurd. This is the sort of badly paid work into which women are all too readily drawn. But trying to stop them is preposterous, also rotten theology. For the Anglo- (and real) Catholic hang-up on women clergy derives from an old Jewish and Arab prejudice about female unclean- liness. The last Chief Rabbi refused to shake hands with women. (The celibacy of priests, by contrast, is a mediaeval fiscal fix introduced by some Vatican Ken Clarke to raise revenue from clerical estates.) The thunderings from Charles Moore's 19th-century soul which made The Specta- tor sound like High Mass from Keble Chapel is a bow, a veneration he would call it, towards St Paul. And St Paul, the prime minister of Christianity, despite every Roman and Hellenic influence, had, like Mohammed after him, solid desert prejudices.
These prejudices, operating comfortably (and comfortingly) before women started becoming judges and spot-welders, are pure and perfect anachronism. I would expect the next Pope but one to see women priests onto the statute book and the next but four to be called Angela. Logically Charles Moore should then follow Lord George Gordon into Orthodox Judaism.
But anachronism is the name of The Spectator game, making it resemble Pea- cock's Mr Chainmail in Crotchet Castle. Mr Chainmail believed that the world had run sadly downhill since the passing of that best of all centuries, the 12th. There, I'm afraid, in a sentence you have The Spectator Zeit- geist — some other Zeit!
One can take all this quite kindly, as one can the honorary membership of the Loyal Orange Order which descends to The Spec- tator apostolically from Peter Utley 'After taking the most blessed sacrament, we march through the Ardoyne to proclaim solidarity with Lord Craigavon. No Surren- der.' But the brutish Europhobia and the snob-flecked malice towards the Prime Minister are less endearing.
Simon Heifer, that little local unpleas- antness, has departed from both Spectator and Telegraph, but the mannerless ill taste on that text which he imported lingers. Michael Portillo was told by his Cambridge tutor that he wrote with a pickaxe. Heifer writes like its handle. (He also believes in the total immersion theory of cliché.) Thinking Enoch Powell 'immensely great', he and his friends have with minute and particular care chosen all the faults. The paranoia is there, also the notion of opponents as traitors, and neighbouring countries as enemies. Powell on any issue which does not excite his deepest fears is delightful and commonly wise. Where they do stand up, he is self-destructive. The rabid Right within The Spectator share the rage, add their own spite and are alien to both wisdom and delight.
One might mention Paul Johnson here except that his enthusiasm for public exe- cutions, a British Berlusconi to govern us and the replacement of Parliament with a pub wired for prejudices, is less tiresome than his art criticism. I forget whether it was Cezanne or Gauguin that Johnson thought 'overrated', but he adores the Salon painters. And one sees why — politi- cally. Offering works for government pur- chase in the years after Sedan, these artists tended to catch the sun as it glinted on the peak of an Alp — a French Alp — literally the sunlit uplands, and perfect Stalinism for the middle classes.
Nationalist triumphalism has no charms. The Spectator would be thought urbane. What Hafer and Johnson illustrate is that urbanity and Portilloism do not mix. The paper has accommodated more than affec- tation. This dandy snarls too often for my taste.
Previous page
