Auberon Waugh on a fellow satirist
The Day of the Grocer William Rushton (Deutsch 95p)
Recently the News of the World ran an absorbing series about people's fantasy lives. Most involved nudity, rape, sexual intercourse in public and the things which one has reluctantly come to accept as being the main preoccupations of one's fellow citizens. If a similar survey were to be held among ex-public schoolboys, no doubt we would all expect it to reveal that their fantasy lives revolved around homosexual masochism — whipping and being whipped. It is an axiom of progressive thought that this should be so, but my own guess is that they would be much more concerned with leading and being led and in this matter the state system has let the side down Rushton's parents invested large sums of money making their boy a leader. Perhaps they hoped that he would be Prime Minister. Unfortunately, the present Prime Minister was chosen in response to a general feeling that after the disaster of Douglas-Home, no more public schoolboys should become Prime Ministers. So our William became a satirist instead, and spent his time making fun of Prime Ministers. No sooner had a large number of public schoolboys become satirists than a whine went up that the satire industry had become undemocratic. Not only must our Prime Ministers be drawn from the lower middle class, but so must those who mock them. It is enough to make anyone bitter.
But William Rushton is too old a hand at the game to be bitter about anything. The audience don't like it, and quite apart from anything else he obviously does not feel particularly bitter. A few things are important — you know, Bangla Desh, world population, that sort of thing — and William acknowledges their importance by tactfully neglecting to make jokes about them. But basically he feels that the role of the funny man is to caper in the wings, at most demolishing and clearing the ground before more important, serious people set about the task of rebuilding.
Or so he represented himself during an interview on Tyne-Tees Face the Press to publicise his book, This reading of his own function is open to two interpretations: that he is a craftsman and artist inspired by a proper humility and concerned only to perfect his craft; or that he is an unscrupulous hack who will pander to popular taste in any way that raises a laugh. If one is to choose which version one prefers one may read The Day of the Grocer and decide for oneself whether the expertise it reveals compensates for its profound lack of constructive argument and its lack even of any wholehearted condemnation of the follies it describes.
Personally, I find that its humour, imagination and wit more than compensate for anything else, but I also feel that Mr Rushton underrates the value of his work. Unless he can accept that the joke is the thing, containing a greater and more worthwhile truth than exists outside it, he has no business to be a joker. If he honestly thinks that his work is only peripheral to the solid achievements, real anti pathy etc of our politicians, he should put away his funny hat, cultivate a classless twang, join the constituency association of his choice and start sucking up to some old age pensioners.
The book is a sober account, humorously told, of Mr Heath's government. The Prime Minister is shown as a victim, conventionally enough. Less excusably, he is shown as a proper object for our sympathy and concern:
" Alec," said the Prime Minister, rising thoughtfully, a strange humility in his bearing, " Am I not a patently honest man? Do I not talk straight from the shoulder? I know I am not as other men. Is that so bad a thing in these torrid days? To be a man moved only by Great Events. Prick me and I bleed . . Do I strike you as cold?" Sir Alec shivered but said nothing; he had was talking about.
no idea what the man 'Alec, I am about to emerge as the greatest leader the country has ever known. I shall be huge, powerful, strong. I shall silence my critics with a wave. Inspire my followers with a song. I shall make the people of Britain jump. Europe will fall at my feet. . . . " So much effort did Sir Alec put into a smile of encouragement that his spectacles fell off.
It is the same with Sir Alec, who is made into a likeable stereotype, straight from William Douglas Home's The Chiltern Hundreds:
There was a knock at the door of the Cabinet Room. The PM softly closed the lid of the piano: "Come," he rapped.
Sir Alec entered from another age.
There is no shortage of excellent jokes. I laughed aloud about ten times. If the book were less good-natured, we should probably laugh less. My only criticism is both pedantic and esoteric, but since I believe it to be true, I shall stick to it: by turning Grocer and Sir Alec into likeable people, Rushton does a great disservice to the cause of truth.
Traditionally, the English have always held their political leaders in a mild and tolerant contempt — or at any rate the more educated and civilised of them have — acknowledging that people are only driven into politics, becoming leaders and influencing events, by some emotional or social inadequacy in their make-up. Plainly, Churchill was less horrible than Hitler, Duff Cooper less horrible than Stalin, but these things are only a matter of degree. With the growth of the public reaction, and greater influence of uneducated and uncivilised voters, it is more important than ever that this tradition should be maintained. There is no shortage of sycophants prepared to build up our politicians as heroes, rather than keeping them in their place. Perhaps they are, in fact, quite likeable; perhaps when pricked, they bleed. But that is not the important or relevant point about them. By showing politicians as human and likeable people, even in caricature, Rushton feeds the vanity and self-importance which it is his proper function to deflate. Worse than a disservice to the cause of true philosophy, it is a betrayal of his old school. Rushton has let the side down. But the book is enjoyable to read.
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