Is Tony Palmer real?
Sir: While appreciating in principle the creation of a character whose monstrous opinions and comic posturings can be used for the subtle denigration of the age-group he is created to represent, I feel that in practice such a characterization can easily fail, and in the case of Tony Palmer, has failed. Caricature must be believable to be effective. Tony Palmer isn't even momentarily believable. The idea behind the creation of Palmer was an inspired one, but it has suffered from its own over-statement. You apparently decided, at its inception, that this character should embody the heartlessness, the irrationality and the boundless self-interest that you felt to be typical of my generation. That through its enlightened fatuousness, its pompous eructations and its presumptuous absurdities it could become the archetype upon which the anathema of the elders could be vented. No longer the need to hunt down and deplore the hideouness of youth in its (as it happens non-existent) smokefilled subterranean refuges. Here within The Spectator itself would be Tony Palmer; the toad from a generation of toads. The polite readers of the magazine would need to go no farther to relish the stupidity of the young. Fortunately it failed. Week by week the column degenerates into flagging attempts to discover yet more unendearing characteristics of the mythical underground to foist upon the hard-done-by Mr. Palmer. And week by week it beccomes more apparent that had he ever had the misfortune to exist, there could be no human condition that could have encompassed his in consistencies, his diverse idiocies and his protracted delusions about the world and his own place in it. Christopher McA/1 Worcester College, Oxford
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