All posts tagged progressives

Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh (1942)

‘[A uniform] is the best possible disguise for a man of intelligence. No one ever suspects a soldier of taking a serious interest in the war.’
(Colonel Plum to Basil Seal in Put Out More Flags, page 150)

Background

In his preface to the 1966 edition, Waugh tells us Put Out More Flags was the only book he wrote for pleasure and it shows. It isn’t exactly a comic masterpiece like Decline and Fall or Scoop, it isn’t a scandalous portrait of a generation like Vile Bodies, it isn’t scarred by a devastatingly bleak conclusion like Black Mischief or A Handful of Dust. Instead it is suffused by a warm, deep sense of English patriotism, embodied in a surprisingly buoyant good humour, occasionally rising to real laugh-out-loud comedy.

Waugh wrote Put Out More Flags on a troopship back from Crete after the island fell to the Nazis in 1941. He had been serving in the army for two years (experiences which would be transmuted into the wonderful Sword of Honour trilogy). Now, as the ship sailed slowly around the entire coast of Africa, he had time on his hands, so he took advantage of the enforced idleness and wrote all day every day, completing the first draft in just a month.

Subject

The narrative covers the period of the Phoney War or what some humourists called the Bore War, between Britain’s declaration of war on Nazi Germany on 3 September 1939 and the sudden German attack on France in June 1940, a long nine months during which we were technically at war but there was no direct attack on Britain. The narrative is divided into four simply named sections, Autumn, Winter, Spring, with a brief epilogue, Summer.

The return of Basil Seal

In part, Waugh wanted to find out what had happened to the characters he’d created in his previous novels. As Waugh himself puts it:

The characters about whom I had written in the previous decade came to life for me. I was anxious to know how they had been doing since I last heard of them, and I followed them with no preconceived plan, not knowing where I should find them from one page to the next.

The narrative opens with Basil Seal, the dashing scapegrace who was at the centre of Black Mischief, because Waugh obviously realised he could use Basil as an entry point to different aspects of English life.

1. Thus we hear for the first time about Basil’s extended family and in particular his sister, Barbara Sothill, who lives at a classic Waugh country house, Malfrey, beside a lovely village in a lovely part of the Midlands, somewhere. This allows Waugh to do lovely descriptions of the countryside and repeat the rather sentimentalised vision of the English country squire he had deployed in A Handful of Dust.

But the house now wears a mournful aspect: Barbara’s servants have mostly gone off to work in factories, and her husband, Freddy, has rejoined his reserve regiment. To her own surprise, Barbara has become the billeting officer for her district, that’s to say she has responsibility for finding accommodation for evacuees from the nearest city (Birmingham) among the local villages. This is played for laughs as Barbara, previously a welcome sight to friends and neighbours, now becomes a scourge, the arrival of her car in the drive now the prelude to requests to the tremendous inconvenience of putting up ghastly working class families or children.

2. Basil’s mistress is Angela Lyne. In what develops into an interesting and moving storyline, we watch Angela hurry back from the South of France immediately after war is declared, back to a service flat in Mayfair and then… then something happens. She holes up in her bedroom and becomes addicted to listening to the news on the radio and… takes to drinking, takes to asking her maid for a drink early in the morning and then… takes to wearing dark glasses, at home, during the day, even with the curtains drawn. It’s a really interesting portrait of someone badly undermined by the declaration of war, someone thrown off their game, made ill by uncontrolled thoughts.

Insofar as Angela was once a luminary of London high society she is also a kind of entrée into that world, occasionally leaving her seclusion to attend a party given by the egregious Lady Metroland, no matter how peripherally, in every Waugh novel since Decline and Fall.

Also, Angela has a husband, Cedric Lyne. They’re in their later thirties now and it is very sympathetically handled, the way Cedric was initially upset when his wife began an affair with Basil, thinking it would all blow over, accepted it was going to last a bit longer, and only slowly realised Basil was in the fact the love of her life. They remain married because, well, the fuss my dear, of getting divorced. So disruptive. More importantly, being a ‘divorced woman’ would close society doors to her, and being in society is her life, and so she persuades Cedric not to divorce her but to continue living on at the family place in the country where he has poured the energy which should have gone into being the head of a happy family into, instead, collecting, importing and installing grottos from around southern Europe.

3. Thirdly there is Basil’s mother, the rather formidable Lady Seal, on first name terms with the Prime Minister, a type of the grand old lady of London society, who is endlessly fussing and fretting about her errant son.

Sir Joseph Mainwaring

Sir Joseph is a minor character who provides great amusement. He is an old friend of Basil’s mother. He enjoys her company but dreads the conversations they have to have about her scapegrace son’s future. As soon as war is declared Lady Seal conceives the ambition to get Basil into ‘a good regiment’. For people like her the war isn’t so much a thing to be fought and lost – or their assumption is simply that England, being in the right, will win – it is about having the right sort of war.

Thus she persuades a very reluctant Sir Joseph to invite Basil for lunch at his gentlemen’s club, the Travellers, with the aim of introducing him to the Lieutenant-Colonel of a (fictional) regiment, ‘the Bombardiers’ who, as Waugh goes on to say with typical bitchiness, is ‘-an officer whom Sir Joseph wrongly believed to have a liking for him’.

Basil’s luncheons at the Travellers’ with Sir Joseph Mainwaring had for years formed a series of monuments in his downward path. There had been the luncheons of his four major debt settlements, the luncheon of his political candidature, the luncheons of his two respectable professions, the luncheon of the threatened divorce of Angela Lyne, the Luncheon of the Stolen Emeralds, the Luncheon of the Knuckledusters, the Luncheon of Freddy’s Last Cheque – each would provide both theme and title for a work of popular fiction.

The lunch with the Lieutenant-Colonel is a predictable and amusing disaster, Basil turning up unshaven and unkempt, and making a disastrous impression. He follows this up with a visit to the L-C in his office which goes even worse, with the old boy almost choking with fury at Basil taking for granted that he will be quickly promoted and able to leave the boring old Bombardiers behind. He barely escapes the old boy’s office without a serious shouting-at.

So much for Sir Joseph. After this abortive attempt to help Basil, he settles down to become a bit character, pompous possessor of ‘a peppercorn lightness of soul, a deep unimpressionable frivolity’, occasionally wheeled on to give opinions and predictions about the war which are consistently and hilariously wide of the mark.

A theory of gossip

A word about gossip. Waugh loved gossip. If his novels weren’t enough of an indication, we have Waugh’s extensive letters and diaries which show what a tremendous party animal, socialiser, snob and social climber he was. From private school through Oxford and on into London’s society and literary circles, it was very important to Waugh to cultivate friends in the right places, be au courant with the young party set, and hobnob with the finest titles he could manage.

So far, so biographical. The point I want to make is the distinctive effect this has on his fiction. This is that no matter what happens to the main characters, Waugh always shows us its impact on ‘society’, on other people gossiping and commenting about them. There are always two levels: the level of the main events happening to the central protagonists; and then a fog of rumour and gossip about them.

In A Handful of Dust an entire extra layer is added to the narrative by the way Waugh describes not only the central tragedy of the accidental death of little John Andrew, but the way every step of Tony Last’s response is reported, repeated, commented on and analysed by outsiders, people not directly connected, people in London’s endless parties who get the facts wrong, twist the facts, and end up making Tony the bad guy in his divorce with Brenda in which, as we the readers see and know, he is utterly innocent.

Although the word ‘gossip’ sounds trivial, I think the way Waugh deploys it in most of his novels reflects a profound truth about human life. Gossip is, in fact, how most of us are perceived in society – not as the brave, clever, hard-working people we think ourselves to be, but as other people see us: the cranky one who’s always getting into arguments, the boring one who always sits in the corner, the scruffy one who always arrives late, who got drunk and did something embarrassing at the Christmas party, and so on.

Most of us live our lives very much for-ourselves and only occasionally overhear what other people really think about us. And when it happens, it is without exception profoundly disturbing to overhear friends or work colleagues everso casually dismissing you, reducing you to a few crude strokes of caricature, to the punchline to a few unrepresentative anecdotes. ‘But I’m more than that,’ you want to protest, ‘I am all these wonderful feelings and perceptions and thoughts and intuitions!’ Not to other people, you aren’t. To other people you’re the one who’s rubbish at telling jokes, gets drunk and argumentative at parties, and broke the office photocopier. A ridiculous caricature.

Lots of people rattle off John Donne’s quote about ‘No man is an island’, but it would be far more accurate to say no person can escape the comments, jokes, criticism, and behind-their-back sniggering of family, friends and work colleagues. No one.

Waugh’s fiction brilliantly conveys this sense that, despite our fondest illusions, we may like to think of ourselves as people-for-ourselves but can never escape mostly being people-for-others. The mistreatment of Tony Last in Handful of Dust, the way his behaviour is misrepresented and traduced by everyone else in the story, even his own servants, is probably the epitome of this vision of humans trapped in a web of other people’s commentary, but it is present in all Waugh’s novels – the notion that all human lives are lived on two levels: first, the actual events themselves and the feelings and motivations of the main actors; and then the limitless way all these fine feelings and high motivations are eclipsed by the superficial rush to judgement of hundreds of strangers who don’t the know the first thing about you but gleefully repeat the most malicious distortions of what you said or did.

Most of the time Waugh plays it for laughs but sometimes to bring out the intense bitterness his characters feel at society’s misunderstanding and judging them (as in Handful of Dust). That’s one it its strengths, as an approach to fiction, this deployment of ‘society’ as a kind of permanent chorus on the action, is that it can be either comic or tragic, as required. But it is always there. Not the fashionable ‘Other’ of sociology and literary theory, much worse: the others, the potentially endless ranks of people who don’t give a toss about you or, if they think about you at all, it’s as a monster, a bully, an oaf, or a fat figure of fun.

In the deftness with which he captures this often overlooked aspect of society, I think Waugh is more profoundly realistic than many more supposedly ‘serious’ novelists.

In this book this aspect of society is epitomised by the incident of Angela at the cinema. As mentioned above, the once supremely confident and renowned Mrs Angela Lyne undergoes a sort of breakdown, taking to her bed, obsessively listening to the radio news and drinking. Her only escape is now and then to totter down the road to the pictures.

One of the recurring characters, Peter Pastmaster, son of Lady Metroland, has a) joined the army b) decided he ought to get married so, in a comically frivolous way, is dating three of the most eligible young heiresses in London. One evening he’s taking one of them, Molly Meadowes, to the pictures and they come across Angela making a fuss because she can’t get the kind of ticket she wants, down at the front. As Peter and Molly push through the queue to get to her, Angela trips and sits down with a bump and the commissionaires are starting to make a fuss. So they pick her up, call a cab, and take her back to her flat, leaving her in the hands of her maid, Grainger.

And then – and this is the point in mentioning it – Waugh shows us how this fairly simple event gets quickly blown up by society gossip into a legend about a roaring drunk Angela getting into a fight with the commissionaire and cabby before being rescued by Peter. Nothing goes ungossiped about. Nobody can escape their life being pawed and prodded and simplified and ridiculed.

(There’s also something profoundly psychologically true in the way that the little escapade of helping drunk Mrs Lyne back to her flat brings Molly and Peter together. Molly thinks it’s sweet the way naive Peter doesn’t even realise Angela is drunk. And she is touched by his genuine chivalry and concern. And so she decides to marry him, a fact Peter proudly announces to his mother, Lady Metroland, later the same evening.)

Left wing intellectuals

So the book reintroduces us to a number of recurring characters from the previous novels, but there are also some new developments. One is a departure for Waugh, a comic description of left-wing bohemians. This is the social set revolving around the fiery painter Poppet Green. A bit like in Vile Bodies Waugh establishes the speech patterns or the recurring topics of conversation in Poppet’s circle so that he can drop snippets of their conversation into larger chapters; so he can cut away to brief dialogue between Poppet and comrades for a quick page before cutting away to something else, having established their tell-tale topics of conversation.

We generally know we’re in that milieu because Poppet and all her friends talk endlessly about communism, and the proletariat, and Russia, are very quick to throw the accusation of ‘fascist’ about (how nothing changes in the ‘progressive’ mind) but above all, how they obsess about the two noted communist poets and best friends, Parsnip and Pimpernell. This pair and their fierce and urgent poetry are seen as the ne plus ultra of the proletarian pose in the arts, literature, specifically poetry.

It helps if you know that Parsnip and Pimpernell are Waugh’s (very effective) comic nicknames for the poet W.H. Auden and his best friend, the playwright Christopher Isherwood. For the entire decade of the 1930s Auden’s thrillingly modern poetry had dominated the world of literature, capturing everything, describing everything, making all political issues more burning and urgent with his brilliantly modern tone of voice and imagery of factories and cars and planes and skyscrapers.

However, just as his reputation was at its height, and just as the political world they had described so well finally reached the crisis they had predicted for so long, with the outbreak of war against international fascism…that’s the moment when Auden and Isherwood, in real life, decided to leave England and emigrate to America (in January 1939). And so, in this fictionalised caricature of events, the great debate which rages among Poppet Green and her friends, is whether Parsnip and Pimpernell were right to abandon their country in its time of need… or did they do the right thing, by staying loyal to their muses and their ART?

The name of the poet Parsnip, casually mentioned, reopened the great Parsnip-Pimpernell controversy which was torturing Poppet Green and her friends. It was a problem which, not unlike the Schleswig-Holstein question of the preceding century, seemed to admit of no logical solution for, in simple terms, the postulates were self-contradictory. Parsnip and Pimpernell, as friends and collaborators, were inseparable; on that all agreed. But Parsnip’s art flourished best in England, even an embattled England, while Pimpernell’s needed the peaceful and fecund soil of the United States. The complementary qualities which, many believed, made them together equal to one poet, now threatened the dissolution of partnership.

In the five novels and four travel books up to this point, Waugh had shown himself a master of depicting the English upper classes partying in Mayfair or at home in their delightful country houses. Describing the rougher, avowedly left-wing and ‘radical’ world of bohemia and the arts is a notable departure of milieu but one he brings off very well. Poppet and her creatures’ endless internecine bickering over ideology and the ‘correct’ line to take is very funny in itself and shows the reader just how little changes in the harshly judgemental and accusatory progressive mindset.

Ambrose Silk

A doyen, a leading figure in this world, although older than many of the others and not as politically engaged as the young firebrands, is the gay, Jewish aesthete Ambrose Silk. The novel contains a number of new characters, but Silk is the one, standout, major new character. He is a great creation and joins Basil as the other major protagonist of the story.

For Ambrose has depths. He is unhappy. He feels like a man out of time. He is an aesthete. He should have been born in the age of Oscar (Wilde) and Aubrey (Beardsley). He goes along with the fashionable political chatter of Poppet Green and her salon of fashionable communists, but feels alienated from them.

But then, he feels alienated from everyone. When he finds himself in the kind of fashionable society party he feels just as ill at ease. He gets a comedy job at the Ministry of Information, in the religious department of all places, and, as an atheist Jew, feels out of place among his caricature Catholic, Anglican and nonconformist colleagues.

And Ambrose is clinically paranoid, a prey to fluttery ‘persecution mania’ (p.174). Just as Waugh shows us Sir Joseph Mainwaring on a number of social occasions making wildly inaccurate predictions about international affairs (for example, that Italy is biding its time before allying with Britain and France), so Waugh shows us a series of scenes in which Ambrose anxiously asks the people he’s with whether they think that, if the Nazis win and invade Britain, they’ll come for Jews like him? And ‘communists’ like him? And intellectuals like him? And homosexuals like him?

On all these occasions Waugh goes deep into Ambrose’s thoughts, giving us almost stream of consciousness depictions of his anxiety and alienation, something he rarely does. Most of his characters just act and talk and we see them only from outside. This dwelling on Ambrose’s inner world is most unusual. It sounds like this:

The party left the restaurant and stood in an untidy group on the pavement, unable to make up their minds who was going with whom, in what direction, for what purpose. Ambrose bade them good-bye and hurried away, with his absurd, light step and his heavy heart. Two soldiers outside a public-house made rude noises as he passed. ‘I’ll tell your sergeant-major of you,’ he said gaily, almost gallantly, and flounced down the street. I should like to be one of them, he thought. I should like to go with them and drink beer and make rude noises at passing aesthetes. What does world revolution hold in store for me? Will it make me any nearer them? Shall I walk differently, speak differently, be less bored with Poppet Green and her friends? Here is the war, offering a new deal for everyone; I alone bear the weight of my singularity.

Ambrose’s magazine

Out of this swirl of emotions and worries, Ambrose conceives the idea of publishing a literary magazine. But isn’t this the worst possible timing, people ask, just as a war is breaking out? No darling, Ambrose explains, it is exactly the right time for a magazine which will preserve all that is best in our civilisation. So he persuades the niche and not very successful publishers of his previous books to back him, being Rampole and Bentley. His magazine will breathe the same rarefied atmosphere as the famous Yellow Book and will be called the Ivory Tower.

There is comedy in the way, over the next few weeks, it becomes clear that almost all the articles in the magazine will be written by Basil himself. His publisher says this will spark criticism, he needs to think up some noms de plums to give the sense of a variety of contributors and so he comes up with some ludicrous names:

Ambrose rather let himself go on names. ‘Hucklebury Squib’, ‘Bartholomew Grass’, ‘Tom Barebones-Abraham’.

Above all, Basil realises the magazine will give him an outlet to express his great, romantic (homosexual) love for a good-looking German boy he met and had an affair with only last year, a youth named Hans. He quickly pens a 50-page hymn to the young man’s virility and good looks and vitality. Tragically, although Hans was a keen member of the Nazi Brownshirts, when it was discovered that he was (like Ambrose) Jewish he was swiftly arrest, disgraced and taken away to a concentration camp, while Ambrose was forced to flee Germany in fear of his life (shades of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin memoirs).

The memoir will, Ambrose breathlessly tells his friends, be titled ‘Monument to a Spartan’ and he shows his friend Basil a copy.

Basil’s scams

Back to Basil for a moment. In the winter section, having signally failed to join the army he goes to Malfrey to stay with his sister. She’s grateful for the company and they soon fall back into the nicknames and games rough and tumble they shared as small children.

The Connollys

Basil gets involved with his sister’s role as evacuating officer and soon discovers there is one particular set of orphaned kids from Birmingham who no-one will touch, the Connolly children:

There was Doris, ripely pubescent, aged by her own varied accounts anything from ten years to eighteen. An early and ingenious attempt to have her certified as an adult was frustrated by an inspecting doctor who put her at about fifteen. Doris had dark, black bobbed hair, a large mouth and dark pig’s eyes. There was something of the Esquimaux about her head, but her colouring was ruddy and her manner more vivacious than is common among that respectable race. Her figure was stocky, her bust prodigious, and her gait, derived from the cinematograph, was designed to be alluring.

Micky, her junior by the length of a rather stiff sentence for house-breaking, was of lighter build; a scrawny, scowling little boy; a child of few words and those, for the most part, foul.

Marlene was presumed to be a year younger. But for Micky’s violent denials she might have been taken for his twin. She was the offspring of unusually prolonged coincident periods of liberty in the lives of her parents which the sociologist must deplore, for Marlene was simple. An appeal to have her certified imbecile was disallowed by the same inspecting doctor, who expressed an opinion that country life might work wonders with the child.

There the three had stood, on the eve of the war, in Malfrey Parish Hall, one leering, one lowering, and one drooling, as unprepossessing a family as could be found in the kingdom.

It should be added that Marlene pees and poos everywhere, indiscriminately. Well, to cut a long story short, after some attempts at trying to park these delinquents with decent folk, Basil has a brainwave. Potential hosts take against them so quickly and totally that one of them offers him money to take them back. Bingo! He realises they are a money-making proposition. And so Basil gets hold of Barbara’s address book and embarks on a campaign of parking the revolting children with the sweetest, nicest, kindest people he can find – almost all of whom ring up within a few days, sometimes a few hours, begging to have them taken off their hands. How much? asks Basil, and start to turn a tidy profit.

What makes it that much more realistic and funny is that flirtatious Doris takes a massive shine to Basil and wants to follow him everywhere and be with him all the time. Basil is a rascal and they soon come to an understanding, namely he is nice to Doris provided she controls her horrible siblings and then obeys orders to play up the second he’s left them with an innocent family.

Meanwhile, as a kind of side order, Basil comes across a nubile recently married young woman whose husband has gone off to join his regiment, is all sad and lonely and so… being the charmer he is, starts an affair with her.

The Ministry of Information and the Ambrose scam

From time to time he travels up to London and hangs around the Ministry of Information, located in Senate House, Bloomsbury (where George Orwell worked, where John Wyndham worked, where half London’s unemployed writers hung around hoping to get a gig, and where Ambrose Silk incongruously gets a job in the Religious Department).

A fluent liar he bluffs his way past security telling them he works for (the non-existent) M.I.13. Utterly at random he is distracted by a very good-looking young woman and follows her down corridors and into the office of one Colonel Plum. He resolves to get a job here, purely and solely to see if he can seduce Susie the sexy secretary, but to do so he finds himself having an impromptu interview with the Colonel in charge of this little unit.

In this absurd interview, Colonel Plum makes it clear he needs to track down and, ideally arrest, enemies of the state. Basil reflects on Poppet Green and her circle of left-wing bohemians, and quickly ad libs:

‘I know some very dangerous communists,’ said Basil.
‘I wonder if they’re on our files. We’ll look in a minute. We aren’t doing much about communists at the moment. The politicians are shy of them for some reason. But we keep an eye on them, on the side, of course. I can’t pay you much for communists.’

What the colonel can pay for is fascists, does Basil know any fascists, he’ll make him a captain in the Marines if he can hand over some fascists? Basil thinks again and has a characteristic brainwave. Ambrose and his essay about beautiful German youth, Hans, a member of the Hitler Youth! Basil tells the colonel he may be onto something, he’ll report back in a few days.

Basil goes his ways, which involve dropping into the office of the Ivory Tower. There are some proofs of the first edition lying around and also a passport, from an Irish priest of all things, a Father Flanagan, S.J., Professor of Dublin University. He wants to visit the Maginot Line in his capacity of correspondent for some Catholic paper and, in the usual chaotic way of the ministry, his application along with his passport have found their way to the religious department of the Ministry of Information, where Ambrose pretends to work. On a whim, Basil nicks it, like he steals so many other random bits and bobs, never knowing when they’ll come in handy or he can flog them for a little cash in hand.

Anyway, he rifles through the proofs and rereads Ambroise’s stirring essay about Hans again. When Ambrose returns to the office, Basil tells him it’s a masterpiece, except for the ending, the bit where the hero is dragged off kicking and screaming to a Nazi concentration camp. Reads like pure propaganda, Basil says, the worst kind of yellow press melodrama, ruins the artistic integrity of the whole.

Ambrose, permanently nervous and paranoid, takes Basil at his word and cuts the final pages of his memoir thus, unintentionally, converting it into a hymn to Nazi youth. A few days later, once it’s printed, Basil triumphantly re-enters Colonel Plum’s office and throws on his desk a copy of Ivory Tower open at the Nazi essay.

The Colonel is delighted, all the more so since the magazine is so obviously a hotbed of Nazi sympathisers, this Hucklebury Squib, Bartholomew Grass and Tom Barebones-Abraham, yes he’s going to arrest the lot of them!

Only as he overhears the Colonel phoning up the police and Special Branch to plan a dawn raid on the magazine’s offices does it dawn on Basil, for the first time, that he might have overdone it a little. It is worth remembering that Basil is prepared to betray one of his closest ‘friends’ and a number of other utterly innocent people (the publishers Rampole and Bentley) purely so that he can get the promised job of captain in Marines and maybe sleep with Susie, ideally both. Basil is charming, funny, and utterly amoral which sounds funny but boils down to the fact that he is a scumbag.

Waugh milks the unfolding disaster for all the comedy he can. Officials interview Mr Bentley, the younger of the two publishers and, seeing the way the land lies, he agrees to co-operate fully and, in a funny scene, proceeds to give detailed descriptions of the magazine’s other contributors, Hucklebury Squib, Bartholomew Grass and Tom Barebones-Abraham, people we know to be utterly fictional but the cops don’t.

In a comic scene written in a deliberately arch knowing style, Waugh describes the arrest of the older partner in the publishing firm, Mr Rampole, his bewilderment at the accusations, his trial, conviction and sending to prison, Brixton Prison to be precise, up the road from me as I write, where, with typically Waughian whimsy, he turns out to be quite comfortable, discovers a taste for reading light literature and gains face, especially with the prison padre, from personally knowing several of the authors. ‘He was happier than he could remember ever having been.’ Waugh likes throwing his characters in prison; remember how half the cast of Decline and Fall end up in chokey and the way Paul Pennyfeather, also, rather enjoys its solitude, the lack of distractions, the luxury of reading all day long. Waugh’s vision of prison makes it sound like a cross between a monastery and a rarefied college library.

So what about Ambrose Silk, the man Basil has told Colonel Plum is at the centre of this dangerous Nazi conspiracy? Basil doesn’t let him be arrested like the publishers but has another brainwave / elaborate scam up his sleeve.

Remember the passport of the Irish priest he pinched in Ambrose’s office? Turns out to be a vital prop or peg for the plot because. For late the night of the arrests Basil bursts into Ambrose’s flat and tells the half-awake wretch that the authorities are coming to arrest him (Ambrose doesn’t need much persuading and doesn’t put up any resistance because, as has been amply emphasised throughout the book, he is a quivering jelly of paranoid fear that ‘they’ are out to get him). Basil persuades him his best course of action is to flee to Ireland in the guise of this Jesuit priest, Father Flanagan and he has brought along ‘a clerical collar, a black clerical vest ornamented with a double line of jet buttons, and an Irish passport’. He hustles Ambrose out of his flat, down the stairs and they are at Euston station waiting for the train to Holyhead in 15 minutes.

‘But what about my flat and my things?’ wails Ambrose at which point Basil has another, simple brainwave. ‘I’ll move in,’ he tells Ambrose,’ and look after everything for you.’ ‘Oh you are so kind,’ smiles Ambrose, in a moment which exemplifies Waugh’s technique of comic and malicious irony. So Ambrose keeps his hat pulled low over his head and tells the rosary beads Basil has provided and catches the train to Holyhead and the ferry to Ireland and then travels as far west as he can in order to escape the pursuing ‘authorities’ In the event he finds a room in a remote village on the west coast, settles in with his minimal belongings and finally finds himself with the peace and time on his hands to write the Great Book he’s been meditating for so long. He, also, rather like Rampole, has found an unexpected peace amid the beautiful Irish scenery.

And thus Basil takes over Ambrose’s luxurious flat which is a far more fitting scene for his seduction of Susie, which proceeds like a dream, especially after he wangles her a promotion at the Ministry, and soon she has moved in with him, the latest in a long line of conquests. In a typical detail which is both funny and heartless, Basil sets Susie to work with needle and silk and embroidery scissors, unpicking the As from the monograms on Ambrose’s crêpe-de-chine underclothes and substituting in their place a letter B for Basil.

Schoolboy japes

The book’s two highpoints are Basil’s scams, the Connolly scam in part one, and the Ambrose scam at the end of part three. From my descriptions you can see how both are really schoolboy japes, species of practical joke. they rank up there with the premise of Scoop, i.e the mistaken identity of William Boot, or the practical joke which launches his entire novel-writing career, the debagging and dunking in a college fountain of Paul Pennyfeather, for which it is Pennyfeather and not the hooligans who assaulted him who are punished. Waugh’s world is one where innocence is always abused and honour is traduced (as poor Tony Last is traduced in Handful of Dust). Clever people play practical jokes on dim people, and Fate plays practical jokes on everyone.

The war

Oh, the Second World War, that one? Well there is comedy or satire in the way that almost all the characters think about the Second World War as an opportunity and worry about whether they will have ‘a good war.’ (An example of a ‘good war’ is that of Rex Mottram, summarised in Brideshead Revisited: ‘His life, so far as he made it known, began in the war, where he had got a good M.C. serving with the Canadians and had ended as A.D.C. to a popular general’. That’s the way to do it: win a medal and get promoted.)

In a brisk, business-like way the older characters remembers friends or brothers or cousins who did damn well in the First War and worry about getting themselves or their sons into the new one as quickly as possible, but only in a ‘good’ regiment, of course, old boy.

Hence Basil’s half-hearted attempts to wangle a commission in the Bombardiers, and the more effective efforts of younger characters lie Peter Pastmaster and Alastair Trumpington to join ‘special forces’.

Sad Angela is visited in her London flat be her sad husband, Cedric, bringing their little boy Nigel. He’s been allowed out of boarding school to come and see his Daddy. Daddy takes him shopping and buys him a model bomber which the other chaps at his school will think ‘absolutely ripping’. It is a sad interview between two utterly estranged people.

We then follow Cedric as he rejoins his regiment and is dispatched on the ill-equipped and ill-organised British expedition to Norway, which had been invaded by the Germans in April 1940. The narrative gives two extended passages describing Cedric’s experiences: first in the chaotic night-time loading of ships in British port, in which Cedric struggles against a welter of contradictory orders and timings (i.e. symbolic of the generally shambolic nature of the British campaign); and then a very long passage right at the end of the book describing actual fighting in Norway, where Cedric is ordered to liaise between British units which have become split up by the German advance.

This scene is not remotely funny, but a kind of quintessence of Waugh’s bitter sense of futility. Two things are notable: in terms of content Cedric is dispatched to run across open ground to find A company and tell them to withdraw in the face of the German advance. Waugh is careful to tell us the A company have, in fact, already realised this and packed up and withdrawn; which is to say that Cedric’s brave run across country to their last know position is absolutely unnecessary. Second thing is that, in a very Waugh kind of way, his brave run through a hail of bullets is not described in itself, but through the dialogue of the Colonel and adjutant who watch him through binoculars i.e. the event is commentated on, viewed from a distance, detached, bleakly distant, alienated.

And then Cedric takes a bullet through the head and dies instantly.

Epilogue: tying up loose ends

At which point the narrative cuts away, as so many Waugh narratives cut, exit, leaving a scene briskly and brutally, the more devastating the event, the more brutal the cut.

The last short section is titled Epilogue: Summer. Waugh conveys the calamitous fall of France in June 1940 through the idiotic eyes of Sir Joseph Mainwaring, a useless fuddy-duddy from the old times. The Chamberlain government falls on a vote of confidence and is replaced by the government of national unity led by Churchill (10 May).

I haven’t mentioned at all two second string characters who recur throughout the novel, Alistair and Sonia Trumpington. You might remember Basil finding himself round this couple’s apartment at the start and end of Black Mischief. Here they are revived to form a comic commentary on the main action, with the comic conceit that, after Alistair has joined his regiment, Sonia ups sticks and follows him round the country as he is regularly posted, as soldiers are, to barracks all round the UK. Here, in the final paragraphs his regiment comes to rest on the south coast, tasked with coastal defence, mining the beaches, setting up rolls of barbed wire and machine gun emplacements. And in the evenings, when he has liberty, Alistair spends a few fleeting hours with his loving Sonia who is now pregnant. Ominous times to become pregnant.

But Alistair shares his boyish excitement that Peter Pastmaster and some of the other chaps are setting up new, small, mobile units to be called ‘commandos’. They carry knives and knuckledusters and rope-souled silent shoes and are parachuted behind enemy lines to assassinate VIPs and cause mayhem. He is everso excited!

Basil marries the newly widowed Angela. The jaded, sophistiqué tone of their conversation reprises all those dialogues from Vile Bodies a decade earlier.

‘I shall be a terrible husband.’
‘Yes, darling, don’t I know it.’

Brief mention of Ambrose, holed up in a tiny village on the far west coast of Ireland. It is not enough. He feels the urge to wander in his Jewish soul. Maybe Waugh is setting him up to reappear in a sequel.

We see Rampole in his prison cell, ‘happier than he could remember ever having been.’

Peter Pastmaster is at Bratt’s (Waugh’s ubiquitous fictional gentleman’s club) drawing up a list of officers to join his new unit. They include Basil, ‘a tough nut’.

Cut back to Basil telling Angela he’s going to join a new unit. It will be a lovely new ‘racket’ for the spring. Pulling the wool over old Colonel Plum’s eyes at the Ministry of Information was fun at the time, but:

‘Besides, you know, that racket was all very well in the winter, when there wasn’t any real war. It won’t do now. There’s only one serious occupation for a chap now, that’s killing Germans. I have an idea I shall rather enjoy it.’

The final word is given to Lady Seal, lunching with Sir Joseph. When she mentions Basil’s name his heart, as always sinks. Only this time it is not to beg yet another favour; it is to inform him that Basil has joined a new unit, all by himself, under his own steam. For once Sir Joseph smiles with genuine happiness. For once he says something unarguably true:

‘There’s a new spirit abroad,’ he said. ‘I see it on every side.’

So despite a hundred pages satirising, mocking and ridiculing the English social and military establishment, the novel ends on a resoundingly, if somewhat unexpectedly, patriotic note.

Summary

In Waugh’s oeuvre, it’s easy to overlook Putting Out More Flags because it doesn’t have the defined central protagonist and unified action of most of the other novels. But it does contain some of the best comic scenes in all the pre-war books and in the figure of Basil Seal his most monstrous trickster. Alongside other more interesting themes, namely the semi-serious, paranoid self-pity of Ambrose Silk and the darker story of Angela Lyne’s strange descent into drunken loneliness, themes which give it a deeper, richer flavour.

If someone who’d never read him asked you to recommend a Waugh novel, I think I’d recommend this or Scoop, probably Scoop because it is more timeless in its satire on the press in general and foreign correspondents in particular, but Put Out More Flags runs it a close second for ripe comedy laced with evocative period observations, for the standout characters of Basil the Rascal and Ambrose the Sensitive Victim, but also for that thread of despair and futility which is always glinting at the edge of any Waugh story.

Credit

Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1938. All references are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

‘We must return to the Present,’ Ambrose said prophetically.
‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Bentley. ‘Why?’

How students, academics, artists and galleries help to create a globalised, woke discourse which alienates ordinary people and hands political power to the Right

‘As polls have attested [traditional Labour voters] rejected Labour because it had become a party that derided everything they loved.’
(John Gray in The New Statesman)

As of January 2020, Labour has 580,000 registered members, giving it the largest membership of any party in Europe, and yet it has just suffered its worst election defeat since 1987. How do we reconcile these contradictory facts?

Trying to make sense of Labour’s catastrophic defeat in the 2019 General Election has prompted a flood of articles and analyses, most of which rightly focus on the distorting effects of Brexit. But I was fascinated to read several articles, by writers from the Left and the Right, which also attribute the defeat to more profound changes which have taken place in the Labour Party itself, that:

The decline of the traditional, manual-labouring working class, the decline in Trades Union membership and the increasing diversity of types of work and workplace, with the rise of part-time and zero hours contracts, now mean that the only section of society which Labour can entirely rely on is the vote of students, academics and middle-class, urban, university-educated progressives – writers, artists, film-makers, actors and the like – in other words, the cultural élite.
Students and academics and artists and film-makers are vastly more woke and concerned about the cultural issues which make up political correctness – feminism, #metoo, Black Lives Matter, LGBT+ issues and trans rights – these issues matter hugely more to them than to the rest of the population. Why? Because they’re well fed, they have the time, and the education.

1. ‘Why Labour Lost’ by John Curtice in The Spectator

John Curtice is Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde and Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Social Research. His article in the Spectator (in fact extracts from a speech) is measured and cautious, but includes the following revealing statements:

Where does the [Labour] party go from here? Well, you certainly need to understand where you are at. This is no longer a party that particularly gains the support of working-class voters. Although it does still do relatively well in places that you might call working-class communities. This, at the moment, is a party that has young people, it has graduates, and their distinctive characteristic is that they are socially liberal. These are the people who are remain-y. These are people who are not concerned about immigration…

… now the party should run with the grain of what its got, which is young, socially liberal, university-educated voters…

This is where source of the new members who flocked into the Labour Party as it became clear that Jeremy Corbyn was running for leadership in 2015: young, socially liberal, aware and radical students or former students, who elected and then re-elected the old school, radical Socialist leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Image result for labour party membership graph

UK political party membership

So if it has such an enormous membership, why did Labour lose so badly? Obviously Brexit played a large part, but so – every single post mortem and account of anyone who canvassed on the doorsteps indicates – did the public’s profound dislike and distrust of Jeremy Corbyn himself.

To put in bluntly: the half million or so members of the Labour Party repeatedly voted for a leader who was shown time after time to be incompetent and unelectable. And in so doing cemented the shift from Labour being a party of the working class, to it becoming a party which mostly represents the bien-pensant, socially liberal, urban, professional middle classes.

2. ‘Why the Left Keep Losing’ by John Gray in the New Statesman

I very much enjoy Gray’s detached scepticism. Like me, he starts from the belief that humans are only another type of animal, mammals who happen to be able to stand up, speak and make things and as a result have developed an over-inflated sense of their own importance, but whose main achievement, in the long run, may turn out to be making planet earth uninhabitable.

Gray rightly gives pride of place to Brexit in this long analysis of what went wrong for Labour. But it is set in the context of a broader attack on the self-defeating progressive strain within the party.

He starts by enjoying the way the progressive liberal-minded politically correct have been shocked to discover that they don’t own the electorate and that things don’t appear to be smoothly trundling along fixed railway lines towards their version of a progressive Nirvana.

For the two wings of British progressivism – liberal centrism and Corbynite leftism – the election has been a profound shock. It is almost as if there was something in the contemporary scene they have failed to comprehend. They regard themselves as the embodiment of advancing modernity. Yet the pattern they imagined in history shows no signs of emerging. Any tendency to gradual improvement has given way to kaleidoscopic flux. Rather than tending towards some rational harmony, values are plural and contending. Political monotheism – the faith that only one political system can be right for all of humankind – has given way to inescapable pluralism. Progress has ceased to be the providential arc of history and instead become a prize snatched for a moment from the caprice of the gods.

He is describing that state of blank incomprehension and incredulity which we have seen all across the progressive cultural élite (writers, commentators, film-makers, actors, playwrights, poets, novelists and academics) ever since Leave won the Brexit referendum (23 June 2016).

The root cause is because progressives don’t understand that the majority of people are not like them – didn’t go to university, don’t agonise every day about the slave trade and trans rights, don’t have cushy office jobs writing books and articles.

Because many people in Britain struggle to earn enough to keep a roof over their heads and feed their children. Many people never read books or magazine articles and only read newspapers for the football and racing results. In fact many people in this country – up to 8 million adults, a fifth of the population – are functionally illiterate. (Adult Illiteracy In The UK)

Ignoring these most basic facts about the country they live in and the people they live among, progressives think everyone is like them, deep down, whether they know it or not – because progressives are convinced that their values are the only correct values and so must inevitably triumph.

Given this mindset, the only reason they can conceive for their repeated failures is that it’s all due to some right-wing conspiracy, or Russians manipulating the internet, or the first past the post system, or the patriarchy, or the influence of the right-wing media, or institutional racism, or any number of what are, in effect, paranoid conspiracy theories.

A much simpler explanation doesn’t occur to them: that the majority of the British people do actually pretty much understand their ideas and values and simply – reject them.

Gray makes a detour to demolish the progressive case for changing the electoral system, the case the Liberals and Social Democratic Party and then the Lib Dems have been making all my adult life.

Because they don’t understand the nature of the population of the country they live in, Gray says, it rarely crosses the progressive mind to consider that, if we introduced some other form of electoral system such as proportional representation, it would in all probability not usher in a multicultural Paradise, but might reveal the electorate as being even more right-wing than we had imagined. Progressives easily forget that in the 2014 election UKIP won nearly 4 million votes. If we had an elementary system of proportional representation, that would have given them 80 MPs!

Progressives talk of building the kind of majority they want, as if it somehow already latently exists. More likely, parties of the far right would set the political agenda, as they do throughout much of the continent. If you want a European-style voting system, you get a European style of politics.

Sceptics love ironies and Gray is a turbo-charged sceptic, he revels in paradoxes and ironic reversals. Thus he enjoys the idea that Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for modernising New Labour, for the glamorous appeal of a global economy and for the unlimited immigration which went with it, ended up shafting his own party.

New Labour’s unthinking embrace of globalisation and open borders produced the working-class revolt against economic liberalism and mobilised support for Brexit.

A key element of this has been the unforeseen consequence of Blair and Brown’s idea to send 50% of the British population to university.

The result over the past fifteen years or so has been a huge increase in the number of young people with degrees, people who – if they did a humanities degree, certainly – will have been exposed to an exhilarating mix of Western Marxism, feminism, anti-racism, post-structuralism and the whole gamut of progressive ideas which come under the rubric of ‘Theory’ or ‘Critical Theory’. (What is critical theory)

I feel confident of this terrain since this is precisely the exhilarating mix of ideas which I absorbed as an English student back in the 1980s, when we thought reading Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan and Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida would somehow sort out the Miners’ Strike and overthrow Mrs Thatcher, much like the rioting students of 1968 thought that reading Michel Foucault would usher in the Millennium.

But it didn’t, did it?

It turns out that clever students reading clever books – devoting months of your life to studying ‘the death of the author’, Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony or Derrida’s notion of deconstruction – doesn’t really change anything. And then they all go out into the real world and become lawyers and accountants. Or TV producers and writers. Or they remain in academia and teach this self-reinforcing and weirdly irrelevant ideology to a new generation of young acolytes.

Gray devotes a central section of his essay to the baleful impact which contemporary woke academia and the progressive ideology it promotes have had on actual politics.

If only people aged between 18 and 24 had voted in the general election, Corbyn would have won an enormous majority. No doubt this is partly because of Corbyn’s promise to abolish student tuition fees and the difficulties young people face in the housing and jobs markets. But their support for Corbyn is also a by-product of beliefs and values they have absorbed at school and university. According to the progressive ideology that has been instilled in them, the West is uniquely malignant, the ultimate source of injustice and oppression throughout the world, and Western power and values essentially illegitimate.

Humanities and social sciences teaching has been largely shaped by progressive thinking for generations, though other perspectives were previously tolerated. The metamorphosis of universities into centres of censorship and indoctrination is a more recent development, and with the expansion of higher education it has become politically significant. By over-enlarging the university system, Blair created the constituency that enabled the Corbynites to displace New Labour. No longer mainly a cult of intellectuals, as in Orwell’s time, progressivism has become the unthinking faith of millions of graduates.

When Labour voters switched to Johnson, they were surely moved by moral revulsion as well as their material interests. As polls have attested, they rejected Labour because it had become a party that derided everything they loved. Many referenced Corbyn’s support for regimes and movements that are violently hostile to the West. Some cited anti-Semitism as one of the evils their parents or grandparents had gone to war to defeat. For working class voters, Labour had set itself against patriotism and moral decency.

Compare and contrast Gray’s summary with this excerpt from an article by Toby Young, who did some canvassing for a friend standing as a Tory candidate in Newcastle. All the working class people he spoke to said they were going to vote Conservative, often for the first time in their lives. This was partly because many wanted to get Brexit done, but also:

Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters have talked a good deal about winning back these working class voters, but his policy positions haven’t been designed to appeal to them. I’m not just talking about his ambivalence on Brexit – there’s a widespread feeling among voters who value flag, faith and family that Corbyn isn’t one of them. Before he became Labour leader in 2015, he was an energetic protestor against nearly every armed conflict Britain has been involved in since Suez, including the Falklands War. He’s also called for the abandonment of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, the withdrawal of the UK from NATO and the dismantling of our security services – not to mention declining to sing the National Anthem at a Battle of Britain service in 2015. From the point of view of many working class voters, for whom love of country is still a deeply felt emotion, Corbyn seems to side with the country’s enemies more often than he does with Britain. (Britain’s Labour Party Got Woke – And Now It’s Broke)

Immediately after the election I read an interview with a Labour activist in a northern constituency which was home of several army barracks of the British Army. She said many people considered Corbyn a traitor who was a more enthusiastic supporter of groups like Hamas and the IRA than of our own armed forces.

The discrepancy between how woke, over-educated commentators interpreted the Brexit vote and the reality on the ground was epitomised by disputes about whether it involved some kind of nostalgia for the British Empire. I read numerous articles by academics and progressive commentators saying Brexit was the result of entrenched racism and/or nostalgia for the days when Britain was Great.

But on Radio 4 I heard Ruth Smeeth, the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, saying she’d been reading London-based, college-educated commentators claiming that the people who voted Brexit were nostalgic for the British Empire, and went on quite crossly to say people voting Brexit had nothing to do with the bloody British Empire which hardly any of them remember…

It’s because where they live there’s widespread unemployment, lack of housing, the schools are poor, the infrastructure is falling to pieces and they just think they’ve been ignored and taken for granted by London politicians for too long. And being told they’re ignorant white racist imperialist chavs by posh London liberals doesn’t exactly help.

This is the problem Rebecca Long-Bailey tried to address a few weeks ago when she called for a patriotic progressivism. She had obviously seen how Corbyn’s support for Britain’s enemies lost him huge swathes of working class support, the support of not only soldiers and sailors and air force personnel, but all the families of those people, the average squaddie and seaman who have often come from rough working class backgrounds and for whom a career in the services, with the training which goes along with it, is a welcome way out of a life of low expectations.

‘We can take the Labour party back into power. Here’s how’ by Rebecca Long-Bailey

But on ‘patriotism’ Long-Bailey is caught between two forces, the common sense views of the majority of the British public and the hyper-liberal progressive values of the modern Labour Party’s middle-class and student base. Just as she is on transgender rights and anti-Semitism and dwelling endlessly on the evils of the slave trade – because the majority of the population doesn’t hold these views, but the majority of the Labour Party’s young, indoctrinated, politically correct students and graduates (the ones John Gray describes) very powerfully do hold all these views.

They have been taught by their lecturers and professors that the British Empire was the worst thing in world history, worse than the Nazis and Stalin and Pol Pot, and that Britain only has any industry or prosperity because of the slave trade, and that all British institutions (starting with the police, the army and the judiciary) are institutionally racist and sexist – just as they think trans rights are one of the key issues of our time, and are vehemently anti-Israel and pro-Palestine – the attitude which lies behind the lamentable rise of anti-Semitism in the modern Labour Party.

Here’s an excerpt from an article in GQ lamenting the big hole Labour has dug for itself by identifying with progressive anti-patriotism, and essentially agreeing with the John Gray and Toby Young analyses:

Much has been made of Labour leadership hopeful Long-Bailey’s reference to “progressive patriotism”, a phrase which wants to have its cake and eat it, but ends up satisfying nobody. The fact that she felt compelled to mention at all it suggests a cultural jolt is underway. In this context, “progressive” is being used to soothe her suspicious supporters, to help them hold their noses when discussing something as demeaning as patriotism. For the millions of voters Labour has lost, patriotism is not and has never been a problem, so dressing it up in the frills of progressive politics not only neuters the idea, but insults their intelligence. (Boris Johnson has won the culture war… for now by George Chesterton in GQ magazine)

Who can forget Emily Thornberry’s tweeted photo of a white van parked outside a house displaying the English flag while she was out canvassing in Rochester, a photo which neatly embodied both the anti-patriotic instincts of the Labour high command, as well as their Islington middle-class contempt for the actual working classes they so ludicrously claim to represent.

Thornberry was forced to resign from the shadow cabinet as a result of this tweet and this image, but she was, of course, taken back into the cabinet a year later, and until very recently was one of the candidates to become next Labour leader. Who needs any additional proof of the Labour Party top cadres’ contempt for the ‘patriotic’, ‘white’, ‘working classes’, three terms which, in the last decade or so, have become terms of abuse within progressive ideology.

Image result for emily thornberry tweet

Towards the end of his essay Gray skewers politically correct progressives with a vengeance:

Liberal or Corbynite, the core of the progressivist cult is the belief that the values that have guided human civilisation to date, especially in the West, need to be junked. A new kind of society is required, which progressives will devise. They are equipped for this task with scraps of faux-Marxism and hyper-liberalism, from which they have assembled a world-view. They believed a majority of people would submit to their vision and follow them. Instead they have been ignored, while their world-view has melted down into a heap of trash. They retain their position in British institutions, but their self-image as the leaders of society has been badly shaken. It is only to be expected that many should be fixated on conspiracy theories, or otherwise unhinged. The feature of the contemporary scene progressives fail to understand, in the end, is themselves.

Given the grip of these progressive zealots over the party base, it is going to be difficult to create a coherent Labour Party ideology which can reunite its alienated working class voters, especially in the North, with the liberal, middle-class progressives of the bourgeois south.

And then Gray ends his essay with a calculated insult designed to infuriate the kind of woke progressives he is describing, suggesting that to a large extent their vehement espousal of women’s rights, black rights, Muslim rights, LGBT+ rights, trans rights and so on were in fact, in the end, the convenient posturing of cynical careerists who could see that it would help their careers as actors and film-makers and TV presenters and artists and gallery curators and so on to adopt the latest progressive views but who might, given the right-wing drift of the times, be prepared to abandon them… for the right price.

Faced with the possibility of a decade or more of Conservative rule, Britain’s cultural establishment may change its complexion. As well as an identity, progressive views have been a means of advancement in the academy, the arts and broadcast media. With the funding position of cultural institutions under review, the usefulness of progressivism as a career strategy may be about to decline.

As satirical insults go, this is quite funny, as funny as anything in Swift or Pope, but I think it’s wrong.

In my opinion progressives will continue painting themselves further and further into a virtuously woke corner, and in doing so permanently undermine the ability of a Left-of-centre government to ever return to power.

Conclusion

The point of this blog post is not to present conclusive evidence for my thesis. There is a world of evidence for countless other positions and I’ve mostly omitted the importance of Brexit which might turn out to have caused a one-off temporary alignment of British politics which then gently returns to its basic two-party model, all the commentators I’ve quoted say that is a possibility.

And I’m always ready to accept the possibility that I am simply wrong.

The main point of this brief commentary on John Gray’s article is more to explain to readers the thinking underlying my response to books and exhibitions which embody progressivee ideology i.e. which go out of their way to criticise Britain, Britain’s armed forces, the British Empire, white people, men, and straight people.

My points are:

1. The progressive academics and writers and artists and film-makers and gallery curators who use 1960s sociological terminology to attack British history, British heritage, the British Empire and British values, and who quote feminist and post-colonial rhetoric to attack men, the patriarchy, the male gaze, heteronormativity, Britain’s racist society and so on – they quite clearly think that History is On Their Side and that each one of their critical and minatory articles, works of art, films and exhibitions, are chipping away at the white, patriarchal, racist Establishment which, because of their efforts, will one day crumble away and reveal a multicultural Paradise in which the male gaze and inequality and manspreading have all been abolished.

2. But not only is this not very likely to happen, but the General Election of 2019 (and the Brexit vote and, if you want to drag the Yanks into it, the election of Donald Trump) suggest the precise opposite: that there is no such thing as history being on anyone’s side, that events take their own course regardless of anyone’s intentions, that their victory is far from inevitable. I entirely agree with Gray’s fundamental interpretation of human history which is things change, they change all the time and often at bewildering speed – but they don’t necessarily change for the better. To believe they do is a fundamentally Christian idea, based on the notion that History has a purpose and is heading towards a glorious endpoint, the Revolution, the Return of the King, the creation of a fair and just society.

But it’s not. It never has been and it never will. To believe otherwise, contrary to all the evidence of human history, is to have precisely the same kind of ‘faith’ as Christians and other religious believers do in their consoling ideologies. It is not, in other words, to live in the real world which we all actually inhabit.

3. And lastly, as the various writers quoted above suggest, there is plenty of evidence that, if anything, the metropolitan, liberal, progressive élite of artists and actors and film-makers and writers and gallery curators and their relentless insistence on woke issues actively alienates the majority of the population.

The majority of the population does not support its victim-grievance politics, its disproportionate concern for refugees and immigrants and every other minority cause, its excessive concern for the Palestinians and the black victims of the American police. Who gives a damn about all that (the overwhelmingly white, London, liberal middle classes, that’s who).

On the contrary most of the polling evidence shows that the majority of the British population just wants someone to sort out the NHS, and the police, and crack down on crime, and control immigration, and improve their local schools. Much the same issues, in other words, as have dominated all the general elections I can remember going back to the 1970s, and which a huge swathe of working class and Northern voters didn’t believe the Labour Party was capable of delivering.

The sound of losers

So it is this real-world political analysis which explains why, when I read yet another book by a left-wing academic attacking the British Empire or the slave trade i.e. fighting battles which were over generations or hundreds of years ago – or when I visit another exhibition about the wickedness of straight white men, or read another article explaining why I should be up in arms about the rapacious behaviour of Hollywood film producers, my first reaction is: this is the rhetoric of losers.

Not ‘losers’ in the playground, insult sense. I mean it is, quite literally, the rhetoric of the over-educated minority of the population who keep losing elections, who lost the last election, and the three before that, and the Brexit referendum. It is the sound of people who keep losing. Any way you look at it, the progressive Left’s record is appalling.

2010 General Election = Conservative-led coalition
2015 General Election = Conservative government
2016 Leave wins the Brexit referendum
2017 General Election = Conservative government
2019 General Election = Conservative government

In order to win elections in a modern Western country you need to build coalitions and reach out to people, all kinds of people, imperfect people, people you don’t like or whose values you may not share or actively oppose, in order to assemble what is called ‘a majority’.

The woke insistence on an utterly pure, unstained and uncontaminated virtue – a kind of political virginity test – militates against this ever happening.

So all this explains why, when I visited the Barbican gallery’s exhibition Masculinities: Liberation through Photography and read its wall labels:

attacking traditional notions of masculinity
attacking men for running the Patriarchy and for their male gaze and for their manspreading and mansplaining and their toxic masculinity (in case you think I’m exaggerating, there is a section of the exhibition devoted to manspreading, and several displays devoted explicitly to toxic masculinity)
attacking white people for their institutional racism
attacking straight people for their homophobia
and attacking heteronormative people for their transphobia

I very simply concluded that this is not how you reach out and build alliances. This is not how you create coalitions. This is not how you win political power.

This is how you create a politically correct ivory tower, convinced of your own virtue and rectitude – this is how you propagate an ideology which objectifies, judges and demonises the majority of the population for what you claim to be its sins of sexism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and so on.

What I felt was that exhibitions like this are part of the much broader anti-British, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-family, anti-tradition cultural message being pumped out across all channels and all media by a London-based, university-educated, progressive élite, which worships American gay and black and feminist art, but which – when it came to the crunch – repelled huge numbers of traditional Labour Party voters and helped deliver the Conservative Party its biggest electoral victory since 1987.

Quite frankly this scares me. It scares me because I wonder whether the decline of the old manual-labouring working class, the disappearance of all the old heavy industries I grew up with – coalmining, steelmaking, shipbuilding, car manufactring – the casualisation and zero contract nature of so much modern work, the loss to Labour of the so-called Red Wall constituencies, the loss of Scotland dammit, combined with the sustained attack on all forms of traditional belief by the metropolitan cultural élite and the reduction of Labour support to the progressive middle classes of the big English cities – London, Bristol, Brighton…

All these social, economic and cultural changes hardly make me think we’re on the verge of some glorious multicultural, post-patriarchal age of Aquarius which progressive ideology promises if only we can smash the patriarchy and reclaim the night and free the nipple and stand up for trans rights and welcome tens of thousands more refugees into the country…

It all makes me wonder whether the Labour Party will ever hold power in Britain again.

And, more specifically, whether the kind of progressive art élite I’m describing is destined to become a permanent minority, stuck like a cracked record in its reverence of ‘transgressive’ and ‘rebel’ art by black and feminist and gay and trans artists from New York and Berlin and Seoul, luxuriating in its rhetoric of ‘subversion’ and ‘challenge’ and ‘interrogation’, while in reality being completely ignored by the great majority of the population or, if it makes any impression at all, simply contributing to the widespread sense that a snobbish progressive London élite is looking down its superior nose at the lifestyles, opinions and patriotic beliefs of the great majority of the working class, while hypocritically keeping all the money and power, the best schools, the private hospitals and the plum jobs for themselves.

The scale of the challenge

Books & Boots