by Stephen Fry
Don’t get me wrong. I love families. Parenthood, children, Christmas, security, nurture, mutual love, all these make for a safer, better, friendlier world. I love my own family and many individual families I know. But ‘a family’ is a very different entity from ‘Family’. Just as Swift loathed and detested that creature called man, but loved John and Peter and Andrew individually, so I loathe and detest that creature called family life and the smothering, leaden, twee, false, moribund, time-serving attitude to existence that is espoused in its name.
Our children should be protected, naturally: from ignorance, convention, the inheritance of parental prejudice, the denial of a youth of experiment and freedom and from the clannish intolerance that really threatens mankind. Of course we should urge them not to inject themselves with poisonous narcotics or mix bodily fluids with strangers – Bohemia has its slums after all; but who could condemn a child to a world of heritage porcelain and ruched Dralon without first allowing them a glimpse of art and surprise?
Setting a good example? What does that mean? Churchill drank too much alcohol, his father died of a sexually transmitted disease. Kennedy was an adulterer. King George V swore. Gladstone met prostitutes. I am far from perfect myself. What about you?
Freddie Mercury went to perdition in his own way: en route he made a difference to millions of lives; he amused, delighted, entranced and enriched. It is right to mourn him. If Britain cannot have diplomatic relations with Bohemia then truly we are damned.
Thar’s Gold In Them Thar Films
Imagine, if you would be so lovely for just one minute of your exceptionally valuable time, the following scenario. A group of people has discovered oil in Britain. They are entranced. They dance with joy, weaving their enraptured steps towards the doors of venture capitalists in the City of London.
‘Please!’ they cry. ‘Only lend us the money to buy drill bits and soon the oil will be pouring from the wells and we will all be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.’
The venture capitalists rub their chins. ‘When will we see a return?’ they ask. ‘Will all the wells bear? What is your collateral?’
Surprised, hurt and a little daunted, the prospectors head towards Downing Street.
‘We’ve discovered oil,’ they say, a little less jauntily. ‘Can we please have some money for drill bits?’
‘Oh lordy lord,’ says the man from the Treasury, ‘but drill bits are expensive aren’t they?’
‘You don’t understand,’ our heroes whimper. ‘Oil … we’ve got oil, here, in Britain. It will make us millions. We just need money for the actual drilling …’
‘Oh gracious heavens,’ mutter the ministers. ‘Oh my good night, oh my beer and whiskies … but drills are expensive aren’t they?’
The geologists and prospectors shake their heads in wonder and leave, only to be heard of next in America, where they are helping to divert oil out of gushers into the coffers of the American Treasury.
It sounds absurd, doesn’t it? After all, we did discover oil in our territory and British companies took advantage of it.
There is more than one kind of oil, however. More than one substance that can lubricate humankind, fuel a nation’s prosperity and energise society.
Examine the extraordinary success of the United States. They are no longer the great manufacturing power they once were, yet there are more nations on earth being penetrated by the sacred American names now than there were twenty years ago: names like Levi, Zippo, Harley-Davidson, McDonald, Coca- and Pepsi Cola, Apple, Disney, Marlboro, Häagen-Daz, Budweiser and IBM. Why?
You may cross the planet from end to end without meeting a soul who has heard of Daks, Bryant & May, Rover, Wimpy, Vimto, Sinclair, Ealing, Woodbines, Lyons Maid, Double Diamond or ICL. Why?
The answer is simple. Films. Movies. American cinema, and the lifestyle – to use a loathsome but necessary word – that it reflects, promulgates, examines and disseminates, reaches every corner of this cornerless earth. America is not the trading nation that Japan is, yet Japanese culture, save a Hokusai exhibition here and a Sumo tournament there, has never influenced or pervaded us in the way American culture continues to do.
British people crowd into pubs drinking Budweiser and smoking Marlboro because of movies; they wear what they see worn in movies, they aspire to a life, a slang, a vocabulary and modus vivendi that is shown them in seventy millimetre Eastmancolor and Dolby stereo. This doesn’t make them weak, pusillanimous or ovine. Many of those who mock this apparent fashion slavery are themselves living in a style borrowed from an Evelyn Waugh novel, drinking drinks drunk by John Buchan protagonists or speaking a language culled from Trollope and Macaulay. It is not people who are weak, it is culture that is strong. That is why tyrants burn books, ban films and imprison artists.
Whether American films are artistically on a par with Waugh, Buchan or Trollope is another question. What is indisputable is that we, as a nation, have lost our cultural influence and, more importantly for our government and industry, with it we have lost our power and authority as manufacturers of icons.
We have no voice in the world. The only voice we could have is cinema, allied with pop music and television. The Japanese, wise as they are, realise that, although they make almost all the machines that enregister, reproduce and rediffuse the product, they cannot generate the product itself. Therefore Sony has bought Columbia, and other Japanese hardware companies continue to buy the studios, the backlists, the ‘intellectual copyright’ as it is known, and the creators of all this popular culture.
Britain, from time to time, chugs out a film revelling in its past – beautifully photographed and acted, no doubt – but hardly a showcase for a nation and its wares.
Yet we retain acres of studio, thousands of the most talented film technicians in the world, hundreds of remarkable actors and actresses, scores of potentially brilliant film writers and, crucially, the native advantage of being born, by definition, Anglophones.
We have oil. But no one, in the public sector or the private, seems to understand that once the drill bits have been paid for and the oil is gushing, the benefits for our entire nation will be incalculably great. Fish and chip shops in Rio, cricket in Tokyo, Marks & Spencer in Moscow.
Valete
It is with heavy heart that I take up my keyboard and fully integrated multi-tasking word-processing software to write these words. It is not post-festal tristesse that weighs me down, nor yet a dyspepsia occasioned by the acid admixture of cranberries, Taylor’s 1966 and BBC1’s Christmas Birds of a Feather. Ich weiss dashed well was soll es bedeuten, das ich so traurig bin, as Heine would have said (a poet, incidentally, from whom I am descended on the distaff), or as Shakespeare preferred, in truth I do know why I am so sad.
I weep because this is the last column I shall be writing in the Telegraph for a while. I shall not burden you with the why-the-hecks and the what-on-earths. Suffice to say my work takes me out of circulation for some months; it is possible, before you start standing on your seats and cheering fit to make the welkin bust, highly possible that I shall return ere the blossom withers on the bough. It may just be that when the fields are white with daisies, I shall, like Psmith, return. Your jubilation may be premature.
It has been a remarkable experience leaking out a hebdomadal eight hundred words for this newspaper over the last two years. Let us suppose that I had been columnising during the period 1986–1988. What great events shook the earth then? This or that company was privatised, this or that minister resigned, this or that royal baby was born.
But from ’89 to ’91 … how the twin pillars of the world shook then. Gorbachev and Thatcher ceased to be, we went to war against Iraq, the hostages returned, the political map of Europe changed more than at any time since Hitler and faster too, Maxwell died and was revealed to be what Private Eye had always said he was, John Major arose from out the azure mainstream and the Labour Party, even in the eyes of its enemies, became electable.1
We always believe
that the age we are in is the age of real change. I have always felt that as I have lived, so the world has undergone its most profound mutations … that I was born just too late to have experienced things as they had been since time immemorial. It was while I was at school that prefects were no longer allowed to beat; it was while I was at university that my college, after six hundred years, went co-educational, it was while I was learning to drive that seat-belts became compulsory, it was while I started doing things with the BBC that it was forced to go all modern and competitive. I don’t suppose any of these changes are significant in themselves, indeed they are, for the large part, admirable improvements. I do not even believe that this impression of living through change is any greater in me than it would have been in someone writing in other epochs.
No one can deny, however, that the global contortions of the last two years have been gobsmacking, snoutspanking and face-walloping.
How am I going to live with myself, therefore, when I look back over my writings for the period and see that I have, while all about me walls came tumbling down and empires fell, failed to predict a single one of the huge events of the period? I do not suppose that I was hired for my geopolitical acumen nor my profound insight, yet it is lowering to consider that I did not even have the gumption to see that Gorbachev was only a doomed transitional Kerensky figure, and that Saddam would still be in power a year and a half after the might of the West was sent to meet him in the field of battle.
What then dare I suggest will happen next year? Will China’s wicked leaders finally be ousted? Will Yeltsin be assassinated and South Africa go up in flames?
The only predictable fact in this world is that nothing is predictable. However close together and however deeply the seismic sensors are planted and however sensitive they are, earthquakes still take the geologists by surprise. However many foreign correspondents we send out, however close to a fax machine they are, still each political upheaval astonishes us.
So farewell then readers and farewell 1991. I have been simply overwhelmed by the support and interest shown by the many hundreds who have written to me over the last two years. If I have not always been able to reply with as much care and concentration as your communications have warranted, I apologise and plead the usual pleas. I have, at the risk of sounding greasy, at least come to the conclusion that the readership of this newspaper is wider, better informed, wiser and more tolerant, wittier and less conservative (with whichever sized ‘c’ you prefer) than its reputation might give out.
Thank you all so very much for bearing with me.
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky … ring out the old, ring in the new. Valete.
1Ho hum …
A Matter of Emphasis
The very nice Max Hastings asked me to write a leading article one week before the General Election explaining why I would be voting Labour. Very kind of an unashamedly Conservative newspaper. Didn’t make much difference, did it? Or perhaps it did … in the wrong direction.
Bernard Levin once wrote that, while his politics had often changed, one position had never altered, his ‘profound and unwavering contempt for the Conservative Party’. I cannot claim such admirable consistency. Indeed, I remember a boy at school whose life was made a living hell because he let slip the dreadful admission that his father voted Liberal. With the unrelenting clannishness of boyhood we were horrified at one of our number being less than truly Blue. How is it then that I find myself to be, twentysomething years later, a passionately keen supporter of the Labour Party, an institution the very pronunciation of whose name, to my younger self, was akin to words like ‘toilet’, ‘serviette’ and ‘portion’, and the very sight of whose leaders, Wilson, Brown and Jenkins, inspired a revulsion in me not unlike that provoked in a vegan confronted with raw steak? Whence this apostasy? It is not as if I have rejected, along with Conservative loyalties, all the other characteristics of my caste. I retain a love of country that, while not jingoistic, a cruel man might call sentimental; I remain as emotionally reserved and spiritually constipated as any proud Briton; I share a love of sport, the countryside, pageant and all the tweed, twaddle and Twinings tea tweeness that one associates with traditional England. I have not embraced that repulsive shibboleth Political Correctness and all its sanctimonious vileness; I am more or less agreed that today’s tunes are not as good as yesterday’s, that Browning was a better poet than Pound and that discipline and good manners have declined regrettably and deplorably; I firmly hold that ignorance, lawlessness and dishonour are evils; I believe that virtue should be rewarded and vice not go unpunished; I have no quarrel with fox-hunting, Ascot, the monarchy or Bernard Manning; I prefer the Daily Telegraph to the Independent and I go a bit funny when I think of Churchill, Nelson, Shakespeare, the Authorised Version, Celia Johnson, Jack Hobbs and Richard Hannay.
I do, however, draw the line at the Conservative Party.
There is an element here of what I would call a British sense of fair play, allied to a natural sympathy for the underdog. The almost daily and universal vilification of Neil Kinnock throughout the eighties in the public prints made me feel that there must be good there. How can one not be fond of something that the Daily Mail despises? I defy it to be done.
The Labour Party has changed: to associate it with the wilder shores of unreason it once inhabited would be like associating the Tory Party with its historic opposition to the Welfare State. Even if he were never to become Prime Minister, Neil Kinnock would stand as one of the most remarkable politicians of recent times on the record of his rehabilitation of the British Labour Party alone. To damn this rehabilitation as unprincipled when it has effected the changes everyone agreed were necessary to render Labour electable is madness. Would we damn the Tories for attempting to scrap the Poll Tax? Of course not, we would damn them for attempting to stand by it, when it is so clearly out of tune with the electorate. Only bad politicians stand still. Margaret Thatcher, for instance, served the Heath government ably, supporting mixed-economy measures, pragmatism, consensus politics, high taxation and interventionism. She moved away from these throughout the seventies, a move Conservatives saw as the sign of a developing political mind. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Thatcher shifted from the centre ground to an extremer, more doctrinaire ideology; Kinnock has moved the other way, as it were from dogma to pragma. I know which direction I believe more sound and more in tune.
Politics in Britain is about what surfers call catching the wave. The Tories caught a great big roller in ’79 but it is now, if not on the ebb, certainly fizzling and frothing itself out on the sands. The Labour Party has caught a new wave, less dramatic, more of a swell perhaps, and all the less precipitous and perilous for that.
Modern Conservatism was founded on the principle of an atomism that denied society and perceived humans as discrete autonomous individuals with no dependence on or connection to a holistic, organic whole. Margaret Thatcher actually stated the case when she remarked that there is no such thing as society. A natural result of this thinking has been the division, vulgarity, loutishness, aggression, intolerance, heartlessness, decay and Brownian chaos that have characterised Britain lately.
In the meantime industry has lost twenty per cent of its capacity, our roads, fabric, health and education services have fallen into a state of disrepair and the crime rate has rocketed like a startled pheasant. As a nation we have started to desertify, like any terrain that has been exploited for cash gain without the expedience of management, plough-back and husbandry.
If we discount the inevitable guff about ‘vision’ emanating from both sides, we are left with choices (the Lord be praised that we have arrived at a general election where this can at last be said) of emphasis.
The choices are not between massive state interference, interventionism and government meddling on the one hand, and complete untrammelled market freedom on the other; nor between the total abolition of taxes under one government and the malicious imposition of punitiv
e rates under the other. The Conservatives would, as they always have done, continue to impose taxes and to intervene in industry, finance and family life, both through fiscal policy and through direct action. Nor will enterprise be hampered by a Labour government. It should be remembered, when John Major’s own journey from Brixton to Chequers is cited as an example of Tory virtues, that he rose from failed bus conductor to banking high-flier and MP under successive Labour governments. For every economist who sees a higher rate of taxation as an obstacle to enterprise and economic growth you will find another who believes it (especially in time of recession) to be legitimate economic kindling. For every businessman who loathes interventionism, you will find another who craves a more planned economy that encourages investment.
I am not Marxist: my known peculiarities and preferences make me, I suppose, a member of what one might call the Millicent Tendency; so, not just a Champagne Socialist, but a Pink Champagne Socialist to boot (and to boot very hard, no doubt). Some wearisomely still seem to see hypocrisy in the idea of a rich socialist, as if socialism were, like Christianity, a doctrine that demanded the giving away of private alms. They would have it that the rich have a duty to vote Conservative and that only the envious, slovenly and undeserving sections of the poor be excused for voting Labour.
I cannot imagine being deterred from working if my taxes go up: nurses, teachers, ambulance workers and firemen, when they demand higher pay, are told that they have a vocation and cannot hold the public to ransom; their incentive to work is their calling. With high earners, it seems, a different logic is allowed to apply: they can threaten to leave the country (an equivalent of strike action if you like) without being excoriated in the public prints.
I do not claim a moral high ground, I am happy to be thought of as a Labour supporter because I am greedy. Greedy for a Britain that is fairer, kinder, more tolerant, better educated and more genuinely prosperous than it has managed to be for many years. But let’s not fight about it: it is, as I said, a matter of emphasis. I don’t regard all Tories as evil, foolish or damned; the least Conservative supporters can do is understand that the Labour Party has no wicked secret agenda either. Whatever happens the White Cliffs will stand and the rain will fall in Wimbledon fortnight, God bless it.
