Michael Wharton, aka Peter Simple: The greatest creator of comic characters since Dickens

“So, on New Year’s Day, 1957, after a sleepless night of confused celebration, I sat down for the first time at my desk in the Daily Telegraph with one of the most appalling hangovers I have ever had in my life, and without a single idea in my head…” The 20th Century produced three truly great English comic writers: P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and Michael Wharton (interestingly, not even the vaguest hint of a progressive idea between them). I’ve laughed uproariously at several others – Auberon Waugh, Frank Johnson and Craig Brown, for instance – but my top three actually changed the way I viewed the world, rather than simply giving me carte blanche to laugh at the silliness of the Great, the Good, and that disgusting curse of our age, the “Celebrity”.

The chap with the hangover was, of course, Michael Wharton, better known as “Peter Simple”, for 50 years the writer of the Way of the Worldcolumn in the Daily Telegraph. Wodehouse and Waugh produced a slew of great comic characters by exaggerating the characteristics of the people in their social set. Wharton created fictional characters in a few deft sentences who would subsequently, as if by magic, take physical form and appear on our television and radio sets and in our newspapers. Waugh and Wodehouse created worlds we could enter simply by opening their books and starting to read: Wharton created large parts of the world we actually inhabit.

How many clergymen and politicians have we listened to or read about who simply are Dr Spacely-Trellis, the go-ahead bishop of Bevindon (who once, we’re told, wrote a book entitled God the Humanist)? 

How many times in real life have we listened to that expert psychoanalyst, Dr Heinz Kiosk, and his habitual insistence that “We are all guilty”? 

Aren’t Cyril Smith and Eric Pickles simply manifestations of Alderman Foodbotham, “25-stone, crag-jawed, iron-watch-chained, grim-booted perpetual chairman of the Bradford City Tramways and Fine Arts Committee”?

Is it even remotely possible that the limitlessly wealthy Mrs. Dutt-Paulker, the Hampstead Garden Suburb Marxist and respected “thinker” (whose husband was accidentally “liquidated” while they were both fighting in the Spanish Civil War) doesn’t exist?

Is it conceivable that someone, somewhere hasn’t invented a device to measure prejudons, the "internationally recognised scientific unit of racial prejudice", which gives readings on the Alibhai-Brown scale and emits a shrill scream until the guilty person has voiced an anti-racist slogan?

Can you imagine that the Top Gear team hasn’t, at some point, road-tested the latest Boggs Super-Oaf?

Has Harriet Harman really never called for the appointment, in the interests of democracy, of a “Queen Nan”? (And can anyone doubt that Harman herself is simply a figment of Wharton’s imagination?)

I can’t think of the many liberal TV producers I’ve known without picturing them “hacking at the furniture with an axe or setting (their) desk on fire in a frenzy of compassionate hatred”. That brilliant phrase, “a frenzy of compassionate hatred”, just about sums up the malign hypocrisy of our liberal elite for the past half century – it is genius, and no one apart from Wharton could have coined it. (Other coinages include   “race relations industry” and “rentamob”.)

Born in Yorkshire to a businessman of German-Jewish origins and an almost-illiterate lower-middle class local girl, Wharton attended Bradford Grammar School and Oxford University and served in the Royal Artillery during WWII. He led an undistinguished, rackety, hard-drinking Bohemian sort of life (leaving his first wife and son in the process), and ended up working at the BBC after the war. He was “let go” in 1956 (a peek at his BBC file revealed that he was “not really BBC material” – and how!) and then got a job on the recently-created Peter Simple column thanks to his friend, the journalist Colin Welch. He continued writing the column for 49 years until his death in 1996, at the age of 92.

For most of his career, he took a bus to work from his mansion flat in Battersea, pausing only to down two large brandies on the way. In the evening, he invariable dined on fish fingers (the exact number remains a subject of controversy). He remarried, and had a daughter. 

Wharton’s political views were so far removed from the mainstream that they’re practically unclassifiable – a feudalist and a rabid reactionary, certainly (he invented the fictitious Feudal and Reactionary Herald). He hated “Progress”, loathed communism and socialism with a passion, and wasn’t keen on capitalism or money-grubbing in general (although he was an admirer of Ronald Reagan). He has been accused of anti-semitism – but then, there isn’t much he hasn’t been accused of. He loved tradition and ritual – the more bizarre, meaningless and ancient, the better. 

Wharton was certainly capable of writing things that tend to make one a trifle uneasy – like this, about Germany’s invasion of Russia: “It seemed to me that to have been a German tank commander on that first morning, waiting on the fragrant turf, with the larks singing, for the order to advance into the blue distances of Russia, would have been to experience true military glory, perhaps for the last time in the history of the world.” 

Crikey! 

(He did point out that, at the time, he had no inkling of the Holocaust, and, perhaps to his credit, the only letter he ever received threatening actual physical violence, was from a member of the BNP.)

After 9/11 he wrote a piece which, while deploring the violence, rather welcomed the destruction of the Twin Towers as symbols of global capitalism. Reading him can be a distinctly uncomfortable experience.

This chronically shy man, who hated the company of the rich and famous whom he ridiculed so relentlessly, and who described himself as a “state-registered melancholic”, produced two volumes of autobiography, The Missing Will (1984) and A Dubious Codicil (1991). They are amongst the most fascinating, original, and funny books I’ve ever read: masterpieces of wit and painful honesty, both. 

There are various collections of Wharton’s best Peter Simple columns available on Amazon – I own the two volumes covering 1980-1987, rereading which helped keep me sane during the recent Blair/Blown Terror. 

His daughter, a psychotherapist, who acted as her father’s literary executor, wrote a fascinating article in the Telegraph about 

their relationship.

A measure of Wharton’s extraordinary comic genius is the fact that hisWay of the World column was inherited initially by Auberon Waugh, and subsequently by Craig Brown - and these brilliant comic writers both demonstrated what I’m sure they already knew before taking on the task:Michael Wharton was utterly irreplaceable.