Auberon Waugh: the genius who taught non-liberals to be thoroughly unashamed

“Two letters in the post cause intense irritation. The first is from the Central London branch of the National Union of Journalists, announcing it has increased my subscription to £88 a year. These greedy, self-important shits know they can demand any sum they choose in blackmail, since membership of the Union is now compulsory...

The second is a begging letter from Christ Church, Oxford, asking if I will contribute to a hideous new quad they are planning to build in St Aldate’s so that their new Comprehensive intake and lower-class research students can be accommodated in the comfort they expect… One problem with the lower classes, as they emerge from centuries of richly deserved obscurity, is that that they are greedy. Another problem, of course, is that they are ugly, boring, humourless and desperately conceited. Perhaps when they have built the new St Aldate’s quad I’ll go and set fire to it and see if I can roast a few.”

I doubt there’s anyone reading this who wouldn’t instantly recognise Auberon Waugh’s unique voice. It’s a mark of comic genius if what you write (a) makes people laugh out loud, and (b) couldn’t have been written by anyone else, even a parodist.  

Such a typical extract is also handy for sorting out the liberals from the men. First, a liberal won’t find it at all funny, and, second, won’t understand that the object of the attack aren’t so much the lower classes as the blisters who make extravagant claims on their behalf in the interests of social engineering.

Despite the fact that Waugh is one of my heroes, I’d put off writing about him in case I’d be disappointed when I reread his stuff (I have a number of his anthologies on my shelves). But then regular commenter Ex-KCS mentioned Kiss Me Chudleigh: The World According to Auberon Waugh, edited by William Cook, which was published in hardcover last year. It arrived last week. Due, one presumes, to inspired selection and some excellent background notes, Waugh’s writings appear even funnier than they did at the time.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Waugh’s contributions to the Spectator and Private Eye from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s helped keep me sane. I’m sure many others feel the same. During the Callaghan administration in particular, when this country really did reach rock bottom morally, politically and economically (well, until Labour came back to power, of course), Waugh’s blistering attacks on the forces of liberalism (amongst other things) acted as a bracing corrective to the madness of the era. His targets included the ubiquitous habit of sucking up to the working classes and the championing of their tawdry “culture” by members of the educated middle classes, the destruction of the education system by the awful Shirley Williams and her ilk, the malignant, ersatz “compassion” of our ruling liberal elite leading to the creation of a mass of largely undeserving victim groups (who’ve become the focus of liberals’ “concern” to the detriment of the indigenous white working class), and the enthusiastic support of the liberal Arts establishment for everything destructive, ugly and meaningless.

Of course, Waugh wasn’t the only writer to despise these fools and to abhor the damage they were doing to our lives – but he was the most effective because he simply refused to engage in arguments with the left on their own terms. They wanted what sounds to their ears like rational debate based on the statistics of deprivation. They wanted both sides to indulge in the posturing language of compassion. Their desire was to be accepted as caring individuals who simply wanted to do their best for those less fortunate than themselves. They wanted their opponents to meet them half-way by agreeing that our national life was a series of problems requiring an educated elite to figure out solutions leading to “social justice” (whatever that might be when it’s at home).

Waugh refused to believe their motives were as pure as they imagined them to be, and simply laughed in their faces. Their version of rational debate was so much prejudiced hot air, and their statistics were pure fantasy. Their compassion was a pretence, a mask for hatred and resentment. The great and the good used those less fortunate than themselves as a means of feeling morally superior to everyone else. Most of the so-called “problems” society faced were the fault of basic human nature, or entirely the product of liberal goody-goodies sticking their oar in where it wasn’t wanted or needed. Politicians and do-gooders generally suffered from the “power urge” - i.e. the need to interfere in other people’s lives in a self-important, self-serving manner.

In short, Waugh refused to play the game according to their rules. In response to their views, he would immediately – and maddeningly - adopt a position so extreme that it precluded the possibility of rational debate. Liberals love nothing more than a debate in which they can paint their opponents as morally deficient: Waugh saved them the trouble - and thereby denied them the pleasure.

They worship the workers? “A chimpanzee can be trained to perform most of the functions of the ‘worker’ in a modern factory, and would probably perform them with better grace.”

They love modern architecture? “Another good policy to adopt towards architects is, if you meet anyone in a pub or at a party who says he is an architect, punch him in the face.” 

They love nothing better than creating a tsunami of new legislation? “Now that Parliament is at last in recess, we should surely ask ourselves if it would not be a good idea for it to stay adjourned… We all know how pitifully overworked these MPs are, and I should have thought two weeks a year was quite enough to keep existing laws up to date.” 

They’re convinced that criminals can be “cured” by showering them with love and understanding? “Perhaps the burglar’s girlfriend is even now sunning her limbs on the Costa Brava from the proceeds of this foul crime [some much-loved items had been stolen from Waugh’s London home while he slept upstairs]. I cordially hope she burns herself to a frazzle, contracts dysentery and is raped by ten Sun readers…”

They’re in an absolute tizz about the effects of city children inadvertently eating dog poo? “It provides a form of sustenance to urban toddlers which is free and non-fattening; although the ingestion of dog shit is thought to cause blindness, it is probably less dangerous than the wrapping paper, elastic bands and other substances they would otherwise be eating.” (Just imagine the reaction of your average Guardian reader coming across that!)

Those poor, darling, unemployed young people thrown on the scrapheap by Margaret Thatcher’s vicious, divisive economic policies? Waugh (correctly) blames Shirley Williams’s disastrous education policy. “For at least seven years I have been pointing out that a substantial proportion of young Britons – I would put it at a third overall, perhaps a quarter in the south and a half in the north – are completely unemployable. They not only lack the disciple necessary to acquire the most rudimentary skills, they also lack the necessary will to please. They are a lost generation, without even the resources to amuse themselves.” And that’s even more true today than it was back in 1983, well before a million Eastern Europeans flooded in to do the sustained work many Britons are evidently incapable of undertaking.

On and on it goes. Here he is on the causes of the homosexual serial killer Dennis Nielsen’s crimes: “Like so many social and emotional cripples, he drifted into left-wing politics and became branch organiser of the Civil Service Union, but even there his boring self-righteousness failed to secure the warmth and comradeship he sought.”

Half the world is starving? “I do not accept that estimate, and would put it at about three hundredths of one percent.” (And that was written in the year that Band Aid was born!)

Waugh said out loud the thoughts the rest of us tried to suppress, and in doing so gave us the courage to recognise that it isn’t abnormal to feel the way we do: it’s a damn sight more abnormal not to!

His attitude towards these pompous prats must have been as infuriating as their attitude to those of us who reject their poisonous nostrums. No wonder Polly Toynbee wrote such a hateful, mean-spirited obituary when Waugh died. She was everything he despised and laughed at.

But it isn’t all politics. Fish and insects inspire some truly original writing: for instance, ladybirds are “lovely pop art creatures” and, realising he doesn’t know the sex of a pet goldfish which has just died, he writes: “Do female goldfish have monthly troubles? Do lonely male goldfish experience nocturnal emissions and if so, how do they distinguish wet dreams from any other type of dream in the encircling wetness?”

Bizarrely, Waugh spent some 30 months in the early 1970s writing columns for – of all places – the New Statesman! Afterwards, in conjuring up his imagine of the typical reader he had been addressing, he proved just how acute was his understanding of the modern liberal mindset. He imagined her as a “taut, slightly embittered female schoolteacher, possibly in Coventry… She was a convinced atheist and a convinced progressive in sexual matters, although her experiences in that field had seldom been encouraging. In foreign affairs she was endlessly progressive but in home affairs subject to strange disciplinarian urges which might suddenly demand unspeakable punishments, not only for racists, rapists and male chauvinists, but also for litter louts, cigarette smokers and males generally. She approved of homosexuality and unmarried mothers, disapproved of drink and drugs, approved of education, disapproved of anyone excelling in it…”

That last phrase, about education, shows Waugh at his absolute best.Genius.

A decade has passed since Waugh died at the age of 61.  A great shame for the great man, his friends, family and many admirers. But, truth be told, his work was done: he had helped a whole generation of conservatives and right-wingers not be ashamed of their views, and not to be afraid of pointing at every self-important, self-regarding member of our ruling liberal politico-media elite and shouting, at the top of our voices, that they’re wearing no clothes.

Many thanks, Mr Waugh. RIP.