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To be perfectly frank
Since Orwell's time there have been more and more things you can't say.
George Orwell's secret list of possible fellow travellers, published for the first time in The Daily Telegraph last week, seems to have upset many of his admirers. The idea that the hero of the right-minded could be an informer in any sense was bad enough, but there was something even more disillusioning about his witheringly dismissive little comments - "sentimental, unreliable and easily influenced" (Stephen Spender); "spurious writer, pseudo-naif" (John Steinbeck); "silly" (Nancy Cunard); "dishonest political climber" (Richard Crossman) and "dishonest demagogic type" (Ralph Ingersoll).
But I didn't share any of this dismay. I don't think Orwell was doing anything wrong, and the sort of thing he was saying seemed to me constructive.
I felt a great sympathy with this saying of the unsayable. We are not permitted to talk about people in this way, for all sorts of good and bad reasons. But no one can stop us thinking, and I suspect that most of us have little lists like this, in which we note briefly and brutally what we truly think of the people we know. It is part of taking soundings in life and, if not of charting a course, then at least of avoiding the rocks, to determine a few clear navigational points about other people.
There was a time, not so long ago, when such judgments were not so secret. People were publicly written off as "perfect fools", and "frightful asses". My late mother-in-law could seldom resist the pleasure of telling people what she thought, and very often she was right: "That boy is lazy, stupid and boring, and he's not his father's son, which explains everything". Lord Charteris, the Queen's former private secretary, once described Sarah, Duchess of York as "vulgar, vulgar, vulgar", and was applauded.
There was a time when school reports were disarmingly unpleasant. I particularly like one from Winchester in the mid-1960s: "If this boy has been studying history this term, I for one am unaware of it." The best and most expensive schools are still prepared to be blunt - my own son once received a harsh but useful report which elsewhere would probably have led to an industrial tribunal and counselling - but generally, across schools and across society, the drift is towards the unjudgmental, the supportive and the secretive.
This may in some ways be kinder and nicer, but it is also boring; and for those who have a perverse interest in the truth, or at any rate in the truth as they see it, it is also very irritating. The result is that there are more and more things you cannot say. There was a brief period of liberation, during the Thatcher years, when at last it became possible to express unorthodox and tough ideas, and things are still better than they were in the 1970s. But I can't help suspecting that the tide may be turning again, partly because of a change of sensibility, and very much because of the formation of a new establishment. Now, anyone interested in social or artistic advancement, quite apart from political advancement or sinecures on quangoes, will have to say only what flatters Blairites or finds favour with them.
The Blairites themselves aren't allowed to say what they think. Some of them are told what to say and issued with little machines to keep reminding them. Senior ministers now refuse to talk at all on serious programmes, such as Today, The World at One or Newsnight, preferring instead the softer sofa slots.
I think the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales very cleverly exploited by Labour, is another instance of the same spirit. Dissent seems to have been silenced. Any comment about her that is not entirely favourable still seems pretty much unacceptable except in private. In all the fierce resistance to the proposed new garden outside Kensington Palace, no one (as far as I know) has dared to put forward the view, which I am convinced many people hold, that she did not particularly deserve such a very exceptional memorial. Still, there is always the secret list in the head, and the retreat, for the duration, into the pleasures of one's private perception.
MUCH astonishment has been expressed about Prince Charles kissing Prince Andrew on meeting him at a party last week. The astonishment is in direct proportion to the ignorant and wilful stereotyping to which the royal family has been subjected. Kissing in that way is not surprising at all. It is a royal custom and not peculiar to our own royal family. The idea that it is surprising is based on a triumphalist bourgeoiscentricity -the unthinking idea that middle-class norms of behaviour and feeling apply necessarily to everybody else.
For Charles to kiss Andrew does not suggest intimacy, or the lack of it. That's simply what some Princes do.
For people to marvel at these supposedly heartless creatures is to miss the point on both counts; they have always had feelings, like anybody else, but their embrace doesn't tell us so, because their tribal customs are not like everybody else's. Interestingly, though, heterosexual middle-class Englishmen are beginning to kiss on meeting, as a sign of intimate friendship; you can see it quite a bit at Kensington Place, that weather-vane of a restaurant and a more reliable social indicator than Kensington Palace.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, June 28, 1998
