Charles Moore
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One cannot really blame Nick Clegg for his flirtation with Labour. He had his own activists to think of. But there was something about the style of it which was unpleasing, and diminished him a little. It reminded me of those bidding wars for sassy female columnists which took place in Fleet Street in the days when newspapers still had lots of money. The longed-for starlet, slightly crazed by competing attention, makes one demand too many. The editor buying her makes the extra concession, but a little shard of ice enters his heart. He won’t give her what she wants next time.
On Monday, I was convicted at Hastings Magistrates’ Court of ‘using a colour television receiver without a licence’. Despite the verdict and a fine of £262, I was impressed by the way the whole thing was conducted. Thanks to the earlier case management hearing and to discussions with the TV Licensing solicitor before we went into the room, we were able to transact the business without delay. The atmosphere was properly formal — standing up when speaking to the bench etc — and yet without flummery. I was allowed to make my speech about human rights and the unlawful behaviour of the BBC to a politely unconvinced court. And I noticed that the poor, waif-like fellow offender tried just before me was treated with gentle courtesy. The lay magistracy has been constantly downgraded by the late government. Reviving its powers would be a step towards creating the Big Society we have been promised. So would the abolition of the licence fee. At present, magistrates’ time is wasted hearing 170,000 cases of ‘evasion’ every year.
Alan Watkins, who has just died, was, among many other things, the master of the Spectator Diary. As soon as I became editor in the spring of 1984, I asked him to do a stint. It was not long before he wrote an item defining what he called ‘a class of person that can be called the Young Fogey’. This person, usually a man, could be found at The Spectator. He ‘tends to be coolly religious, either RC or C of E. He dislikes modern architecture. He makes a great fuss about the old Prayer Book, grammar, syntax and punctuation. He laments the difficulty of purchasing good bread, Cheddar cheese, kippers and sausages…’. Alan was the first to admit that he had not invented the phrase — he attributed it, in the same item, to Terence Kilmartin, then the long-serving literary editor of the Observer. But, with his characteristically minute powers of observation, he developed the idea. Although he would have laughed at the phrase, Alan was a ‘style-watcher’. Soon, newspapers and magazines were groaning with features about Young Fogeys, who were taken, despite Alan’s declaration that the average Fogey ‘has no time for Mrs Margaret Thatcher’, to be in some way emblematic of her era. There was even a book published called The Young Fogey Handbook. For me, longing, like most young people, to be taken seriously, it was a frightful nuisance. Alan’s was the worst sort of caricature that one can suffer — an accurate one. There was no real escape from the label, except, through the passage of time, from the word ‘Young’. At least I did not panic and stop his Diaries: he was one of our very best.
We live in a society which says that it celebrates ‘diversity’, but one notices that the Young Fogey has a thin time of it nowadays. He is not tolerated by the ‘progressive majority’ which on Monday staged an unsuccessful coup against the wishes of the electorate. He does not have the gift, so sought after in current politics, of ‘looking like Britain’. Even in the new intake of the Conservative party, he is represented blue in tooth and claw only by Jacob Rees-Mogg, although — if I didn’t know it might damage his career — I would also accuse Kwasi Kwarteng, the new Member for Spelthorne, of having fogeyish tendencies. However, it should be pointed out that the Young Fogey is not necessarily politically conservative: I think I detect that the comedian David Mitchell is part of the gang. And now up comes the new Dr Who, Matt Smith, a sex-god to young women, in bow-tie and Harris tweed.
In the late 1980s, Alan Watkins was one of the judges in the Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards. In 1987, someone suggested that we should give the award for ‘Member to Watch’ to a rising young man called Gordon Brown. I was a little shocked that Alan, that great observer of the Labour party, had never even heard of him. But as the years unfolded, I realised that this inattention had showed Alan’s instinctive good taste.
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