Charles Moore
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If you like reading this magazine, you should pause this week to thank Ian Gilmour, who has just died. It was Ian, as owner and editor from 1954 to 1959, and as owner but not editor until 1967, who gave The Spectator the beginnings of its modern shape. Until he came along, it was definitely rather stuffy, almost Victorian. Things that we now take for granted — such as comic sketches of politicians (Bernard Levin), columns by intelligent women (Katharine Whitehorn), articles about cooking good food (Elizabeth David) — were his innovations. Both in real life and in print, Ian understood that what might be called the Tory conversation could range wide, be funny and, in the good sense of the word, liberal. Perhaps he made a mistake by becoming a politician. Like many people criticised for being arrogant, he was very shy, and he found the necessary crudities of public political argument distasteful. There was also a pathos in his relationship with Margaret Thatcher, who bore a curiously striking physical resemblance to his wife, Caroline. He simply couldn’t bear her, whereas she, who likes tall, good-looking, gentlemanly, clever men, long believed that his intellectual talents were important to the Conservative party. If only he could have requited her admiration, much could have been done. Like many able people who go into politics, Ian had an attractive, romantic idea of its possibilities which did not match the reality. But that idea was what made his Spectator so good.
Last week the Rectory Society, of which I am chairman, went on its first expedition. About 50 of our members piled into a bus and visited the gorgeous Humphrey Repton creation of Sarsden Glebe (a former rectory), Oxfordshire, and the astonishing Victorian Old Vicarage of Kintbury, Berkshire, which rises gothically, suddenly, all finialled and pointed, by the banks of the Kennet Canal. Perhaps the greatest kindness of our hosts, Rupert and Amanda Ponsonby and Robert and Gill Harris, was to allow us over every inch of their respective houses and gardens. What people (including myself) really like doing is peering into everything, the more domestic, small-scale and personal the better. It was wonderful. I asked directions in Kintbury, and the man I stopped said: ‘Do you mean the real Old Vicarage or the other one?’ I said I thought I meant the real one, and this proved to be the case. Because the church authorities love selling off their buildings, the Harrises’ house is the first Old Vicarage. Its replacement, a smaller and much inferior building, has also been sold off, and the owners cause endless confusion by calling it the Old Rectory, which it certainly isn’t. Jesus said, ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions’, but I doubt whether He would have included most of the efforts that the Church Commissioners erected to replace the goodly heritage they squandered.
The difficulty for most of those who wish to overthrow the capitalist system has historically been that they lacked the power. I wonder if that is still the case. In August alone, 102,000 Americans defaulted on their sub-prime mortgages (as opposed to just over 40,000 for the same month in 2006). These sub-primers are reported to be chiefly black. If a revolutionary leader were to come forth and persuade them all, in their millions, to default on their mortgages, their problem would become the bankers’ problem, and their ‘can’t-pay, won’t-pay’ cause would become legendary in the annals of civil disobedience.
One needs a word to describe the monotonously chirpy, conventionally iconoclastic, relentlessly informal tone of voice that is typical of the blog. Does the phrase ‘blog-standard’ already exist? If not, it should.
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