Sure, she’s “attractively dangerous,” not least to herself. Shouldn’t she have married a Bolshevik after all, or at least reserved her whore-earnings against future cold spells? (“Czechs take Kazan; Archangel shelled by British; cholera in Petersburg”, runs a scene-setting montage.) “Say, Vladimir…” she frets, “you don’t suppose they’ll stop selling French lipstick in Moscow, do you?” With her gold Guerlain pencil now off the vanity table and in her hand, she continues to educate her spouse. “How should I ever get by without it?” Fortunately, she won’t have to. Marienhof being anything but subtle, the reason why she won’t gets foreshadowed on their first post-wedding morning, when the “coverlet severs her head at the shoulders” and “her hair flows like blood” down the pillow, reminding hubby of John the Baptist: “I am as proud and as happy as King Herod.”

Over 130 matrimonial pages later, she rings him up: in five minutes she will shoot herself. Her adorer rushes home, and there she is, awaiting him in bed, jolly and bloody, ha-ha!  (For Cynics, you must admit, is a real laugh.) “‘I imagine I shall be dead by this evening,’ she says… The operation is carried out without chloroform… She struggles to open her eyes and says: ‘Don’t be a cretin… I just can’t stand lying here without any lipstick on… I must be a frightful sight.’”  Then down to death she goes, obedient to the hordes of Red prophets. “Our terror shall not be individual,” says one, “but it shall be a mass terror, a class terror.’” So they divide the bourgeoisie into three categories: liquidate the first, lock up the second and set the third to “menial labor”.

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Olga, in her own way, picks the first. As for the enema-bringer, he may not be as “idiotically romantic’ as we suppose. “I hate my love,” he says, “I would tie a stone weight to its neck and drown it.” Never mind how spoiled she is; both spouses are self-destructive ditherers leeching off capital to which the Revolution is entitled. Sometimes I find them pitiable, but never admirable. Nor is any other character, not even Vladimir’s Bolshevik brother Sergei. So now you know why The Cynics remained unpublished in its native Russian until 1988, when Sovietism was senile and dying.

As for Marienhof himself, though he had fought on the frontline in the First World War, involuntary service for the Tsar hardly impressed the Bolsheviks. About that slaughter Solzhenitsyn remarked: “It isn’t the advancing armies, the fires, and the bombing that make war terrible, it’s terrible mainly because it gives stupidity legitimate power over intelligence.” Cynics takes a comparable view of the Revolution itself: “My brother,” says Vladimir, “had been given as tutors three commanding officers, each one decorated, like most Russian generals, with senility and defeat.” Olga wants to work for the Soviet government, and Sergei wants Olga. Now what exactly can she do for the Revolution? Since she “of course” does not know much of anything, Sergei decides that “in that case, you’ll have to be given a position of responsibility.” The Party was not amused. Cynics first appeared in Berlin in 1928; after 1930, its author would be unpublishable for life.

Worse yet for Marienhof, he was co-founder and core member of the Imaginists, a literary group who instead of accepting that art must follow ideology dared propound that art’s mission is simply to make images. These, in turn, can address each other through literary tropes, as in the best sentences in Cynics:

The stars look as though they have been washed with good-quality perfumed soap and dried with a Turkish towel… The brazen moon sheds streams of cold copper. They have soaked me through… But what does the moon have to do with it?… It’s love that’s to blame…! I spit in its eyes and talk to it like a drunken pimp demanding his nightly receipts from some little trollop.

Doesn’t that make you reach for your enema hose?

Marienhof’s Imaginist colleague and possible lover Sergei Yesenin dedicated works to him. In due course, those dedications necessarily got deleted. For this was, you see, a happy, happy time. Yesenin just happened to be under his own dark cloud. Arrested and rearrested, he kept getting out of trouble, but hanged himself in 1925, with or without the “help” of the OGPU secret police. Doubtless that event failed to brighten Marienhof’s already sunny disposition. But why shouldn’t he give us a chuckle? After giving herself to Sergei, Olga comes home, finds Vladimir sampling Marfusha and says: “Pray don’t go to sleep… once you’ve finished ‘draining the cup of pleasure.’ I’ve brought… new Imaginist poems. We can laugh at them together.”

The communist and fascist movements of the Twenties provoked artistic engagement with mass consciousness. In 1927, following a stimulating but unfulfilling visit to Moscow — his Latvian beloved not being in the mood — Walter Benjamin wrote that the city “reveals a full range of possibilities in schematic form: above all, the possibility that the Revolution will fail or succeed. In either case, something unforeseeable will result… The outlines of this are brutally and distinctly visible among the people and their environment.” In other words, here was a theater for Bolshevism to perform itself in; likewise a laboratory mixing-vessel, school, dungeon and inspiration. The operation will be carried out without chloroform.

In Dziga Vertov’s astounding 1929 film-about-itself Man with a Movie Camera, the masses constitute one animated Leviathan. We follow their frenetic detachments, from dawn to dusk, of a single composite day. Cynics’s very distant cousin, James Joyce’s Ulysses, was a stream-of-consciousness recounting of another single day, in Dublin, in 1904. Comparing that 1922 work to Cynics would be a tedious, slippery endeavor. Let me simply say that this city likewise “reveals a full range of possibilities in schematic form”. Dublin’s parts are concrete, identifiable, while like the characters they stand in for semi-unconscious mythic things.

Andrei Bely’s Petersburg — also 1922 — was set a year later than Ulysses, in allusion to the bloody confrontation between the masses and Tsar Nicholas II. Its doom-ridden, symbol-overgrown weirdness places it in the same genus as Cynics, to which it is much superior. The translators of the edition I own note that Bely is “constantly invoking the gray faceless masses of the metropolis… Ultimately there are no private thoughts or private actions; all are reflexes of larger realities.” Whether Marienhof’s Olga and Vladimir actually generate private thoughts or are merely parodic “reflexes of large realities” is for the reader to decide. (I see them as somewhere between brain surgeons and enema hoses.) In both novels, reality’s playthings sense with dread that “something unforeseeable”, whose onset if not yet its character is “brutally and distinctly visible”, and which will soon overturn the known. “The coffins lined the paths…” writes Bely. “Time sharpens its teeth for everything — it devours body and soul and stone.”

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I should also mention Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), which employed montage in the fashion of Cynics, causing Walter Benjamin to enthuse that this might show literature a new way forward. Like Petersburg, it is a work of a genius, whereas Cynics is a work of mordant promise. That promise might have been fulfilled had Marienhof been better treated. As it is, the book remains worth reading for its patches of Imaginist lyricism.

Now here’s another montage for you, courtesy of Cynics: the district morgue, capacity 12 corpses, now houses 300. Another: in comes official news on “the results of experiments in baking bread from rotten potatoes.” That bread might go divinely with potage à la paysanne, peasant-style soup made from “liquid Smolensky clay and rich black Penza soil.” A horse dies, probably from hunger; Olga consoles the coachman with a bourgeois diamond. Meanwhile the authorities advise the hungry to seek food elsewhere at the expense of class enemies: “Worker! Peasant! To the kulaks’ granaries for bread!” The kulaks were rich peasants. If they were well off, then they must be criminals; war communism was brilliant at quick, cruel solutions.

When that gave way to the New Economic Policy (NEP), which temporarily reenabled small-scale capitalist enterprises, cruelty grew more capricious, not to mention speckled with corruption. Benjamin observed “members of the opposition removed from important posts… countless Jews removed from middle-level posts… The leftist movements which had proved useful during… war communism are now being completely discarded.” As Olga put it: “That most beautiful of mothers is giving birth to a monster.” After her $15,000 NEP-man lover recounts his triumphant speculation in paraffin, Vladimir ingenuously tattles to his brother, who gets the fellow arrested. Olga smilingly feeds her husband one of the NEP-man’s chocolates. And history goes on making progress, like a scalpel in flesh. Another jaunty montage sums up Marienhof’s theme: “There are reports of cannibalism on a mass scale.”

American men are generally taller than British ones, and tend to move in a different way. A student on a US campus once told me he knew I was English by the way I walked. Hegseth stands with his arms hanging loose but slightly bent like a gorilla. In the 19th century, Irishmen were taller than their British counterparts. We know this from the statistics kept by the British navy at the time, which had a fair number of Irish recruits. Many of them would have been brought up eating almost nothing but potatoes, and potatoes contain almost everything you need for a healthy diet. This was also a reason why the Irish made such good navvies, building Britain’s roads, canals and railways. Upper-class men are for the most part taller than working-class ones. In the gentlemen’s toilet at the Cambridge Union there’s a sign on a very high beam which reads “Mind Your Head”, but given the size of some of the young Rt. Hons who frequent the place it may not be intended as a joke. When I was a student at the place myself I felt like a stunted Northern prole scurrying among braying Brobdingnagians, of whom more in a moment. 

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As you grow older you may not grow smarter but you certainly get smaller. Just look at pictures of Prince Harry next to his grandmother. Jesus Christ is believed by some of his less theologically sophisticated followers to have been exactly six foot tall. One wouldn’t want a short guy as a savior. Given the age in which he lived, however, he was probably about the size of Ronnie Corbett. As for Shakespeare, you could probably have put him in your pocket. On the other hand, Napoleon, generally considered to be gnome-like, was actually the average height for males of his time. Seeing him as dwarfish was just British propaganda. I used to be exactly the same height as Mick Jagger, but this is no longer true unless we’re shrinking at the same rate.

There is a Lilliput Press in Dublin, run by a suitably diminutive publisher. It’s named of course after the pint-sized characters in the Dubliner Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels. During his stay in Lilliput, Swift’s protagonist is much too gullible, which is the reason for his name. He takes on the conventions and perspectives of his hosts far too zealously, hotly denying the charge that he has had sex with a Lilliputan woman without once raising in his defense the physical impossibility of doing so. By contrast, when he arrives in Brobdingnag, a land populated by giants, he refuses to adjust to their form of life and remains obtusely Anglocentric. He delivers a self-satisfied account of British customs and institutions to the king of the country, from which the king “cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl on the surface of the earth”. This isn’t quite the impression Gulliver intended to give.

The question is what distance you need to establish between yourself and what you confront in order to give a true assessment of it. Gulliver’s problem is that he’s either too close to a culture to criticize it, or too remote to do so adequately. As Bertolt Brecht remarked, only someone inside a situation can judge it, and they’re the last person who can judge. Swift was Anglo-Irish, and thus knew a good deal about living on the cusp between two civilizations. If he hated a lot about the British establishment, he also detested a good deal about the people of Ireland. His satire isn’t polished and urbane, but savage and polemical, shot through with fury and disgust.

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At one point in the novel, Gulliver wonders whether there’s a race of creatures somewhere in the world to whom the outsized Brobdingnagians appear as minuscule Lilliputans. Might there be an infinity of sizes? What is the “proper” height to be? The answer, of course, is that there is no such thing. Human beings like Gulliver think that they’re the right size; but this, as Ludwig Wittgenstein points out, is like a man exclaiming “But I know how tall I am!” and placing his hand on top of his head. This philosophical fall guy hasn’t grasped the fact that size is relative to a norm, which isn’t something purely subjective. Otherwise we would have to say that everything is just the size, weight and shape that it is, which is to say nothing at all. We are the right size for our world, sure enough, but that’s because we’ve shaped it to suit us.

The problem is that there are many different norms, as Gulliver’s Travels demonstrates. One of the book’s purposes is to show how at least some of one’s own norms and conventions may be universal, but not necessarily in ways we should find gratifying. The Lilliputans differ from humans in various ways, but there are also ways in which they are disconcertingly similar. They, too, are excessively ambitious, mean-minded, foolishly proud of honors, ridden by political rivalries and so on. In one sense, this lets humanity off the hook: if our own vices are to be found everywhere, this makes us less responsible for them. But it also brutally undercuts those utopian thinkers who hope to stumble upon an ideal society somewhere over the ocean. By ascribing all-too-human qualities to beings so physically alien to us, the Tory Swift maliciously unsettles the progressive thinkers of his time.

Like Gulliver before the king of Brobdingnag, colonialism comes face to face with civilizations very different from its own; but by remaking them in its own image it refuses to be disturbed by their difference. Gulliver has the chance to objectify his own way of life, seeing it for a moment through the estranging eyes of the horrified king; but he refuses to allow his identity as a chuckle-headed Englishman to be thrown into question, and the Irishman in his author invites us to smile at this obduracy. The joke, however, is finally on us. In the final part of the novel, Gulliver finds himself among the Houyhnhnms, a race of wise and virtuous horses; but instead of trying to see them judiciously, as he does the Lilliputans, he ends up yearning to be one of them himself. He begins to think of himself as a horse, chatting to his own horses for several hours a day and finding the human smell of his wife and children intolerable. He swings from a puffed-up pride in his own kind to a pathological hatred of them. He’s always either too deeply in or too far out, too close to judge or too distant to do so, too rigidly normative or too ready to throw norms to the winds.

Swift’s hero, in a word, finally goes mad. He has objectified his own culture to the point where he loses touch with it altogether. Either you refuse to have your identity called into question by a different way of life, or you idealize that way of life in an absurdly uncritical fashion. The sentimental liberal who refuses to breathe a word of criticism of female genital mutilation in Africa is simply the flipside of the bigot for whom cultures other than his own are naturally inferior. The liberal’s problem is one of cultural relativism: all societies do things in their own peculiar way, and that’s just fine. It’s a deeply condescending viewpoint: sex trafficking is okay for them but not for us. To claim that something is acceptable because it’s part of your culture is to claim that it’s alright to do it because it’s what you do. There have been more persuasive arguments. 

All human cultures are contingent. They arose and evolved in largely random ways, and none of them is based on any divine or metaphysical necessity. If God exists he has a special regard for absolutely none of them, not even the United States or Israel. Jesus was too busy reviling the Pharisees to walk on our own green pastures. There might just as well not have been an English or Malaysian people, and there might not be at some point in the future. History is littered with the husks of civilizations that believed they would last forever. Some British values in the past would be deeply objectionable to Britain in the present, and most of what’s claimed to be peculiarly British — honor, fair play, modesty, decency, a racist police force, and so on — can be found in a host of other societies as well. 

None of this implies that one shouldn’t value aspects of one’s own culture. It’s just that one should do so ironically. To live ironically is to commit oneself to a course of action or form of life while recognizing its fundamental contingency. The same is true of the individual life: you play tennis and stack the dishwasher while acknowledging that none of this will ultimately matter because in the end you will be dead. That’s no reason to stop doing such things, but it may prevent them from filling your attention to the point where you can’t see around and beyond them. Jonathan Swift was a supreme ironist; Gulliver’s problem is that he doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

Admittedly, there lacks a vigorous tradition of satire in the nation: their impulse is always to affirm rather than deflate. Satire is thus at odds with the idealizing tendency of American culture. It’s the opposite of that most depressing type of humor, good clean fun. The days of the great Tom Lehrer, who sang of chopping up babies and poisoning pigeons in the park, are long gone. For all his admirable readiness to speak up against power, Stephen Colbert is no Frankie Boyle and David Letterman is no Stewart Lee.

England, by contrast with the States, boasts of a rich lineage of satirists — from Chaucer, Ben Jonson and Dryden to Pope, Swift, Byron, Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis. (Waugh hasn’t always received the recognition he deserves: a few years ago, on a radio quiz show, the contestants were asked who he was, to which one of them replied “Hitler’s girlfriend”.) And over the centuries, a good many English politicians have feared the lampoons of Grub Street hacks, many of whom wrote anonymously or pseudonymously to avoid the wrath of the state. The satirist is a scourge of vice, but he punishes you by making you look pathetic rather than wicked. Stephen Colbert belongs in this distinguished company.

It’s common enough in political circles to hear people complain that “words just aren’t enough, we need to do something”. But authoritarian regimes have never underestimated the power of words, which can be as much a form of action as tearing down a fence. If all the supporters of Palestine Action were to hold placards reading “Plasticine Action”, as one protesting satirist did recently, the police might be forced to hire literary critics to determine whether this constituted a criminal offense. And what — as happened with another wag — if the words “Palestine” and “Action” appeared at different places on a sign? Perhaps the police would suggest there were nefarious intentions here; but appeals of this kind can always be taken too far, as with the police officer some years ago who arrested an anti-Royalist carrying a blank placard on the grounds that they may have intended to write something on it just before the royal limousine sailed past. It’s what one might call a subjunctive theory of crime — crimes that might be committed, thus allowing you to arrest anyone with saliva on the grounds that they might spit in someone’s face.

Satire mauls its object rather than elevates it, and is often too negative to be enjoyable. Swift’s suggestion that the starving Irish should cook and eat their own children stretches the permissible almost to breaking-point, fueled as it is by a furious sadistic energy. But Waugh and Amis can be extremely funny, and in any case all humor has a utopian dimension, however scurrilous and abrasive it might be. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes, not the most rib-tickling of English authors, describes laughter as “sudden glory”. One might see it as the language of the body, as language proper disintegrates into a set of meaningless grunts or chortles and the body dissolves to the uncoordinated state of an infant. Comedy is, quite literally, a bodily disorder. The symmetry of everyday life encounters a sudden contradiction or incongruity, which means that for a precious moment we can stop investing our unconscious energy in the business of keeping things shipshape and release the energy we’ve saved in the form of laughter.

This melting away of meaning and coherence is part of humor’s subversive effect, since disorderly bodies of one kind or another have always been a target for authority. Laughter signaling a loss of self-discipline, is potentially dangerous. The body must be smoothly coordinated, as well as appropriately clothed. In the days when men regularly wore ties, the rebels and dissenters among them took to wearing roll-neck sweaters. This meant that you weren’t wearing a tie, thus preserving your nonconformity, but nobody could see that you weren’t, thus satisfying convention. There was anxiety as well as insolence in the question of the American reporter who asked President Zelensky why he wasn’t wearing a suit.

But humor can do more than question the status quo. It can also outline an alternative to it, one in which the sharing of pleasure and friendship becomes an end in itself, and is thus akin to art. Jokes might impress or cajole or disarm, but, like play in general, most don’t get you anywhere. But they can as a critique of a civilization in which getting somewhere is considered a sacred obligation. To mention Dante’s great poem is to recall that the word “comedy” can have a deeper meaning than anything that can be found in Derry Girls. The Divine Comedy doesn’t yield the reader many laughs, unless seeing people tortured in hell makes you chuckle, but that’s not what the poem’s title means. It refers to a condition in which all things are fundamentally well, whatever appearances to the contrary may suggest. It’s from this sense of serenity that true humor springs, so that the two meanings of “comic” converge.

If Donald Trump really wants to be a king, he should stop bullying satirists and find himself that most indispensable member of any royal entourage, a Fool. Though arguably the American President already has one: himself. Like Boris Johnson, he’s both monarch and clown, switching in a second from regal petulance to baby talk. He’s retained the cap of the traditional Fool but not the bells. Jesters, though, do more than make their masters laugh. His job is also to cut him savagely down to size, as with the Fool in King Lear. He holds up a mirror to the monarch’s feebleness and finitude, which most autocrats hardly find gratifying. When the distraught Lear cries: “Who is it who can tell me who I am?” The Fool replies “Lear’s shadow”, meaning that the king is a shadow of his former self but also that he, the Fool, who shadows his master wherever he goes, is the only one who can resolve the problem of his identity. When power goes mad, only the riddling, enigmatic talk of the jester is able to penetrate it. When it threatens to expand almost beyond limit, the satirist must step in to debunk and deflate it.

The Fool punctures the grandiose delusions of power by reminding it that it has a body and is therefore vulnerable. Just as we can never truly see our bodies in the round, so we can never entirely integrate them into our consciousness. The body hovers between being subject and object, and part of the jester’s task is to remind the rulers of this crippling incongruity. It’s this that Lear discovers in his wanderings on the heath. He thought he was everything, he mutters, but he is not “ague-proof”. Power is mortal, potentially diseased and desperately fragile, even though it behaves as though it will live forever.

Trump, having survived an assassination attempt, behaves like he is invincible. But you have to find some way of anticipating your death if you’re to live fully. To acknowledge a limit is to begin to transcend it. But Trump isn’t a man for limits or defects. Everything in his manically hyperbolic universe is fine, beautiful, fantastic, best ever, gonna be great. That’s why he needs the Colberts of this world, and also why he can’t abide them.

In 1954 Professor Ross, a latter-day Henry Higgins, published a lengthy essay called “Linguistic Class-Indicators in Present-Day English” in the Finnish philological periodical, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen. His argument was that aside from “minor points of life” — such as “the games of real tennis and piquet, an aversion to high tea” and “having one’s cards engraved (not printed)” — the only remaining class distinction in post-war Britain was spoken language. Today, he argued, a member of the upper classes was “not necessarily better educated, cleaner, or richer than someone not of this class”, he simply spoke differently. And thus to guide those keen to distinguish between the language spoken by “gentlemen” from those “persons who, though not gentlemen, might at first sight appear, or would wish to appear, as such”, Ross created the terms “U” (for upper class) and “non-U”.

The first part of his essay, “The Written Language”, is effectively a style sheet: how to correctly address an envelope and begin and end a letter; what to call, in correspondence, a Duke or a Lieutenant Commander; the correct use of “Esq”. “Knowledge of at least one initial of the recipient’s name is, of course, a prerequisite for addressing him with Esq.” The writer “will be in a quandary” if he does not have this information: “in these circumstances I myself use the Greek letter ø (as ø. Smith, Esq), but this is probably idiosyncratic.”  

Ross gets into his stride in the second part, “The Spoken Language”, which starts with pronunciation: U-speakers say “temprilly” rather than “temporarily”, “goff” rather than “golf”, and “tar” rather than “tire”.

Next comes an alphabetically ordered vocabulary list in which the middle classes are shamed. Here we find non-U “serviette” versus U “table napkin”, “toilet” versus “lavatory”, and “mirror” versus “looking glass”. While a U house must have a name rather than a number, the names of many houses are non-U: “Fairmeads”, for example, or “El Nido”. “U-children” and “U-dogs” eat their “dinner” in the middle of the day when their U-parents and owners are having “lunch”; “pardon” is non-U: the U response after belching should be silence. A non-U speaker cannot, Professor Ross argued, become a U-speaker, because the misuse of “one word or phrase” will give him away (“for U-speakers never make mistakes”).

Alan Ross was a U-speaker in a non-U university. Born in Brecon in 1907 and educated at Malvern College and Balliol, he worked during the war at the government code and cipher school in Bletchley Park. It was as an undergraduate that he lay the foundations of his study of English linguistic class signifiers, working on it for his own amusement while developing his lifelong interest in Finno-Ugric languages. Like Nancy Mitford, whom he met at a luncheon (“old-fashioned U”) in 1955, Ross was famously witty. He had employed in his article, he revealed to Mitford, the class distinctions made in her autobiographical novel The Pursuit of Love (1945). Fanny Logan, Uncle Matthew complains, is picking up “dreadful expressions” at school such as “note paper”: “What is this education? Fanny talks about mirrors and mantelpieces, handbags and perfume, she takes sugar in her coffee, has a tassel on her umbrella, and I have no doubt that, if she is ever fortunate enough to catch a husband, she will call his father and mother Father and Mother”. Uncle Matthew is famously unreasonable, but on this occasion even the conciliatory Aunt Sadie agrees with him. “Fanny darling. It is called writing-paper you know – don’t let’s hear any more about the note, please.” The case of the Mitfords proved Ross’s point. Far from being “better educated, cleaner, or richer” than their non-U neighbors, the single proof of their social superiority lay in their peculiar use of language: the Mitfords employed a vocabulary understood by no one outside the family circle, while the “Mitford voice”, even they admitted, was ridiculously posh.

Nancy Mitford responded to Ross’s essay with an essay of her own called “The English Aristocracy”, published in Stephen Spender’s Encounter (September 1955). The upper classes, she explained, did not use fish knives or put the milk in first when pouring tea. Silence, she agreed, was the U response to belching, as well as being “the only possible U response” to other “embarrassing modern situations”, such as being told “it was so nice seeing you” after saying goodbye. She would tear up any letter beginning “Dear Nancy Mitford”, rather than “Dear Miss Mitford” or “Dear Nancy”. To Ross’s vocab list, Mitford added “sweet” as the non-U version of “pudding”, “sofa” as opposed to “settee”, “glasses” and “dentures” as the non-U equivalents of “spectacles” and “false teeth” (U-speakers dislike euphemisms).

The September 1955 edition of Encounter sold out instantly. “U” and “non-U” became the buzz words of the day, and newspaper letters pages were filled with the responses of readers. “It is sad to find”, Graham Greene wrote to The Observer, “that by Miss Mitford’s exacting standard Henry James was often non-U in his correspondence. Frequently he allowed the “unspeakable usage” of writing to someone as “Dear XX”. Henry James, Mitford explained, “was an American”. Another letter to The Observer pointed out that Shakespeare had made clear, in Richard II, that in fact “mirror” was U and “looking glass” non-U:

King Richard: An if my word for sterling yet in England
Let it command a mirror hither straight…
Bollingbroke: Go some of you and fetch a looking-glass.

To this, Mitford replied: “It is probable that Richard II, like many monarchs, was non-U”.

It was Mitford’s idea to republish in book form a shortened version of Ross’s essay together with “The English Aristocracy” as Noblesse Oblige. “It seems like a natural for the Xmas market”, she wrote to Heywood Hill. Illustrated by O. Lancaster and entitled ‘‘Are You U?”, the volume also included a letter by Evelyn’s Waugh and other satirical delights such as John Betjeman’s “How to Get on in Society” (“Phone for the fish-knives, Norman”). Malcolm Muggeridge, editor of Punch, devoted almost an entire issue to the book. The magazine’s cover bore a mock coat of arms with the device “Snoblesse Oblige” and a coronet was printed at the top of each page.

Why does Noblesse Oblige continue to sell and make us laugh? One reason is that the English have always enjoyed the comedy of our intricate class distinctions, particularly those within what George Orwell called in 1920, “the lower-upper-middle classes”. Another is that Ross gave us a snapshot of the end of an era, after two wars had dramatically altered our social structures. England in the Fifties had a Labour government, and the Angry Young Men, disaffected offspring of the Bright Young Things, were documenting the new equality, which included the democratization of language. Four years after Noblesse Oblige appeared, academics were called to the witness stand at the Lady Chatterley trial to explain that the word “fuck” was not, in the right context, obscene, while the judge, Mervyn Griffith-Jones (U), caused nationwide hilarity when he instructed the jury to consider whether D.H. Lawrence’s novel was the kind of book you would “wish your wife or servants to read”.

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Noblesse Oblige has dated in the 70 years since its publication, but surprisingly not that much. Middle-class men are now less likely to play tennis in their braces, and we no longer have either (the U-pronunciation is “eye-ther”) jerries (U) or chamber pots (non-U) to contend with. But status anxiety is still with us. I wince at the word “toilets”, for example, and “serviette”, despite not coming from the top-drawer myself, and am always, like society decorator Nicky Haslam, on the look-out for things that are “common”. Haslam’s special-edition Christmas tea towel, “Things Nicky Haslam Finds Common”, include social crimes such as “side plates”, “Confidence”, “type-2 diabetes”, “Bach”, “Loving your parents”, and “Primrose Hill”. Remember the tabloid furore (the “e” in “furore”, according to Haslam, should not be pronounced) when Carole Middleton, mother of the Princess of Wales, said “pleased to meet you” to the Queen, rather than “How do you do”?  

Linguists today talk about standard Southern British English (SSBE), Estuary English (EE) and Multicultural London English (MLE) rather than U and non-U, but there is still a U way of speaking. The Queen’s English is now the King’s cockney, with public school boys saying “wanna”, “gonna”, and “wa’er”, while a 2025 update of Noblesse Oblige would include the U pronunciation “twenny-twenny five”. The copious use of the word “fuck” is now very much U. 

Mary S. Lovell writes in The Mitford Girls that Alan Ross, who died in 1980, “resented” Miford for “making fun of his serious academic thesis”. This is surely not the case, and Lovell offers no source for her statement. The whole notion of writing what Ross ironically called a “scientific” disquisition on upper-class lingo was parodic (“U-dogs”, for example). Trading on his celebrity, Ross produced three further books on the theme: What Are U? (1969), How to Pronounce It (1970), and Don’t Say It (1973). His grandson, Carne Ross, who resigned from the British foreign service after giving secret evidence to an official inquiry into the use of intelligence before the 2003 Iraq invasion, has since become an advocate for anarchism. “His accent”, writes Anthony Andrews in an interview with Carne Ross for The Observer, “is now faultlessly demotic, but he says it wasn’t always like that.” One-downmanship is the new one-upmanship.

The book, which has echoes of American Psycho, is the story of Doughty, a young, handsome, blond blueblood from Darien, Connecticut, who is also a shallow, self-involved sadist, rapist and psychopath. As a child, Doughty fries ants. As a high-schooler he puts cigarettes out on his buddies and passes around Beata, a lower-middle-class girl he’s pretending to date. In college, it’s more of the same until he drops out and moves to New York, increasingly in the grip of alcohol and drugs and ready to victimize women full-time. He pretends to be a real estate agent while insinuating himself into the lives of various women including Beata (now also in NYC, tending bar) and Sophia, a middle-aged publishing executive with a Soho loft. The time period is the late Nineties, though this feels cosmetic; the book’s concerns are contemporary. What could seem more clever in today’s culture than satirizing the very worst, privileged white man on earth?

The premise gleams with made-for-Netflix glamour, but the execution is flawed from the start by Bomer’s ideology, which forces her to be in deadly earnest, and makes Doughty into a walking cliché. “Originally I wanted him to be the devil,” Bomer told Megan Nolan in an interview published this week. “The actual devil, evil incarnate.” As Nolan explains the book, Doughty “represents the male intrusion on female life” and is “the bearer of an entitlement so groundless and infinite that it obliterates anyone he approaches.” To these didactic ends Doughty reveres his father and his lineage, believes he has natural advantages over other people, looks down on the poor, and admires his own penis a lot. He is prone to wooden statements about his awesomeness. The book’s humor is supposed to come from the fact that he’s so self-important and dim, he doesn’t realize it’s all a chimera. His mother is an alcoholic (the fault of the horrible men in her life); his father is broke; he himself has none of the intelligence or superior skill he thinks he does. But for this to be funny, there would have to be some pathos or some charm in it, which the underlying ideology could never allow.

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Bomer has also gone astray in choosing to write in a close third-person point of view — the story is told in Doughty’s voice, which could be funny when the reader sees what he’s not seeing. Such a choice works well with sympathetic characters, or those with a compelling personality. But since Doughty is required to be a walking cliché, this can only result in a flood of dull prose. “He liked winning. He loathed losing,” Bomer writes. He’s a caveman grunting out the simple sentences, get it? Or, here’s another ungainly passage: “His father, who often exclaimed ‘I’m the king of the castle!’ when bossing his mother around. He had given Doughty so much… He knew authority mattered more than anything.” Bomer has fallen for the mimetic fallacy, making her prose ugly and dumb to suit the character, and it’s a slog to read.

She also seems to be unaware that satire works by skewering pieties, and that the only pieties on display here are those of her class and station. There is nothing satirical about doubling down on the evil of privileged white men in 2025; it’s the status quo perspective. Nor is the information outside the frame — surprise, the female characters are rich in virtue and humanity! — any more interesting. In this flawed work, the satire rebounds, unintentionally, on the book itself. The Stalker’s true innovation is to present what happens to women when they start seeing men as completely evil. And this makes for some ugly and chilling reading.

Bomer isn’t interested in men or masculinity, Doughty is a cardboard cut-out, and deliberately so. If she were attempting to portray a glad-handing Connecticut-bro sociopath with any degree of insight or flair, she’d have to occasionally allow him to think about stereo equipment or the comparative trunk-space in late-model SUVs. But she doesn’t. Her true interest is misogyny, which she writes about in loving detail. Despite the flat dullness of Doughty’s thoughts, his narrative perspective pays enormous attention to women’s bodies, and an unrealistic amount of attention to the women themselves. The title says it all — this is a perspective obsessed with women (though actually betraying little of the psychological profile of stalking). And it’s an excuse to indulge in an orgy of sexualized hatred.

Beata (get it?) has “the hair of a baby or an old woman,” “tiny breasts,” and, when Doughty gets there by force, “a few fine, long, dark hairs on her pussy.” Doughty’s friend Lew’s mom often wears exercise clothes, displaying “her thick hips, the tight aerobic pants crawling up her butt crack and cupping the U-shape of her pussy.” His college girlfriend has “tits larger than her head, each one a softer, and more fun, larger head.” The prose, notably, gets better in these descriptions. It’s horrible to read, but it’s more creative and there’s more invested in it.

Very little of this feels like male thinking. It feels instead like female self-obsession, female insecurity, female self-objectification, and female body-hatred. On Doughty’s first night at Sophia’s place, he describes her: “She came out of the bathroom in a small silk-looking beige nightie. It was nice. At least she wasn’t fat. Although she could gain some weight. But at her age, it would probably go to all the wrong places. Like her stomach.” This is lifted straight from a woman’s internal monologue. What young man has any idea where women in their 40s put on weight? What young man is obsessed with it? A few pages later Doughty grabs Sophia’s hips and again thinks about her weight and her stomach, now upgraded to “a medium-sized pouch.”

This is all disturbing enough, but it’s also, grotesquely, a sexual fantasy. Doughty, the man with zero virtues, is actually good at one thing — performing oral sex on women. It’s highly implausible, but nonetheless, Bomer endows him with this skill, and writes many lavish, graphic passages describing his methods. The dehumanization of her female characters that this entails — please, describe how the man responsible for my death makes me orgasm, in graphic detail, from an up-close view between my legs — again seems confused, less a critique than a fantasy. An author could, of course, write a violent, dehumanizing sex scene that’s a critique of violent, dehumanizing sex, but they’d need to bring more to it than female pleasure and the generic language of pornography. The major rape scene involving Beata at the end is also, long, extremely detailed, and hot if you like that kind of thing, which many people, including women, do. This is an innovation of a sort, revealing as it does the essential sexual co-dependence of the genders. If you are a woman who hates men and believes their essence is to degrade you, you end up fantasizing about it. What else is there?

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That third-wave feminism has devolved into misogyny porn is on the one hand surprising, but on the other not so much. In Bomer’s earlier work, she had a way of leaning into women’s fears about their bodies that felt empowering. In one story from Inside Madeline, a woman has massive, personhood-defining tits — and that’s it, that’s basically the story. In 2014 this still felt critical and risqué, part of the trend that said women could overcome negative stereotypes by embracing them. The book’s title story is about a voracious fat girl masturbating, which again at its time seemed to be doing a kind of reclaiming work. By openly daring to totally objectify and sexualize Madeline, without trying to please the male gaze, the story seemed like a monument to female power.

However if The Stalker proves anything, it’s that this approach hasn’t worked out. Viewing men in a totally negative light has only enshrined misogyny. And the “empowering” self-objectifying, a decade later, has become self-annihilation, a lesson that leaning into a bad thing does not produce something good, as much as we might wish to the contrary. The book ends in an explosion of gore, with both Sophia and Doughty’s gruesome deaths. Bomer means this as a tragedy for Sophia and a deserved comeuppance for Doughty. But what comes across instead is a mutual death-spiral, with a kind of unintentional elegant logic of its own. By fully dehumanizing men, we fully dehumanize ourselves.

Minutes before the show was due to begin, a flustered woman emerged from one of these doors exclaiming angrily that there were “men pissing in front of everyone”. Given that the show we were about to watch was Diary of a Somebody, John Lahr’s 1986 adaptation of Joe Orton’s diaries, I couldn’t help but wonder who Orton’s targets might be in the context today’s eternally baffling culture wars. Would it be the kind of woman who was clearly upset at having to wash her hands in full view of male genitalia, or would it be the authorities at the theatre who expect her to do so and would presumably brand her a “transphobe” or a “bigot” should she complain?

This revival of Diary of a Somebody includes a running joke delivered by Mrs Edna Welthorpe, an alter-ego of Orton who would write to the press and to theatres in the late Sixties to complain about his plays. She emerges from time to time at a window on the upstage wall, a kind of choric figure expostulating on the evils of our hero. Her words are lifted verbatim from the letters that Orton dispatched under her name. For instance, her letter to the Telegraph described Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964) as an “endless parade of mental and physical perversion”.

Such satire feels more relevant than ever when one considers how the new puritans of “Critical Social Justice” often give the impression of emulating Mrs Edna Welthorpe, with all their talk of how libraries ought to be “decolonised”, their pruning of supposedly offensive comedy shows on streaming services, and their attacks on “problematic” representations in art and literature. In this, Orton had an advantage over the satirists of our time. While he was lauded for lampooning the establishment and breaking taboos, writers who do so today are likely to be chastised by critics and the doyens of the industry for failing to toe the line.

Consider the responses to the West End revival of Jez Butterworth’s award-winning Jerusalem. “Should the play be revived?” writes playwright Bea Roberts. “I’m not sure. I read the script again recently and there’s a lot that feels dated: the laddish chat about ‘birds’ and the racial references… I understand it’s a safe bet for producers, this big, much-loved hit — and I loved it too. But at a time when theatre is grappling with questions of diversity and representation after Black Lives Matter, and when we’re seeing the rise of nationalism post-Brexit, doing a play about defending the homeland and Englishness seems ill-judged.”

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Roberts is far from alone in her belief that it is the responsibility of the dramatist to reinforce voguish and ephemeral trends. It seems unlikely that a work as genuinely subversive as Orton’s What the Butler Saw (1967) would ever be commissioned by a major theatre in the current climate. Early drafts would require a thorough going-over by a “sensitivity reader”, and doubtless a director with concerns about how theatrical productions ought to send the “correct message” would mangle whatever glimmers of genius remained.

I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. I have spoken to actors who have found that valuable rehearsal time is often now occupied with interrogating the morality behind the texts, and how the first session begins with each cast member declaring their preferred pronouns. Many avid theatregoers have been turned off because so many productions feel more like sermons than works of art. Critics in the mainstream press are now regularly assessing drama on the putative “message” of the piece, or whether or not they approve of the way in which characters are represented. The star-rating system has always been fatuous, but is especially so if marks are docked for insufficiently diverse casting.

None of which appeared to bother the best critics of Orton’s day. That his appeal has endured is, of course, partly due to the mystery surrounding his gruesome death, the event that Lahr’s play steers us towards with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. In 1967, Orton was beaten to death with a hammer by his lover and mentor Kenneth Halliwell in their small Islington flat. In his suicide note, Halliwell wrote: “If you read his diary all will be explained. KH. P.S. Especially the latter part.” Yet the final pages were missing.

Some believe that Orton’s agent Peggy Ramsay took the diary from the murder scene and may have removed the final section, possibly to protect someone’s identity. Friends of Orton have testified that he was having an affair and was on the brink of leaving Halliwell, but the man in question has never been named. The theatre critic Michael Thornton was informed by police that he was mentioned in those final pages, and that they had been withheld because they “contained sensitive information about persons still living”. If true, this would scupper the theory that Ramsay censored the document, and would suggest that the solution lies buried in police archives.

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Nico Rao Pimparé’s excellent production does not linger over the death itself, or indulge in a crude re-enactment (this was the major failing of Simon Bent’s 2009 biographical play Prick Up Your Ears at the Comedy Theatre in London). Rather, we are left with the image of Orton as he was in life; a puckish and defiant figure who revelled in the joys of his own sexuality. There is no deus ex machina of the kind we remember from What the Butler Saw, no figure from the heavens descending in a great blaze of glory to provide a satisfactory resolution. The final entry in Orton’s diary ends abruptly, cut off mid-sentence; so too the story of his life.

It was his promiscuity that may have been the catalyst to Halliwell’s mania. Orton would leave his diary around the flat in the knowledge that his lover would read his accounts of sexual exploits with strangers. This is also why its reliability cannot be trusted. Orton wrote these entries knowing that they would one day be published, and nothing satisfied him more than exasperating the prigs and pearl-clutchers of his day. As he noted when revising What the Butler Saw, “sex is the only way to infuriate them. Much more fucking and they’ll be screaming hysterics in next to no time.”

It was arguably Orton’s time in prison that consolidated this desire to provoke, and that appears to have been the driving motivation in both his life and his work. Orton and Halliwell served six months for defacing books at Islington Library. The pair would add semi-pornographic images to dustjackets, or rewrite the blurbs in the hope of shocking unsuspecting readers. He later claimed that prison “crystallised” his sense of “something rotten somewhere”, and that “the old whore society really lifted up her skirts and the stench was pretty foul”.

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While comedy tends to fare badly with the passage of time, relatively recent productions of Orton’s farces have proven hugely successful. The 50th anniversary production of Loot at the Park Theatre in 2017 was one of the best I have seen, and was enhanced immeasurably by a live actor playing the corpse that is stripped naked and bundled about the stage in the escalating mania. It was quite the contrast to the 2012 production of What the Butler Saw at the Vaudeville Theatre, whose fatal misstep was to allow the characters to find their own lines funny. If Orton’s farces aren’t played straight, they simply don’t work.

There are no likeable characters in What the Butler Saw; Orton sees humanity as a parade of degraded creatures, slaves to baser instincts, whose only value rests in being figures of fun for us to pruriently observe. The title invites us to imagine a butler taking a moment from his duties to peer into one of those seaside peepshow machines, popular in Edwardian England. This is what his “betters” get up to behind closed doors. Through his treatment of themes such as police brutality, institutionalised abuse, incest and necrophilia, Orton strips away the patina of respectable society. Whether one finds this cynical or not, it is undeniably funny.

True to the golden rule of comedy, revivals of Orton’s plays are all about the timing. And now that the theatre industry appears to be so ideologically captured, what better time for writers to pick up where Orton left off? In his day, the Lord Chamberlain would ensure that potentially subversive material would not make it to the stage. Today, theatrical practitioners have taken on that role for themselves, embodying the kind of prissy moralisers that Orton took such pleasure in skewering. Mrs Edna Welthorpe is back — and it won’t be long before her skirt gets lifted.

Our son was 18 at the time and had lived his entire life under a Tory government. My mood in the weeks ahead of Election ’97 was positively gleeful. As The Thick of It‘s Peter Mannion said a decade later as Labour’s own dynasty entered its fag-end phase: “Our tanks on their lawn at last, fuck a doodle-doo!”

Did the Blair years change satire? Not really. Maybe. Sort of, accidentally. The first Blair government happened to coincide with the growth of heartless piss-taking on the internet — that was new. And a young, earnest, sexually-active prime minister was bound to provide a welcome target for satirists bored senseless by John Major and his dreary retinue at Castle Greyscale.

We saw the elevation of “spin” to Dark Arts status, even though it has been a standard political ploy since Henry VIII’s first divorce. The appointment of Thomas Cromwell Alastair Campbell as press secretary defined New Labour’s presentation style, and his method and strategies paved the way for a new satirical landscape. Here was a journalist brought in at the very top, issuing orders to civil servants, enforcing the ministerial line on public statements, keeping the spads on message. Essentially Blair’s official spokesman, but with a senior civil servant’s salary and the influence of a deputy prime minister, say, or an editorial in the Sun.

In those balmy first months of summer 1997, however, the focus was very much on Tony: his barrister’s smile, his soft-Left dress code, his political philosophy of “whatever works, yeah?”. Private Eye portrayed him as a trendy vicar, irritated by church affiliates and parishioners alike. Steve Bell did him as a glinty-eyed Thatcher clone. Rory Bremner nailed the voice and mannerisms but, like many, struggled to find an ideology to satirise. As he told the BBC in 2007: “As soon as you got a handle on some area it would just vaporise and disappear and they’d be off somewhere else…”

Nebulous politics were hip, fading seamlessly into the wider cultural vacuity of Cool Britannia. Post-modern Union Jacks winked at us from everywhere — an Oasis guitar here, a Spice Girls frock there. Everyone was mad for Britpop and football and ecstasy and an end to boom-and-bust. Happy days. In PR terms, pride in New Labour’s New Britain was whatever worked, yeah? Whatever made us look good and feel fabulous. Dolce et gabbana est pro patria mori, as somebody should have said at the time.

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The great satirical chronicler of the rise and fall of New Labour was Armando Iannucci. Earlier in the decade, with Chris Morris and a brilliant team of writers and performers, he had entirely reset British satire, first on radio with On The Hour, then on TV with its mad descendant The Day Today. The format spoofed news stories through the prism of a news format which was itself satirised, Morris anchoring as a demented Paxman. When Blair was basking in warm hosannahs as the New Labour Messiah, Iannucci was there at the start of the Great Experiment with his new show, Saturday Night Armistice. He was there too at the end with The Thick of It as the hot air balloon deflated and Blair parachuted out, allowing Gordon Brown to navigate the last few hundred feet as the economy, with Labour in it, crashed.

Iannucci was taking the piss out of Blair even before the evangelical shine dimmed, at a time when New Labour was all about a new hope and Sure Start and billions pumped into education and health; when Blair’s public approval ratings were up there with Diana, Princess of Wales and Fatboy Slim. Armistice featured a soft toy called Mr Tony Blair whose inanities could only be heard by Iannucci. It seemed jarring to me at the time, Blair as a platitudinous gonk, but it was, as it turned out, merely prophetic. I spoke to Iannucci recently about satirising Blair in those early years. “We started portraying him as the Sun King,” he said. “That whole sense of him feeding off how good he thinks he is as a person, his saintliness, his good works. It wasn’t like we were trying to bring him down, just to pierce that sense of mass hysteria…”

In due course, the satire became less about the Mandelsons and Prescotts of New Labour. “All the ones that the impressionists would automatically do, they were all gently eased out,” said Iannucci. “Anyone with a hint of idiosyncrasy had to go. Blair wanted managerial clones of himself, safe and uniform. Thatcher and Major had tended to appoint ministers who had a bit of clout, some expertise, in their subjects. Under Blair, it was much more the case that ministers were required to do what Number 10 wanted. Message control — that was what the whole Blair thing was about…”

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He mentions Excalibur, the party’s “rapid rebuttal unit” which compiled computerised data on Labour’s opponents, allowing it to mount agile and aggressive counterattacks during the ’97 election campaign. By 1999, aggressive counter-attacks were seen as a bit tame. The party appointed a Head of Attack to lead its election campaign using Excalibur 2. “They didn’t want to make the mistake of not preparing,” Iannucci said, “and then went crazily the other way…”

As the Millennium dawned, so did something else. Satirists realised that the key strength and weakness of the government was the Blair-Campbell axis. Until now, the most famous media bulldog had been Thatcher’s scrotum-chewing press secretary, Bernard Ingham. In those days the job meant protecting your boss. Now it meant being his locum. By the time the Iraq war happened, Blair’s moral compass was already spinning in its grave. The Public Finance Initiative was revealing itself to be a massive siphon, sucking money from taxpayers to developers from here to eternity, ASBOs were already a badge of honour for young criminals, and Parliamentary oversight was becoming an afterthought rather than a statutory condition.

And every week, as the misery in Iraq increased, I thought — loads of us thought — of Bush and Blair and their prayer breakfasts, with their mad conviction that they were on a mission from God. How we’d have loved to hear the other side of those prayers.

This audacity of self-belief: how it trumped political process, how pure it was. Iraq exposed a contempt for accountability, a legacy we enjoy to its fullest with the current shower of crooks and clowns. As Iannucci told me: “Because they were crushing the personality out of the Cabinet, the subject was therefore going to be the process. It had to be. It’s why we went into the process itself with Thick. We were thinking about what happens to people when they have untrammelled power. You know, ‘I invaded Iraq because I thought it was the right thing to do’. That’s not enough — you need proof! This is what happens if anyone at any point on the political spectrum believes they have a mission, that only they can fix this…”

As an exercise in satirical archaeology I recently watched Iannucci’s Election Night Armistice. It went out live on the night in 1997 and honestly, it’s all there even before Blair slipped into his monogrammed pyjamas at Number 10. I’d missed most of it at the time because, like every other pissed Old Labour voter, I was mostly glued to the unfolding source material. But on Armistice, here was the sensationalist media taken to a logical conclusion: someone in a giant penis costume — the Sleaze Cock — was on the streets badgering senior Tories. Sally Phillips was the Whore in a Helicopter ready to invent a tabloid affair with the first MP elected.

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And some bits were comedy microcosms of the fearsome governmental narrative control we were to see in the years to come. Spin Olympics, in retrospect, was eerily prescient. Here, flanked by a Thatcher-era PR guy and a Lib Dem treasurer is 30-year-old Derek Draper, former chief adviser to Mandelson, who would go on to have a chequered career in the Labour Party. Unlike the other two — the Tory ebulliently clueless; the Lib Dem sober but useless — Draper is utterly, utterly brilliant. He understands how the game works, here and in real life. In the first round, the contestants have to spin some awful thing a politician has said: for example, David Blunkett: “I hate Muslims.” For comic effect Draper channels furious sanctimony to insist that Blunkett was talking about the way Muslims are stereotyped by the media, and deplores the way that this show itself threatens to denigrate and harm minorities.

Round Two features a random policy generator, which nonsensically burps up: “We/would like to/nationalise/Europe.” Nevertheless, Draper talks it up, arguing that individual EU nations would be improved. A Wheel of Spin is spun: Talk Tough. Without missing a beat he says “… and if they don’t like it they’ll just have to put up with it…” The wheel spins again and again. Do a U-Turn: “… though of course each nation will have control over its own affairs…” Go Negative: he does, firmly disavowing the policy without breaking his tone of sincerity. It’s a tour de force, and an astonishing glimpse of what was to come fictionally with Malcolm Tucker and the hapless ministers under his control.

So the Blair years didn’t change satire. But satire was there all along, hiding in plain sight, waiting to become real. In the dying light of 2009, with Tony now well into his new globalist afterlife, Thick scriptwriters and New Labour wonks were coming up with identically desperate policies, week after week in Broken Britain. Policies that had to sound impressive and cost nothing. The audience looked from satirists to policymakers, and from policymakers to satirists, but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Political satire has been in a confused state these past five years, since Donald Trump short-circuited it so dramatically that it is yet to recover. It became a cliché to say that the things Trump said and did on a daily basis would have had you laughed out of any writers’ room if you’d invented them. How could you parody a man who, vaccinated against embarrassment by his total absence of humour, parodied himself? Boris Johnson is a very different character — a sense of shambolic comedy is his sword and shield — but similarly hard to spoof because he caricatures himself.

After The Thick of It, Iannucci went to the US and launched Veep, bringing a dissonant note of panic and incompetence to a country where fictional presidents are usually very good (Jed Bartlett from The West Wing) or very bad (Frank Underwood from House of Cards), but generally on top of things either way. He left the show after three seasons in 2015 so that he could direct movies, just in time to avoid having to grapple with the conundrum of a president who made Veep’s Selina Meyer look relatively decent and proficient. David Mandel, his replacement as showrunner, didn’t so much solve the problem as ignore it. Veep remained very funny but it lost much of its relevance by unplugging itself from the wild new reality of Washington DC. It ended in 2019, a few months after House of Cards.

Nothing has come along to replace those shows. The old warhorses of satire roll on — Have I Got News for You and the revived Spitting Image in the UK; Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show in the US (a British version of SNL is in the pipeline). But where are the dramas and scripted comedies? Politics is not where the action is.

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When I interviewed Iannucci recently, he chose Succession and The White Lotus as the most biting satires around. Both shows coolly dissect the callousness of the very rich, and show the casualties they leave behind. Inevitably, some of that wealth comes from tech. Nicole Mossbacher (Connie Britton) in The White Lotus is the CFO of a popular search engine. In this series of Succession, Waystar-Royco’s old-media empire is seeking a life-saving deal with Lukas Mattson (Alexander Skarsgaard), the bored and ruthless CEO of the streaming company GoJo. The most powerful character in Iannucci’s own Avenue 5, a sci-fi sitcom about a society under pressure, is tech billionaire Herman Judd, played by Josh Gad as a vain man-baby. And it’s telling that Adam McKay, whose 2018 movie Vice was a black comedy about Dick Cheney, is making his next picture about Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal.

There’s a novelty factor here. Next to most politicians, the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are fascinatingly weird characters with literally cosmic ambitions. Mark Zuckerberg, in his public appearances, comes off as less a human being than a beta-version AI — a flesh-and-blood demonstration of the uncanny valley. This is good material. Take Christopher Evan Welch in Silicon Valley, whose character Peter Gregory always looked as if he were on the verge of teleporting back to his home planet, Oscar Isaac’s malfunctioning hipster hermit in Ex Machina, or Nick Offerman’s glumly deranged schlub-genius in Devs. Succession’s Lukas Mattson combines a killer instinct with airport-bookstore self-help mantras and the distinct impression that he could tank GoJo’s share price with a single ill-judged tweet composed while tripping at Burning Man.

But tech gurus aren’t just a fun new toy for writers to play with. Satire follows power, and power is not where it was. In Western democracies there is a general sense that politicians are hamstrung and hopeless while tech companies are busy changing the way we communicate, think and act. After a mob stormed the Capitol on January 6, for example, social media companies did far more to dampen Trump’s efforts to overturn the election than Congress did.

Iannucci told me that his final episode of Veep, which ended with a deadlocked electoral college, “seemed to me to sum up where American politics is”, which is to say paralysed. While Joe Biden’s ambitious legislative agenda depends on the vanity of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, Jeff Bezos is flying into space and earning $143,000 a minute. Which man is the more fertile source of both comedy and outrage? In Succession, Logan Roy has the power to bring down one president and handpick another, yet even he is at the mercy of Lukas Mattson’s whims.

Charlie Brooker, who rivals Iannucci as the UK’s most celebrated satirist, was ahead of the curve with Black Mirror, where politics is a sideshow if it features at all. In its very first episode, The National Anthem, broadcast ten years ago this month, the Prime Minister is a sympathetic character who accedes to a horrific televised humiliation for honourable reasons. The real villains of the episode are the people who watch it. Nosedive, the first episode after Black Mirror’s move to Netflix, is a dystopia without a dictator, where lives rise or fall according to an app. In Smithereens, Brooker finally introduced a modern-day tech bro: a pseudo-hippie with a man-bun, evidently modelled on Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, who has lost control of his own creation.

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By Dorian Lynskey

Brooker is sometimes stereotyped as a grumpy technophobe (“what if phones, but too much,” as one brilliant parody put it), but the world is coming around to his point of view. Who would have thought that a social-media platform that started out by rating the attractiveness of Harvard students would end up, 15 years later, facilitating genocide in Myanmar? There aren’t many takers these days for the old Silicon Valley utopianism. Perhaps the only heroic tech billionaire in popular culture, before his death, was Marvel’s Tony Stark, but his enemies were usually also tech billionaires, so that balanced out nicely.

This antipathy to Big Tech isn’t confined to the screen. In the realm of fiction, its most dogged opponent is probably the American novelist Dave Eggers, who has just published The Every, the hefty sequel to his 2013 bestseller The Circle. Eggers has called smartphones “technological crack” and compared our relationship with technology to “being in a relationship with a very controlling, needy, obsessive person. You’re never free; you’re always paranoid. You’re simultaneously on a leash and under a microscope”.

Several years on, the social media giant The Circle has acquired an online retail platform nicknamed “the jungle” from its spacefaring founder (the thinness of the disguise is a running joke) and rebranded itself as The Every. (The novel was finished, by the way, before Zuckerberg renamed Facebook’s parent company Meta.) True to its name, The Every seeks to permeate and control every nook and cranny of human existence — all for the greater good, of course.

Refuseniks who choose to live outside The Every are labelled “trogs”. Eggers is a proud trog and The Every is an unashamedly old-fashioned novel of ideas. It goes on for too long, as angry people often do, because Eggers has so much to get off his chest. Though ostensibly about the efforts of one employee to infiltrate and destroy the company, it is less a story than a series of conversations about increasingly berserk innovations.

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Test article

By Giles Fraser

In a neat satirical twist, the company cloaks its unrelenting assault on personal privacy and freedom in the language of political correctness. It is obsessed with veganism and reducing carbon emissions to the point of demonising pets and bananas. Once something is deemed “problematic”, it is not long for this brave new world where totalitarianism wears a tight smile and shame is a weapon of mass destruction. As for politics, The Every runs the world’s dominant voting software (no account, no vote) and kills the presidential campaign of its leading opponent in just minutes. To The Every, democracy is a bug to be ironed out.

Likewise in the real world, if you really want to look at how the world works, you’re better off writing about a CEO than a president. As Boris Johnson’s hapless behaviour this week showed, a politician as smoothly machiavellian as Frank Underwood or his British predecessor Francis Urquhart would be no more plausible than one with X-ray vision. Perhaps, looking back, the panicky impotence of the characters in The Thick of It and Veep was a sign that political satire was running out of road. The day somebody writes a successful new satire on politics, politicians should welcome it with open arms. It will mean they matter again.

The complex relationship between leaders and satirists is as old as politics itself. Aristophanes attacks Socrates in his comedies, Plato accuses Aristophanes of misrepresentation and whipping up the mob. Nearly two and a half thousand years before the invention of the internet, the same issues surface again and again: hypocritical public figures, comedic put-downs, public anger, the manipulation of public anger. But have satirists ever had this much of the upper hand? Those who would expose political deceit have so many more means of detecting hypocrisy — cameras in Government offices, for heaven’s sake — and increasing access to audiences to expose it to.

The jester used to sit in the corner of the royal court, occasionally telling the truth about the king in the apparently innocuous form of comedic banter. Now the jester has a court of his own. Sometimes he is better paid than his targets. He may have a larger public profile, perhaps even more political clout that those he mocks. As the satirist Steve Punt joked on Private Passions, there are some young people who watch Have I Got News For You but won’t watch the news itself. Comedians have real power in holding politicians to account; but how do we hold them to account?

Part of the trouble is to be found in the complex eddies of truth that swirl around the notion of hypocrisy. The exposure of hypocrisy is the satirist’s stock in trade. The danger however is that the satirist can all too easily presume that he or she is above it. As R. Jay Magill writes in his fascinating little book on Sincerity, “satirists mean sincere things by saying them insincerely, hypocrites say sincere things but actually mean them insincerely.” In other words, despite their superficially self-deprecating irony, the purpose of the satirist is one of deep sincerity and moral seriousness. They possess the true heart, so beloved of religious Puritans since the sixteenth century.

And this may be part of the problem: the mocker becomes the moral hero. Those who would cast our political life as a parade of stupidity and hypocrisy understand themselves to be above the very things they point to in others. Often, we don’t even know who they are. Who produced all those Hancock memes? I have no idea. And no idea whether their own lives match up to the moral seriousness they see lacking in their target.

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The Church is abandoning its flock

By Giles Fraser

One explanation for our increasing concern with sincerity — with whether people are who they say they are — is that it came about following the Industrial Revolution, as people moved from a settled rural life to an increasingly transitory urban one. In the rural village setting, if you are born and die in the same place, people can eventually work out who you are. If you say one thing and do another, others notice. Your true nature emerges over time. But when people move about more frequently, the question of whether someone is as they profess to be becomes much trickier to establish.

Something similar is also produced by the way our relationships are now so mediated by technology. Where there is a screen between you and me, I no longer feel I have access to the social cues that can reassure me of your sincerity. In such a context, we often insist upon our own sincerity by signalling it to others in increasingly deliberate ways. Ironically, there then becomes something increasingly artificial about the profession of sincerity – which only intensifies the cycle of distrust and the need for a more genuine expression of sincerity. With so much work, and even socialising, done on Zoom, the whole of our lives seem to resemble a kind of demonic Turing Test, an attempt to work out the truth of the other at some impossibly digital distance.

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There are many echoes of the past here. The Puritans of the 16th and 17th centuries were gripped by the fear that others did not sincerely hold to the faith that they professed. Was the conversion of others genuine? Or was it mere outward performance? How could you tell? It is no coincidence that with this Puritan anxiety came a new proliferation of testimonies and autobiographies, all attempts to show the inner self to the outside world, proving sincerity.

Much has been made of the idea that we are now in an age of New Puritanism, a new era of moral intensity. Some call it woke, but I wonder if the more interesting comparison is with the anxiety about sincerity. As our lives are more mediated by technology, and as the wearing of masks has become standard practice, the question of the truthfulness of the other is once again intensified. The very word hypocrisy derives etymologically from the Greek for play acting, referencing actors who wore masks on stage. Now we all wear masks. And so now the question of hypocrisy has intensified, generating renewed social anxiety.

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Zoom takes away a piece of our souls

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This is where the satirists come in, and why they are the crack troops of the New Puritanism. Imbued with a sense of moral righteousness, they set about trying to unmask the deceivers. And politicians make for a ready and easy target. Don’t get me wrong, they often deserve it. And satire is a vital component of a society saturated with bullshit, political and otherwise. But the rise in the importance of, and our need for, satire is also a consequence of the weakening of the social bonds that used to form the basis for our mutual understanding. Increasingly, is is also a consequence of the kind of mediated and distanced lives we are being forced to live through technology.

Like the Puritans of old, we are obsessed with the fact that others might not be as they seem, with hypocrisy, with transparency. And like the Puritans, we are obsessed with parading our inner righteousness in moral testimonies for all to see, making public demonstrations of sincerity. We now call this virtue signalling — which is not about younger people being more self-righteous, but more about the need to demonstrate moral sincerity in a context where so many of the traditional mechanisms for establishing it have collapsed.

In the end, however, the old-style Puritans had God to settle the matter. He alone would know the secrets of your heart, He alone would unmask the truth. The new-style Puritans give this role to The Now Show and Mock the Week.

It now turns out that it’s not just the putative audience of the show that’s thinking this. ITV’s director of television Kevin Lygo (ITV have the controlling stake in BritBox) this week told a TV diversity session  that the makers of the new version have volunteered for advice from executives about how to portray non-white public figures, and whether non-white puppets should be voiced by white actors. Amusingly, Lygo caveated his remarks about these ‘surreal’ meetings with the customary nervous trickle of cancellation terror, apologising for the past sins of ITV and its lack of diversity

So, we have a general atmosphere of apprehension and doubt all round. This is just the kind of worry that’s famous for producing rambunctious, devil-may-care satire. One pictures Jonathan Swift sat immobile at his desk with his quill drying up, head in hands, wailing “Gadzooks, what if I sayeth the wrong thing?!”

Some background for the young. The original Spitting Image was the televisual incarnation of staggeringly cruel puppets, beautiful in their grotesqueness, designed and built by sculptors Peter Fluck and Roger Law. These were often seen in the press, illustrating articles in the Sunday colour supplements of the day, from the mid-1970s. They were political cartoons come to three dimensional life, and these were not kind cartoons or fond exaggerations. They are horrible in the same way as a George Cruikshank caricature of the 19th century. You’re certainly never in any doubt who the person is meant to be. The first reaction to a new one was always a visceral OH MY GOD and a nervous guffaw (a nervous guffaw is possible).

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Why the woke can't make jokes

By Gareth Roberts

Spitting Image began a few years later, in 1983. On tv and in motion the puppets became even more extreme. They farted and wept, sweated, belched and vomited. Labour’s thoughtful and cultured deputy Roy Hattersley became an incoherent windbag, constantly spraying jets of saliva. Tory education minister Kenneth Baker became an oleaginous head on the body of a snail, Liberal leader David Steel a tiny, piping-voiced nothing. 

The scripts (more hit-and-miss than we tend to remember these days) and their depictions of the targets’ characters were equally cruel — Princess Diana was a sharp-nosed airhead, and the mocking of her anorexia was a key joke. (In one sketch she is offered her ‘favourite food’ — a cloche is pulled off to reveal an empty plate.) Such rough-and-tumble moments weren’t unusual. This was constant.

People often call satire savage but it hardly ever is. Spitting Image was savage — a carnival of human frailty, in which people are little more than animals with delusions of political or celebrity grandeur. Nobody is worthy of respect or consideration. Everybody, of all political persuasions, is just awful. 

Can you see the problem with reviving this in 2020, when we are so much more sensitive and mindful of medical conditions, mental health and unfortunate physical flaws? The year when The League Of Gentlemen and The Mighty Boosh were pulled off the BBC iPlayer, and the stars of Little Britain and Bo Selecta have had to make repeated disavowals of their work?

Yes, every joke offends or disquiets someone, and in a sane world we would all accept that, tut and sigh, and move on.

But I find it uneasy to see non-white people portrayed in extreme physical caricature, and I’m a conservative in my fifties who finds identity politics nauseating. God alone knows what will happen when and if middle-class Millennials see this.

The history of cartoon depictions of ethnic minorities in the western world and the exaggeration of their facial features is a repulsive one, and you don’t have to go very far back in time to find it. In the days of the original Spitting Image there were simply no ethnic prominent politicians. The only ethnic puppets from the original that I can recall were Frank Bruno, Chris Eubank, Trevor McDonald and Prince — all of whom were sculpted with thick lips they did not possess in life. 

Now we have Priti Patel and Rishi Sunak as Home Secretary and Chancellor, and Dawn Butler and Diane Abbot as major ‘characters’ on the Opposition, and the Duchess of Sussex as the most highly contentious public figure of all.

If the new Spitting Image follows the lead of the original, what will their puppets look and sound like? By the old rules, Labour’s current deputy Angela Rayner would have to be depicted as a drooling moron that can’t get a coherent sentence out. (Interestingly, Margaret Thatcher, the undoubted star turn of the original, was never given any quarter — but then, she never asked for or expected any. Our current crop of politicians is a far less hardy breed.)

There is humour to be found in discomfort like mine, sure. A lot of comedy is at the edge of acceptability, and plays with our anxieties to release tension. But is fledgling channel BritBox really going to take the plunge, in a hyper-conscious racially charged atmosphere, to make the new Spitting Image, in the words of Roger Law, “more outrageous, audacious and salacious” than ever? And God alone knows what will happen if and when they should ever unveil a trans puppet.

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How I was cancelled by Doctor Who

By Gareth Roberts

We are at a sticky, transitional point in social history, with women and minorities taking much more of a role in public life; while at the same time we are still very antsy about the legacy of how they’ve been portrayed in the fairly recent past. It feels unhealthy, especially when people with those characteristics are in positions of power, but we have arrived at a point where there are people we simply can’t poke fun at.

So my advice, if I’d been in those ITV meetings, would have been “Don’t even try to make this. Stop immediately!” Because Spitting Image in 2020, if it were to retain its original nihilism and scabrousness, would cause absolute meltdown. It would be a succès de scandale requiring balls of adamantine from BritBox and its backers at ITV and BBC Studios (which, to say the least, is very unlikely).

So my secondary advice would to be to do something else, find another way. BBC Three’s much missed and inexplicably cancelled Mongrels used puppets cleverly to be satirical, very naughty and very funny. We definitely need something to defuse and diffuse our tensions, and heated, angry Spitting Image ain’t it.

It is coming anyway. The new series will need to be written to an incredibly high standard with surprises and unforeseen quirks. It must make you gasp in horror at its nerve and cleverness, and ignore both old worrywarts like me and the woke cultural establishment. Its license to offend must be defended to the hilt. But let’s face it, it won’t. Much more probably, it will be timid and pull its punches, and follow 2DTV and Newzoids (no, me neither) into oblivion. Satire just doesn’t work if you’re afraid.

Why have we become so obsessed with snobbery — or the snobbery of other people, at least? You might think: has it not ever been thus? “Snobbery is the religion of England,” wrote Frank Harris in the 1920s. And it was Orwell who claimed that nobody was as snobbish as the English.

But it’s worth remembering that in the 1960s, with the celebration of youth and the new classlessness, snobbery seemed old-fashioned and foolish. It was seen as the social vice of suburban social climbers and downwardly mobile toffs. Snobbery was doomed because it had no place in a modern, meritocratic Britain — or so its critics assumed.

We would laugh at snobbery and the Great British Snobs of TV sit-coms such as Hyancith Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances, Margo Leadbetter in The Good Life and Cyril Blamire in Last of the Summer Wine. But now snobbery is no laughing matter.

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It has even undergone a kind of conceptual make-over. For social scientists and public intellectuals, snobbery as a concept once lacked substance — at least when it came to the analysis of serious issues like class conflict or capitalism. But since Brexit and the victory of Trump, snobbery — along with elitism — dominates much of our serious political and cultural analysis both in the UK and the USA.  For many it’s a way of understanding the world and what’s gone wrong with it.

For the Right, snobbery plays the same role as racism does for the woke Left: an ugly social evil that must be exposed and expunged from society. And in the same way that the woke-Left sees institutional racism everywhere, so the Right sees institutional snobbery everywhere too — in the BBC, The Guardian, academia and the arts.

Anti-racists believe that along with explicit racism there’s a hidden implicit racism at work: a whole substratum of assumptions and codes that needs to be teased out to reveal the truth of what white people are really saying. For anti-snobbists too, snobbery exists in a series of codes and assumptions. They hear the dog-whistles of snobbery everywhere.

You may think that you don’t like reality TV because it’s mindless rubbish, but anti-snobbists claim the real reason is that you don’t like the spectacle of working-class people — and you don’t like the sort of people who watch reality TV, either! And so you’re a double snob!

And you may think that a holiday in France, a night at the opera or drinking wine from Tuscany are just the innocent pleasures of life: wrong! According to a New Statesman columnist, these are the “culture tokens” by which the snobbish middle-class, “state and restate their presumed superiority over the common masses”.

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In snob-sensitive Britain, not only do you have to be careful about appearing to criticise other people’s taste, but declaring your own. The writer Candia McWilliam was once labelled a “super-snob” for saying she loved ”reading Villiers de L’Isle Adam while eating a pomelo”. OK, it’s a touch pretentious, but snobbish? I don’t think so.

If all this talk of snobbery were just so much social-media banter without any wider consequences it wouldn’t matter. But in the same way that racism or transphobia can cost you your job, so can snobbery, as the MP Andrew Mitchell discovered in 2012 when he was alleged to have called a policeman “a fucking pleb”. Two years later Labour’s Emily Thornberry, then the Shadow Attorney General, tweeted a photo of a house in her constituency in Kent with three flags of St. George and a white van in the front of it. Whatever her intentions were — her tweet carried no comment — the mere whiff of snobbery cost Thornberry her job too.

Politicians and public-figures now show off their man-of-the-people credentials by displaying their love of football, pop music or the latest Netflix series everyone is watching. If you’re an old Etonian in public life with a passion for the works of Seneca, best keep it to yourself. And that’s exactly what the Latin-loving Boris Johnson has done ever since his Brexit rebranding as a man of the people. During the run-up to his 2019 victory Johnson was asked how he liked to relax and told his talkRADIO audience he likes to make “models of buses” and “paint passengers.” Clearly his days of quoting Virgil and wearing a toga are over.

Snobbery in our post-Brexit era has become something more associated with the liberal-Left than the conservative Right. It wasn’t always so. Snobbery used to be most visible among the Right — unapologetic snobs included Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Anthony Powell and the Oxford don A.L. Rowse.

That is not to say that the Left was never snobbish. But as the self-appointed champions of the working-class they saved their snobbish comments for the middle-class, or the “bourgeoisie” as they were contemptuously called. Looking down on Suburban Man, his subservient Stepford-Wife and 2.4 kids — with his ghastly taste in decor, his middlebrow music and books — was perfectly acceptable and even admired, as the success of Mike Leigh’s 1977 BBC television drama Abigail’s Party showed.

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In those days though, that was called social satire. Snobbery is when you laugh at the working-class; satire is laughing at the middle-class. And we’re still mocking and laughing at the middle-class, only we’re too worried about snobbery towards the working-class to notice or care. Owen Jones in his book Chavs (2011) claimed that prejudice towards the working-class was the only socially acceptable form of prejudice; now when it comes to snobbery it’s the only form of prejudice that causes concern.

I accept that no one is going to take a stand against being snobby about us poor maligned middle-class folks with our much-mocked “first-world problems” and our curated coffee fixations. I get it. But if anti-snobbists really believe that snobbery is wrong — and they do — then why not?

Britain really became snob-sensitive in the wake of the EU referendum of 2016. Many commentators claimed that a new wave of snobbery had been unleashed by Remainers. And that’s partly true. Too often I have heard my Remainer friends bemoan those “ghastly” Brexiteers. That said, over 16 million people voted to remain in the EU — they can’t all be snobs, can they?

We all agree that snobbery is wrong. The question is: how wrong? How terrible a social problem is it? Considering the fury it provokes, you’d think snobbery were on par with racism, anti-Semitism or sexism. And for the anti-snob, it is. Bryan Appleyard in the Spectator magazine argues that “snobbery is exactly like racism” and that while it may be occasionally funny, snobbery is always, writes Appleyard, “evil”.   

Is it really evil or something merely offensive?  It’s true that like racism or anti-Semitism, snobbery is rooted in prejudice. But there is a prejudice that causes real harm — physical injury and emotional damage — and prejudice that is shallow and does no real serious and lasting damage.

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Whatever happened to TV's working-class heroes?

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We make a big fuss about snobbery but I suspect that its actual presence on people’s daily lives is minimal. You don’t find YouTube videos of passengers on public transport being subjected to vicious tirades about their cheap Primark clothes, vulgar jewellery or their dropped ‘h’s by a drunken snob, clutching a vintage bottle of Chateau Du Ponce.

And what of the serious damage caused by snobbery? Are mosques fire bombed and Jews attacked on the street because of snobbery? (The snob raises their nose, not their fists.) Does snobbery create poor health, homelessness, family breakdown, mental illness, suicide or drug addiction the way poverty can? I don’t think so. Does anyone really believe that if snobbery totally disappeared that it would make a substantial difference to the quality of everyday life of ordinary people?

Anti-snobbists complain when the working-class are shamed on social media — but do they really feel ashamed? Maybe it’s — dare I say it — a bit snobbish to assume that working-class people are so fragile they’d be hurt by some ephemeral tweet from some snobbish twat?

The Right is always complaining that people — particularly the young — lack any kind of resilience or fortitude when faced with words or ideas that make them uncomfortable or hurt their feelings. Such people are usually dismissed as “snowflakes” — unless they are working-class people who allegedly have been a victim of middle-class liberal snobbery.

The idea that working-class people across the land are sitting at home and in pubs seething with indignation at the snobbery of middle-class people at north London dinner parties is absurd. Of course if you ask such people they will criticise the more blatant forms of snobbery. But most of the time, I suspect, they don’t even think about these matters. Why should they care what such people think?

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And there’s some academic evidence that they don’t. In Reacting to Reality Television the sociologists Bev Skeggs and Helen Wood examined the hostile and often snobbish attitudes towards working-class women who appeared in reality TV shows. These women were criticised for being too fat, for drinking too much, smoking too much and having too many children — all the clichés about “chavs” rolled into one.

But how did these women react to such snobbish attacks? Were they angry or hurt? Did they feel ashamed? No, they responded with admirable indifference. Professor Skeggs said on a BBC Radio 4 programme on snobbery, that these women who had been subjected to such abuse didn’t “care about a lot of these middle-class judgments being imposed on them. They just didn’t notice it.”

By defending the white working-class from middle-class snobbery it allows one to appear a true egalitarian — without having to believe in equality. It’s curious that people are so angry about snobbery, but not the inequities of class or the inequalities of capitalism that snobbery is based on.

If anyone is to be pitied it’s not the working-class person who is looked down upon, but the snob doing the looking. Believing in your own superiority — because of your birth or consumer choices — means that you are in the grips of a terrible and dangerous form of self-delusion. The snob is trapped in a self-fulfilling fallacy. Like the man who thinks he’s Napoleon or Jesus Christ, the snob needs our help to get back to reality, rather than our condemnation.

So 1961 was a propitious moment for Private Eye to be born.

And what a time they had of it! It must have been the most wicked fun to put together a magazine whose sole purpose was to ridicule, undermine and embarrass the Powers That Be. It required, too, a measure of courage to seek out and take on rich and powerful individuals and to subject them to relentless, scornful scrutiny.

And when you look at the Eye’s battle honours from those early years you have to say they (mostly) chose the right targets. The long campaign against the scoundrel Robert Maxwell, the dishonest proprietor of the Daily Mirror, showed the magazine at its best; it had intuited that Maxwell was a rogue and stood up to all his costly and dishonest litigation. Vindication came after his death when his true perfidy – which included robbing the Mirror’s pensioners – was laid bare. It was episodes like that – and there are many others – which proved how necessary the Eye was; it devoted itself to uncovering wrongdoing, it did so with an anarchic sense of humour, and the country was a better place because of it.

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But what of today? Everything still looks the same: the front cover still carries the little cartoon figure of ‘Gnittie’, the glum looking crusader knight, some of the jokes still show flashes of wit, some of the journalism is worthwhile (some of it is very good, taking on stories that other outlets ignore), but as for the satire, it is for the most part, leaden.

The American humorist and journalist Molly Ivins put it well when she said that “Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful” and all too often, these days, the Eye seems to have lost sight of that essential truth. The Establishment that was the Eye’s original target has long since disappeared; that world where senior politicians were accorded respect simply because of the positions they held, where there was a traditional (though sometimes hypocritical) morality which held sway in the public realm, that has all vanished. In its place there is a new Establishment with a new, lax moral code but with a novel and rigidly enforced set of ‘correct’ opinions – and this has proved a much more difficult target for the Eye.

The best satire is the product of a sense of burning injustice. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is the stand-out historical example. Swift’s proposal that the poor should sell their children for the rich to eat was coruscating hyperbole done to shame the Establishment of the day. As Private Eye reaches middle age what is lacking is any sense of true outrage impelling the attacks.

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The last edition, for instance, had a front cover lampooning (yet again) Boris Johnson; but this feels more of an affectionate cuddle than a stiletto attack. Partly, I think, this is due to Ian Hislop’s role as ringmaster and presiding genius of the BBC show Have I Got News for You – interestingly the very programme which helped turned Boris, with his artfully constructed, shambolic persona, into a media darling. In his HIGNFY incarnation Hislop has become a celebrity and that is an uncomfortable coupling for a satirist; he is himself now part of the new Establishment, which blunts his satirist’s edge. From what I know of Mr Hislop he has lived a virtuous life and is the enemy of wrongdoers but in the process he has morphed into that most paradoxical of things – an Establishment satirist.

It is noticeable for instance how anti-Brexit the Eye is; in an interview on the Andrew Marr show in 2017 Hislop agreed that he had become a ‘remoaner’ and that he fully intended to carry on fighting to reverse the referendum decision and, naturally, his own feelings on the matter colour his magazine’s coverage. By proudly announcing his Remain credentials he merely cemented his credentials as a member of the new Establishment and in doing so certainly conforms to the BBC’s view of the matter. It is clear from the polling evidence that the Remain position is the choice of the well-educated and the affluent whilst Leavers are often the left-behinds. It would seem more natural if our leading satirical publication should be siding with the underdogs instead of which on the defining issue of the day it aligns itself with the boss class.

It is not only Private Eye that illustrates the decayed state of British satire. We now live in a country saturated in satire but the Right – or at least a caricature of what the Right really is – is often the target. That governing class long ago went to its final resting place so the jokes don’t find their mark.

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The BBC, for instance, is fond of launching ‘edgy’ satirists on its radio and TV shows; in practice these almost always turn out to be the same old, vaguely leftie, Jeremy Hardy wannabes. But maybe change is in the air: after decades when all satire seemed to be in the hands of social justice warriors, a new breed is emerging. These anti-woke jokers (Geoff Norcott and Konstantin Kisin are leading exponents of the new wave) are claiming the right to make jokes at the expense of doctrinaire liberals. They’re still outnumbered by the old guard but it’s the best thing that’s happened to British satire since … well maybe since Private Eye itself was launched.

One of the motivations of Christopher Booker and the other founding fathers was, apparently, their dismay at the decline of Punch magazine. That venerable institution, founded in 1841, began life as a vehicle for sharp satire but over the decades it fell prey to a debilitating politeness, closing finally in 2002. Private Eye, a child of the Sixties, has not been able to maintain the fine, fiery contempt that fuelled its early years; there’s still just about enough in it to justify the effort of buying and reading it but – as it celebrates its 1,500th edition – it’s beginning to feel just a little tame and constrained. Under Hislop it has built a big circulation but he has now been editor for 33 years – exceptional tenure for any editor; one day, surely, the baton will have to be passed on.

Satire is a serious business; we need it to highlight our follies, failings and frauds. Mockery is the price our rulers must pay for their privileges but it is the weapon of the angry outsider; Private Eye’s problem is that it has now become too much of an insider. Time for a change?

The Associated Press report which followed that headline related one of the records now regularly being broken in women’s sports. That these gains (in college and professional sports) are coming from male to female transsexuals is a detail you can either celebrate or find troubling.  Though woe betide you if you choose the wrong reaction there.

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For if you find such developments remotely troubling you will simultaneously find yourself in a majority and yet exiled. Martina Navratilova chose to raise her concerns about transsexual athletes, and instantaneously a woman who has been a trailblazer for women – especially gay women – in sport was accused of undermining LGBT rights and expelled from an LGBT activist group.

In a world where born-men beat born-women at women’s sports and everybody is meant to just shut up about it nobody could possibly be surprised if reality and satire begin to grow thin and one eventually begins to resemble the other.

Perhaps it is for this reason that the art of satire has developed a new platform and a new audience. In recent years, real satire has emerged not on the tired, stale and ‘safe’ platforms of the BBC and other mob-vulnerable old media platforms, but in places which allow people to be nimble, swift and independent as they hover over every necessary target of our time.

Suggested reading

Liberal smugness will destroy the Left

By Giles Fraser

A couple of years ago, Twitter discovered the genius of Godfrey Elfwick. The “genderqueer Muslim atheist”, though born white claimed to be black, and became famous for his ability to fudge the boundaries between the zeitgeist and the inventions of his head. Among his masterpieces was his contribution to the Social Justice Warrior movement’s brief post-Trump election qualms over when and where to punch people you suspected of being Nazis. Elfwick answered this question with the statement: “I’d rather punch 300 innocent people and 1 genuine Nazi, than punch no Nazis at all”.

And then there was his response to the pussy hat protests:

“When the next generation ask: what did YOU do when Trump came to power?  I’ll proudly say: ‘I called him a Nazi while dressed like a vagina.'”

The boundaries between fantasy and reality sometimes blurred so close that Elfwick fooled even the wisest of minds. In November 2016, the Guardian published a piece titled “‘Alt-right’ online poison nearly turned me into a racist.” The anonymous author described his descent as starting at the work of Sam Harris until, “On one occasion I even, I am ashamed to admit, very diplomatically expressed negative sentiments on Islam to my wife.”

I must shamefully admit that I was among those who fell for this piece, assuming that the Guardian had only gone slightly further down a trajectory it had long been on. But the piece turned out to be the work of Godfrey Elfwick, who had ‘punked’ the Guardian into running a piece from an anonymous writer sending up an argument the newspaper so desperately wanted to hear.

Much more of this, of course, and a lot of serious people from all sides begin to look silly. And so, eventually, Elfwick became a victim of his own success and was barred from Twitter last summer for reasons that only a multi-billion dollar public platform could justify or successfully keep private. But from the rubble emerged Titania McGrath. For a time it seemed as though McGrath and Elfwick might be one and the same person.  But sources suggest otherwise, pointing to the fact that there may be more than one person on the planet able to use social media against Social Justice Warriors and the old media that seems so supine before them.

Like Elfwick, some of Titania’s critics assumed that her arguments must be for real, so close did they come to arguments seriously put forward by real people. Private Eye – the relict of what used to be British satire – even put Titania in ‘Pseud’s Corner’, unaware that Titania was heading for targets Private Eye could barely even see. She was there for her claim that people should buy her book Woke: a guide to social justice not for her own sake, but for ‘the sake of humanity.’

Her book is now out, and extends in long-form the style that Titania has perfected on Twitter. As her freshly revealed creator, Andre Doyle says:

“She is named after the queen of the fairies because I think all of this ‘woke culture’ is an utter fantasy world. The people who promote this hyper inclusive culture are fantasists.”

Titania is a creation of genius. The lady herself is truculent, privileged and incapable of self-reflection. She scythes her way through Twitter like an avenging SJW angel. Anybody who suggests that there are biological differences between men and women will find Titania coming down on them from the greatest height, berating them and demanding that Twitter remove them from the platform for “hate speech”.

The joke is partly on the platform, for Twitter has been willing to suspend people for precisely this sin, although Twitter executives have attempted to simultaneously deny and defend precisely these actions.

Wow, the entire interview is fascinating & disturbing. @joerogan @Timcast catch Twitter in multiple lies/misrepresentations. Illuminating.
pic.twitter.com/TkGs9CDPHo

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) March 6, 2019

Like Elfwick, Titania has found herself the target of Twitter’s efforts to police its own platform. Last December she was suspended from Twitter for a day. She returned with a Tweet pointing out that her suspension demonstrated the systematic oppression of women in our society, and wrote a piece pointing out that after her 24-hour suspension from Twitter “I now understand how Nelson Mandela felt“.

Though in this latter piece Titania explained that “If anything, my ordeal was even more damaging. Mandela may have had to endure 27 years of incarceration, but at least his male privilege protected him from ever having to put up with mansplaining, or being subject to wolf-whistling by grubby proles on a building site.”

The way in which Titania has broken out from Twitter is a magnificent thing to behold. Finally, the plodding, establishment satire of recent years might have finally been subject to the disruption it has so badly needed. For decades in Britain, being brave in satire has consisted of making jokes about the Duke of Edinburgh, or saying “the Tories” or “Thatcher” and expecting a great panto boo followed by a forced laugh at whatever inanity follows.

Titania, like the now resurrected Elfwick, show what true disruption of a tired genre looks like. For just as the legacy media and social media make claims which are maddening, presumptuous and untrue, so these creations of the new media have emerged to shine a light which is not just funny, but fatally accurate and true.