EXILE  IN  THE  KINGDOM

(a version of this appeared  n a church magazine – it’s good to be able to sound off in the most unlikely places)

Sometimes, in truth, I don’t know where I am. The disassociation  can be  a jar to the senses, or more of a creeping malaise, a sense of alienation within my own country - or perhaps I should say, within that cultural hemisphere I call home. There are times when the only language I want to listen to is that of silence - on the other side of which, as George Eliot famously wrote, is the place where ( if one could only hear it) roars the cumulative pain of the universe.

That may seem a strange observation from someone for whom words have always been the chief source of pleasure, as well as consolation and inspiration. Yet just now I find myself brooding on their power to hurt - to bruise, slash, cut,  gratuitously and with ease. It goes without saying that I am thinking of the tools of my own trade - journalism. The alienation I sometimes feel within that world (which I have always loved) derives from the delight in maiming for its own sake which seems to have infected its practitioners. I recall those Glasgow gangs I wrote about for The New Statesman in the seventies, which held it a proof of manhood for a teenager to go out into the street, razor the face of a complete stranger and thereby ‘mek a name fer yoursel’.’

These thoughts are prompted by some of the responses I read to the engagement of the Prince of Wales to Camilla Parker Bowles. How will history judge this sort of journalism, which we should attempt to separate from issues of church and state? Used as I am to the cynicism and negativism of certain sections of our press (and indeed I have been on the receiving end, which inserts a useful amount of heavy metal into both backbone and soul) some of the comments left me with that queasiness one feels after a disgusting meal of fast food. Having  consumed what was cheap and of dubious provenance, your system is polluted.

The strap line above Polly Toynbee’s column in The Guardian read, ‘This tripe, trivia and tosh poisons British politics and belittles us all.’  A committed republican, Toynbee is also an intelligent, experienced and accomplished journalist, and expresses her views on the monarchy with rigour.  It happens that I disagree with them, but that is not the issue here - although in my mind’s eye Toynbee, Suzanne Moore, Amanda Platell, Catherine Bennett et al  sit knitting beneath the guillotine only to  blame the royal blood for spoiling their good clothes. It occurs to me that the ‘tripe, trivia and tosh’ which ‘poisons...and belittles us all’ is not the existence of a monarchy which (for all its faults) does more in the line of painstaking public service than the whole gaggle of guffawing Guardian journalists put together. No, it is the slavering appetite for gossip and celebrity which, thugh a part of the human condition, infect us as never before. Combined with the nihilism of the chattering classes it results in the casual cruelty meted out every day in journalism - so common we hardly notice.

Until, that is, something is printed which makes even somebody relatively tough (like myself) rock back, heave, and reach for a bowl. I am proud to be a contributor to The Times, but Julie Burchill’s piece on February 11th was shaming for journalism, especially that written by women. This columnist is clever, although after a while one realises that her skill is that of a circus animal who, indulged by the crowd, performs the same five tricks in the ring, knowing it will always get a fat bag of food to guzzle at the end. The person who dishes out routine savagery called herself ‘insulted’ by the Windsors; the hack who churns out the same set of preening certainties and prejudices week after week described the newsworthy wedding as ‘hackneyed’; and the woman who calls herself a feminist described Mrs Parker-Bowles as having ‘a face like Iggy Pop’s arse’, continuing with the infantile epithet ‘Bum-Face’ . Her original copy was far worse and she squealed  protest when epithets which must surely have been slanderous were removed. Predictably, many readers of the newspaper complained, as well they might since it was they who were insulted, not by Burchill’s views, but by her cheap, coarse way of expressing them.

I have long been exercised by the mystery of why women with privileged access to print are so enthusiastic in their denunciation of their own sex, in tones that would be repulsive in the mouth of the most oafish football hooligan. Men dismiss women casually, women do so with passionate intensity. You have only  to study the opinions of the identically sullen-faced hackettes who write oh-so-many columns to realise this - and marvel. Victoria Mather (Telegraph, Vanity Fair, Tatler) told American television viewers that Camilla is  ‘a 58 (sic) year old bag’, and expressed her relief that the lady will not marry in white, otherwise, ‘she’d look like one of those great big bits of ice that have just fallen off the Antarctic. Having one of those coming down the aisle wouldn’t be a pretty sight.’ On another occasion this person who travels the world courtesy of glossy magazines (but almost certainly never has to do anything worthy like visit a tribal project or a hospital) delivered herself of  this verdict on Prince Charles (who always does), ‘You’ve already been a failure as a husband. You’re a failure as a father. You’re just a failure, aren’t you?’

No doubt Victoria Mather is, like la Burchill, a blessed and perfect human being and therefore entitled to pelt the Prince of Wales and his bride-to-be (and so many others) with the bread rolls of her abuse. Yet were that true it would be no excuse, and the fact that it cannot be true renders the lack of anything remotely resembling human sympathy all the more disturbing. Never before has so much harsh judgment been meted out by so few. Of course, invective has always had a place in journalism; a brilliant writer like the late Bernard Levin could demolish individuals and institutions with the power of wit and righteous indignation. The quality of his language was itself mitigation, and as William Blake wrote, ‘Damn braces. Bless relaxes.’ I am the last to advocate a sort of Mary Poppins journalism, full of spoonfuls of sugar, but there is a world of difference between clever criticism and careless bitchery. Now  that interchangeable columnists (male and female) proliferate within fragmented newspapers, with so much space to fill each week, what is easier than to curl the lip, routinely, at everything?.

The question I ask is what cumulative effect this has on the soul of the nation. Is  so much poison igood for us? It cannot be measured by a YouGov poll, and were I to go to a smart London dinner party as I used to, to raise the issue would be a social liability - rather like questioning the complacency of Channel 4. The theologian Karen Armstong writes in her autobiography ‘The Spiral Staircase’, ‘I find myself more and more distressed by the disdain that so often peppers social conversation. I know how this puts a splinter of ice into the heart of the disdained.’ Armstrong’s urgent call for a return to the compassion which is at the heart of all the great faiths is inspiring, if deeply unfashionable. She reminds us of the Golden Rule of Judaism, ‘that every time we are tempted to say or do anything unpleasant...we should ask ourselves how we should like this said or done to ourselves, and refrain.’

The result of that would be, she says, ‘to transcend the frightened egotism that often needs to wound or destroy others in order to shore up the sense of ourselves’. Yes, indeed. But of course it would never be commercial, for newspaper editors today whip in the little  kings and queens of mean, assuming the readers are entertained by their knee-jerk judgments and routine castigations, especially of those who have once been popular. But what good  does it do? In ‘Middlemarch’  Dorothea Brooke (a woman who makes so many mistakes, just like the Prince of Wales, just like all of us) expresses her ideal for our brief span on this earth as, ‘widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.’ 

Oh, if only. In our kingdom of the press, where so many are stabbed through the arras, such ideals would be mocked by a hundred jesters. The court chatters, praising the latest fad or favourite for just a while, before pronouncing sentence.  Will the ante be upped and upped, as the Burchills of the world are allowed to get away with more and more - the print equivalent of autopsy on TV?  The trouble is, if you slag everything off, there is no meaning.  Nothing is left, and nobody cares. After all, the chattering classes will laud any two-bit film-maker who offers real fellatio and fucking on big or small screen, yet savage the human being who offers The Prince’s Trust.  Truly, I don’t understand. But I do know that each time the words of graituitous cruelty are set out into the ether the world withers  - just a fraction.