The Spectator delights in publishing columnists who eschew “political correctness”.
Political correctness, in this context, means “giving voice to your stupid prejudices and bigotries in the hope that other prejudiced and bigoted people will agree with you”. It may also mean “saying something vile in the hope that non-vile people will react in an amusingly outraged manner”.
For years, the crown prince of this sort of journalism was the cocaine importer, Taki. However, Rod Liddle has given him a run for his money in recent times. For a moment, it looked as if Melanie Phillips might have trumped them both by writing something which occasioned a visit from the police: however it turned out that Inayat Bunglawala wasn’t telling the truth about that.
I’m a fan of this sort of writing. I infinitely prefer it when racists and bigots are frank about their views, than when they sugar coat them.
There is a great example of the genre by (I assume) the historian, Alistair Horne in this week’s Spectator. You can find it in a review of the new Savoy Grill (proprietor: the “the foul-mouthed Celt”, Gordon Ramsay). Here it is:
Another common fault of even smart London restaurants — the tables in the Grill are too close together. (The Ritz is an exception.) Our conversation was beaten down by the nasal tones of Finchley Road entrepreneurs, boasting their latest high-powered deals.
The voices carried me back to the last time I was treated to ‘Henry’s table’ in the Grill. It was June 1940, a party to cheer up my cousin, Cecil, who had just been given the DSO (on top of a WWI Military Cross) for bringing his battalion out of Dunkirk.
He was a man brave as a lion, who rather alarmed me as a child, and that day was gaunt and hollow-eyed as if he had escaped from hell. He had. He talked of German ‘secret weapons’. Then, as we rose, he looked around the room and asked scathingly: ‘Are these really the people we fought for?’ He might possibly have posed the same question today, except that he was killed two years later at the head of his brigade in the desert.
The money obsessed nasal Finchley Road entrepreneurs, of course, are the hook nosed Yids.
UPDATE: Good article here.
