If, as we now keep being told, "everyone" knew about Jimmy Savile, then it is utterly inconceivable that Margaret Thatcher was unaware of his activities when she entertained him at Chequers for all 11 of the New Year's Eves when she was Prime Minister.
She probably just didn't care. We are talking about Margaret Thatcher here, the woman whose legend was burnished when she "miraculously escaped" from a bomb which killed five of her colleagues and crippled the wife of one of her closest allies, but which had been planted by an organisation with which she pretended not to be having what was in fact her continuous contact.
If anyone ever did write Eminent Thatcherians, following the pattern of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians and of Piers Brendon's Eminent Edwardians and Eminent Elizabethans (Andrew Roberts did not stick to it in Eminent Churchillians), then one of the four subjects would just have to be Savile. How could it not be? Who, we now see, more perfectly embodied the seamlessness between the 1960s and the 1980s, via the complete free-for-all and the hopeless institutional response to it in the 1970s?
The New Right that became Thatcherism was calling for drug legalisation and for the abolition of the age of consent, and was putting those principles into practice, as surely as was the sociologically indistinguishable New Left that eventually became New Labour. The Sixties Swingers hated the Wilson Government, and a decade later punk branded the Callaghan Government a "fascist regime".
For all its alleged left-wingery, and its ability to annoy no end the forces of conservatism that in many cases really were and are left-wing, British rock'n'roll was made up of common or garden proto-Thatcherites, often tax exiles. The only exceptions were David Bowie and Eric Clapton, way out on the Far Right. The view of it as an expression of working-class culture is also rubbish: to cite only the two most stellar examples, neither John Lennon nor Mick Jagger came from anything remotely resembling a working-class background, with Jagger's father a second-generation teacher even then, the son of a headmaster.
But who might be the other three subjects? Lady Diana Spencer, the sometime Princess Charles of Wales, obviously. Sir Richard Branson, the bridge between the Thatcher and the Blair Eras. And Dr Robert Runcie? No. Dr David Jenkins. Like Thatcher, he is now 87. His funeral, certainly if it is held in Durham Cathedral, will utterly baffle London reporters, the youngest of whom might never have heard of him, with its outpouring of popular grief for our champion against That Woman and all her evil works.
But the sting in the tail, and in the tale, would be as it has always been: that his liberal theology was ultimately unable to provide a sufficiently radical critique, and in that way opened up the space for things like the Radical Orthodoxy that, with its broader sensibility in which many of us find ourselves, is such a significant factor in the re-emergence of what is now at least broadly known as Blue Labour; the emergence of the postliberal politics of which Radical Orthodoxy's founder credits me with having been the harbinger.
Yes, I do know who that means should write it. But if, and it is a big if, I ever did so, then I could only do so after David Jenkins, a friend of my late father's, had had his send-off.
She probably just didn't care. We are talking about Margaret Thatcher here, the woman whose legend was burnished when she "miraculously escaped" from a bomb which killed five of her colleagues and crippled the wife of one of her closest allies, but which had been planted by an organisation with which she pretended not to be having what was in fact her continuous contact.
If anyone ever did write Eminent Thatcherians, following the pattern of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians and of Piers Brendon's Eminent Edwardians and Eminent Elizabethans (Andrew Roberts did not stick to it in Eminent Churchillians), then one of the four subjects would just have to be Savile. How could it not be? Who, we now see, more perfectly embodied the seamlessness between the 1960s and the 1980s, via the complete free-for-all and the hopeless institutional response to it in the 1970s?
The New Right that became Thatcherism was calling for drug legalisation and for the abolition of the age of consent, and was putting those principles into practice, as surely as was the sociologically indistinguishable New Left that eventually became New Labour. The Sixties Swingers hated the Wilson Government, and a decade later punk branded the Callaghan Government a "fascist regime".
For all its alleged left-wingery, and its ability to annoy no end the forces of conservatism that in many cases really were and are left-wing, British rock'n'roll was made up of common or garden proto-Thatcherites, often tax exiles. The only exceptions were David Bowie and Eric Clapton, way out on the Far Right. The view of it as an expression of working-class culture is also rubbish: to cite only the two most stellar examples, neither John Lennon nor Mick Jagger came from anything remotely resembling a working-class background, with Jagger's father a second-generation teacher even then, the son of a headmaster.
But who might be the other three subjects? Lady Diana Spencer, the sometime Princess Charles of Wales, obviously. Sir Richard Branson, the bridge between the Thatcher and the Blair Eras. And Dr Robert Runcie? No. Dr David Jenkins. Like Thatcher, he is now 87. His funeral, certainly if it is held in Durham Cathedral, will utterly baffle London reporters, the youngest of whom might never have heard of him, with its outpouring of popular grief for our champion against That Woman and all her evil works.
But the sting in the tail, and in the tale, would be as it has always been: that his liberal theology was ultimately unable to provide a sufficiently radical critique, and in that way opened up the space for things like the Radical Orthodoxy that, with its broader sensibility in which many of us find ourselves, is such a significant factor in the re-emergence of what is now at least broadly known as Blue Labour; the emergence of the postliberal politics of which Radical Orthodoxy's founder credits me with having been the harbinger.
Yes, I do know who that means should write it. But if, and it is a big if, I ever did so, then I could only do so after David Jenkins, a friend of my late father's, had had his send-off.
Watch Lindsay run away from claiming that Savile was innocent. We're all laughing.
ReplyDeleteAll I said was that I was inclined to believe in the innocence of anyone who had been pronounced guilty by Damian Thompson, of all people. That remains my inclination, but we are beyond that now.
ReplyDeleteIt works both ways, of course: Thompson's reaction to the revelations about his late friend and employee Fr Kit Cunningham was not only, like Esther Rantzen with Jimmy Savile, "Everyone who was anyone knew this anyway, dahhhling", but also that he had done nothing morally wrong. Presumably because we are talking about girls in Savile's case, whereas Cunningham's predilection was for boys.
People knew that Savile was a Catholic, but it was not part of his publicity as such, still less did he set himself up as the arbiter of orthodoxy. Thompson, on the other hand...
Removed from the Herald over it, not least thanks to you, Mr. L. One last push to get rid of him completely? "While the balance of his mind was disturbed"?
ReplyDeleteNow, now.
ReplyDeleteBut he would have to come out as a monumental fraud in order to avoid committal as a schizophrenic or something similar. Which is he going to do?
On topic, please.
@18:13 has it right, nothing could give you greater pleasure than if Damian either topped himself or opened the door to a hail of bullets from some Arab Christian militia that you had finally goaded into rubbing him out. Maybe only one or other of those events could bring any pleasure into the painkiller ruled remains of your life.
ReplyDeleteI am not putting up any more off-topic comments.
ReplyDeleteWho the hell are these anonymous johnies anyway?
ReplyDeleteOh, I know who they are. And they know that I know.
ReplyDeleteIt is always good to see Damian Thompson lining up with Oliver Kamm, whose abortion-up-to-birth atheism expresses his own real views.
Thompson only disapproves of Savile for having gone after girls. Kit Cunningham's predilection for boys was judged a positive qualification for employment on the Catholic Herald when it was edited by Mabel, who urbanely informed us of that fact on her Telegraph blog when Cunningham died.
Might Eminent Thatcherians lead into Eminent Blairians that you always said was impossible because there were none?
ReplyDeleteIf anything, it would be better following something on the 1960s. That Eminent Blairians might have to feature a chapter on either Damian Thompson or Oliver Kamm, just to fill it out, says everything that needs to be said about what an utterly undistinguished period those tragically lost years were.
ReplyDeleteIn the 60s book, who would correspond to each of Diana, Branson, Savile and Jenkins?
ReplyDeleteI am not sure that it would work strictly like that.
ReplyDeleteThere would have to be a chapter on John Lennon; Brendon, although his new book is huge fun and displays a wonderfully rich vocabulary, has rather copped out by doing Jagger rather than Lennon, just as he has by doing Charles rather than Diana (although he does not spare her in the chapter on her sometime husband).
But Lord Kagan or Lord Goodman seems to obvious. Perhaps, even though Brendon has already done her, the early period Margaret Thatcher, showing that the roots of her economic transformation of Britain were in her legislative support for 1960s permissiveness? I'll have to think about that one, and I am very open to suggestions.
Michael Ramsey is just begging for it. I couldn't not. And the fourth? Whom do people think and why?