Who At Any Rate Seeks The Cachet

“An arriviste, certainly, who can’t shoot straight and in Jopling’s damning phrase “bought all his own furniture”, but who at any rate seeks the cachet. All the nouves in the party think he is the real thing.”

So said Alan Clark of Michael Heseltine. 

I thought of that last night, at one of Lanchester’s annual set piece events, when no fewer than four people, by no means all of them very friendly with each other, separately came up to me and warmly told me in so many words something that had vaguely occurred to me on previous occasions. 

It turns out that one’s choice of side over my never-ending and farcical bit of trouble has become a test of respectability. Whatever one’s rank, style or title on paper, to side against me is to be a touch below the salt, and not quite One of Us. Like Simon Henig, in fact. Or the Crown Prosecution Service. 

Curiously, I have been here before. Perhaps this theme is to recur in my life, every 20 years or so?

Once before, so far, I have been the unlikely totem for perfect English gentlemanliness against those who were also not quite English, or not quite gentlemen, or both, but who positively revelled in that sorry state of affairs. 

I cannot recall paying for a lunch or a dinner in about a year. Yet I ate an awful lot of very fine lunches and dinners that year. Whatever one’s rank, style or title on paper, to side against me was to be a touch below the salt, and not quite One of Us. 

And here I am again. An arriviste, certainly. But one who at any rate seeks the cachet. And all the nouves think that I am the real thing.

Including the nouves who are trying and failing to lock me up, a suggestion that is treated by absolutely everyone as downright satirical. That is no small part of why they are trying to do it. But I am never going to prison. Based on past form, I am never even going to stand trial. 

Simon Henig, Oliver Kamm (also known as Philip Cross), Not Dame Alison Saunders, whoever is running the CPS these days, whichever barrister the CPS might use against me: whatever your rank, style or title on paper, to side against me is to be a touch below the salt, and not quite One of Us.

And you know it.