“EVERY communist has a fascist frown; every fascist has a communist smile,” writes Nicholas Farringdon, the doomed young hero of one of my favourite books, Muriel Spark’s
The Girls Of Slender Means. As a description of how the extreme Left and extreme Right seem to overlap at times, it’s masterful — and no less useful today, when both the SWP and KKK are against the Allied liberation of Iraq.
And of course the two extremes have always agreed when discussing the evils of popular culture and, by extension, the “undeserving” working class. In this case, every socialist has a conservative sneer; every conservative has a socialist leer. Long before Paul Johnson moved to the Right, even as the young firebrand Editor of The New Statesman in 1964, he was writing this: “Ten years of schooling can barely raise them to literacy . . . the bottomless chasm of vacuity they reveal! The huge faces bloated with cheap confectionary and smeared with chainstore makeup, the open sagging mouths and glazed eyes.”
Now while you might think this is a pretty good description of the Tory party at their annual jamboree, it’s actually a description of harmless teenage pop fans. Not content with taking a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, Johnson goes on with his extremely un-Christian snobbishness. “The boys and girls who will be the real leaders of society tomorrow never go near a pop concert.” Nor near Tory party conference either, Pauly, if we’re taking no prisoners.
Fast forward more than 40 years and another stuck-up socialist is describing her forthcoming television role of playing the Queen — in the days after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales — as “a world of duty, sacrifice and honour meeting up with the Walkers crisps generation of consumer celebrity, going to Ibiza, taking your top off and staggering home boasting about how many guys you shagged that night”.
Forget the sumptuous hypocrisy of Helen Mirren — Helen Mirren! — demonising girls for getting their kit off, even if it is akin to the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan accusing the BNP of being racist. It is, after all, par for the course with ageing glamour girls that when the nipples go south, the nose goes north and they become self-deceiving grandes dames.
But consider this; to go by her rebel stance throughout the past three decades, and by her recent bumming up of the loathsome Ken Livingstone, you’d have thought that Mirren was some sort of lefty — albeit one who felt it within in her rights when interviewing him for the GLA newsheet to keep her taxi’s meter running outside, costing the London taxpayer a cool £103. (They’d only have spent it on Walkers crisps anyway, the plebs!)
Maybe she is, and it’s just that, as I said at the beginning, every socialist has a conservative sneer. I just turned on the radio and heard the Kaiser Chiefs, one of the inexplicably “hot” bands of the moment, listing a catalogue of social ills in their song I Predict a Riot: “Walking through town is quite scary/Girls walking round with no clothes on/To borrow a pound for a condom/A man in a tracksuit attacked me!” The lyrics could have come straight from a shock-horror chav-Britain rant in the Daily Mail. Yet this very pop group claim to be the guardians of the punk flame of ’77! Sorry lads — but that was John Lydon, Steven Jones and Paul Cook — not John Redwood, Steven Norris and Paul Johnson!
But I say this more in sorrow than in anger, because I believe that most cultural snobbery comes from envy rather than contempt — and that’s a big, big difference. Be it old girls who used to take their clothes off without frightening the horses envying young girls who still can, the bourgeoisie envying the sexual ease of the chav, or Dames of the British Empire envying those who have not bowed the once-radical knee to brownnose to the monarchy, envy often passes for snobbery.
And, like American Express, it says far more about one than mere money ever can. The great Bill Hicks maintained that once a man — or woman — had taken the advertising shilling, nothing he ever said could be believed again. The same, I believe, is true of snobs. Especially snobs who used to get their kit off for a living.
Sex and stony silence
WOMEN “too tired or too busy” for sex are going in for IVF, so said doctors this week. According to one “expert”, such women see having a baby as “no different from putting your name down for a handbag”. Well, hardly; buying a handbag doesn’t entail, so far as I know, having a general anaesthetic — though as both can cost up to £4,000, it might be just as suitable in one case as the other.
Apparently the odds for an IVF pregnancy are slightly higher than for a regular conception in a woman of 35: one in three after one treatment, whereas if she had sex once every three days for a month the odds would be one in four. Still, I don’t get it — how can a woman be too busy for sex? It only takes 60 minutes, after all — 15 minutes of kissing, 15 minutes of teasing, 15 minutes of pleasing and 15 minutes of blowing one’s top, as the old song so delightfully had it.
“Many of these couples are simply not having sex or not having enough sex. There has been a trend away from having sex and loving relationships,” tuts Michael Dooley, a London gynaecologist, who says he has seen a 20 per cent increase in the number of women seeking “inappropriate” IVF treatment.
In my experience, women are only too busy or too tired for sex because of one reason: they aren’t getting an orgasm out of it, or they don’t fancy the person they’re doing it with; both, probably, as one thing tends to lead to the other. The National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles claims that 55 per cent of married women suffer from sexual boredom. But put Sean Paul or Gordon Brown in bed with these women who are allegedly too busy and tired for sex, and my betting is that they’re going to be singing a different song — one that goes, roughly, “Yes, YES, YES!”.
And as more than one medico has pointed to a link between the female orgasm and the likeliness of conception, couldn’t it be that women who go in for “unnecessary” IVF are simply listening to their bodies, hearing a stony silence where their sex life is concerned and simply doing the sensible thing and cutting out the (useless) middle man? Just a frisky little kitten to drop among all you coupled-up pigeons this weekend.
The iron butterfly that won't be broken
TALKING of gross hypocrisy, the sumptuous banquet of self-righteous envy that is Kategate goes on. I wrote a piece about Kate Moss some weeks ago pointing out that she was feared and loathed by the goody-goody, the bad-tempered and the ugly because she is the one constant great hell- raiser it is impossible to feel sorry for: no lost looks, no lost love, no failed career, just an endless parade of drugs, boys and girls to take or leave as she wished. This lack of pitifulness is, I’m sure, what made the hypocrites and fun-spoilers go after her with such savagery.
People can forgive any sort of women but an unrepentant one — well, it smacks of strength, a lack of shame and a total disregard for the opinions of others. Imagine, if all women were like that! Why, no woman could ever be bullied, badgered or beaten down again, either by individuals or by society. In short, anarchy!
Now the apologising has started and she is to appear on Michael Parkinson’s show to plead her case. It is probably the first dishonest thing she has done in her life. But because it was forced on her, she still has nothing to be ashamed of. Unlike the creeps who pushed her into this corner out of sheer envy for her free spirit, clear-eyed recreation choices and endless beauty. It won’t work though — Kate Moss is an iron butterfly, never to be broken on the wheel of public hypocrisy.
Still, I wonder how Burberry justify employing the known cocaine user Lord Freddie Windsor — or is it different rules if you were born posh and useless? And as for the Met wanting to interview her on her return to England, they can forget that — don’t they know Kate never gives interviews?
