HOWZAT

“There is a tribe that in the world exists/ Who might be called the pseudo-culturists/ Who think they can to heavenly realms aspire/ By warbling Handel in the concert choir;/ He who acclaims as masterpieces all/ The tawdry paintings of Chagall/ Who quotes from Blake or from Professor Freud/ This man I label with the title ‘Pseud’.” This bit of bilious doggerel from The Salopian magazine in the 1950s came from the pen of young Richard Ingrams. His Private Eye - a vital part of a long tradition of curmudgeonly conservativism and English philistinism - still divides the world into pseuds and bores.

Noël Coward, a crusty Tory, insisted that the stage is “primarily a place of entertainment . . . political or social propaganda in the theatre is a cracking bore”. A lot of his lyrics were fantastically conservative though, such as There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner: “If the Reds and the Pinks/ Believe that England stinks/ And that world revolution is bound to spread,/ We’d better all learn the lyrics of the old Red Flag/ And wait until we drop down dead.” Nonetheless, Coward was much more interested in getting bums on seats and fending off the ravenous Inland Revenue.

Malcolm Bradbury, who bequeathed us the brilliant satire on left-wing academic lunacy The History Man, once wrote tongue-in-cheek on the conservative nature of English culture. “Notice how fogeys tend to analyse a book or play in terms of its ending (‘it didn’t have a proper ending’, ‘it left things in the air a bit’). Fogey art should leave no residuum. Fogey art also has good characters and fine writing. Fogeys dislike real art because it creates problems and leaves them unsolved.”

Fogey art also happens to be wildly popular. “No one in the Establishment seems to understand that you can’t make a film industry out of minority-interest, alternative movies,” Fellowes says. But the closest we have to a successful studio is Working Title, the people that gave us Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually. Coward would have loved these conservative rom-coms: gently aspirational, decent well- spoken people coping with love, death and the stuff of life. These films find appreciative audiences but seldom critical kudos.

But I guess the real question is who are the real conservatives in the arts world? We have the juicy irony of an avant-garde that has turned into a big lazy establishment but hasn’t cottoned on to it. Its members bang on about the same old tired issues and hand out gongs and grants to each other.

Fellowes recounts a recent encounter with a television big cheese who proudly announced to him: “My views are the same now as they were when I was 18.” To which Fellowes replied: “Christ! What was the point of the past 40 years?” Compared with the arthritic avant-garde, being right-wing seems bracingly bohemian. So perhaps, I’ll turn my hand to composing The Taxi Driver Opera or writing Yes, Quangocrat, an hilarious satire on the British Potato Council (responsible for National Chip Week) . . . Stop, stop! That would be as boring as a David Hare play.

True blue through and through

GILBERT & SULLIVAN
'He is an Englishman!/ For he himself has said it,/ And it’s greatly to his credit,/ That he is an Englishman!' For these operatic chroniclers of empire, foreigners are amusing, aristocrats cherished adornments and the Union Jack a 'flag that none defy'.

NOËL COWARD
You cannot be anything but conservative to write Cavalcade, a patriotic romp exuding pageantry and tradition. And like all good conservatives he knew that the country was going to the dogs under the Socialists: 'Labour leads us all/ Though we know they bleed us all.'

EDWARD ELGAR
Pomp and Circumstance and The Enigma Variations - he made the music that sounds like the essence of Englishness. By the time of his death he resented the jingoism that attached itself to Land of Hope & Glory, which goes to show that he truly was a melancholic.

JULIAN FELLOWES
He won the Oscar for the screenplay of the country-house drama Gosford Park; appeared in Tomorrow Never Dies (Ian Fleming is a true right- wing hero) and helped to write some of Iain Duncan Smith’s speeches. What more evidence do you need for being right-wing?

ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER
I agree, it’s hard to find much that is right-wing in lyrics such as “Well I never. Was there ever a cat so clever as Magical Mr Mistoffelees”. But never forget that the man who gave us Cats, Evita and Starlight Express sits on the Tory benches in the Lords.

Fading to blue? The jury's still out...

JOHN OSBOURNE
It’s not far from 'angry young man' to 'angry old curmudgeon'. Wasn’t Jimmy Porter angry at a disappearing world? And assuring Spectator readers that the Book of Common Prayer was a good politically incorrect read? Pretty reactionary, don’t you think?

GILBERT & GEORGE
They flirted with Thatcher and pumped-up patriotism during the Falklands war, but were the artists responsible for Naked S*** Pictures and the like trying to shock the arts establishment: posing as right-wing is more daring than common-or-garden blasphemy?

MADONNA
“Some boys try and some boys lie but/ I don’t let them play/ Only boys who save their pennies/ Make my rainy day, ’cause they are . . .” A little ode to thrifty self-reliance? A Tory mother-in-law? A love of playing lady of the mansion? Makes you wonder.

TOM STOPPARD
“I’m the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.” Not a frothing ideologue, but a defender of liberty who doesn’t always march with the rest of the Left.

CHRIS MARTIN
One to watch. Remember his note to the PM? “Dear Mr Blair, My name is Chris; I am the singer in a band called Coldplay . . . I think all the stuff you’re doing this year in terms of trying to sort the whole place out is BRILLIANT.” Mmm, searching for respectability . . .