Sometimes I suspect the Countryside Alliance was right and that the national debate about fox-hunting came down to a very simple equation: which do you prefer, toffs or foxes? And the answer was pretty much unequivocal.
Of course, this is no basis upon which to frame important legislation, laws that will undoubtedly threaten the livelihood of several score of people across the country. There are far more complex, subtle and rational reasons to ban fox-hunting that don’t involve the invocation of class hatred. But that is what I suspect decided it in the end, toffs v foxes.
In other words, are you on the side of an inbred pestilential vermin, which, when its population is uncontrolled, wreaks serious damage upon the rural landscape — or are you on the side of the foxes? Ha. Only joking. I’m British, and part of being British means having an ambivalent attitude to class distinctions and one’s social superiors. Ever since Harold Macmillan told us that we were all middle class now (actually, I’m not — and neither, for that matter, were you, Harold), we have been living a denial; we know that our class system should be swept away by modernity, we know that it is corrosive and divisive. But we still cling to it. We find it comforting. In theory, we know it’s wrong to despise or look up to people because of their social class. But in practice, the whole complex edifice of social stratification is still with us: we still have Debrett and Ascot and Henley and U and non-U. We may feel the upper classes to be absurd and, on the whole, as thick as a plate of mince, but we don’t want to see them executed, necessarily. Subjected to the most appalling indignities every so often, sure — we make them open their stately piles to the plebs and attempt to reform their debating chamber out of existence. But we still want them there, with their accents and their dogs and their rather wonderfully undimmed arrogance.
Evidence of just how much we really like the class system, despite ourselves, can be found on our televisions screens. Recently, we had working-class Julie Burchill eulogising the new lumpenproletariat, the chavs. Last week, we had the middle-class journalist James Delingpole sucking up to the toffs in The British Upper Class (Sunday, C4). This was creeping on an epic scale: Delingpole was clearly besotted with, entirely in thrall to, the tweed-jacketed numpties who, since the Stuart monarchs invented a bunch of spurious titles, have been our nominal masters. That this great love was not remotely requited did not deter Delingpole. They brushed him off hither and thither and he always returned, mouth agape with awe, for a bit more premier-league fawning. And, as a result, we began to like him, for his charm and persistence. Delingpole trailed in the wake of the aristos as they went about their hobbies — all of which involved maiming animals or, if no animals were available, themselves — and attempted to snuggle up to them at stilted cocktail parties. The only aristo who gave him the time of day was that braying criminal Charlie Brocket, who in any case effectively renounced his high birth by appearing on I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!. The rest treated him with glacial disdain — which was their loss. For this was good television and Delingpole proved an engaging and refreshingly ingenuous guide.
It would have been good PR then if the toffs had resisted the temptation to spit on his shoes. Delingpole has a point, too; there is something attractive about the devil-may-care arrogance of the blue bloods. “You’ll miss them when they’re gone,” he said at the end, as he disappeared inside his bourgeois Camberwell villa. But my suspicion is they’ll never be gone.
Nor, from the look of things, will Al-Qaeda. The British upper classes may have their faults, but they are not known for the suicidal deployment of rucksacks: there is, lest we should have forgotten, a real enemy out there. An enemy deranged by faith. With consummate timing, the Panorama reporter Peter Taylor has delivered a three-part investigation into the workings of these most unattractive people. Part one, The New Al-Qaeda (Monday, BBC2), concerned itself with the organisation’s sophisticated internet technology. You just knew they’d be bona fide computer nerds, didn’t you? The very notion of extreme jihad has the whiff of a spotty adolescent boy’s fantasy game, with its black-and-white cast of infidel demons and brave martyrs and its copious and florid mumbo jumbo. Taylor’s excellent report revealed how Al-Qaeda attempts to recruit young, western-based Muslims to the terrorist front line through the distribution of incendiary videos via an almost infinite number of URLs. The videos show westerners being blown up or having their heads hacked off to a background of ominous Koranic keening and wailing.
This sort of stuff, the FBI man told us, is crucial to Al-Qaeda, for both recruitment and propaganda. And then we had a pleasant chat with the man responsible for the dissemination of this filth in Britain, the quietly implacable madman Dr Muhammad al-Massari. He smiled slightly as he explained that he had absolutely no objection to videos showing Kaffirs being decapitated on his website. At the end of the interview he presumably ambled back to his pleasant suburban semidetached house, made himself a nice cup of tea and logged straight back on to continue the jihad. If we sent al-Massari back to the country from which he emanated, Saudi Arabia, there’s a fairly good chance the authorities would kill him. Not a 100% chance, sadly, but certainly a big enough risk to stop us kicking him out.
So we let him pretty much alone, lest his human rights be infringed.
The bombings in London happened too late to be included in Taylor’s film, otherwise we could have watched al-Massari patiently refusing to condemn them with another one of those reasonable smiles. He must have very understanding neighbours. Anyway, Taylor’s documentary was meticulous, intelligent and, in the circumstances, remarkably restrained. And about as depressing as a television programme can be.
The fact is, it’s been a very bad two or three weeks and we’ve all needed a bit of cheering up. What we got instead was the return of The Smoking Room (Tuesday, BBC3). I’m at a loss to understand how this programme made such a name for itself; the stilted, self-conscious dialogue, the lumpen performances, the interminable, inexhaustible, horrible wryness of it all. It was like watching an am-dram performance of Waiting for Godot, except without the jokes and the depth. But, hell, maybe it’s just me; most of the critics seem to love it. And, after all, I seem to be alone in the country in finding Peter Kay about as funny as a sack of wet coal, and at least one-third of Little Britain leaves me shaking my head in mirthless mystification. It may be that I simply don’t find anything funny any more — apart, that is, from our upper classes.
AA Gill is away
