Words that have no place at Downton
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Travesty
In a minute, I will say why the new film of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' is absolutely unforgivably awful, giving full details. But first I will give some background (and those who don’t want to have the plot spoiled can safely leave off reading here).
When John le Carre (David Cornwell) first began to write about the secret world, I was among millions who were overwhelmed by the power of his writing.
These books were thrillers, but also thrillingly potent ‘state of the nation’ novels about the decay of a country , the doubts of its governing class, the illusions of greatness which still clouded the minds of so many.
He knew exactly how his people spoke. He was a trained listener, and his conversations in dusty Whitehall attics, basements registries, safe-houses, committee rooms and clubs are so spot on that you can hear them in your head (though I should add that he cannot do male-female relationships).
I reckon he gained his amazing powers of observation during the alarming, chaotic, hilarious and tragic childhood which he more-or-less describes in ‘A Perfect Spy’, which I suspect is as near to his autobiography as we are going to get.
I have always loved his use of the word ‘actually’ in conversation. He had spotted that when a British public servant employed this word, he was (actually) saying ‘Oh, shut up, you blasted fool’. It has gone now, and Mr Cornwell’s continued use of this device in some later books rings false, rather like the extraordinarily formal speeches which P.D.James gives some of her modern characters.
In those days, when someone ended a statement with ‘actually’, it was a very bad sign, as it is now when an American official addresses you as ‘Sir!’ (when this happens, freeze).
His bottomless scorn for deluded sorts who could not see how much we had declined is savagely expressed in ‘The Looking Glass War’, a book so sad and full of rage that is painful to read decades after its targets retired and went to their graves.
‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold’, likewise drawn from the life, explores the matching cynicism of East and West, and first introduces us to Cornwell’s conviction that a country’s spy services are microcosms of its whole society, and that there is an alarming equivalence between the secret services of East and West. There’s some truth in this. Much of the Cold War was a choreographed dance in which both sides told their peoples that things were worse than they were. But it was not as true as Mr Cornwell thinks it is, in my view. It is this conviction which has gradually turned him into a rather silly anti-American and which has made several of his more recent books disappointing and flat. I still buy and read them. But only once.
Whereas I could not say how many times I have read ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’, or seen the superb film which was based on it. Or ‘The Looking-Glass War’. As for what is in some ways my favourite, ‘A Small Town in Germany’, if I had a long journey to undertake, I’d pick up my tatty old copy of it and read it with joy yet again - holding my breath as the long-jammed lift ascends from the basement with its cargo of unwanted memories. It’s not in the Smiley sequence and is only marginally about spying. But it is marvellous about British embassies, diplomatic dinners, British decline, the aristocracy, the failed hopes of 1945 and the black German past. Mr Cornwell is that very rare thing in modern Britain, someone who knows and likes Germany and understands it. I often wonder if he privately thinks this book is his masterpiece.
As for ‘Tinker, Tailor’, I was thrilled when I learned that it was being made into a TV series for, as sometimes happens, I longed to know if others shared my own imagined idea of what the people were like. I was also annoyed, because I had for some years refused to have a TV set in my home, and knew that I couldn’t really watch the whole series by going round to friends’ houses (I tried, but it obviously wasn’t polite or sensible).
And the makers of the BBC series did share my imagined idea. In fact their pictures were better than mine. This is most unusual for me. The only other instance I can think of is David Lean’s ‘Great Expectations’, which I think Charles Dickens himself would have loved. My re-reading of the book since it was televised has always been enriched by what I saw back in 1979.
So when I heard that a new film of ‘Tinker, Tailor’ was to be made, I knew that I would have to see it, but expected I would be at least mildly irritated by it. I love going to the cinema for its own sake. I sometimes walk out of really bad or unexpectedly violent or coarse films, but in general the experience is pleasing enough to make for an enjoyable evening. There’s a bit of ceremony about it, and an audience to share the drama with (I’ve written a little about this, and its difference from TV, in ‘The Abolition of Britain’).
When I saw the trailers, I was a bit peeved to see the (to me) familiar vista of Budapest, a rather dull city whose charms are over-rated and which doesn’t feature at all in the book ‘Tinker, Tailor’ (from now on, when I say ‘the book’, I mean ‘Tinker, Tailor’, and when I say ‘The TV series’ I mean the Alec Guinness version).
Also I couldn’t work out what they were doing on an airfield. And Istanbul was a bit of a shock, though as I shall explain later, there are excuses for this.
Still never mind. Let’s see what they have made of it. (By the way, though I came out of the cinema muttering imprecations, and may have upset those sitting nearby with various groans and snorts, I am greatly encouraged in my apparently isolated view by a gloriously excoriating attack on the film in Tuesday’s ‘Times’ by Roger Lewis - sorry I can’t link – who said among other things that it was ‘absolutely terrible’).
First of all, they have *needlessly messed it up*. Of course there couldn’t be another Alec Guinness. But Gary Oldman? Smiley is famously described as being owlish and fat with short legs and ill-fitting clothes. Gary Oldman just has heavy glasses. And also he wastes great portions of valuable time swimming in Hampstead Ponds, something the Chelsea-dwelling, bookish, unathletic Smiley would never have dreamed of doing. Why? You might as well show him doing Pilates.
Then the sequence is tossed about all over the place. As I know the story backwards, it didn’t trouble me too much, but I don’t know if a newcomer would have been able to make it out at all.
For no reason I can think of, the crucial entrapment of Jim Prideaux is shifted from a forest in Czechoslovakia to a café in Budapest. The whole point of this event is that it should go spectacularly wrong, in a remote and inaccessible place rather than slap in the middle of a relatively open city, and be misrepresented as a British attempt to kidnap a Czech general. The book also contains a terrifying sequence during which Prideaux becomes keenly aware that he is being closely watched, but goes ahead with the mission anyway. All we get in Budapest is a walk through the streets of Pest and a very sweaty waiter. Plus, we see some of the gore that the makers seem to think is necessary. I might add that the pointless transformation of Jerry Westerby from Fleet Street old-timer to furry-faced junior spy (a merger of two different figures in the drama) is a sad waste of a character. In the time spent by Gary Oldman ploughing up and down the weedy waters of Hampstead, this gap could have been rectified.
Then there’s the vital scene in Istanbul. Actually (that word again) the original event on which this story is based did happen in Turkey, when the atrocious Kim Philby told his Kremlin masters about a Soviet defector in Turkey, and the man was last seen being carried on a stretcher into a Soviet transport plane. And, though in the book the events take place in Hong Kong, they could happen in any cosmopolitan major city. The TV series set them in Lisbon.
But you do just wonder if the crew didn’t fancy a few weeks in Istanbul, the way they let the cameras linger on the night clubs. The supposedly exotic city on the Bosphorus, much of it in fact quite banal and some of it rather grim, has a strange charm for film-makers, as shown in the more or less idiotic scenes set there in ‘From Russia with Love’.
The meeting between Ricki Tarr and Irina is actually much more interesting in the book than it is in the film (check it out) and would have made better cinema. And it happens without any need for a long-distance shot of Russo-Turkish Rumpy-Pumpy. As for her delivery of the vital secret, I’d be amazed if any newcomer to the story had the faintest idea of what was going on. But while we don’t get much of an explanation, we do get gallons of wholly unnecessary gore, including the incomprehensible murder of Tufty Thesinger who, despite being a retired officer of the King’s African Rifles speaks with an Oop North Accent (hardly anyone in the film speaks as such people really did). Perhaps Karla killed him for not speaking proper. I don’t know.
Sorry about all these details, but it sometimes looks as if someone has gone through the book changing things for their own sake. Smiley’s London refuge is moved from Paddington to Liverpool Street (where as far as I know, faintly shady hotels are uncommon). Peter Guillam has his orientation changed from sturdy heterosexual with a lovely, enigmatic musician girlfriend to clandestine homosexual. Why? The comically appalling meal, during which flakes of white fat congeal on the ghastly food, is transferred to a Wimpy Bar. Why? Jim Prideaux is made to be needlessly cruel to Jumbo, the unhappy boy he befriends. Why? Prideaux is also supposedly listed as dead, while teaching *under his own name* at a prep school in England. Why? Prideaux shoots Bill Haydon in broad daylight with a rifle, rather than climbing into Sarratt aftr dark , sharing a bottle of vodka with him and then breaking his neck. Why? Irina is murdered by a KGB interrogator during the interrogation of Jim Prideaux, who couldn’t conceivably have met her or know anything about her. Why? Ricki Tarr, a cynic, hoodlum and trickster so hard-boiled he once passed as a gun-runner and then shot all his confederates, is turned into a sentimental idiot who thinks Irina can be rescued from Karla, and is in love with her. Why? He would have known perfectly well that she was dead and never greatly cared for her anyway.
Oh, and Smiley claims he ‘can’t remember’ what Karla looks like. Is this because they’re hoping to make a sequel ‘Smiley’s People’ (more swimming?) and haven’t cast Karla yet? Smiley remembers very clearly what he looked like, and describes him.
Oh, and that’s another thing. Does Smiley really say that Karla had been ‘tortured by the Americans’ and that they had pulled out his fingernails? Or was I dreaming? This is such an absurd departure from the book, and so far from all likelihood, that I hope I was dreaming.
Percy Alleline, the smooth and pompous Secret Service Chief, cruises his way through Whitehall, associating with ‘golfers and Conservatives’, speaking orotundly of ‘My brother in Christ, the Chief of Naval Intelligence’(to give a sample of his speech). He simply has to be tall, pin-striped and slightly well-padded, with the trace of an Edinburgh accent. Instead he is a short ginger baldie who sounds and looks as if he has recently given up being a Glasgow bus conductor.
As for Control, is it possible to believe that the director of the Secret Intelligence Service (at one point Cornwell says that he was so secretive that his own wife believed till the day he died that he worked for the National Coal Board) would have left his London flat full of charts and notes about a mole hunt in SIS, and that it would all still be there, untouched, months after his death?
That’s just an example of the unlikleiness ofthe re-worked plot, and of the miscasting. There’s a problem in general with casting. Colin Firth is technically old enough to play Bill Haydon who, having been up at Oxford in 1939, would have been in his mid-fifties at the time the action is set. But like so many people of the post-war generation, who escaped wartime privation, post-war rationing and the age of cold baths and suet puddings, he doesn’t look old enough or ravaged enough. This applies to lots of the cast, but perhaps it only matters to those of us who know what the past really looked like.
As for Connie Sachs, well, what can I say? Not many women would want this part, basically an enormous squeaky, gushy schoolgirl, fat, lachrymose and boozy, but also brilliant, a hangover from wartime in more ways than one. But the idea that she would tell George Smiley that she is ‘un****ed’ is just absurd. Her voice is, once again, hopelessly wrong. And her amazing piece of detective work on Poliakov, the Soviet mole-runner, is hopelessly skimped.
As for the final, churning scene in the safe house as the Mole is uncovered, I cannot for the life of me work out why the director has removed all the drama from it. But he has. I’ll leave it at that for now, but might say more in response to comments.
**Note: The following article was published on Sunday 18th September in the Mail on Sunday. It has aroused a certain amount of controversy in Boston itself. The leader of the Borough Council has attacked it as 'cliched, jaundiced, inaccurate and one-sided'. I have also received messages from Boston residents endorsing its message.
Obviously it has a wider application, as many parts of Britain are now experiencing very large scale migration. I have posted it here so that it can be more easily found by those who are interested in discussing this important subject.PH **
You cannot get much deeper into England than you do under the huge skies of Lincolnshire, where land and sky and water meet and the impossibly beautiful tower of Boston’s ancient church reaches towards the clouds.
I came here first nearly 30 years ago and had a sense of penetrating a sleeping, utterly undisturbed part of the country. The Sixties had not really happened. There were no motorways. Life was slow, a little shabby, but untroubled by the fake urgency of more modern places.
I half-expected to meet Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy L. Sayers’ aristocratic detective, on his way to solve the mystery of The Nine Tailors, set in this haunting countryside of fens, dykes, floods and bell towers.Respectability was still strong, and so was the sense of belonging. Because I was from outside Lincolnshire, they rather charmingly called me a ‘foreigner’.
How shocking it is, then, to return and find Boston so strangely and unexpectedly transformed. In the past few years this place has seen drunken street battles between locals and migrants, some nasty assaults and a continuing air of suspicion and dislike that it is hard to miss – yet which cannot be openly expressed.
At one major road junction, a huge poster demands a ban on the public drinking of alcohol. Knowing that rowdy street-drinking (and public urination) is one of the main local complaints against migrants, I cannot help wondering if this is not some sort of covert protest against their presence.
If you look carefully as the train from Grantham rolls into the station, you can see the blasted, scorched lock-up garage where, a few weeks ago, five men died in an explosion that could be heard five miles away across the great fields of leeks, sprouts and beetroot that surround the town. We may say with some certainty that they were trying to make illegal vodka, and that they came from Eastern Europe. Police investigations are still continuing into the background of this nasty business.
But another, slow-motion explosion has also hit Boston. Here, of all the unlikely places, a somnolent and kindly town has been upset, alarmed and riven by mass immigration in its hardest and most uncompromising form.
Note here that I use the word ‘immigration’, not ‘immigrants’. All the people who have been hurt, uprooted and upset by this rather cynical piece of social engineering are pretty much free of blame. Who can honestly disapprove of the poor person from Lisbon, Riga or Bucharest, with a family to house and feed, tempted to uproot his or her life by the promise of wages unthinkable at home? There is something brave and commendable about their willingness to live in crowded, shared lodgings, eating cheaply and saving hard; an experience we should all go through at some time or another.
Who can frown on the farmer who welcomes the fact that he suddenly has a reliable source of hard-working young men and women ready to lift his crops for long hours without complaint? And who can blame the people of this ancient place, nervous, baffled and disquieted by the sudden arrival of hundreds of people who do not speak English, who are ignorant of our customs, who move among us like interplanetary visitors, so cut off that they could not even understand a shout of ‘Help!’, let alone laugh at our jokes?
If you seek a villain, you’ll need to look elsewhere, in warm and comfortable rooms occupied by complacent, powerful people whose only experience of immigration is cheap, exotic restaurants and cheap servants. Here in the English fenland, everyone involved is a victim of enormous, irresistible powers. Those abstract ideas called ‘market forces’ and ‘free movement of peoples’, so beloved of academics, politicians and journalists far away in London, come to life and stalk the streets.
Like most grandiose ideas, they are not as nice as they sound. In Boston, what they mean is this. On a 20-minute walk from railway station to bed-and-breakfast, I meet and see almost nobody who speaks English. Most of the few I do see are the kind of people nobody wants to employ: the only players in this sad melodrama who might conceivably have chosen a different outcome. In the shadow of the great church, big enough to be a cathedral and now absurdly large for the mainly Godless town at its feet, the home-grown English youths are there with their cans of lager and their hoodies, shouting and cackling. I have to mention this because there is also no shortage of young Eastern Europeans who end up in court here charged with urinating in public places, obviously drunk.
The difference is that the British louts are the end-product of decades of social tenderness, child-centred education and welfare. But the newcomers, emptying their bladders where they stand or driving drunk and uninsured after an evening of illegal hooch, are the end of 70 years of miserable communism, deliberate demoralisation and a culture of desperation and drunken oblivion. Both systems have more in common that you might suspect.
I came to Boston at the invitation of a man I shall call Ted. He wanted me to see at first hand a place that cannot really cope with what is happening to it. He tells a disturbing story about strange events soon before the migrants arrived, around the turn of the century. A small advertisement in one of the local papers asked people who were worried about immigration to contact a phone number. Ted did. He describes what happened.
‘The advertisement read, roughly, “Are you concerned about large numbers of migrants arriving in Boston?” with a mobile phone number to contact. I felt very concerned with the number of immigrants being talked about at that time, 5,000 Portuguese! We little knew that was only the beginning of a much greater number from all over Eastern Europe, Iraq and Russia who would be arriving in their thousands.
‘I phoned the mobile and was only given a Christian name, “John”, I think. He was quite vague and would not give more information, only to say he was a concerned resident and was looking to meet anyone who felt the same. He said he was going to organise meetings etc and would be in touch and asked for my contact details, which I gave.
‘As I had not heard from him or seen anything in the paper, I rang the mobile again. He suggested we meet up in the Red Cow pub in the town at midday. He was about 5ft 10in to 6ft, short fair hair (not skinhead), looked fit, casually dressed but smart. He definitely did not have a Lincolnshire accent.
‘He bought half a pint of bitter and we sat in a quiet corner. He asked me what I did, and would I be prepared to go on a demonstration march through Boston; what were my thoughts on the proposed mass immigration into Boston and how far would people be prepared to go to register their disapproval.
‘I told him how I felt, that a small community like Boston should not be swamped with immigrants. It is not about race, it is about keeping things in proportion. Nothing materialised, no leaflets no demonstration, nothing. So I rang him again, and got a very short answer that “he would be in touch”. After that, the number was not in use.
‘I am fully convinced the guy I met worked for the Government and was sent to Boston to see what the public reaction would be. Not long afterwards, there was a public meeting on the subject. Among the listed speakers was a representative of the BNP.’
As Ted, a mainstream, conservative-minded businessman, says: ‘If you want to kill off any political opposition to any issue you invite the BNP.’
I include this story because I have long been haunted by the extraordinary and astonishing revelations of Andrew Neather, a former New Labour speech writer who worked for, among others, Jack Straw. He wrote in a London newspaper in 2009 that the huge immigration increases in the past ten years were at least partly caused by a desire in government to change the country and ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’. He said Labour’s weaker border controls were a deliberate plan to ‘open up the UK to mass migration’ but that Ministers were nervous about discussing this openly, for fear of losing working-class votes.
So instead, they just went on and on about the supposed economic benefits of welcoming more migrants. Boston, interestingly, is a mainly Tory area, where Labour did not need to worry about lost votes. Well, as Boston shows, there definitely are benefits to immigration. Thousands of hard-working young men – no one seems to know how many thousands – are helping to harvest the dull but necessary vegetables that Lincolnshire grows. Local landlords have no trouble in renting property, and Boston is going through a small housing boom, with lots of new blocks of flats and housing estates, as well as some pretty dispiriting caravan encampments close to the farms.
Officially, Boston’s population is 61,000, but the borough council believes the true figure is more like 70,000. The immigrants are paying their council tax and their income tax, and spending a bit in some of the local shops – but I’ll come to that. Their children are now arriving in the schools. At one, Park Primary, just over half the pupils do not have English as a first language.
We might expect this in London’s Tower Hamlets or parts of Manchester or Bradford. But in Boston? I’ve spoken to teachers who are actually quite pleased by the new arrivals. Their presence has forced the local authority to pour money into schools that were previously at the back of every queue and at the bottom of every pile. In some classes there are now as many as four expensively hired adults trying to overcome the language barriers caused by the presence of children who speak Russian, Polish or a Baltic language at home.
Teachers insist that all is well. How would you prove it wasn’t? Parents may suspect otherwise but they will have learned, like everyone else in Britain, that it is all too easy to be dismissed as ‘racist’ if you make a public fuss about such things.
And as usual, the parts of the town most affected are the poorest streets, where people are least equipped to protest. Of course ‘race’ has nothing to do with it. Boston’s migrants are white-skinned Europeans. What separates them from us is culture: upbringing, manners, tastes in food, history and language. A few dozen such people in any place would be easy, even beneficial. But thousands of them, all at once, in a small town, mean the creation of a great invisible barrier, snaking down every street and cutting through every district and many lives.
On West Street, known by locals as ‘East Street’ for obvious reasons, there are half a dozen independent shops selling Baltic, Polish and Russian food, an internet cafe used mainly by Eastern Europeans and a Polish restaurant. Nearby there’s a rather inviting Latvian pastry and cake shop. Almost certainly, without the migrants, these places would be boarded up, or charity shops.
But what consolation is that to born-and-bred Bostonians who see parts of their home town transformed into a foreign zone? Enter these shops and you will find them selling vodka (one brand rather tactlessly named ‘Boom’), and the pickles, spicy salami and smoked meats that are the staples of the Baltic diet. The brands of cereal, biscuits, beer and sweets are all unfamiliar. They are a little piece of Eastern Europe. I suspect I am the only English-speaking customer most of them have seen. In one shop I find a middle-aged Polish businessman who is happy to talk to me. I ask what brought him here. His answers may surprise you.
‘Britain is the best country in Europe to work in. You are more open-minded, more helpful, more friendly to newcomers than anyone else in Europe.
‘I like this country . . . I like to live and work here.’
He compares us most favourably to the unwelcoming, prejudiced Germans who are far closer to his home region in Western Poland. But – and I have to press him to talk about this which he says is ‘a very delicate matter’ – he is baffled by the unwillingness of the British to take the jobs on offer.
‘Many of you just don’t want to work. You take incapacity benefit [he knew the exact English phrase]. You just assume you’ll get money from the Government.’
He finds this attitude unbelievable. It wouldn’t be possible in Poland.
‘It’s just not true that we take your jobs,’ he says emphatically, ‘I’ve been working here for a long time now, and I know this – that all businesses want reliable, friendly, helpful workers. That is all we do. You can do it too.’
Of course, there are British workers who complain with justification that they have been undercut by cheaper East European rivals – and are then asked to go round and fix the mess that they have made. But in the end such people face the horrible truth, well known to the British Government and the EU, that one of the purposes of mass immigration and open borders is to push down our wages.
Perhaps if TV presenters and MPs could be replaced by cheaper Polish immigrants, they would be more concerned about this. As it is, they just rejoice that nannies cost less than they used to, and restaurant meals are cheap. But there is another reason the locals may be failing in this competition. It is summed up in a smart and obviously well-financed little establishment, paid for by taxes, itself not far from a flourishing business specialising in providing interpreters.
Slip inside this ‘Resource Centre’ and you find it full of advice on how to poison yourself with illegal drugs. There is information on nine different types of syringe, and warnings not to mix your drugs with lemon juice; to rotate your injection sites, and to angle the needle correctly. There are posters threatening unconvincingly that, if you sell the methadone provided to you by the taxpayer, you could face penalties ‘up to life in prison’.
The very existence of this establishment, with all that it implies, helps to explain why young men and women growing up around here have been so easily supplanted by strangers who do not even speak the language of our country.
No, it is not that they are all drug-takers. It is that our welfare state assumes that any weakness, any failing, any bad habit, requires help and public money rather than moral guidance and stern limits to behaviour. The same is true in the classrooms, and in thousands of homes. The newcomers have been in a harder school. They have grown up in a cold grey world where if you don’t learn, you fail your exams, if you don’t work, you go hungry, and where if you don’t obey the law, it lashes out at you with a club. Offer such people free entry to Britain, and they will think they have come to paradise, even if they have to sleep ten to a room and work until their backs break for the minimum wage.
Sooner or later they, too, will be corrupted by it. There is nothing here for our comfort. I came away from Boston wanting to tell the truth about it, without making it worse. It is easy to understand the frustrated resentment of decent people whose friendly, known world has been destroyed by distant politicians. It is not hard to sympathise with a young man or woman with the guts and energy to come hundreds of miles to find work that locals do not much want to do. But it is impossible not to be angry with the politicians who either couldn’t imagine what their policies would bring in practice, or did not care.
The destruction of familiarity and security cannot be measured in money. And I suspect they encouraged this vast migration because they lacked the courage or the will to confront the huge problems of broken families, feeble schools and welfare dependency: the real causes of the so-called labour shortage.
By doing so, they have done deep and lasting damage which has already led to bloodshed and hatred, and which could easily lead to more in the years to come. Yet nothing will bring them to admit it, or to change their minds. They never visit their own country and I do not think they give a damn about it.
An Orwell Pilgrimage
Among all the many festivals and gatherings that now make British life so much more entertaining, it is rather surprising that –until now – there has never been one devoted to George Orwell, incontestably one of our greatest and most influential writers.
This year that has been put right. There’s a very good Orwell Festival, or rather was, as it has just finished, in and around Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire. With a bit of luck, there will be another one in two years. I do hope they repeat the performance of ‘The Last Man in Europe’, a one-man show about Orwell’s life that I didn’t have the chance to see.
I like Garden Cities, mainly because of their slightly Edwardian art-and-crafts feel , relics of the age before the First World War, high-minded and benevolent, usually teetotal. The paternalism is slightly worrying (though it’s much stronger in company towns such as Port Sunlight). But there are, as we all now know, many worse things than paternalism.
Letchworth had a raw deal from Orwell himself. His famous explosion against sandal-wearers, polysyllable-chewing Marxists, escaped Quakers and bearded men in shorts is supposed to have been written after he encountered just such a group on a bus in Letchworth. He thought they agve socialism a bad name (alas for him, they were true representatives of the cause, a fact he couldn’t quite cope with). Garden Cities are also mocked as centres of weedy pacifism by John Buchan in one his least satisfactory Richard Hannay books, ‘Mr Standfast’ . This name is also used by George Smiley in ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier , Spy ’, though I wonder how many modern readers realise it comes originally from ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’, a book once known and read in almost every English home, and now almost completely forgotten. (So, by the way. Does ‘Vanity Fair’ , which most people think is a magazine or, if they are reasonably well-educated, a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. They are right. But they are also not right, just like people who think that ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ is a novel by Ernest Hemingway).
So when I was invited to talk about what Orwell would be writing about now, at the Orwell Festival in Letchworth, I very willingly said ‘yes’. This wasn’t one of those speaking engagements I sometimes lightly undertake, months in advance, and then regret later. It was fun to do, especially because among my fellow-panellists were Gordon Bowker, author of a biography of Orwell, and the Ukrainian journalist Vitali Vitaliev, who has embraced England so thoroughly that he has become a keen student of Orwell and is deeply knowledgeable about him and his writing.
Vitali kindly offered to drive me out to Wallington, the village where Orwell lived (and ran the village shop) before the war, and where he wrote ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ and ‘Coming up for Air’ – and where he is also thought to have had the original idea for ‘Animal Farm’ .But I was able to take my old bicycle up to Letchworth on the train, and rode out there myself. I had wrongly thought the landscape was flat, but still managed to wheeze my way up and down the chalk downland (beautiful in the clear early autumn light, which gives a pinkish glow to these low hills as evening approaches). The village is still much as Orwell knew it - though far more prosperous, and of course far less truly rural, its pubs and its farm labourers and its school all gone. The great barn, in which a key scene of Animal Farm takes place, is still there. So is Orwell’s house, now attractively restored and thatched. In his day it had a corrugated iron roof, and the doors and windows didn’t fit, so it was freezing cold and his weekend guests couldn’t wait to get back to London, so uncomfortable were the arrangements.
There is also a particularly lovely church, one of so many beautifully proportioned, light-filled churches still to be found, tragically under-used in village England, full of the Holy Ghost and populated by centuries of prayer and song now coming, it seems, to an inevitable end. Not that Orwell would have thought that, even though he was married there. He claimed to be Godless, as men of his type and era so often did, though he was in a way quite fond of the Church of England.
Copies of his marriage certificate are on sale, if you like that sort of thing. There is, I am glad to say, no Victory Tea Shoppe (or should that be ‘The Chestnut Tree Café?), just a modest plaque and feeling of being very deep in the England Orwell loved above all things. If you do visit it please go, as I did, by bicycle, or on foot (there are good bridleways all around) so you won’t wreck the peace you’ve come to experience.
Then I headed back to Letchworth, to what I believe is Britain’s only vegetarian school, St Christopher’s, to take part in the debate.
I did say at the beginning of my contribution to the discussion that I thought Orwell would have seen straight through the humbug of man-made global warming. And I also suspect , not just because it suits me, that he would have been very suspicious of the European Union’s secretive and authoritarian nature. And we covered a lot of other ground, from toads and tea to the Internet. But what follows, is more or less what I said that night, for those of you who are interested.
What George Orwell would write about today.
There’s a temptation here to say that Orwell would have been just like us. Or, to be more specific, just like me, me, me.
Many modern writers would greatly like to consider themselves to be the New Orwell.
However, reputation, like truth, is the daughter of time. Best not to make any hasty judgements.
In any case, there were many Orwells. There was the pacifist Orwell, now forgotten. There was the nostalgist Orwell of ‘Coming up for Air’, in my view by a long chalk his best novel, once you have excluded the mighty works of ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ and ‘Animal; Farm’.
Then there was Orwell the policeman and anti-imperialist, Orwell the tramp and the Paris plongeur, Orwell the voluntary slum-dweller of the ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ Orwell the literary reviewer and admirer (bafflingly to me) of Henry Miller and James Joyce’s Ulysses.
And then there was the Orwell of the POUM Militia, who discovered at first hand the horrible truth about official Communism – and the even more creepy truth about how many people, from Victor Gollancz to T.S.Eliot, would find it politic to suppress criticism of Moscow.
And on top of that there was Orwell the Old Etonian, and Orwell the author of ‘Politics and the English Language’, a sermon on purity of writing so severe that no honest scribbler can read it without recognising some of his own recent faults in it.
And finally there was Orwell the lover of England, paradoxically revolutionary, with his batty dreams of Red Militias billeted in the Ritz, but his view of this country as a family, with the wrong members in control, of railway cuttings choked with wildflowers, red pillar boxes, blue policemen, all of them sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England – and a capital so peaceful and civilised that a blind man could cross it from side to side without being molested. There’s the Orwell who instinctively disliked the metric system, who liked proper pubs, strong brown tea and the magical appearance of toads in the English countryside in the early spring. And the Orwell who couldn’t abide Scotsmen.
Finally, there’s an Orwell I have always objected to – the Orwell who completely misunderstood the relationship between sexual freedom and real freedom, and who imagined that a future left-wing dictatorship would have an Anti-Sex League and raid illicit lovers in their bedrooms.
To give an honest answer to this question, I have to consider which of these Orwells would have most disliked me, if we both lived at the same time.
Might he have approved of liberal intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya?
I suspect he might. After all, he himself took part in the prototype liberal intervention in Spain.
Might he have approved of the sexual revolution? I am sure he would, at least to begin with.
Would he have looked down his nose at conservative popular newspapers such as mine?
I am more or less sure of it. An Etonian revolutionary could hardly be expected to do anything else.
Would he have supported comprehensive education? Yes, I think the man who wanted London’s squares stripped of their railings would have seen this as a liberating measure.
Would he have favoured large-scale immigration into this country? Very possibly. He would have instinctively sided with the person he regarded as the underdog, perhaps not seeing that when mass immigration comes to a country, both migrants *and*hosts are underdogs.
Would he have supported relaxed drink licensing laws? I think so. He viewed such things as silly and puritan.
Would he have fervently opposed smoking bans? Without a doubt. His generation viewed smoking as a normal human activity.
In all these matters, it is only right to consider him as a whole, as a man of his place and time, the very things which forged the steely core of him.
But there are one or two issues on which, willy nilly, we would have found ourselves on the same side. I believe that the man who wrote so cleverly about Newspeak would have seen the speech codes and inclusive language of political correctness for the sinister linguistic prisons that they are.
I believe he would have loathed the attempt to introduce identity cards.
I believe he would have supported Steve Thoburn and the metric martyrs against concrete-headed attempts to prosecute them for selling bananas by the English pound.
And I think he would have hated motorways, and the devastation of the railways, and the grisly new liturgy of the Church of England, and the insane massacre of healthy trees by health and safety fanatics.
And he would have absolutely loathed Anthony Blair.
None of us here would ever have found him entirely convenient, or comforting, or a certain ally. He had that genuine independence of mind whose unfailing magnetic north is a love of truth and a loathing of humbug and which scorns all conventional wisdom. That’s why, knowing that he would probably have scorned me and everything I ever wrote or said, I’m still very proud to be associated with his name here today.
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