IRONY or PSYCHOPATH: 1, David Starkey

Bizarre Saturday Times this week. We know this only because we’ve gone home and Daddy reads the Times. I mean, of course Daddy reads the Times. As Jim Hacker puts it in an episode of Yes, Minister I can’t be bothered to specifically identify:

The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; The Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

And the Marilyn’s Daddy runs the country.

First of all, there was the front page of the Review, completely taken up by a feature called ‘The books you must read before you’re 21.’ So far, so unimaginative: Erica Wagner couldn’t even be arsed to make it, I don’t know, ‘21 books you must read before you’re 21’ or something at least semi-symmetrical like that. And so far, so fucking irritating. Because these lists always involve aged writers telling an imagined (and, indeed, this being the Saturday Times, also entirely imaginary) kiddie audience that they simply must read a certain book before they pass a no-longer-even-legally-entrenched arbitrary milestone, even though they didn’t actually do so themselves. Presumably because (bearing in mind this list contains contributions by Callow and Rushdie) they were chasing cock or snatch, as one does at the age of <21.

I discovered Auden at the age of 25...Here was a wonderful humane voice, and I was sorry I had not come to him earlier. Sixteen is the age to begin Auden, in my view, although sometimes it can be before that.

Your view, Alexander, even though you don’t actually know what it’s like to read Auden when you’re sixteen BECAUSE YOU CAME TO HIM WHEN YOU WERE IN YOUR MID-TWENTIES. SO HOW DARE YOU FUCKING PREACH? Parts of Auden are pretty difficult. Yeah, they mostly rhyme, but y’know, one need only glance at, y’know, part two of ONE OF HIS MOST FAMOUS GODDAM POEMS, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats,’ to realise THERE’S PROBABLY SOMETHING HERE FOR YOU EVEN WHEN YOU’RE NOT PUBESCENT:

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

What makes the feature particularly bizarre, though, is that it hinges itself, sexy picture, sexy frontpage advert, all of itself upon a contribution from Nigella goddam Lawson. A piece containing contributions from Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn and its most notable feature is, to Wagner’s mind, Nigella’s prose. Which is, inevitably, a masterful exercise in involuntary self-parody (albeit recommending an excellent book). We’ve bolded the best bits for the win:

Tonio Kröger, by Thomas Mann

It is one of those novels – though strictly speaking, a novella – that is only truly appreciated by the adolescent reader. The intensity of feeling, the overwhelming anguish and unbearable conflict that Tonio Kröger feels, needs to be met with fellow-feeling in the reader. Once you have grown up, I suspect that a lot of the book’s power, even meaning, would be lost. It’s certainly a book that poleaxed me when I read it at 18 etc. etc.

Since Saturday, we have masturbated exactly 14 times over the image of the adolescent Nigella, not yet touched by the hairy Saatchi hand, getting poleaxed. It doesn’t even hurt anymore.

Involuntary self-parody pales into insignificance, though, when placed alongside that dear man David Starkey’s comments in the Times Magazine's ‘What I’ve learnt’ section, which represent an excellent introduction to a new game we’ll be playing over the next few months: IRONY or PSYCHOPATH? The premise is simple: cite a couple of credibly quoted quotations belonging to a famous man or woman that, if not ironic, unquestionably represent the rantings of a fucking madman, and then decide whether they are in fact ironic or not. Over to you sir...

There’s no connection between a Damien Hirst and a Holbein or a Raphael. The only reason modern art exists is to decorate large banks’ foyers. So it was clever of Nicholas Sarota to commission Tate Modern – which looks exactly like a New York bank foyer.

That actually sounds rather reasonable, albeit misguided…

I despair of politicians. I put it down to the disintegration of the governing class. Aristocratic governments tend to be rather impressive. Look at the Roman Republic, or England in the 18th and 19th centuries. Look at Churchill. Democratic politics have occasional wondrous peaks, but most of the time you’ve got John Prescott.

Wait a minute, he didn’t just try to say…did he...

Gays are a bit like Jews. We’re an extraordinarily odd minority that’s had a totally disproportionate effect intellectually and culturally. But now homosexuality has been normalised, and in some ways that’s a tremendous loss.

What. The fuck?

The verdict: IRONY

These comments, although bewilderingly problematic are, we have to admit, rather droll. This, in the same interview, similarly: ‘I’ve been “the rudest man in Britain” ever since my encounter with George Austin, former Archdeacon of York, on the Moral Maze. He did a high-flown rant against Prince Charles, and as he left I said, “Don’t his fatness, his smugness and his pomposity really make you want to vomit?” It’s a great line: two Anglo-Saxon insults followed by a Latin one.’

Psychopaths are seldom droll, therefore we must rule in Starkey’s favour. Jesus what a prick though, right?