An Unrelenting Stream of Negativity
Jul. 7th, 2014 11:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselJan 2014
50 People who buggered up Britain - Quentin Letts - Constable, 2008
*
[It is ten years to the day since the first posts in this blog. Given that my one of my intentions in starting it was to point readers at worthwhile books, it is somewhat ironic that today's review is of one that really isn't. But that's the way it goes...]
Anyone who has perused this blog before will doubtless be unsurprised to hear that I am not a regular reader of the Daily Mail. In fact I consider it one of the more pernicious elements of modern British society. But I am also aware that my liberal biases are not necessarily intellectually sound and sometimes seek out more right-wing and conservative opinions to test my opinions. This applies to humour too. There is nothing intrinsically unfunny about right-wing or conservative humourists - while preferring the vaguely left-wing chatter of, say, The News Quiz, I have read and enjoyed books by the likes of P.J. O'Rourke.
This one, however, left me completely stone-faced. Written by the Daily Mail's parliamentary diarist, it is a series of character sketches of the people who, in the author's opinion, have made Britain the miserable dump that it is today. This would be fine if they were funny or insightful, but they're not. They are merely depressing.
The one thing that I can say in this book's favour is that the choice of victims is broad, covering the full political spectrum from John Prescott to Margaret Thatcher, with some personalities from sports and entertainment and various bureaucrats and innovators thrown in. You will undoubtedly find someone who annoys you in the list and may even agree with Letts' criticism of them. He is right, for example, to ask why Jeffrey Archer retains a position in a law-making body (the House of Lords) after being convicted of perjury. More often, however, the sin that he condemns them for is a little Englander peculiarity. He lambasts Kenneth Baker for the law against corporal punishment, Antony Crossland for introducing comprehensive schools and Rhodes Boyson for taking away their playing fields. He has a weird obsession with the rights of motorists, dedicating three of his fifty spots to the inventors of the speed camera and the mini-roundabout and a police chief who practised zero tolerance to law-breaking on the roads.
What's odd about this is that he seems to think that these people made their decisions in isolation and then somehow imposed them on everyone else. But this of course is not the case. The sophisticated and powerful institutions that our society has developed mean that most decisions affecting public life are collegiate and for the most part are at least partially evidence-based. The evidence may of course turn out to be inaccurate or biased, but most people make justifiable decisions given the information available to them at the time. I am not saying that every speed camera in the country is sensibly placed, but to blame their inventor for poor decisions made by others seems unfair.
What tips this book from being merely wrong-headed to actively unpleasant, however, is the quality of some of the invective. Only six people on the list are women, but the abuse thrown at them is noticeably more personal, with acid remarks made about their appearance and voice that are largely missing from the sketches of the men. For example, the weather forecaster Helen Willetts is described as a "geeky-smiled creature" who "parades her Cheshire accent with care" (Letts doesn't think that weather forecasters should have northern accents). Dame Suzi Leather, former head of the Charity Commission, is described as "an unelected harridan who draws her money from the public sector and sticks her nose into other people's business". I shan't bother to repeat what he says about Janet Street Porter, but you can guess. It's not very original.
Letts is, of course, a hypocrite, on the one hand condemning Stephen Marks for coarsening public language with his (admittedly tiresome) "fcuk" campaign at French Connection and on the other adopting a title for his book that I for one feel quite uncomfortable saying out loud. But it is the laziness of his received opinions that I find most galling. Jimmy Savile appears on the list, and I was interested to see whether there would be any hint of the allegations of child sex abuse and rape that emerged after his death (this book was written in 2007) and which may have been at least suspected by some journalists earlier. But no. Letts' chief criticisms of him are that he wore a tracksuit, acted younger than his age and had a yodelling Yorkshire accent. Hardly insightful.
Parodic character assassination requires wit and originality in the writing to justify its wholly negative and unfair view of the human condition, and this book has neither. What's worse, Letts is seeking to infect others with his brand of miserabilism. The final pages consist of an empty numbered list for you to come up with your own rogues' gallery of people to blame.
Well, that's not a game I'm playing. Normally I give books I don't like to charity shops, but as the only people who would get anything of out of this are Daily Mail readers whom I suspect don't visit such emporia, I think I'll spare the rest of humanity and just bin it.
50 People who buggered up Britain - Quentin Letts - Constable, 2008
*
[It is ten years to the day since the first posts in this blog. Given that my one of my intentions in starting it was to point readers at worthwhile books, it is somewhat ironic that today's review is of one that really isn't. But that's the way it goes...]
Anyone who has perused this blog before will doubtless be unsurprised to hear that I am not a regular reader of the Daily Mail. In fact I consider it one of the more pernicious elements of modern British society. But I am also aware that my liberal biases are not necessarily intellectually sound and sometimes seek out more right-wing and conservative opinions to test my opinions. This applies to humour too. There is nothing intrinsically unfunny about right-wing or conservative humourists - while preferring the vaguely left-wing chatter of, say, The News Quiz, I have read and enjoyed books by the likes of P.J. O'Rourke.
This one, however, left me completely stone-faced. Written by the Daily Mail's parliamentary diarist, it is a series of character sketches of the people who, in the author's opinion, have made Britain the miserable dump that it is today. This would be fine if they were funny or insightful, but they're not. They are merely depressing.
The one thing that I can say in this book's favour is that the choice of victims is broad, covering the full political spectrum from John Prescott to Margaret Thatcher, with some personalities from sports and entertainment and various bureaucrats and innovators thrown in. You will undoubtedly find someone who annoys you in the list and may even agree with Letts' criticism of them. He is right, for example, to ask why Jeffrey Archer retains a position in a law-making body (the House of Lords) after being convicted of perjury. More often, however, the sin that he condemns them for is a little Englander peculiarity. He lambasts Kenneth Baker for the law against corporal punishment, Antony Crossland for introducing comprehensive schools and Rhodes Boyson for taking away their playing fields. He has a weird obsession with the rights of motorists, dedicating three of his fifty spots to the inventors of the speed camera and the mini-roundabout and a police chief who practised zero tolerance to law-breaking on the roads.
What's odd about this is that he seems to think that these people made their decisions in isolation and then somehow imposed them on everyone else. But this of course is not the case. The sophisticated and powerful institutions that our society has developed mean that most decisions affecting public life are collegiate and for the most part are at least partially evidence-based. The evidence may of course turn out to be inaccurate or biased, but most people make justifiable decisions given the information available to them at the time. I am not saying that every speed camera in the country is sensibly placed, but to blame their inventor for poor decisions made by others seems unfair.
What tips this book from being merely wrong-headed to actively unpleasant, however, is the quality of some of the invective. Only six people on the list are women, but the abuse thrown at them is noticeably more personal, with acid remarks made about their appearance and voice that are largely missing from the sketches of the men. For example, the weather forecaster Helen Willetts is described as a "geeky-smiled creature" who "parades her Cheshire accent with care" (Letts doesn't think that weather forecasters should have northern accents). Dame Suzi Leather, former head of the Charity Commission, is described as "an unelected harridan who draws her money from the public sector and sticks her nose into other people's business". I shan't bother to repeat what he says about Janet Street Porter, but you can guess. It's not very original.
Letts is, of course, a hypocrite, on the one hand condemning Stephen Marks for coarsening public language with his (admittedly tiresome) "fcuk" campaign at French Connection and on the other adopting a title for his book that I for one feel quite uncomfortable saying out loud. But it is the laziness of his received opinions that I find most galling. Jimmy Savile appears on the list, and I was interested to see whether there would be any hint of the allegations of child sex abuse and rape that emerged after his death (this book was written in 2007) and which may have been at least suspected by some journalists earlier. But no. Letts' chief criticisms of him are that he wore a tracksuit, acted younger than his age and had a yodelling Yorkshire accent. Hardly insightful.
Parodic character assassination requires wit and originality in the writing to justify its wholly negative and unfair view of the human condition, and this book has neither. What's worse, Letts is seeking to infect others with his brand of miserabilism. The final pages consist of an empty numbered list for you to come up with your own rogues' gallery of people to blame.
Well, that's not a game I'm playing. Normally I give books I don't like to charity shops, but as the only people who would get anything of out of this are Daily Mail readers whom I suspect don't visit such emporia, I think I'll spare the rest of humanity and just bin it.