Britain's "purse-lipped mother-in-law."
This week's issue of The New Yorker (though dated 2 April, it came out on 26 March) has a lengthy article looking at "the most powerful newspaper in Great Britain," the Daily Mail ("Mail Supremacy: The newspaper that rules Britain" by Lauren Collins); while the article is interesting in and of itself, it struck me for another, somewhat synchronous reason: the weltanschauung of the Mail, described by one anonymous editor as the belief "'that Britain has gone to the dogs,'" is markedly similar to that evinced in James Barlow's 1968 novel The Burden of Proof (which was the last novel he had published before he emigrated to Tasmania, of all places).
The man currently running the Mail seems to have another point in common with Barlow: "The Mail's editor, Paul Dacre, considers it a compliment when critics accuse the paper of moralizing.....According to one editor, Dacre is enamored with New Zealand: 'He thinks it's like Britain from the nineteen-fifties.'" Yet Dacre's prudery evidently doesn't extend to language: "Because Dacre tends to refer to underlings as 'cunts,' the daily [editorial] meetings are known as the Vagina Monologues."
But whereas I found Barlow's views in The Burden of Proof fascistic by implication, the Mail's fascistic sympathies were explicit, at least in the 1920s and 1930s:
"In 1934, the Mail promoted the ideas of [Sir Oswald] Mosley....This time, it was the British Union of Fascists, not [Standard Bread, which was espoused by the grandfather for whom Mosley was named], as the Mail published a now infamous editorial entitled 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts.' Throughout the thirties, [the Mail's owner and publisher, Harold Harmsworth, Lord] Rothermere, who supported appeasement, maintained a close relationship with Hitler.....When the Second World War began, the Mail changed its course, writing on September 4, 1939, 'We now fight against the blackest tyranny that has ever held men in bondage,' but its credibility was damaged."
Ms. Collins also offers this irresistible, parenthetical anecdote: "One [of the Mail's columnists], Liz Jones, recently wrote about stealing her husband's sperm in an attempt to have a child without his permission, earning her the nickname Jizz Loans."
Stern censoriousness never seems to go out of style; nonetheless, it was a bit surprising to me to read this piece and find that the Daily Mail expresses views virtually unchanged from Barlow's minatory pronouncement on the state of the nation over forty years ago:
"England was impotent now, but talkative, petulant, critical and, in decline, intellectually arrogant. She was too articulate in relation to her negligible power to support her arguments. Nobody could do anything now without being accountable to the scorn of the liberal intellectuals in print or on television. England was too articulate at the top. Nobody, even in a Socialist liberal permissive society, had the slightest notion of the wishes of the people, out there beyond the great controversial shop of London. It was all done in the metropolis. And, too often, views were accepted by the Government because they were proposed by the new establishment of Socialist MPs, liberal journalists and the apparatus of dons, students, South Bank churchmen, pop singers, professional satirists and pundits, none of whom must be offended. England was still in social ferment, with new variations of the class war...."
The man currently running the Mail seems to have another point in common with Barlow: "The Mail's editor, Paul Dacre, considers it a compliment when critics accuse the paper of moralizing.....According to one editor, Dacre is enamored with New Zealand: 'He thinks it's like Britain from the nineteen-fifties.'" Yet Dacre's prudery evidently doesn't extend to language: "Because Dacre tends to refer to underlings as 'cunts,' the daily [editorial] meetings are known as the Vagina Monologues."
But whereas I found Barlow's views in The Burden of Proof fascistic by implication, the Mail's fascistic sympathies were explicit, at least in the 1920s and 1930s:
"In 1934, the Mail promoted the ideas of [Sir Oswald] Mosley....This time, it was the British Union of Fascists, not [Standard Bread, which was espoused by the grandfather for whom Mosley was named], as the Mail published a now infamous editorial entitled 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts.' Throughout the thirties, [the Mail's owner and publisher, Harold Harmsworth, Lord] Rothermere, who supported appeasement, maintained a close relationship with Hitler.....When the Second World War began, the Mail changed its course, writing on September 4, 1939, 'We now fight against the blackest tyranny that has ever held men in bondage,' but its credibility was damaged."
Ms. Collins also offers this irresistible, parenthetical anecdote: "One [of the Mail's columnists], Liz Jones, recently wrote about stealing her husband's sperm in an attempt to have a child without his permission, earning her the nickname Jizz Loans."
Stern censoriousness never seems to go out of style; nonetheless, it was a bit surprising to me to read this piece and find that the Daily Mail expresses views virtually unchanged from Barlow's minatory pronouncement on the state of the nation over forty years ago:
"England was impotent now, but talkative, petulant, critical and, in decline, intellectually arrogant. She was too articulate in relation to her negligible power to support her arguments. Nobody could do anything now without being accountable to the scorn of the liberal intellectuals in print or on television. England was too articulate at the top. Nobody, even in a Socialist liberal permissive society, had the slightest notion of the wishes of the people, out there beyond the great controversial shop of London. It was all done in the metropolis. And, too often, views were accepted by the Government because they were proposed by the new establishment of Socialist MPs, liberal journalists and the apparatus of dons, students, South Bank churchmen, pop singers, professional satirists and pundits, none of whom must be offended. England was still in social ferment, with new variations of the class war...."