You didn't read it here first

 Heaven knows I've been trying my best not to pass comment on the Prime Minister here any more but, even though it was obvious he couldn't do it, it can't have been me who was first to say so.

It's not an easy job. It demands application, seriousness, a sense of responsibility, all kinds of things like that. All the things that the self-regarding buffoon always very obviously never had. So, don't come crying to me, all you hapless Leavers who fell for his 'showmanship' and clowning. That's all he ever was and it's all he ever had. It was only a few weeks ago we were treated to the nightmare vision that he thought it had all gone quite well, on the whole, and that he might have a go at the 10 years that the likes of Mrs. Thatcher achieved and ended in tears and then Tony Blair hung on grimly for.

Ye Gods and little fishes. I think it was Milhouse van Houten in The Simpsons who said, 'I saw it would happen, and then it happened.' There's not much one can add to that.

--

For once a disc was a bit of a disappointment. The Brahms String Quartets, and Quintets, as recorded by the Budapest string Quartet, probably don't represent him at his best on a couple of plays but his best is a great thing and they're there to be returned to sometime.

--

Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Cafe was a magnificent account, though, and never less than vividly readable in an area that can't ever be made lightweight. There's more to a book like that than just setting it out and she entirely not only 'gets it' but makes it as accessible as is possible to a non-philosopher like me.

Sartre was one of those, like Balzac, for example, who wrote so much I can't imagine him having time for any other life. And it follows that there can't be much to write about if all you do is write, so he must have been very fluent.

The Family Idiot, on Flaubert and Madame Bovary, ran to 2800 pages without the fourth and final section ever getting written. That's betting without the constant flow of essays, books, forewords, novels and plays and that, for a degree in Existentialism in 1981, all we actually read was an early section from Being and Nothingness.

But he wasn't a good lad, genius in phenomenology though he may have been. Eventually demurring on his support for the Soviet Union, he only shifted to Maoist China, which is no more than from the frying pan to the fire and, significantly, he fell out with most of his friends. Sarah still has a point, though, that one can't help liking something about him.

But at that stage that most books reach when you realize it has reached a 'summing up' stage and, to be fair, it is on the next to last page, she says,

When I first read Sartre and Heidigger, I didn't think the details of a philosopher's personality or biography were important. This was the orthodox belief in the field at the time...

Thirty years later, I have come to the opposite conclusion. Ideas are interesting but people are vastly more so.

It has taken her most of her adult life to recover from the education she was provided with. I know what that feels like. From 1978-81, the orthodoxy we were taught was based on The Intentional Fallacy, the vogue instituted by Wimsatt and Beardsley, and the 'death of the author' of Roland Barthes. In the same way that universities are now all, apparently, 'cancel culture', it was then a correctness as written up in The History Man, a lot of righteous, loud Marxists setting the holier-than-thou tone and such a heap of doctrinaire claptrap that Roman Catholics would have admired the thoroughgoing adherence to sophistry even if they didn't like God not being a part of it.

One might be tempted to think it's no wonder university education wasn't paid for by students in those days. It was hopeless. But there's not much reason to think it's any better now and might be more rigidly set out now than it was then for all I know and the lecturers, as much fashion victims as the students with their Frank Zappa, John Coltrane and other misery LP's, were only doing what they thought was right.

--

You probably wouldn't accuse A.N. Wilson of having been among that crowd. His Our Times now gathers pace, including his unlikely, somewhat contrived joke that Naomi Campbell read Foucault.

Wilson is never slow to disparage any figure he can find reason to and he makes great entertainment, no doubt for himself as well as his readers, by doing so. He often has a point but his use of crabbing, malicious adjectives betray his fogey-ish, old High Tory sympathies when he describes the 'rent-a-mob'

of,

poets, dons, clergy and ankle-socked female graduates 

protesting about government policy in the Suez crisis while not colouring the right-wing denizens of the Garrick Club, Malcolm Muggeridge or the idea of Gloriana, which is always implied, with any similar undermining comment. 

He's more iconoclastic than iconaltry, though, not minding too much about whose reputation he derides and he praises the journalism of Paul Foot and is in the spirit of Private Eye, Have I Got News for You and, once, when he was on the upgrade, Jeremy Thorpe, in saying that Rab Butler and Macmillan, 'progreesivists at heart',  'allowed hanging to continue',

when weighing in the balance a fellow's mortal existence and their own chance of re-election.

 

It is a thrilling read, the better for Wilson's jaundiced view which is sometimes questionable, sometimes righteous but always Wilsonian. He's clever enough to bring it off in a way that the likes of our current Prime Minister would never be capable of.

It wouldn't be healthy to only read those things one agrees with, that tell you what you want to hear. Wilson is 'stimulating' but this book has reduced him from the status I had previously had him at and, having admired his immense scholarship over several books, and now seen the murky gremlin within him, might leave it a while before I return or more of his skewed vision.