When considering the Troubles in Northern Ireland, he writes:

Sympathy for both sides must be keen in the bosom of any but a biased observer ... It would take 30 years to persuade British governments to adopt the saving doublethink which saw that Ulster both was — and was not — British.

‘Saving doublethink’ is a Wilsonian virtue. He’s a partisan of both Charles and Diana; of both optimistic Karl Popper and gloomy C. S. Lewis; of both Apollo and Dionysus. He argues for the necessity, or perhaps inevitability, of Thatcher’s economic policies but is clear that they were a decision ‘to allow the lumpenproletariat to stew in its own juice’.

In his discussion of the Profumo affair he sticks up for hypocrisy: ‘In the imperfect world we actually inhabit, the elimination of double-standards resulted in the weakening of any standards at all.’ That cast of mind informs his attack on the scientism of Richard Dawkins and his disciples, and on the ‘chippy paranoia’ of Foucault. Wilson is not uncertain — he is actively chary of certainty. Perhaps because he feels the magnetic draw of sainthood or monomania, it is the saints and monomaniacs whom he tilts at.

The reason the Cuban missile crisis did not lead to nuclear holocaust, he argues beguilingly, is that

Armageddon occurs because the Reign of the Saints and the True Believers is about to begin, when differing certainties come to blows in the Last Battle. But the Cold War was fought not between fundamentalisms but between self-doubters posing as fundamentalists; not between certainties but between uncertainties. Both sides in the poker game knew they had almost worthless hands.

‘When civilisations are in freefall, everything becomes inverted,’ Wilson writes. ‘It is the sages who say the most foolish things; those behaving with the deepest solemnity become like clowns.’ Under his greasepaint, Wilson the clown-sage is serious. And he is, as ever, even-handed in his conclusion: ‘The Britain which saw Elizabeth II’s coronation, and the Britain which will see her funeral are in reality two different, equally awful places.’

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