The next time I met Taki was at last year’s Spectator Editors’ Dinner in the grounds of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea. Perhaps five years had passed since I’d bowed to him on the steps at Doughty Street. This evening I merely offered him my mitt. We exchanged pleasantries and before we parted, he shot out a hand with the speed, accuracy and audacity of a black-belt champion and chucked me gently under the point of my chin. Impressive. Never mind the bowing, Mr Karate, he seemed to be implying: you didn’t see that coming, now, did you? To the people who ask me what Taki is like, I say with confidence that he is a gentleman, a sportsman and a top geezer.
Other people who say, ‘That Taki: what’s he like?’ aren’t asking a question: they are repeating a popular idiomatic cliché suggesting that Taki is surely a man who is beyond help or reason. The phrase in its newer sense is most often put to me by young Left-leaning journalists. They are frankly amazed that somebody who isn’t on the Left is still getting away with writing a weekly column in a British mainstream magazine. Not that they’ve ever read a High Life column in its entirety, I don’t suppose. And not that Taki is particularly on the Right as far as I can tell. I’ll concede that he does not appear to support the view that the march of human progress is heading steadily towards the sunlit uplands — but who any longer does? Taki has far too much experience of life, it seems to me, to have any truck with anything resembling political paradigms.
I tell these moralisers that this peasant, at any rate, enjoys Taki’s accounts of the doings of old aristocratic men with old money, and their dispeptic disdain for the rising class of the new men with their new money. I’d rather read about the foolishness and vanity of the individuals at the top of the food chain, than, say, the foolishness and vanity of those who are merely two thirds of the way up. And if Taki occasionally lowers his sights to pick off a few common or garden politicians with head shots, the carnage is exhilarating. In which other column but The Spectator High Life would you see Jack Straw described as a ‘low-life coward’ for having ‘kissed the black arse of the murdering Robert Mugabe’? (Ole!) Or Tony Blair and Lord Levy curtly dismissed as ‘hustlers and bull-shit artists’? (Bravo!)
Here, attractively served in large-format paperback with end flaps, with an elegant foreword by Charles Moore, and a marvellous seaside postcard-style cover by Heath, is the latest collection of our very own poor little Greek boy’s High Life columns —104 of them — chosen from the last decade by Charles Glass. Let us all bow in homage and gratitude. Oss, sensei!
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