Keep on running

Astonishingly, it is nearly ten years since Auberon Waugh died. I never met him — I came about half a glass of wine away from introducing myself at a party, but didn’t quite make it — but like most of his fans, read him avidly and admired him from afar. My girlfriend used to work at the Academy Club and was very fond of him, even though she was a lefty actress who thought he was the most right-wing man who had ever lived. It’s strange the way this reputation clung to him.

After he died, Polly Toynbee wrote a quite crazed hatchet-job in the Guardian, describing him as the leader of a clan of writers who were ‘effete, drunken, snobbish, sneering, racist and sexist’. You can forgive her inability to take a joke — Waugh had been mocking her remorselessly for years — but this passage suggested that she had failed to get the joke as well. In his introduction to this magnificent book, William Cook describes him as ‘a born trouble- maker, cunningly disguised as an irascible old buffer’. He was an instinctive satirist in the conservative-anarchist tradition, distrustful of authority in all its forms, sharp-eyed for all manifestations of bullshit and cant:

There is no point or purpose in any form of political idealism. Not only does socialism do nothing to improve the lot of the poor, making it in fact considerably worse, but capitalism also, by scattering plenty o’er a smiling land, creates as much vileness and havoc as socialism creates poverty and oppression.

Nothing, though, falls into abeyance more quickly than a journalistic reputation. Five minutes after we have filed our last ever piece we are forgotten, and might never have existed. I don’t think Waugh was too worried about this.