Imagine I were to begin this column by remarking that a woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not done well, but you’re surprised to find it done at all.
Dear me, that would never do, even in as cheeky a magazine as The Spectator. Then try instead: ‘Dr Johnson was no admirer of the female sex. “A woman’s preaching,” he said, “is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”’
I could get away with that. An antiquated opinion, safely attributed to an 18th-century writer, enclosed behind quotation marks and decorated with a few cobwebs, can still be sneaked past our 21st-century censors.
But how about a more recent offensive remark? Imagine that during Hillary Clinton’s run for the US presidency, I had opened a column by joking that she reminded every American of his first wife. No, still unacceptable. So try instead: ‘Never afraid to offend, the late P.J. O’Rourke remarked that Hillary Clinton was “every American’s first wife’’.’ Fine. Saved by the quotation marks. He may have said that. I couldn’t possibly comment.
Both quotations are included in my anthology of insult and abuse, Scorn, just republished. The first edition came out 31 years ago, and everything in such a collection is, by definition, dressed in those disarming quotation marks. But every entry once came naked into the world. Someone said them. And, in so many cases, couldn’t say them now. It’s quite remarkable how much of the best and sharpest in my collection could not be born today – or, if born, would be strangled at birth by a nervous editor.
Only the Welsh are still allowed to be rude about Wales
One doubts any mainstream modern journalist would dare be so personal as to describe a US president as in 1863 the Houston Telegraph described Abraham Lincoln:
The leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege, which all politicians have, of being ugly.
And lest you suppose that’s OK because it is ‘of its time’, here’s Mark Steyn abusing a president still very much with us, Bill Clinton. Steyn was referring to some anatomical speculation following reports of an affair with Monica Lewinsky: ‘If the President’s penis is straight, it is the only thing about his administration that is.’ Mark would struggle to find a respectable newspaper to carry this kind of invective in 2025.
A glorious millennium of gloves-off offensiveness is shrinking fast in our rear-view mirror. An exchange in the Palace of Westminster between Tim Sainsbury MP (of the supermarket dynasty) and Nicholas Soames MP comes from another age:
SAINSBURY (Seeing Soames dressed in an extravagant tweed hunting outfit): ‘Going ratting, Nick?’
SOAMES: ‘Fuck off, you grocer – you don’t tell a gentleman how to dress on a Friday.’
I’d like to believe, but cannot, that such exchanges are still commonplace at Westminster. I can quote this one, but woe betide any politician today overheard and reported as engaging in such verbal jousting. We still love cruelty, we still delight in quoting and reading invective both of the stiletto and the sledgehammer variety; but we must take our pleasure vicariously, as audience not practitioners. As with classical opera, we’re not producing this stuff any more; instead we’re replaying material from the past.
I’ve dwelt above on misogyny, political insult and ‘personal’ remarks. We’ve become even thinner-skinned, however, on race and nationality. My anthology’s chapters here read almost like historical documents. Consider poor old Wales. Only the Welsh are still allowed to be rude about the country, though it must be said they’ve always stepped up to the challenge. ‘Land of my fathers – my fathers can have it,’ said Dylan Thomas.
We may dismiss Walter Savage Landor’s letter to his fellow poet Robert Southey(‘The Earth contains no race of human beings so totally vile and worthless as the Welsh’) as being two centuries old; I doubt, though, that anyone now would repeat the proverbial English insult: ‘A Welshman is a man who prays on his knees on Sunday and preys on his friends the rest of the week.’ And would we forgive – would Wales today forgive – Tony Blair’s ‘Fucking Welsh!’, as reported by Alastair Campbell?
Here’s O’Rourke again:
The Greeks – dirty and impoverished descendants of a bunch of la-de-da fruit salads who invented democracy and then forgot how to use it while walking around dressed up like girls.
Rereading my chapters on race in particular, I cannot regret the constraints we now place on remarks, both considered and off the cuff, that within memory wouldn’t even have raised an eyebrow. But it does strike me there’s a good deal of insult in these most sensitive areas which today would find critics urging that we shouldn’t even repeat, let alone publish within quotation marks, what used to be commonplace. Were self-censorship to go that far, we would be sealing ourselves off from our own cultural history.
When my publishers sent me the proof of the new edition of Scorn, and after rereading the anthology with growing surprise at how unacceptable the recently acceptable has become, I asked to insert two sentences at the end of the old introduction: ‘And a postscript to a new edition in a new age of self-censorship: view this republication as a history lesson too. Over the short years since I put the anthology together, how fast our era’s intolerance of what may offend has grown!’
Something is gained: courtesy, consideration. But something is lost, too: the sheer exuberance of insolence, obloquy and scorn the English language has brought the world. ‘If you haven’t anything nice to say about anyone,’ Dorothy Parker may or may not have said, ‘come sit by me.’
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