Conservative iconoclasts required

Having been a monarchist all my life, it was a bit embarrassing the other day to have to admit to a television interviewer that I could not remember the reasons why I had become one in the first place. In truth, of course — as I explained — I became a monarchist as a matter of course, pretty well by instinct; everybody was doing it. So I did it. The interviewer was not impressed. ‘Sounds like prejudice to me’, he said, putting me to shame. Now, along comes the highly cerebral prison doctor, Theodore Dalrymple to assure me that I was wrong to be ashamed. Prejudices of that kind, he argues, are a thoroughly good thing and the sooner we get back to being a nation which imbibes its sense of right and wrong, and of manners and morals, with its mother’s milk, the better all round.

Not that his nostalgia for the old prejudices includes racism, which is another one that I briefly shared, this time inheriting it from my father who had lost all his money farming tobacco between the wars in what was then Southern Rhodesia He really was one of the old school who believed that blacks had just come down from the trees. In spite of hating that kind of coarse language and thinking, I did believe that white supremacy, at any rate for the foreseeable future, was the best bet for all concerned — a view to which many are now returning.

I am over simplifying. The great doctor’s book is very learned and subtle. Here, for example, are a few of the chapter headings which give an accurate idea of its tone, scope and depth. ‘The Effect of Pedagogy Without Prejudice’; ‘Prejudice a Requirement of Benevolence’; ‘No Virtue Without Prejudice’; ‘Projection of Prejudice Not a Good in Itself’ and so on.