It must be 20 years since Spectator readers first encountered the name Theodore Dalrymple. It’s not his real name, of course. Several times over the years people have told me of his true identity, which I have always instantly forgotten, presumably because I don’t really want to know it. Far more appropriate that Dalrymple should operate within his own world and on his own terms: as a doctor and a psychiatrist, working in an inner-city hospital and a nearby prison, dealing every day with the detritus of our native land, the slum-dwellers, the underclass, call them what you will. His dispatches from this frontline — closer to your home and mine than any other — have always had a tone and a quality entirely their own. He is a right-wing Tory, he makes no bones about it, and he can rant and rave with the best of them, but the stories he tells are so much more powerful than the great flood of opinion we receive from most other directions. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve got a little tired of people telling me what they think. Whereas people telling me what they have observed first-hand … well, maybe it’s their rarity that makes you sit up and take notice.
That said, I think Dalrymple’s impact may have lessened over the years. He does really only have the one theme — our precipitous national decline — and you sometimes felt he had said much the same thing last week, last month, last year. Reading this selection of longer pieces, I realised the problem: 600-650-word pieces just aren’t his metier. He is so much better when he can stretch out, construct an argument and batter the innocent reader into submission with the sheer weight of gruesome evidence.
In fact, Not With A Bang doesn’t particularly read like a collection of old pieces. Because he doesn’t repeat himself (much) and considers each facet of dismal national failure separately, the disparate chapters gradually build up into a coherent whole. How much you will agree with him will depend to some extent on your own prejudices. I discussed this with a fellow Spectator contributor (and friend) who is as right-wing as I am not. We found we both loved about half of TD’s output — he loved what I didn’t like, and vice versa. In this book I particularly relished the demolition of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand: a superbly considered assault on their hubris and lack of contrition. It is the best piece I have read on the subject and demonstrates Dalrymple’s defining qualities: his clarity of thought, his precision of expression, his reasonableness (when the rage can be kept in check) and his constant, terrible disappointment.
He also has a wonderful gift for the pithy phrase. On Blair (another superb chapter): ‘No Prime Minister had ever been so ubiquitous, so informal and so inaccessible.’ He describes ‘a demoralised police force that is both bullying and ineffectual, of which only the law-abiding need be afraid’.And later: ‘That Blair could speak with conviction of the low unemployment rate, and believe that he was telling the truth, is to me worse than if he had been a dastardly cynic, more Talleyrand than Walter Mitty.’ Worse to me too.
Actually, the ‘to me’ in that last quotation is telling. Dalrymple does not pronounce from on high. He can be a little pompous, but this masks a humility, an essential kindness, in fact, that doesn’t seem to have been eroded by his years of doctoring. He rarely says ‘I am right’; he just says ‘this is wrong’. You get the sense that he writes because he is compelled to, not because he wants the attention, the ego-massage. He is, in almost every significant sense, the anti-Clarkson.
Just occasionally in the book, the rage does get the better of him, smoke appears from his ears and the impact is lost. But you can’t really blame him: the temptation must be intolerable. And he always draws you back in with the sheer originality of his thinking: what Norman Stone on the dust- cover calls his ‘unconventional wisdom’. I’d recommend the book to anyone with a brain and a heart, of whatever political persuasion.
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