How I miss Auberon Waugh

Every now and then one suddenly misses somebody. I miss Bron, who died 17 years ago last month. There’s an Auberon Waugh-sized hole in British satirical journalism.

Listening to the radio last week — it was all about famous women, women in history, women’s suffrage, sexual harassment of women, equal pay for women at the BBC, women this and women that — I felt vaguely irritable. Not that I seriously disagreed with anything being said, or wished to rain on any suffragist’s parade, or have ever been remotely sympathetic to inappropriate male behaviour towards women … no, I’d place myself on the ‘politically correct’ side of the argument on every one of these issues.

So why the urge to switch off the Today programme? How can I put this? It was all getting a bit, well, relentless. I’ve never even propositioned a woman. I’m pretty sure I’d have been in favour of women’s suffrage. It’s doubtful I’m paid more than equivalent women for presenting Radio 4’s Great Lives, and in our choice of lives I know we do our best to see that women in history are represented, and that a decent quotient of women guests are invited on to the programme. So as a man I couldn’t help feeling a bit got at.

That’s unfair, of course. Laying it on thick is what effective campaigns do; they must pump out a broad-brush message even if it doesn’t apply to all their audience. Besides, pendulums that have swung too far one way must necessarily swing back a bit too far the other: heaven knows women’s issues have been under-represented for centuries — so was a week of over-representation on news programmes really so unfair?

No. My argument was tetchy and thin, and couldn’t be sustained.