Ivo Dawnay

P.J. O’Rourke’s death marks the end of a great satirical era

[Getty Images]

There was something old school about P.J. O’Rourke, who died on Tuesday, something that felt like a leftover echo of the American Revolution. Visiting him in his ancient, low-ceilinged, clapboard farm-house in Sharon, New Hampshire, one half-expected Paul Revere to burst breathlessly into the kitchen warning that the British were coming.

Though he was by birth an Ohio boy, New England felt like the tweedy satirist’s natural environment — a pioneer sensibility that combined American impatience with the Old World with a nostalgic yearning for the oak-panelled values and certainties of yesteryear.

Never quite a ‘gonzo’ journalist, his departure to the cigar bar in the sky nonetheless marks the end of a great satirical era that he shared with Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. Of the three, O’Rourke was both the funniest and the gentlest.

‘There’s never a policeman around when you want one.’

Having met him only a few months before, he generously agreed during the 2020 presidential primaries to put me up in his writing room at March Hare farm and take me on a tour of the candidates’ stump speeches at local school halls. On his desk lay the first draft of a new column for the Washington Post. ‘What this country needs,’ it began, ‘is fewer people who know what this country needs. We’d be better off, in my opinion, without so many opinions. Especially without so many political opinions. Including my own.’

It neatly sums up his small ‘c’ conservative philosophy, less ideological, more a very American heartfelt plea to be left alone; a deeply held, world-weary scepticism that eschewed conviction politicians of all colours and embraced, unlike many other moderate Republicans, the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

The son of a Republican car salesman — echoes of Updike’s Rabbit — O’Rourke flirted with the radical left at college, joined the anti-war movement, smoked dope and wrote for ‘underground’ magazines.

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