Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The good news is, we’re all living longer; the bad news is, we’ll be miserable

The ideological dimension to life expectancy

Notable people who are quite right-wing live a lot longer than notable people who are decidedly left of centre. This discovery of mine is, you might argue, counter-intuitive; you would expect right-wingers to be eaten away with dyspepsia and choler, the blood vessels on their foreheads popping open every time they read of a mosque about to open, or a wildcat strike about to take place. Whereas lefties, traditionally, possess a communal ethos and are tolerant of the many and diverse ways in which our society expresses itself. Not so, however. They die younger. Of cancer.

I discovered this by means of a random analysis of the obituaries pages in the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian; those people who, having passed away, were subsequently honoured for their lifetime achievement by the Telegraph lived, on average, a full eight years longer than those similarly honoured by the Guardian. Now at first sight this seems to be one of those false correlations I mentioned last week; right-wingers tend to be better off than left-wingers and it is their greater affluence which provides them with a longer life. However, I’m talking about ‘notable’ people — pretty much all of the people whose deaths are commemorated in the Guardian are, like Polly Toynbee Herself, both high-born and fairly well-heeled, so that usual caveat simply doesn’t apply. I suppose you might argue that given the tendency to become more right-wing as old age digs its teeth deeper into your neck, then my thesis is a tautology: it is during those later years that individuals do or say stuff which endears them to the editor of the Telegraph. But I don’t think this quite accounts for the marked discrepancy, either.

The typical Telegraph obituary will be of some bewhiskered old fascist who held off 5,000 darkies at Rorke’s Drift, formed an organisation called The League Of English Patriots in 1927 after an epiphany upon visiting Rome, and spent the rest of his life on the board of various arms dealers and his local Neighbourhood Watch committee and was an expert on something arcane — Victorian tram tickets, say or golliwogs.

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