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.
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