Letters | 15 November 2012

What the result says

Sir: John O’Sullivan (‘Obama’s hollow victory,’ 10 November) says that after President Obama’s re-election, ‘America looks a less naturally conservative country, more a centre-left one.’ But we ought to consider what John O’Sullivan thinks of as left and right, conservative and unconservative; what Americans think; and what most of us British readers think. For most of this year, Obama has been, as Michael Lind observed in an earlier edition of the Spectator (‘All Right Now’, 8 September), the sensible conservative choice. Where Mitt Romney aligned himself with the forces of ideological radicalism and Tea Party craziness, Obama stood for moderation and calm. He spoke for fiscal prudence (even if his policies did the opposite), a measure of restraint in US foreign policy, and, as Lind put it, a ‘preference for Burkean incrementalism over utopian reform’. When, in the last weeks of his campaign, Romney stopped dog-whistling to the right and started attacking Obama’s economic failures in the voice of a sane-but-concerned American, the polls began to move sharply in his direction. Romney left it too late, perhaps, but we shouldn’t assume that America is becoming ‘a nation divided’, a demographic nightmare of squabbling minorities. The American public seems to have far more common sense than we realise.
Jonathan Cowan
London SW10

Auden’s rent boy

Sir: Can I suggest that Douglas Murray is perhaps too generous in his assumption (‘Beyond a joke’, 10 November), that Auden did not use rent boys? Richard Davenport-Hines in his 2008 biography of Ettie Desborough writes, ‘Auden noted in his Berlin journal that his “sex snobbery” had been gratified to discover that a previous client of his rent boy “Pieps” had been “Lord Revelstoke, the banker who died in Paris, a friend of the King”.’
Jane Moth
Norfolk