Byron Rogers

Michael Wharton: A Peter Simple life

In praise of the satirist Michael Wharton, who would have been 100 this week

issue 20 April 2013

He was fascinated by the Welsh, whom he listed, along with walking and gardening, as one of his three recreations in Who’s Who, something that alarmed those few Welshmen he actually met. One of them, the political columnist Alan Watkins, who had been sturdily on the run from his race for most of his working life, said of him, ‘He’s mad, the man’s quite mad.’

The journalist Peter Simple, who wrote a column for almost 50 years in the Daily Telegraph and the centenary of whose birth is on 19 April, was almost as fascinated by the Tibetans, a people, he told me, who had forever solved the problems of political philosophy by reducing the subject to two propositions, ‘It is the custom’ or ‘It is not the custom’. That he managed to find himself loose, and employed, in the 20th century, which he survived by dying in 2006, is one of the mysteries of our time.

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