The enemy of liberal cant

When the Twin Towers collapsed, I read nothing sane upon the subject in any newspaper until Michael Wharton, as Peter Simple, filed the following to the Telegraph: ‘Only a stony-hearted fanatic could have been unmoved by the massacre in America. Yet for us feudal landlords and clerical reactionaries, cranks, conspiracy theorists and Luddite peasants, the downfall of the Twin Towers that symbolised the worldwide empire of imaginary money is not in itself a cause of grief. Ever since the atrocity, dense clouds of hysterical rhetoric have been drifting about the world. America is at war, says President Bush. Britain is at war, says Tony Blair, dutifully echoing his master. The whole world is at war, say the “media”. But what enemy is the world at war against? Terrorism! A war against terrorism is as futile and fatuous as those other fashionable wars, “the war against drugs” and “the war against racism”. You might as well declare war against old age or death. September 11, the “media” say, was the day that changed the world for ever. But the world has not changed. It is still the same old world, good and bad, that it has always been. As for terrorism and terror, only one thing is certain: we have seen nothing yet.’

Now, incredibly, that voice which has been sanely commenting on the world’s affairs, and delighting us with his array of characters — Dr Spaceley-Trellis the Go-Ahead Bishop of Bevindon, Keith Effluvium, Environmental Consultant, J. Bonington Jagworth, leader of the Motorists’ Liberation Front — is silent. Aged 92, Michael Wharton is dead. In 1957 he joined his great friend Colin Welch as co-writer of the Daily Telegraph’s Way of the World column under the pseudonym Peter Simple. He was assisted by Claudie Worsthorne and eventually by a merry band of others.