Unless I am much mistaken, obituarists and tribute-writers have this week been poring over the Fleet Street archives, beset by a difficulty as unexpected as it has been puzzling. We have been looking for brilliant, extended passages of the late Bernard Levin’s writing to offer modern readers a sample (and older readers a reminder) of the work of a man who we all agree was one of the 20th century’s greatest British columnists.
We remember his greatness. We recall the thrill as Bernard laid into the idiots and idiocies of the age. How we wished we’d said that! How we wished we had his courage, his effrontery, his learning, his mental treasury of quotation, his gift of language. Time and again Levin found the words to say what, once we had read him, we knew we thought already but had somehow failed to express.
What was it — jog my memory — he wrote about the Gas Board? It slips the mind but it was spot on. Then there was that piece about — who was it? Lord Denning? Christine Keeler? — which simply said it all. And didn’t he attack the Post Office in language which must have left the Postmaster General jibbering into his morning coffee — what was it, again, he wrote?
Can’t recall now, but it was delicious. All I do remember is that as an undergraduate at Cambridge in an era of suffocating left-liberal complacency and trade-union greed, a time when one’s every waking thought seemed to begin with an unspoken ‘am I alone in thinking…?’ or ‘why oh why?’, two men kept me sane: Keith Joseph and Bernard Levin. Remind me, then, of the famous columnist’s genius. Reprise the best of Levin, for old times’ sake.
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