The work of P.G. Wodehouse is immortal, but he was guilty of a moral lapse

The debate about P.G. Wodehouse’s wartime radio broadcasts from Nazi Germany has been raging for more than 60 years. It is re-ignited by Robert McCrum’s admirable new biography of the great writer. Most reviewers have taken the line that ‘Plum’s’ talks were inconsequential. Though sympathetic to his subject, Mr McCrum is a little sterner. ‘His behaviour,’ he writes of Wodehouse, ‘was incredibly stupid, but it was not treacherous.’

What business is it of a media column to re-enter these difficult waters? My excuse is that Wodehouse was almost destroyed by a journalist, and he has over the years been defended and largely rehabilitated by writers who were also journalists. His reputation has been settled by the fourth estate. The man who tried to ruin him was William Connor, ‘Cassandra’ of the Daily Mirror, who much later became Wodehouse’s friend. Connor’s main assault came not in the columns of his newspaper but in an address on the BBC which was disowned by the governors, and criticised in 133 out of 166 letters or telephone calls to the Corporation. Connor’s attack was extreme, but it is useless to pretend that Wodehouse’s broadcasts — though largely innocuous and nowhere displaying the slightest pro-Nazi sympathies — did not arouse passions in the breasts of reasonable people. Harold Nicolson, clearly no extremist, wrote in his diary: ‘I do not want to see Wodehouse shot on Tower Hill. But I resent the theory that “poor old Wodehouse is so innocent that he is not responsible”. A man who has shown such ingenuity and resource in evading British and American income tax cannot be classed as impractical.’