Directory of Lost Causes

Is something that you must never do.

If I took this particular Britishism too seriously, I'd be very worried right now, and in something of a quandary. How do I disagree with the Daily Mail and still hate Tony Blair, for instance? Anyway, the Daily Mail has just released, or is about to release, its list of 'the fifty people who have wrecked Britain', which is a pretty fun sort of concept, and, having seen the top twenty, I'm afraid I find myself nodding my head in many places.



How far do these views represent those of the management, I wonder? How worried should I be about this? The actual author is one Quentin Letts, a fellow who shares my first name (which is always a bad sign unless they also share my second name), and who looks like a more emphatic and dynamic version of Gyles Brandreth.

Here are the fools, knaves and vulgarians who ripped up British honour and glory and set in its place the tawdry and the trite. Will my list of prime suspects match your own? Read on and find out ...

So writes Quentin Letts. And 'let's' follow his suggestion.

1 Jeffrey Archer. Say no more. I agree. I think everyone does. Not sure about placing him so highly, but there you go.

2 Richard Beeching. Agreed. Absolutely. I'm trying to ween myself off my blog expletives, so I won't write the word that immediately comes to mind. I grew up partly in Ilfracombe, which had once been on the end of a branch line, a branch that was singled out in the 1963 report for Beeching's Axe, though the actual end came later for this particular branch. In These Things Take Time, Morrissey wails, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the sacred Wunderkind/You took me behind a disused railway line", thereby evoking the landscape of decline and waste so familiar to the British, which Beeching had created. (To me that particular line always meant Ilfracombe.) We are now, of course, realising more and more just how wrong Beeching was to destroy so much public transport.

3 Howard Schultz. Once again, agreed. I'm afraid I'm guilty of patronising Starbucks, but that's because people unimaginatively suggest it to me as a meeting place, and I'm really a very mild-mannered sort of person. I have never suggested it as a meeting place myself. Of course, it's recently come out that Starbucks wastes about fifty trillion gallons of water every second (can't remember the exact figure).

4 James Callaghan (for making British money decimal). I have no opinion here.

5 Diana (as in Princess). Yes, I agree. There is something wrong and deranged in the way that people have soaked her corpse with snot and tears like an old hanky, or something. Having said that, it does seem that she was used. I mean perhaps that should be no surprise, since the nobility have been using people since the dawn of time. I think that must be the definition of 'nobility', isn't it? People who use people? So, perhaps other members of the Royal Family could be inserted here to better effect. But then, perhaps this highlights what is, after all, an obvious part of the agenda of this list. Other royals could not have 'ruined' Britain, because they've always been there. The assumption behind the list seems to be a 'golden age' kind of assumption. That doesn't mean it should necessarily be dismissed, but it might be worth examining.

6 Greg Dyke. I don't have an opinion on Greg Dyke. Michael Grade, on the other hand, from this distance looks like a complete...

7 Charles Saatchi. I don't have much of an opinion on Saatchi, to be honest. I'm skeptical of the value of the work produced by the YBA, and have a lot of time for Billy Childish. I do think artists should be allowed to play and make possibly bad art in the name of the exploration of ideas. However, I also agree that there seems to be something wrong with the current British art scene. A friend, whom I hope doesn't mind me alluding to our conversation, told me of his applications for art school, and of how he disagreed with the teaching policies. Much of the grade was to be made up of essays explaining one's art. Art, he said, should not need essays explaining it, but should stand on its own. It seems like much art in Britain today is the product of this conceptual, explaining culture, and is shit.

8 Graham Kelly. I don't even know who Graham Kelly is.

9 Anthony Crosland. If this is the guy who is responsible for the very poor education I received at Ilfracombe Comprehensive School and Community College, then I hate him.

10 John McEnroe. I suppose he's another one of those who eroded native Britishness with Americanisation, in all of the many ways it's been eroded, for instance, with the introduction of credit cards. I don't really have a strong opinion about him, though.



11 Stephen Marks. He's credited by Letts with (should I say 'accused of'?) degrading British language by promoting swearing. I'm afraid that I have mixed feelings about this. I'm very, very guilty of this kind of thing myself, though I do appreciate the idea of keeping language pleasant for the sake of civility and so on. There is also another possible factor here, though. Someone once - and it does seem rightly - pointed out to me that this is a class thing. The British middle classes are far more likely to turn their noses up at swearing as at a bad odour. For the working classes, 'fuck' and its variants, are general-purpose adverbs and sentence filler, not entirely dissimilar to the American 'like'. "I was, like, really, like, amazed", for instance, becomes, "I cunting fuck was fucking cunt amazed. Cunt." Maybe. I still get annoyed by loud swearing on the train, though.

12 John Prescott. I don't have an opinion on.

13 Frank Blackmore. This is all to do with 'mini roundabouts'. I don't drive and never have, so have no idea why these are considered a curse.

14 Sir Jimmy Saville. Sir Jimmy Saville? Sir Jimmy Saville? Surely not! Oh, all right, then.

15 Edward Heath. This is an interesting and loaded one. Letts accuses Heath of creating the current climate in Britain whereby it's impossible even to discuss immigration as an issue. It seems that you either support an open-door policy or you join the BNP. No discussion. I do believe such a climate exists. Is it Heath's fault? Possibly. But what about Enoch Powell's fault for provoking Heath's reaction in the first place?

16 Janet Street-Porter. I'm not a fan of Janet Street-Porter. I don't have a particularly strong opinion about her, but, again, from this distance, Letts's comments about her ring true. She does look suspiciously guilty of contributing to dumbing down through 'yoofism'.

17 Margaret Thatcher. Milk-snatcher. Personally, I hated having to drink milk at school, but I think I'm right in saying that the snatching came too late for me. I wasn't very interested in politics as a teenager, and I'm still not now, really, although I have been following things more closely this century than last. My image of the Thatch is not a good one. It's almost like that of Hitler, of unquestioned evil. That must say something about the circles in which I move. I believe that she took us closer to American-style capitalism. Not a good thing.

18 Alan Titchmarsh. Why? I actually never watch his programmes. I mean, I don't watch TV much anyway. I suppose he has released celebrity books (he must have), and for that alone, he must die.

19 Topsy and Tim. Never heard of them.

20 Tim Westwood. I haven't been following his career, and I'm not interested in it. He's accused here of corrupting the English language. If that's what he has done then I have some sympathy with putting him on this list. As mentioned above, my own education, probably due to that Anthony Crosland cunt, was woefully poor. Beyond the parts of speech, and commas and full-stops, I was taught no grammar at school, for instance, and had to learn the little I know later, in adult life (I'm still learning English grammar). I have been an English teacher, and I am a writer, and declining levels of literacy in Britain are frankly depressing to me. But we're not allowed to care, because that's not cool.

A slightly different version of the same top twenty here, also names Tony Blair and Richard Dawkins. On Blair, Letts apparently comes close to breaking his own rules on clean language:

There is a good, rough word to describe Tony Blair but we had better not write it out here in full.

Needless to say, I agree.

I also agree with the inclusion of Richard Dawkins. I have no idea what he's like in person, but as a public figure, I don't like him. Even if he's not responsible for any cultural damage (and he probably is; I was greeted recently by someone who told me he found a particular festival we were attending challenging because he was an atheist and had just read The God Delusion; I didn't know why he felt he had to tell me that and wasn't impressed; it sounded to me like he'd found his one book and was standing by it; notice how badly I've used semi-colons thanks to my poor comprehensive education) he still symbolises what I believe is one of the worst aspects of British and particularly English culture - the old imperial scoffer. "Nonsense, just native superstition, old chap. Just a lot of these blighters' mumbo-jumbo."

I have included less of this kind of opinion on my blog recently, since following Justin onto the Richard Dawkins message boards for his thread, 'The Cell-Theory of Organic Life is a Hoax'. The reason is not that I was persuaded of the error of my ways, but that I found my prejudices to be confirmed to a greater degree than I had imagined. I felt both a sense of resolution over things that had been bothering me, and a feeling that there was no point in going looking for trouble, and I should just let these idiots get on with it if they wanted to. I should not like to do a disservice to the intelligent and cordial people who did respond on that thread, and I certainly asked for some of what I got by being a loud-mouthed git, but those intelligent and cordial ones appeared to be a minority, and the rest seemed to possess little in the way of humour or warmth. Richard Dawkins is not a humble man. Make no mistake, this is a powerful figure. It seems to me, as professor for 'the Public Understanding of Science' at Oxford, he is a man surrounded at various distances by concentric circles of toadying cronies. And if you wander into the den of one of these outer circles and don't show the proper respect, you can expect venom. So, no, I don't like Richard Dawkins. I'm not impressed.

I hope I can phase out the usage of the word 'cunt' and the Richard Dawkins references (funny how they seem to go together) to make this blog a more pleasant place in future.

If you have lists of your own, feel free to post them.