There was published yesterday a book called Widower's House by John Bayley, emeritus professor of English and the husband for 44 years till her death two years ago of the novelist Iris Murdoch. Its unexpectedly lurid highlights are already familiar from the serialisation in the Daily Telegraph: how after Iris's death John found himself being seduced by two persistent visitors - Margot, an "ample presence" who joins him under the duvet in a spare bedroom, and "scrawny" Mella, a former student, who having pretended to faint pulls him down on the bed. "At least we were fully clothed," the professor writes. "A couple of hours later we were not."
At the weekend the Sunday Times accused him, in effect, of making all this up. But according to Monday's papers Bayley denies that claim. He conceded, the Guardian reported, that he had strayed into he realms of fiction. Strictly speaking, Margot and Mella did not exist. They were composite characters, both real and unreal. The book was designed as a comedy on the theme of bereavement "and what happens when one is all at sea, when the certainty of one's existence comes to an end".
That this glimpse of a world which exists in a limbo where real life becomes indistinguishable from imagination and invention should have come to us by way of the Daily Telegraph makes it even more treasurable. For this is the world to which the Telegraph too belongs, along with that rich, ripe slice of Old England for which it speaks; a world which is all at sea, where the certainty of its existence and identity have come to an end. In some senses, the Telegraph's writers and readers live in much the same world as the rest of us. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and what the papers has taken to calling "the government (of which Keith Vaz is a member)" are as much a part of their reality as of our own. For them too, the trains run late and the weather is ghastly and foot and mouth is ravaging Cumbria and Man United are already effective winners of the Premier League. But other parts of their world are as fictional and fantasised as Margot and Mella.
The nation writhes under the yoke of a government as cruel and unprincipled as any since Nero. The countryside is up in arms, and would have marched on London last weekend in defence of its liberty and its livelihood and above all its right to hunt, but for foot and mouth - which some Telegraph letter writers believe may have been started by Blair and his cronies to stop the march happening. As for abroad, that is largely inhabited by eccentric and often dangerous people plotting not just our defeat but our extinction, and encouraged in that enterprise by so-called political leaders here who, lacking any kind of true Englishness, wish to destroy us by selling us out to those who wish to wreck the unity of our kingdom and sell us out to Brussels. (The exception is the US, which having elected George Bush is almost as OK as Old England. Also Canada, homeland of the paper's proprietor.)
The conspiracy is not Labour's alone. John Major was part of it, and traitors such as Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke. Indeed, the rot set in long ago. The official persecution of the Sunderland trader whom they always describe as "the metric martyr" suggests we should probably never have abolished the groat or insisted that Bristol surrendered its ancient sovereignty by accepting London's time zone.
Why is it, then, that this evil, virulent gang, still has control of our destiny, and may even be given a second term if the government (of which Keith Vaz is a member) persists in its present wicked intention of staging an election in May? Yes, even Telegraph readers know that Labour is likely to win, and win big, very soon. Balanced reporters such as George Jones and Andy McSmith still get such unpleasant truths into the paper. Professor Anthony King is still allowed to intrude with his Gallup polls, warning last week that the Conservative party "is probably suffering from the greatest credibility gap in its long and distinguished history". As I read the Telegraph, and especially its columnist Janet Daley (every bit as tedious in print as she is on the Moral Maze), who has made this theme her own, it's because the British electorate, softened and brainwashed by years of socialist propaganda, not least from the BBC, is simply not up to it. It does not have the nous to see how it is being betrayed.
How does a once sane (more or less) daily newspaper get itself sucked into the fantasy world where the Telegraph lives today? John Bayley answers that too. "I wanted," he said, explaining his "fictionalised constructs" to Monday's Times, "to try to convey what it's like when a person has died and you are missing them terribly." There you have it. His Iris Murdoch; their Margaret Thatcher.
