When things are awful and frightening, and the haunted face of Matt Hancock appears unbidden on my television, refusing to rule out moving us into subterranean one-person pods until 2055, I turn to the balm of comfort culture, familiar and beloved: PG Wodehouse.
“Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale,” reads the Evelyn Waugh cover quote on the faded orange Penguins by my bedside. “He will continue to release future generations from a captivity more irksome than our own.” Our current captivity must register fairly high on the “irksome” scale, and losing a few hours to pig theft, bumbling curates and Jeeves getting his own way over a garish cummerbund raises my spirits like nothing else. I will always be cheered by an exquisitely insulting Wodehouse description of a child (my current read features a kid with “a face like a turbot”).
If it is not Wodehouse, it is Nancy Mitford: a delightful escapist world of horses, heiresses and languid young men. Mitford also excels at rudely describing infants (“The usual howling orange in a fine black wig”); I wonder what it says about me that I find these irresistible – nothing good, certainly. I have found myself wondering, too, recently, why so much of the culture I love is aristocratic and if that is capital-P Problematic.
I am far from alone in getting my comfort from the fictional peerage: Netflix’s regency toff blockbuster Bridgerton had 63m views in its first month. I tried 10 minutes and it is preposterous, a horribly scripted cocktail of baronets, barouches and heaving cleavages, meaning I will probably watch all of it in the next 48 hours. Season four of The Crown was watched by more people in its first week than the real Chuck and Di wedding.
Why? Well, the ruling classes have better outfits, nicer houses and plotlines other than dying in childbirth, for a start. Something like Zola’s Germinal, with striking miners starving in mud and abject poverty, has considerably less of the “good vibes only” feel we seem to crave.
But does our affection for fictional aristocratic high jinks reinforce a deferential acceptance of the upper class as the ruling class? It is probably stupid to feel a sliver of unease at enjoying the antics of the gentry when there are still so many of them in real public life, but I do. It is certainly a terrible, self-sabotaging thought, because I can’t bear to give up Wodehouse. Like butter, he is too delicious even if he is bad for us.
Culture need not be irreproachably improving, after all: that is not what it is for. There is nothing wrong with watching footman-heavy froth, and Wodehouse and Mitford are wildly funny, sharp and gifted writers who mock the milieu they describe. But there is indulgence and affection in that mockery, an indulgence we need to stop extending to Wodehouse characters when they shimmy off the page and into politics.
Because Boris Johnson is Bertie Wooster’s oafish cousin, the Bullingdon his bread-roll-throwing Drones club. Jacob Rees-Mogg is pure Wodehouse villain, possibly a loathed prep-school headteacher.
Politics is a lark in Wodehouse: the Mosley-lite despot Spode and his “Black Shorts” movement are ludicrous; idiotic curates stand in byelections with farcical consequences. I think politics was a lark to some of the cabinet, too, a game without consequences, at least until the past year. Maddeningly, we keep letting them play it, these men who cannot conceive of children without internet access or hot meals. Worse, opinion polls suggest we might again. The PM’s bumbling, bashful Latin-spouting shtick might have been mildly amusing set to a light jazz age soundtrack if 80,000 people and counting had not died on his chaotic watch.
Wooster was happy with his “idyllic world” of cocktails and country house parties; he would never have aspired to run a country. I wish Johnson and his ilk felt the same. Perhaps we can persuade them that politics is irredeemably “non-U” and keep them out of government? Then I could enjoy my Wodehouse guilt-free.
