Over the years (1 and a half), this newspaper has gently ridiculed Will Self.
I long resented his conservative politics and the way he laundered his own reputation as an ‘experimental’ novelist through pastiches of writers who were dead decades before he was born. His monoglot disdain for English people.
I would humbly volunteer that I and one or two friends have been Self’s greatest parodists. I have spent hours of my time trying to make fun of his ponderously melodramatic style, obviously gleaned from reading nothing but translated literature for a decade and peppered with New Labour pieties.
Nonetheless, credit must be given where it is due; Will Self’s attack on Adrian Chiles in The New European has vindicated his entire career. He has, for the first time in his life, written a genuinely provocative and funny piece deflating the pretensions of the rich and mighty. It has enraged the Establishment across different twitter tribes. Arron Bastani and Boring Right alike unite with Daniel Finkelstein to pour scorn on the Sage of Hampstead Garden Suburb.
Like all great personal attacks, it speaks to a genuine social problem: the decline of highbrow English papers into personal blogs for boring people. If Adrian Chiles was a 24 year old woman posting about her domestic life, most people would find an attack on her ‘narcissism’ justified and ignore it. For the first time in his life, instead of bashing imaginary little England Brexiteers, Self has actually managed to hit on a target genuinely insulated by privilege; an embodiment of all that is wrong with British centre-left journalism and culture and a stereotypical "mediocre white man" to boot. Yet those usually happy to denounce such people now leap to their defence.
Adrian Chiles is what some poets have called a "tranimal." Celebrating a middle aged man getting a column to write about his stools through pure nepotism is just like celebrating Henry the Hoover or the Royal Family: a symptom of terrible decadence.
The loss of the mandate of "high culture" by the British centre-left should be good for me, an internet troll, who yearns for the demise of “institutions”; a populist, a Putinist. But I am not wholly immune to some nostalgia for the golden age of The Cathedral; I like the idea of a secular priesthood, I miss the days of the Hitch: they were all idiots of course but that is the point, it is important to have people who can propound with authority on matters of taste.
For a decade "public intellectuals" have allowed their own scene to rot in a deluge of "ironic" mediocrity and now ChatGPT threatens the entire edifice of culture. Reversing this begins with people like Self living up to their role, rightly won or not, as arbiters of public taste. There must be a return to Vidalian feuds; it must become acceptable to mock the bourgeois again.
Will Self will be hated because he alone has, after a lifetime of pretension, actually bothered to hold his own side to account regardless of cheap ideological bigotries and acted like a bipartisan intellectual.
Too much cock talk for me. But still funny!