The Daily Mail is supposed to be conservative, and by and large its editorial content is, in the sense in which conservatism is understood these days.
Or rather misunderstood. Conservatism in its proper, English, meaning is above all about style, manners, temperamental predisposition, prudence, self-restraint and common sense.
It’s emphatically not a political philosophy, economic theory or, God forbid, ideology. That doesn’t mean that conservatives don’t care about politics or economics. They do. However, such quotidian concerns are strictly derivative.
People arrive at conservative views because they are conservatives. They don’t become conservatives because they hold conservative views.
Since so few people understand this, the term ‘conservative’ is routinely misused these days to denote, inter alia, an economic libertarian or a populist. Thus, for example, some MAGA Americans who derive their concept of English conservatism from MailOnline at best, or from Steve Bannon at worst, regard Tommy Robinson as every inch conservative, which he every inch isn’t.
And they fail to understand why I don’t see their current president as a fellow conservative. Isn’t he trying to stop illegal immigration? He is. But there’s more to conservatism than that.
English conservatives don’t suffer from such misapprehensions, or at least shouldn’t. The problem is that many Britons accept things American uncritically, including fast food, revolting soft drinks, verbs made out of nouns – and the definition of conservatism.
Back to The Mail now. It’s an axiom that mass publications should cater to the masses. If they don’t, they won’t remain mass publications for much longer. This explains why I had to qualify my description of The Mail as a conservative paper.
It can only be as conservative as its readers, which, to me, means not very. The paper still employs a couple of truly conservative columnists, but its general thrust is vectored more and more towards the populist end.
(In spite of that, the paper has lost some two-thirds of its circulation in the past five years, but I suspect on-line offerings have more to do with that than a slide towards populism. Yet the slide is noticeable.)
Yesterday I looked at two articles in The Mail, one about Royal Ascot, the other about the euthanasia vote in Parliament. Each had a feature asking the readers to vote for or against the simple propositions based on the stories covered.
The instantly available poll results prove that The Mail is becoming less conservative, as I define the word. Alas, conservatives seem to be a minority in the paper’s readership.
The first article dealt with Royal Ascot, a five-day racing event that’s the highlight of the summer social calendar in Britain. The outing is truly royal: it was founded by Queen Anne in 1711. Since then, the monarchs have been appointing representatives to administer the Royal Racecourse on their behalf.
The event is always graced by the monarch’s presence, emphatically including our late queen, herself a breeder of thoroughbreds. King Charles was in attendance this year in spite of being poorly, and God bless him.
Such a royal pedigree turns Ascot into a magnet for inveterate social climbers. While in our aristocratic past the races used to be the playground of nobility, today they also attract socially insecure individuals hoping that some of the royal glitter will rub off on them.
The moment the event draws to a close, the wives of accountants, sales managers and stockbrokers begin to campaign for next year’s pass to the Royal Enclosure. There a strict dress code going back to Beau Brummel still holds sway: morning dress and top hats for men, formal daywear and elaborate hats for women.
Hoi polloi outside that area, mainly the less enterprising accountants and their wives, still tend to follow suit more or less, with men dressed, and women undressed, formally. Both sexes watch the races with half an eye, the rest of their sight scanning the Royal Enclosure hoping to spot pop stars, retired footballers and other celebs hobnobbing with the princes and princesses.
Champagne gushes in a steady torrent in both areas, but by and large those in the Royal Enclosure handle it better than the accountants and sales managers. Their natural habitat isn’t so much Ascot as the local boozer, and they do their utmost to turn the former into the latter typologically.
Once the combination of drink and hot weather takes effect, the atmosphere develops that magic je ne sais quoi that has English stag and hen parties banned from bars around Europe. And, both last year and this, fisticuffs broke out, as they invariably do on the grounds of Millwall FC.
This year two suited and booted gentlemen went at it hammer and tongs, with the one less handy with his fists ending up bloodied on the ground. All par for the course, I dare say, although in the past that particular course was spared such entertainment.
Having covered that unsightly brawl in a lengthy article complete with gory photographs, The Mail asked its readers: “Are you shocked by this behaviour?” And what do you know, 53 per cent answered no. This means that over half of the paper’s readers don’t have a conservative bone in their bodies.
Another poll appeared in the article about Parliament’s having passed a bill empowering our sainted NHS to offer suicide services to patients not expected to live beyond six months.
Any proper conservative would be appalled by this legislation for any number of reasons, moral, religious, aesthetic – and practical. As I can testify from personal experience, doctors can get such forecasts terribly wrong. In my case, a Scottish haematologist told me “your prognersis is pure” (as best I can reproduce his accent), yet here I am, chuckling about this 20 years later.
I’ve written about this abomination many times in the past, citing examples of the Netherlands and Oregon, the only US state where assisted suicide is legal.
In Holland, doctors have been known to kill even patients who tried to change their mind at the last moment. This reinforces my belief that, once euthanasia becomes legal, sooner or later it’ll become compulsory.
And both in the Low Countries and Oregon, many patients choose accelerated death for fear of being a burden on their families. Shame on the families who go along with that, and shame on the doctors who kill people not to fritter away their estate on bothersome care.
This was a free vote, with the Whips putting their lashes aside. Still, I would have expected the vote to go along party lines, and Labour enjoys a 156-seat majority. Yet the bill only got a majority of 23, with even the Labour Health Secretary Streeting voting against it.
Where the outcome wasn’t paper-thin was in the Mail poll, with 61 per cent replying yes to the question “Do you agree with legalising assisted dying?”. I wonder what Mr Hippocrates would have to say about this bill.
But just think about it: even over a hundred Labour MPs voted more conservatively than almost two-thirds of The Mail’s readers.
Considering that another bill, abortion on demand at any stage in pregnancy, had sailed through Parliament only a few days earlier, our Labour and other socialist MPs aren’t overly concerned about such outdated notions as the sanctity of human life.
Still, many of them found the euthanasia bill unsafe, correctly anticipating its practically guaranteed potential for abuse. No such compunctions among most readers of a supposedly conservative paper.
If this is what British conservatism has become, include me out, as they say in Oregon.
Yesterday morning I shared a platform at Clapham Junction with a horde of people dressed up and bound for Ascot. I’ve never seen so many cheap suits, white stilettos and people drunk before noon on alcopops! One even asked me if I knew where the ‘toilet’ was.
‘Conservatism in its proper, English meaning…..’ One infers that a true conservative perforce must be an old school English gentleman, by birth or cultivation. What of the non western civilizations, all of whom are largely traditional and also considered ‘conservative’? Or am I perhaps etymologically challenged and unaware that conservatism is a western born concept relevant only to western reality, the universal reality? What do we call the Chinese and Muslims, most of whom, very much unlike westerners, are guided by thousand(s) year old unchanged values?
The term seems also to beg more pliancy when we consider it from another cited definition in your learned pages, ‘conserving what is best of the past’, which would make it a more relative concept acquiring reality or significance according to its chronological position in history. For example, yesterday’s radical-the first century Christian in Rome-becomes today’s conservative.
There is a danger to interpreting any political term, including ‘conservative’, too widely. For example, in Russia the word means ‘Stalinist’; in China, ‘Maoist’. And Iranian ayatollahs are as conservtive as they come, but I wouldn’t regard that as a point in their favour. In France, the word ‘conservative’ is mainly pejorative, close in meaning to our ‘reactioanary’.
I apply the term to a strictly Western, more specifically Anglophone, reality. All such countries have much of a similar cultural background, and the base culture (and language) is English. Law in America, for example, is founded on the English Common Law, and top barristers in Canada are called KCs. Unless otherwise specified, such is the context in which I use the word ‘conservative’ — as distinct from ‘libertarian’ or ‘right-wing populist’.
Perhaps the question regarding behavior at Royal Ascot was poorly worded? Who among us is shocked by the behavior of anyone these days? Disgusted? Yes. Shocked? No. We scream in support of the extermination of 7 million Jews. We riot, loot, and burn in support of various criminal activities, or in protest of police officers performing their lawful duties. We advocate for the mutilation of children. Public intoxication and fighting? Ho, hum. (I think we can also safely assume that worse things were said than, “Come on, Dover! Move your bloomin’ arse!”)
I’m afraid English vocabulary has advanced no end since My Fair Lady. Today’s Ascot-goers are more likely to use a different adjective before ‘arse’, although they’s still keep the noun.