In the days and weeks after the general election last summer, many commentators began talking of the culture wars, now seemingly imported to these shores from the United States, where they had raged since the 1990s.
The battle lines had been drawn, they said, and the run-up to Brexit was only going to make it worse. At the time, I must admit, I didn’t fully understand what they were on about; wandering around Clitheroe in Lancashire that autumn, everything seemed unchanged to me.
The British are so benign, I thought fondly, gazing at the window of Cowmans Famous Sausage Shop. But I suppose I got the drift. Coming soon: massed crowds outside abortion clinics, endless furious discussions about transgender and other rights, and a dramatic degradation in the quality of talk radio, which was about to become much, much more beastly.
These same commentators insisted that it was now beholden upon people like them (and me, I guessed) sometimes to leave their “metropolitan bubbles”, the better to observe, to understand – and thus, perhaps, in some way to resist – these cultural fault lines. Their words on this matter had a punchy, self-help tone, the idea being that you had to accept the new reality, no matter how terrifying or ugly; that you had to look it in the yellowish whites of its horrible eyes and that this would somehow empower you.
Did I take this stuff seriously? I’m afraid that I did. (I’m not, incidentally, talking about Clitheroe; I go there all the time.) Which is why, last week, I came to find myself sitting on a plush red velvet seat high in the royal circle of the London Palladium watching Rod Liddle live. Yes, Rod Liddle, as in the former editor of Radio 4’s Today who now writes a column in the Spectator, the magazine that organised this entertainment, and whose editor, Fraser Nelson, hosted it. (What I mean by hosting is: pressing the buttons on the Rod Liddle anecdote jukebox.)
It was an ineffably strange evening. In my naivety, I’d expected many seats to be empty. He’s not exactly Michael McIntyre, is he? But the 2,300-seat Palladium was sold out (tickets were £40 a pop). When I arrived the queues outside were long and those standing in them visibly excited, ready for a good night out.
Who were they? The people behind me had travelled from Essex; the family in front spoke Dutch. All age groups. Red trousers, quilted jackets, white mini skirts, lots of Boden. Outwardly, they had nothing in common save for the fact that they were fans of Rod – and yet they clearly had a great deal in common. Bubble-slipping liberal journalists apart, it’s fair to say that you’re unlikely to want to spend an evening listening to Rod Liddle talk of health and safety gone mad, his feeling that the only political party left to him now is the Front National and his exasperation with the fact that so many television ads feature mixed-race families, unless these are opinions with which you broadly agree. Actually, broad did not come into it. Everyone felt very specifically about Rod. “Hear, hear!” shouted one white-haired man at the end of every riff. (His monologues took in the awfulness of the BBC, his use of the word “Abo” in a column he’d just filed and the fact that he is keen on Brexit mostly because it has pissed off all the right people.) They laughed and cheered wildly; even on the rare occasions they heckled, they were ever fond.
The format involved first Nelson asking his employee questions, then the audience. But two short films were also shown in which Rod, wearing a series of ridiculous wigs, played a series of “comic” characters, among them Annabelle Snowflake, leader of Camden Women Against Everything. (Others bore a resemblance to the philosopher AC Grayling and to the musician Damon Albarn.) I hardly knew where to look at this point. For some reason, I thought of the two Ronnies, Barker and Corbett, whose show used to include, in the 70s, peculiar serials like The Worm That Turned, a dystopian fiction in which women ruled the world. Then I came to my senses. Ronnie Barker he is not. He’s barely Jim Davidson. Wary as I am of spinning big theories from small events – 2,300 people is hardly Wembley, though from the look in Nelson’s eye, they may have a stab at that next – it was the films that gave me pause for thought. These culture wars of ours. I don’t disagree that the atmosphere is toxic, that bad things are happening online and elsewhere. All the same, it occurs to me that if this is the best the winning side can do – and though you’d never know it from the way they carry on, what are Liddle and co, post-Brexit, but the victors? – perhaps we’re not, after all, going the way of the US.
Liddle loves to rail against political correctness and the rush to offence; he finds himself ever more excited by Donald Trump. But it seems that in the end what really gets him off is not nationalism, or libertarianism, or even a simple desire to aim two fingers in the direction of Brussels. No, what really gets him off is dressing up as a woman and putting on a high-pitched voice, as if he were some pound-shop Dick Emery or Widow Twanky in the Saltburn-on-Sea pantomime (he lives in Saltburn). Weirder still, this is something that has people clapping with glee.
It’s so very British, and it’s so very crap, and realising it sent me out of the theatre and on to the tube feeling quite a lot less gloomy than I might otherwise have been.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer writer and columnist
