Fresh from his triumph in forecasting that the England managership was certain to go to a man called Sven Goran, Smallweed this week trains his matchless predictive powers on an even more closely fought contest: that for the editorship of the Spectator, in succession to Boris Johnson, the present incumbent, and his predecessor Frank Johnson. Various so-called short lists are appearing in rival papers, featuring folk such as Matthew d'Ancona of the Sunday Telegraph, Sarah Sands of the Daily Telegraph and Simon Heffer of the Mail.
Disregard the lot of them. The only contender so far named who has any chance at all is the Daily Telegraph columnist Alice Thomson, since she is the only one whose surname sounds even remotely like Johnson. So here, for the first time in print anywhere, is the short list supplied to Smallweed by a fitfully reliable source:
- Rachel Johnson, occasional Spectator columnist, sister of Boris;
- Paul Johnson, once controversial Spectator columnist, now writing mainly about 18th-century painters, beautiful sunsets and how well his gardenias are doing;
- the Spectator's crossword editor, who in January revealed that he is a Johnson too;
- Charles Bronson, longstanding Hollywood actor;
- Gerald Ronson, tycoon;
- EW (Gloria) Swanson, deceased cricket correspondent;
- Sven Goran Johnsson, 1970s Malmo midfielder.
Please don't waste your hard-earned money backing anyone else.
Now for my weekly dose of the dedicated socialist, hunting enthusiast, general bon vivant and Philip Gould insultee John Mortimer, whose "embonpoint", an Evening Standard interviewer revealed this week, is "a synecdoche for champagne socialism". Let us plumb these wise words in the hope of netting a meaning. Though nowadays the concept appears in newspapers almost exclusively in the context of Melinda Messenger, embonpoint is not, as any pedant will inform you, a mere synonym for a bosom (or as people says nowadays, bosoms). All it implies is stoutness. Synecdoche, though, gave me a moment of pause. Was this perhaps the name of a girl I once went out with in Oxford? Happily, no. A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part is substituted for a whole, or a whole for a part. The Collins dictionary gives the examples of "50 head of cattle" meaning "50 cows", or more controversially, "the army" instead of "a soldier". We old Leeds United supporters prefer the version in Longmans, one of whose sample synecdoches is "Leeds beat Stoke" - always good news.
Let us draw these strands together. Mortimer's embonpoint - his stoutness, perhaps his stomach - is some kind of symbolic embodiment, we are asked to believe, of the world of champagne socialism. Alternatively, champagne socialism is some kind of representative symbol for Mortimer's stomach.
In Smallweed next week: Would you buy a used zeugma from Michael Portillo?
The agony aunt Claire Rayner, I see, has applied to the Patent Office to register her catchphrase, "Will you do that for me, luvvie?" What kind of nonsense is this? Suppose her catchphrase had been "Please pass the marmalade" or "My goodness, is that the time?" Would that formulation henceforth belong to her rather than us? This is not the only such case. A reader wrote to me some time ago asking how it was that the Abbey National could claim as its trademark the catchphrase "Because life's complicated enough". This kind of privatised raid on the English language seems to Smallweed a case of brass neck, or even brass embonpoint, unparalleled in the annals of champagne synecdoche.
And which composer is this, from Slonimsky's Lexicon? "You know his musical system. There has not yet been an Italian composer more incapable of producing what is commonly called a melody" (Gazette Musicale de Paris). "The unfortunate man is incapable of real melody - his airs are such as a man born deaf would compose by calculation of the distances of musical notes and the intervals between them" (the diaries of George Templeton Strong). "In England and France, the operas of Signor X only pass because there is nothing else_ the first more elegant and gracious Italian composer who arrives can sweep them away to the limbo of forgotten frenzies" (the Athenaeum magazine, London). Here is a clue: this limbo would include such works as Aida, Falstaff, Otello and Nabucco.
M y near neighbour the profile page carried a fascinating account last week of the philosopher Roger Scruton's conversion to conservatism. He was in the Latin quarter during the 1968 événements, watching from his window as his student friends tore up paving stones, overturned cars, built barricades, and hailed the arrival of revolution. "I suddenly realised that I was on the other side," he told Nicholas Wroe. "What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans. When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook. I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of western civilisation against these things. That's when I became a conservative."
This account of the dawning of truth bears an uncanny resemblance to a chapter in a long-ago book called Conviction, in which the writer and journalist Paul Johnson describes his conversion to socialism. He too was looking out of a window in Paris during a student riot when he saw a flic bashing a student over the head with a truncheon. In a twinkling Paul, like Roger so many years later, was converted - only in his case, to socialism. Yet Paul, as we know, had a further road-to-Damascus experience on his way to middle age, and ended up a Thatcherite. Can we now confidently predict that Scruton, say 10 years from now, will be selling copies of Socialist Worker on street corners?
Realist (Ottery St Mary) writes: I wouldn't waste your hard-earned money on that if I were you.
