Dismal Prospect

If the Spectator is champagne for the brain, quaffable on a weekly basis, then Standpoint is Grande Champagne Cognac, a rarer treat which repays the investment of sufficient time to relax and savour it fully.

I have a subscription to both of these excellent journals, and also one which I shall not renew to the leftie Prospect which I suppose the rightie Standpoint was launched to balance. Standpoint and Prospect both publish articles by some of the best writers on current politics and culture. Design-wise they could be twins. The painful difference between them – and I make no claim to academic objectivity in myself, here – is that while Standpoint’s writers examine things as they actually are, Prospect’s writers examine them with that unconvincing and uniquely leftie combination of Olympian faux-detachment and whining because their world-view, albeit correct, irrefutable and historically inevitable, is not shared by and cannot be enforced on the unenlightened who are regrettably still too numerous, recidivist and noisy. The grim mixture of de haut en bas and just-you-wait-you-bastards is quite simply indigestible, like the Guardian, distilled. Now you may say that this is just the old ‘irregular verb’ fallacy, as in ’I am objective, you are a teeny bit biased, he is an appalling bigot’. You may well be right. Sue me. Bugrit, I am getting too old to waste my time trying to be balanced. A lifetime’s experience has made me a right-wing fogey and I intend to spend the rest of my allotted span luxuriating in my prejudices. They took decades to hone and now they are just about bloody perfect. I may relent and buy the odd issue of Prospect if it carries an above-average interesting article by an above-average interesting writer. Possibly not. There is too much good writing around and too little time. But what made me finally decide on the cull? This, from the deified prophet of the respectable Left, John Lloyd:

Expecting a Ford Cosworth for review and instead receiving an inferior model, he [Clarkson] writes that “the pain of not getting a Cosworth hurt: it hurt in the same way as a Sherman tank would hurt if it ran over your legs.”

[…] a car reviewer’s disappointment cannot be in the same league as one whose legs are crushed by a 30-tonne tank…

Yes, dear reader, it was that last phrase. I mean, life is just too short to waste one’s declining years on the humourless warblings of the sort of ponce who could write ‘a 30-tonne tank’.