I expect many of you have been in that tricky situation in which two of your friends fall out with each other and you are left uneasily in no-man's-land unable, and unwilling, to choose between them. As many of you know, I am a dedicated reader of The Spectator without which I would not be the immensely knowledgeable, wise and balanced commentator whom you all appreciate so much - sorry, didn't quite catch that! Anyway, imagine my horror when I opened this week's edition to read an excoriating attack on my belov-ed Sarah Palin by, of all people, my hero Alexander Chancellor, a former editor, no less! In it, he accuses my darling Sarah of being "a greedy celebrity" but on close examination of his essay that accusation seems to be based on the fact that she resigned the governorship of Alaska and then wrote, or had ghosted for her, a book which earned her $7 million. She is, apparently 'writing' another book and has entered into a TV deal to present a documentary programme based on her home State. Also, evidently to Mr. Chancellor's extreme ire, or could it be envy, she is charging £100k for a single speech. He also spends nearly half of his polemic attacking her daughter and the lay-about oaf who put her in the family way which can only be of marginal interest in assessing Mrs. Palin's worth as a politician. Much of his attack on her is based on her malapropisms as a public speaker, as quoted by a man who specialises in picking up her errors with the same eagerness with which he pursued George Bush's - in order to sell a book! So there we have it; Mr. Chancellor dislikes? despises? perhaps 'detests' is not too strong a word, my darling Sarah and for the reasons given above believes she is unfit for political office.
Well, I'm sorry to say this but everything Mr. Chancellor has written reeks of old Etonian and Cambridge snobbery, they being his principal places of learning during his youth. There-after, he has flitted here and there in the small, incestuous world of 'hackerdom' (like Mrs. Palin I have a weakness for neologisms), mostly in London but with occasional forays to New York. The latter cannot have helped broaden his mind to the myriad and mystifying ways of 'the cousins' since most of his time was spent writing the society page in the New Yorker magazine where, presumably, he spent most of his time wining and dining with the East Coast smart set. This, I guess, is about as far removed from the politics, red in tooth and claw - and I don't mean the grizzlies - in Alaska. Nor, from his pristine heights in the British upper-middle - and moneyed - classes does he seem to appreciate that 'over there' making money is still considered a virtue.
Nor, it seems to me, does he appreciate the irony that today we have a president who, whilst his antecedents might be a touch dodgy, old boy, has been to a frightfully good university and does at least walk, talk and dress in a manner that makes him acceptable in decent society - almost one of us, really, although one wouldn't want him to marry one's sister - but who has turned out to be so stupid that he makes Jimmy Carter look really rather bright!
It's no more, no less, than all that 'intellectual vs. non-intellectual' stuff again. If you haven't been to a university - and not just any old university but one of the top notch ones then, really, you're simply not up to the job. If you add to that disadvantage by displaying a positive desire for some money, well, sorry, dear boy, or dear girl, but you are quite beyond the pale. Any attempt to remind the likes of Alexander Chancellor that Winston Churchill was an abject failure as a schoolboy scholar and never went to any university at all, unless you count Sandhurst into which he only just scraped, and who displayed throughout his life a keen interest in aquiring money, would no doubt be shrugged off. Similar indifference would be shown to the long list of university-educated intellectuals who were abject failures as politicians, the more so, of course, because their very intellectuality abetted them in their profound arrogance and belief that they knew better than anyone else (see Brown, G., passim).
Mrs. Palin may well turn out to be a failure as a politician but as I have said here before, you will never know the true worth of the man or the woman until they are in the job. In the meantime, I will repay Mr. Chancellor's essay by grading it 'E-' on the grounds that it was an idle, not to say downright lazy, piece of August journalism of the sort that any decent editor would have rejected if written by an intern!
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