Patronising Bastards - Quentin Letts ****

By Brian Clegg

Parliamentary sketch writers have a very dated style of writing – their ‘humour’ feels both heavy handed and has a grotesquery more suited to an eighteenth century political cartoon than the modern day. In this book, Quentin Letts (a sketch writer in his day job) does deploy some of this style in his ad hominem remarks about individuals – and I probably disagree with about 90 per cent of his viewpoints (though I’m definitely with him on hymns, the House of Lords and justice being blind).

But – and it’s a big but – what I do absolutely agree with is that subtitle – ‘how the elites betrayed Britain’. Letts highlights the horror of the Establishment when the people turn against them by, say, voting for Brexit or a certain US president. Without supporting either of these it is easy to see why it is happening. Just this morning I heard on a podcast a well-known political commentator (and self-affirmed member of said elite) saying how Brexit remains incomprehensible to people like him. And that’s the problem.

Letts catalogues a whole parcel of ways members of the Establishment feather their own nest without considering the ordinary people. He gives us a tour of public bodies such as the Arts Council, various commissions, the whole EU gravy train, of course the House of Lords, and far more where our liberal elite rewards those who network well and have friends in the right places at the expense of the rest of us. He is pitiless in uncovering the patronising attitude of the liberal elite to ordinary people. The same commentator on the podcast was hoping that the voters would realise how wrong they were in a wonderfully patronising fashion – he called their decisions irrational, without even trying to understand the genuine reasoning that is there.

This combination of patronising distaste and ‘we’re obviously right because we personally benefit from the approach’ is particularly obvious if you live outside of London and the South East (think of the difference between the treatment of the Elizabeth Line and HS2). The result is lashing out the only way the masses can. Leaving the EU, for instance, may well be considered self-destructive in terms of GDP, say, but to paraphrase a northerner Letts quotes, why should he care about GDP when he never sees any of it.

This, then, is the reason I give the book four stars. There are very few commentators from the elite (which Letts certainly is) who really get what’s behind the populism and how things really need to change if we are to get away from this situation. It’s a difficult book to read when you do feel naturally antagonistic to many of Letts’ viewpoints… but if you can put aside that feeling it’s very informative.

You can buy Patronising Bastards from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.