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The Recent Death of Michael Wharton
The Recent Death of Michael Wharton
who was the most right-wing person who ever lived? Many thought he was. I
am not sure he did himself. The last time I saw him, when he was already very
old, I asked him how he saw himself and he replied, ‘Moving to the right.’ He
said this as if regretting a life of obstinate radicalism, though as the honorary
editor-in-chief of the Feudal Times and Reactionary Herald for more than half
a century it was always difficult to get to the right of him (I tried) in any issue
on the political agenda. On other matters he resembled Gilbert Pinfold (or his
creator, Evelyn Waugh) and ‘abhorred … everything that had happened in his
lifetime’.
Wharton’s own hero was Colonel Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorpe (1783–
1855), MP for many years for Lincoln, a borough represented previously by
his elder brother, father, great-uncle, great-great-uncle, and after his death by
his eldest son. He served in the Peninsular war, in the 4th Dragoon Guards,
and inherited Canwick Hall and the family estate in Lincolnshire; by his wife,
Maria, heiress of Ponsonby Tottenham, he acquired another estate in Ireland.
The DNB says, ‘He belonged to the ultra-Tory and ultra-protestant party, and
was the embodiment of old-fashioned prejudice.’ He was one of the diehard
group of 53 Tories who censured free trade in 1852. His one parliamentary
success was to get the proposed grant to Prince Albert reduced by half on the
grounds that he promoted ‘foreign influence’, and he opposed the Great
Exhibition for the same reasons. Otherwise he sounds pretty tame, though one
would like to know what was meant by the statement, ‘His appearance was
extraordinary and his dress attracted attention.’
There is always a weak spot in every reactionary. C.S. Lewis told me, when
ambling through Addison’s Walk at Magdalen, that Joseph de Maistre was the
ideal right-winger. He thought the most important official in the state was le
bourreau, the executioner, ultimate guarantor of order. There were three
divine laws of society: monarchy is a necessity; the monarch must be
absolute; his duty is to uphold papal supremacy. De Maistre is the only
political philosopher who is consistently shrewd. He coined the axiom, ‘Every
country has the government it deserves.’ But Lewis thought de Maistre’s wit
was his weakness: ‘A true reactionary has no sense of humour. You must be
able to propose the impossible with a straight face.’ Michael Wharton, of
course, would not have agreed with that. He took the Chestertonian line that
all truth was encoded in a joke, a view shared by Ronald Reagan, the most
successful right-winger of modern times, who communicated entirely through
one-liners and had over 5,000 of them, by heart, for every conceivable
occasion.