Finally, aged 92, Michael Wharton is dead. He was the greatest British journalist of his generation - perhaps the greatest of the 20th century, writes Kevin Myers
That he survived it at all, his quill still conjuring great fantasies from the vellum parchment on which he wrote his copy, was probably a deeply regrettable mystery to him, for he found the present to be an unspeakable horror. His natural epochal home was the pastoral Elysium of his own devising, in which worthy Saxon rustics toiled in the fields, yeomen coppiced the woodlands, red-faced squires in tail-coats cracked nuts before the manorial mantel, and noble whigs whigly nobled.
He maintained that the worst thing that ever happened to Britain was the industrial revolution, with its ruination of the great estates and the peasant classes that maintained them. Other unspeakable events included the Great War, communism, socialism in all its forms, mass immigration, and any attempt by Ireland to modernise. That he lived in a world of caricatures did not rob his journalism of an extraordinary ability to find the larger truth, which was generally concealed by the media's unquestioning acceptance of the new. (He would have deplored the term "media".)
His support for the white Rhodesia of UDI was quixotically typical: that the Smith regime was militarily and morally unsustainable was barely relevant. The Rhodesia of his mind was like the ancient England of his imagination or his equally fictional Ireland: a land of contented peasants, guided by their betters and their clergy. The modern English world of equality agencies, of armies of social workers, of police performance-targets, of metropolitan parks infested by cruising homosexuals at night and of the "outreach" programmes of London boroughs, offering free flying-lessons for black lesbians - all this was a hell from which he fled into his world of fantasy.
Its name was Simpleham, the imaginary country estate unravaged by any event of note since the Middle Ages. Generations of peasants had toiled unbrokenly in the fields since Comte de Simple had arrived and married the widow of the local thane, who had perished guarding Harold's flank at Hastings; and thenceforth, all lived happily ever afterwards. Here, in this demi-paradise, fletchers trimmed heron-feathers into arrow-flights for the bowmen limbering in the butts, buxom wenches drew creamy gallons from the udders of fat and affable kine, and cheery farm-workers refreshed themselves from their toil with bread and cheese, washed down with cider; at day's end, the church bells rang for evensong, as an auriferous sun sank to the silicate growl of whetstone on sickle and the leaky wheeze of the smithy's bellows. It was the eternal dream of romantics: the lost paradise.
But beyond the stout stone walls of Simpleham existed a world of dragons. Here were the bossy monsters who made modern life in England so disagreeable: Sir Aylwin Goth-Jones, "the genial, unpopular" chief Constable of Stretchford, the arrogant motorist J. Bonnington Jagworth, the mad psychiatrist Dr Heinz Kiosk, the agony Aunt Clare Howitzer, and the "go-ahead" Bishop of Bevindon, for whom a belief in the existence of God was merely an optional requirement for those who aspired to the Archbishopric of Canterbury.
Peter Simple's world was lurid, grotesque, enchanting, a columnar Gormenghast which matched that other and rather similar world of Myles na Gopaleen, whom Michael Wharton revered. Both were socially limited men whose company could - and apparently did - usually disappoint. Did they ever meet? I don't know. Wharton lived for a while in Dublin after the second World War. Had they encountered one another in the Pearl or McDaid's, they would probably have sat in companionable silence, Brian O'Nolan with his ball of malt and pint of plain, and Michael Wharton with his unfailing brandy and ginger ale.
Michael Wharton was truly a self-invented man. For his family were not the Anglo-Norman nobility of his fantasies, but German Jews who had settled in Yorkshire. With an aptitude that will be familiar to anyone who has studied military history, the British army's Intelligence Corps recruited this fluent German speaker during the second World War and then - naturally - sent him to fight the Japanese in the jungles of Burma.
Michael Wharton was never predictable. For though right-wing, he was also a conservative - not the same thing at all - and he hated the American way, was appalled by Nato attacks on Serbia, opposed the US invasion of Iraq, and deplored Ireland's desire to modernise. Few could agree with all he wrote - but his quill never failed to enchant, as he tackled holy cow after holy cow, with never any prospect that he might be seduced by the most enervating vice of journalism, the consensus. Not merely did he dwell far away from that abysmal trading-stall, which exchanges courageous independence and questioning vitality for voguish timidity and bien-pensant compliance - he wasn't even in the same marketplace.
Now he is gone. So bid the archers string their bows, and let their mournful volley fill the sky! Yeomen, port your halberds! Bell-ringers, toll the parting knell! And now, a riderless Shire, reversed empty boots in its stirrups, is led by a black-clad equerry, in the van of the sorrowing cortege; a single muffled drum strikes the pace; six swaying pallbearers shoulder the box of ancient English elm; and in the rear, comes the wild, broken paean of grief from the massed ranks of war-pipers, as sturdy Rangers from Connaught, kilted Buffs from Ross-shire, and tiny mountainy-men from Nepal unleash, in plangent reiteration, that great anthem of bereavement, "Oft in the Stilly Night".
King Michael is dead.