There is a poignant condescension that comes with the status of national treasure. Recall how the late Tony Benn, once vilified as the most dangerous man in Britain, spent his twilight years being lauded by Westminster politicians of all hues as a great parliamentarian even as his politics moved further to the left.
Similarly, the latest instalment of the playwright Alan Bennett’s diaries portrays a man who has plenty to say but is all too aware of his marginalisation: “I seem to have banged on this year rather more than usual,” he writes in an entry of December 2007. Nevertheless, “I shall still be thought to be . . . essentially harmless. I am in the pigeonhole marked ‘no threat’.”
Although many of the entries, which cover 2005-15, are of a personal or professional nature, their political content is what stands out. Bennett is trenchantly critical of both New Labour and the “austerity” governments that followed in its wake.
It is depressing to note that so much of what stoked his ire in the latter years of the last Labour government in the UK has become the norm, particularly the erosion of civil liberties by successive home secretaries: the extradition treaty with the US that allows suspects to be extradited without any evidence being heard before a UK court; the ejection from a Labour Party conference (and prosecution under the Terrorism Act) of an elderly activist who heckled Tony Blair; the UK government’s complicity in the “rendition” of terrorist suspects for torture.
In recent years Bennett has campaigned tirelessly against the closure of public libraries. ("Hinder a child's access to books and you damage that child probably for life.") In a 2011 speech entitled Baffled at a Bookcase, reprinted as one of a number of appendices in this sizeable volume (which also includes two manuscripts and a number of journalistic pieces) Bennett notes that the policy of privatising libraries had been on the Tory agenda since the 1990s, pending "a convenient crisis to smuggle it through". The economic downturn that began in 2008 provided just such an opportunity.
Bennett is even more forthright in a 2014 sermon at the chapel of King’s College in Cambridge, attacking the anti-statism of the prevailing neoliberal consensus as “ideology masquerading as pragmatism”. Bennett, who is a butcher’s son, declares: “Without the state I would not be standing here today.”
It is a measure of how far the spectrum of political discourse has shifted to the right that this fervour – in defence, merely, of the mainstream values of postwar British social democracy – strikes a radically dissident note.
Politics aside, there are more quotidian enjoyments to be had, from whimsical musings about animals – “Starlings. Slightly sweaty birds” – to pithy reflections on the debasement of language. The use of the word “beautiful” by a Classic FM DJ to describe Elgar’s Symphony No 1 shows “what is wrong with Classic FM”. Blair’s deployment of supplementary adverbs is dissected with acerbic glee.
Bennett turned 82 in May, and the everyday travails of ageing loom large on these pages. There are awkward misreadings – mistaking the high-street retailer Fat Face for Hot Faeces – and mishearings, such as an exchange with Alan Titchmarsh: “He says they’ve gone to Grantham. I say I didn’t know they were planning to move. They weren’t. What he’d actually said was they’d got a grandson.”
He describes exciting new hobbies – “Moth-hunting has now become an obsession” – and even a reluctant foray into hair removal: we read, in a 2006 entry, of how Bennett’s Kurdish barber periodically offers to shave his eyebrows, and is rebuffed; Bennett finally relents in 2015. Affronted that the talking clock now speaks with a cartoonish American accent, he grumbles: “One does try not to be an Old Git but they don’t make it easy.”
Perhaps it is not just a matter of age: Bennett’s métier is implicitly concerned with questions of authenticity and fakery, and these are increasingly pertinent in a fast-changing cultural landscape. Here he laments that a “lot of the camp” has gone out of air stewarding. There he complains that a sullen doorman at Butchers’ Hall is “no advertisement for the supposed cheerfulness of the butchering profession”. (Conversely, a later entry bemoans the “overly cheerful butcherly demeanour” of a farmers’ market butcher in a middle-class area.)
For anyone wedded to stock types, as thespians inevitably are, it must be disconcerting to watch them either slide into obsolescence or be sustained by a contrived artificiality. For all his chagrin, though, Bennett is sanguine about the power of drama not only to illuminate politics but also to breathe joy into everyday live.
Reflecting appreciatively on a gregarious salesman at a hardware store, he remarks: “That’s what makes it a nice shop to go into and which oils the commercial wheels. Camp.”
Houman Barekat is a literary critic
