Late last summer, I was invited to a Society of Bookmen dinner, a dusty gathering of largely veteran publishers, agents and booksellers who meet once a month at the elegantly dishevelled Savile Club. John Tusa was the guest speaker that evening, and his performance was melancholy. Here was a man who had made a career in several great cultural institutions but on whom a sad twilight was settling-a man out of time. He lamented the impoverishment of Britain’s arts; the disappearance of anything like a common culture; and the triumph of a crude relativism, in which all cultural works were “equally valid.” I couldn’t help feeling that I’d heard it all before, that I was listening to the late-middle-aged voice of the post-war elite who had done well out of subsidy but who were struggling to adapt to a more complex and diffuse cultural climate.
Tusa, like his friend and fellow public pontificate, John Drummond, is an unashamed paternalist: he believes in the supremely civilising qualities of great art and in the government’s duty to provide large-scale state funding, even for those performance arts enjoyed by only a tiny (and often wealthy) minority. It hardly needs saying that Tusa despises the Blair government-again in common with his old pal Drummond, and also with George Walden, the disaffected former Tory MP who has just published The New Elites: Making a Career in the Masses (Penguin Press), an eccentric diatribe against contemporary populism.
John Drummond, John Tusa and George Walden are archetypal representatives of post-war Institution Man. They have all dedicated the best part of their lives to historic British institutions-Tusa to the BBC and the Barbican; Drummond to Radio 3, the Edinburgh Festival and the Proms; Walden to the foreign office and to Westminster. Their experiences have been rich and varied but have left them with a sneering disdain for contemporary society, a conviction that there is a crisis at the heart of modern civilisation, and a belief that ordinary people (mass man, in Walden’s phrase, borrowed from Nietzsche) are the victims of a populist conspiracy which privileges the mediocre and the banal above the difficult and true.
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