“In a bate”: conservative default culture

You’re a right-wing journalist or blogger in a hurry. You need a cultural reference. You dig down deep, to default culture territory. To all that stuff that’s buried so far down, you hardly know it’s there.

You are Quentin Letts, probably on your third article of the day. And you need to abuse Speaker Martin over his rants in Parliament. You write:

“In the middle of Mr Martin’s bate…”.

His what? Where did that come from?

Rather sadly, M. Apache knows where. From the Jennings and Darbishire books written by Anthony Buckeridge. When form master “Old Wilkie” was angry, he was said to be “in a bate”. Young Apache used to read these books – it all began in 1954 with Jennings Goes to School, and reprints are still being published.

Letts was born in 1963, so he would have started out with Speaking of Jennings!, published in 1973. Or else he picked it up at Haileybury.

But how extraordinary that Quentin Letts should think that Daily Mail readers are likely to respond to antiquated public school slang.


Then there’s Guido Fawkes. He blogs us with Lord (George) Foulkes’ successful attack on BBC presenter Carrie Gracie, when she admitted to a salary of £92K. But in Guido’s world no politician can ever be right, so he blogs the incident under the heading “Foulkes Doesn’t Like It Up Him”. This is from Dad’s Army, whose last new episode was broadcast in 1977. Foulkes showed no sign of being troubled, so the heading makes little sense.

What is it with rightwing culture and the 1970s?

What is Paul Staines?

Paul Staines – Guido – is not a “fascist”, as Nicky Campbell called him, but a rightwing anarchist libertarian. He is also barely articulate, and not very nice.

Another of the same kind, but all too articulate, is historian David Starkey. He was allowed a free run on the Gabby Logan show a couple-three weeks ago. The studio (Gabby was away) loved it – here was a real Oxford professor slagging off Gordon Brown! You could hear the thrill.
It didn’t occur to anyone to ask him a testing question – this was culture, right there in the studio.

The appalling Starkers only knows about one thing – Henry VIII.

Quite why a libertarian anarchist should go for the authoritarian Henry is difficult to work out. But that’s right-wing culture for you.