Middle Classholes 2 - Philip Pullman

Anger in an alternative universe

The universe began with a big bang thirteen billion years ago. All subsequent events - all of us - are mere echoes. But there have been other such explosions since, on the individual level.

The author Philip Pullman, for example, exploded on June 23rd 2016. He has been reverberating like a tuning fork ever since. Like the universe, it may take another thirteen billion years for him to settle down.

Pullman is physically typical of a very specific type of middle classhole; greying, with narrow peeved eyes behind thin-rimmed steel-framed spectacles, staring at the world as if it’s just barged into their study without knocking, and just about to give it five hundred lines.

The transformation, over the last decade or so, of many formerly loose-hanging liberal men - Ianucci, Schama, Grayling - from Tucker Jenkinses into Mr Bronsons has been a delight. Angry posh men are funny. They just are. Kenny Everett’s ‘Angry of Mayfair’ character has been reborn in the twenty first century, on the other side of the political aisle.

Peter Hitchens is an angry posh man, but then he’s supposed to be. I once saw him on the tube, at the top of the escalators at Piccadilly Circus, and the very air seemed to be thrumming around him, as if he was forcing himself through it. He was giving out almost visible waves of heat, like tarmac in the dog days of August.

Conservatives are allowed that. It fits us. In progressives it doesn’t - when they’re angry they’re meant to be Guevara-esque gunslingers, not smouldering, buttoned-up old chaps.

Pullman’s most celebrated works are the beguiling His Dark Materials trilogy of children’s books. These largely take place in an alternative universe where everybody has a ‘daemon’ - a permanently attendant talking animal that is a physical manifestation of their inner self. When a human is separated from his or her daemon, it causes extreme, existential distress to both. This is referred to in the books as ‘pulling’.

Pullman was pulled from his daemon - whatever it was, I see an amiable badger - with the referendum result, and nine years on they haven’t been reunited.

Pullman’s world was destroyed, the rug he was standing on was whipped away. Worse, the rug turned out to be not that fine a carpet in the first place; a roll of drugget rather than an Axminster. The protracted agony of the Brexit negotiations, the endless inane ‘three baskets’ politicking by Tories who had to be dragged kicking and screaming to carry out a democratic instruction they clearly resented, were painful for all of us. Worse still, Brexit revealed even to its biggest fans that leaving the EU didn’t make much of a spit of difference to the awful way Britain is governed. Our problems are far, far deeper than that. So everybody got to be cheesed off in different ways.

The Brexit vote caused a terrible psychic spasm among the British progressive middle class, who are very unused to not getting their own way - so we got the ‘Peoples Vote’ campaign, the Wooferendum, the scourge of the FBPE hashtag on what was then Twitter. Pullman was in the thick of this, penning furious little tweets and acres of blog posts.

His lengthy splutter ‘The 1000 Causes Of Brexit’ https://www.philip-pullman.com/newsitem?newsItemID=20 is an interesting historical relic, handily adumbrating every single self-comforting cliché trotted out by everybody on his side - something something Murdoch, blah blah nostalgia for the British Empire, etc - and overlooking any of the actual reasons. It accuses other people of living in a lost past that never truly existed, while living in a lost past that never really existed. It also shows how Brexit robs him of his skills as a writer. ‘But then, if we had a properly thought-out constitution instead of a cobwebbed, rotten, diseased and decaying mess of a patched-up, cobbled-together, bloated, corrupted, leaking and stinking hulk, we wouldn’t have come to this point anyway’. Put that thesaurus down, Phil!

What was it/is it about the EU that inspires such loyalty, such zealous devotion?