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The rightwing press is practised at poisoning our politics with confected outrage
Writing last weekend on the scandal surrounding the Proms’ absence of patriotic songs, the former minister of fun David Mellors opined, “the person I feel most sorry for is Edward Elgar”, the composer of Land of Hope and Glory. Not black Britons offended by Rule, Britannia!’s references to slaves; not black Britons annoyed by people taking offence on their behalf; and not the blameless female Finnish conductor suffering death threats for, in Mellors’s words, “uttering a load of woke nonsense about Black Lives Matter”. No. Who’s the most oppressed minority in the world today? Dead, white, male Victorian composers! And Laurence Fox!!
I felt sorry for Elgar too. In 1998, I worked with Keith Harris, the ventriloquist famous for Orville the Duck. But Harris told me he now hated “that bloody bird”, regarding it as an albatross even though it was a duck. By 1918, according to unsubstantiated “diary” extracts published in the Daily Mail in 2018, Elgar hated Land of Hope and Glory too, writing, “I went to the Coliseum and they played Land of Hope and Glory not once, but twice; the whole audience joined in. I could not. I regret very profoundly how this song has become an anthem to war… I am awfully tired of it.” Elgar would have been delighted to see his piece abandoned, just as Harris would have liked to see his puppet duck dismembered by a puppet fox, perhaps Basil Brush, violent when drunk. I hope Elgar and Harris, haunted by their Frankingsteins, can comfort each other in heaven somehow. Continue reading...