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Auberon Alexander Waugh (November 17, 1939 - January 16, 2001) was a British author and journalist.
Life and Career
Waugh was the son of Evelyn Waugh, and was educated at Downside School in Somerset and Christ
Church, Oxford. During his National Service he almost
accidentally killed himself with a machine gun. He began his journalistic
career in 1960 as a cub reporter on Peterborough, the social/gossip column of the Daily Telegraph.
In a long and prolific career he wrote for The Spectator,
The New Statesman, British Medicine and various
newspapers (including, surprisingly, the Daily Mirror). 30 years
later, he was to return to the Telegraph as the successor of Michael Wharton (better known as Peter Simple)
writing the paper's long-running Way of the World column. This would see him writing three columns a week for the Daily
Telegraph plus another for the Sunday Telegraph from
1990 until December 2000.
Private Eye
Waugh achieved his greatest fame with his diary in Private Eye,
which ran from the early 1970s until 1985, and which he described as "specifically
dedicated to telling lies". He fitted in well with the Eye which had set its political ethos as "balls to the lot of them",
although he made clear his dislike of the Labour government
of the 1970s. The Education Secretary Shirley Williams became a
personal hate figure arising out of her support for comprehensive education. In his 1990 autobiography Will This Do?,
Waugh claimed that he had broken two bottles of wine by banging them together too hard to celebrate when she lost her seat in the
House of Commons as an SDP MP in 1983 (not when she lost for Labour
in 1979 as previously stated here).
Waugh was a candidate at the 1979 election, indulging another of his pet hates - former Liberal Leader Jeremy Thorpe, who was
about to stand trial for conspiracy to murder arising out of a scandal that Waugh had helped expose. It was alleged that Thorpe
had links to an incident in which a man claiming to have had an affair with Thorpe had seen his dog murdered, and Waugh stood
against Thorpe for the "Dog Lovers Party". Thorpe obtained an injunction against Waugh's election literature, and he polled only
79 votes.
Waugh's Views
In her first years as Prime Minister, Waugh broadly supported Margaret Thatcher, but by 1983 he became disillusioned by the
Government's economic policy which he felt embraced the economics and cultural ideas of the New Right. When Thatcher became a
strong public opponent of his friend and Sunday Telegraph editor Peregrine Worsthorne,
Waugh became a confirmed opponent. Her closeness to Andrew Neil, editor of
the Sunday Times, who Waugh despised, further confirmed his view. Waugh
tended to be identified with a defiantly anti-progressive, small-c conservative worldview, opposed to "do-gooders", social
progressives and suchlike. Three days after his death, he was vociferously attacked for such views by Polly Toynbee in The
Guardian).
Waugh bemoaned what he saw as the cultural proletarianisation of the British middle classes, the general Americanisation of
Britain and the sell-off of the wealth of the English shires to American businessmen, which from an old-school Tory perspective
were key tendencies of the Thatcher years. He had a house in France and was a fervent
supporter of European integration and the single currency, which he saw as a means of de-Americanising the UK. He opposed
anti-smoking legislation and in his later years he was highly
critical of Labour threats to ban fox hunting. Waugh has been assessed as a
nostalgist and a romantic, with a tendency to snobbery at times, although his anarchistic streak ensured that he retained the
admiration of a surprising number of people who he would have considered horribly "progressive" or "leftish".
Literary Career
Before giving up writing fiction because he knew he would always be compared to
his father and he knew he would not be able to match up to his father's standards, Waugh write five novels. They are:
- The Foxglove Saga (1960)
- Path of Dalliance (1963)
- Who Are The Violets Now? (1965)
- Consider the Lilies (1968)
- A Bed of Flowers (1972).
He made several programmes for ATV in the 1970s, and was interviewed by Anthony Howard in 1991 for the
Thames TV documentary "Waugh Memorial". From 1986 until his death he also edited the Literary Review magazine, where he organised
awards for what he called "real" (ie rhyming) poetry, and also a "Bad Sex Award" for the worst description of sex in a novel.
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