It is a shame such gifts of expression have fallen to such a right-wing man, but if you dislike the present government his words have the power to make you say "Yes!" out loud

I have never read Charlotte's Web, the children's story now in cinemas as an animated film, but I am an admirer of E B White, its author, because he was also responsible, with William Strunk, for The Elements of Style, one of the great books on writing good English. First published in the 1950s, it is a short and often brisk guide - "Omit needless words" is Rule 17 - but it is also charming. Of the word "prestigious" it declares: "It's in the dictionary, but that doesn't mean you have to use it."

White's contribution included a chapter called "An Approach to Style", which is full of humane good sense, telling us among other things to write in a way that comes naturally, to rely on nouns and verbs and not adjectives and adverbs, and to avoid fancy words. Another of his tips is: "Do not affect a breezy manner."

How do our leading newspaper writers measure up to this? Nothing would be easier than to take the prose of some famous modern columnists and, by testing it against White's principles, to show their shortcomings as stylists - about half would fail on the breezy manner point alone. But that would be unfair because White's standards are so high, and it would also be asking for trouble.

For me, though, there is one political columnist whose style certainly passes the White test, and that is Simon Heffer, whom you can read in the Daily Telegraph twice a week. If you don't know his work, just consider this crescendo to a recent article assailing the government's record:

"The extra taxes we have paid have been wasted, not least in putting 700,000 socially unproductive people on the public payroll, where they can gratefully vote for Gordon Brown in perpetuity. They, Mrs Blair, the Irish Republican Army and those for whom the most important thing in life is to be allowed to sodomise 16-year-old boys are the only ones I can think of who have done well out of the past ten years."

Many columnists strive in that way to make you suck the air in through your teeth, but few succeed as often as Heffer does. It wouldn't happen if he didn't have strong views (on which more below), but it owes just as much to his extraordinarily fluent delivery. Not only does he write in a way that clearly comes naturally while relying on nouns and verbs, but he does most of the other things White advises. "Work from a suitable design." "Do not overwrite." "Use figures of speech sparingly." "Do not take short cuts at the cost of clarity." I can't see Heffer writing "prestigious", and I doubt if he needed E B White's advice on the point.

It is obviously a great shame that such gifts of expression should have fallen to such a right-wing man, an admirer of Enoch Powell and the UK Independence Party who even now won't believe in global warming and is capable of calling murdered prostitutes "tarts". There is consolation, it is true, in the way he can't help connecting such attitudes with blimpishness and snobbery, for he is a proud shooting gent who seems to yearn for the England of Agatha Christie novels - he wrote recently, apparently sincerely: "Do you remember the good old days, when the job of a policeman was to catch criminals and, once he had done that, to tell you the time?"

But so smooth is the writing, that these oddities can seem no more than fleeting glimpses, quickly forgotten. It would be a mistake to underestimate Heffer's power as a polemicist, and there can be poison in those well-chosen words. When he writes of Margaret Beckett that "I am not going to fall into the trap of thinking that just because one's experience of foreign affairs has been limited to the more exotic excursions of the Caravan Club one is bound to be a bad foreign secretary", you know he has not mentioned the idea accidentally.

Yet just now, and possibly for a limited season only, Heffer offers some wicked pleasures for those of us on the other side of the political divide. For one thing, if you happen to dislike the present government you will occasionally find yourself in complete agreement with him, exclaiming "Yes!" out loud and wishing that you had said what he had written. Better still, Heffer seems to dislike David Cameron (he calls him "Dave") even more than he dislikes Tony Blair, which not only makes for amusing reading but also has to be bad news for the Tories.

How was it for me?

The Telegraph reported the other day from Los Angeles on a magazine interview given by Martin Amis, in which he talked of his romance with the teenage Tina Brown in the 1970s, when they were both students at Oxford.

Amis, it seems, spoke warmly of how pretty and ebullient Brown was and how, though she was four years younger than he, she gave him confidence. On being asked whether the relationship was "mutually satisfactory", Amis replied, as quoted: "Yes. She was and is adorable." Men, eh?

Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website