In her last year at Cambridge she started a blog, entitled ‘PLAIN COMMON SENSE’, in homage to her mother’s column. She regularly sent Sir Peter links to the latest entries, but he almost never responded, even though she was doing her best to imitate the tone and content of his own newspaper, and to carry on her mother’s tradition of ruthless, instantaneous opinion-forming. Undeterred by her lack of first-hand knowledge, Josephine began to campaign against what she called Britain’s ‘benefits culture’, which handed rewards to idlers, scroungers, loafers and cheats while ‘ordinary, hardworking people’ (of whose silent, victimized existence it suited her to appear convinced) picked up the tab. At the centre of her phantasmagoric worldview there lay a malignant, amorphous monster called ‘the left-liberal establishment’, dedicated to the redistribution of funds from the deserving to the undeserving, and to the general sabotage of everything that was right and proper in British civil society. The paradox of this monster was that, although Josephine knew exactly what its tentacles consisted of, she could not have put the knowledge into words. It was a slippery, evasive nexus of institutions, made up of grant-awarding bodies, human rights organizations, legal advice services, NGOs, certain branches of the Church of England and the judiciary and, of course, hovering over it all, more powerful, more insidious, more venomous than any other public body in the kingdom, the British Broadcasting Corporation itself, whose mission it was (in the eyes of Josephine and her growing band of supporters) to drip-freed a toxic daily diet of left-liberal propaganda to the nation at the taxpayers’ expense.
Sir Peter was now seventy-six years old, although he showed no signs of retiring: his rampantly illiberal views and irascible personality were so closely identified with the newspaper he edited that it was impossible to imagine the two ever parting company. When Josephine graduated, he temporarily stirred himself out of his state of paternal apathy and offered her, without much enthusiasm, a platform on the newspaper’s website. Josephine took it, of course, but what she really wanted was a regular slot in the print edition. But Sir Peter was reluctant to endorse his daughter’s efforts to that extent. He would relent only occasionally, when a star columnist went on holiday and needed a stand-in, and when this happened Josephine pulled out all the stops. Once, seeking inspiration in the archive of columns from her mother’s glory days, she chanced upon a particularly outrageous example from 1990. Hilary had been enraged by a recent court judgement in favour of a disabled tenant whose landlord had unlawfully evicted her and had railed with unusual vigour against the left-liberal establishment’s skewed value system. ‘The landlord of this property,’ she had written, ‘was a white, middle-class, heterosexual, God-fearing, law-abiding citizen of what used to be Great Britain, and every one of those attributes was a card stacked against her. Were her claims respected? Did her point of view get taken into account? Of course not. Asked to choose between her rights and those of — to choose a scarcely hypothetical example — a black one-legged lesbian on benefits, our judiciary would inevitably come down on the side of the latter.’
In her own column, more than twenty years later, Josephine set about defending the coalition government’s introduction of the Bedroom Tax. But her larger point was that the climate had not changed much in the intervening decades: Britain was being dragged down by an underclass of scroungers, who lived in a ‘something-for-nothing culture’, and Hilary’s ‘black one-legged lesbian on benefits’ could still be held up as a paragon of modern entitlement. It was high time, and only right and proper, that the government should be doing something radical to cut down Britain’s welfare spending.
Sir Peter agreed with her sentiment, but he was not impressed with her reasoning. He thought that the archetype Josephine had resurrected from her mother’s column was hopelessly out of date. ‘You fucked up your argument in the last few paragraphs,’ he told her. ‘A black one-legged lesbian on benefits? Even our readers know there’s no such thing. They’re only worried about Muslims these days. Put your little straw woman in a niqab and then you’ve given them something to worry about.’
Josephine was stung. She went and looked up ‘niqab’ on Wikipedia, and for the next few weeks turned her bile (once again confined to the online edition) on to Britain’s Muslim community, bemoaning its failure to condemn terrorist atrocities and accusing the Left of giving succour to radical preachers. Meanwhile, however, Sir Peter continued to ignore her efforts, and her sense of exclusion stewed. His words ‘Even our readers know there’s no such thing’ gnawed at her soul. Why was her father so dismissive? Why did he assume that, just because he was not paying any attention to her words, nobody else was? Did he not know that her one print column, about which he had been so scathing, had been picked up by a well-known satirical quiz show on television, and mocked and vilified on primetime TV? What was that, if not a badge of honour? Within a few weeks, any stand-up comedian who wanted to milk an easy laugh from his audience had only to mention Josephine’s name. What was that, if not a mark of success?
As a matter of fact, Sir Peter was aware of these developments, and he was furious about them. It was one thing not to think much of his own daughter’s writing; but it was quite different when other people, both inside and outside the paper, began to make fun of her. One quiet afternoon in the newspaper’s offices, a disturbing scene took place. Neale Thomson, the Deputy Features Editor, and Derek Styles, one of the few remaining full-time subs, were sitting at a computer screen watching something on YouTube. They did not realize that Sir Peter had entered the office and was standing directly behind them. They were watching a section from leading stand-up comic Mickey Parr’s DVD, Would You Credit It? — On Stage and On Fire. It was the section where he attacked Josephine Winshaw-Eaves. The routine was not especially funny, but Neale and Derek were enjoying the feeling of behaving like naughty schoolboys, the cosy subversiveness of having a laugh at the expense of the boss’s daughter, and they chuckled along enthusiastically with the live audience. The words that stopped them in their tracks came from a few feet behind them, and were uttered in the unmistakable patrician tones of Sir Peter himself; although they had never heard him speak quite so quietly before, or with such an icy note of menace.
‘Right, you cunts,’ he said, in little more than a whisper. ‘In my office. Five minutes.’
As Neale and Derek told the story to their ex-colleagues in the pub afterwards, it wasn’t the speed of their dismissal that was so shocking: it was the undertone of quivering, barely controlled hatred in Sir Peter’s voice, and the eye-watering inventiveness and cruelty of the violent acts which he swore he would arrange to have performed on them if they ever came within one hundred yards of the building or, indeed, if he ever saw them again. To say that they had touched a raw nerve would, clearly, be an understatement. A brief account of the sackings was included in the next issue of Private Eye, where readers were also offered a recap of some of the more colourful episodes in Sir Peter’s career (a punch-up with a rival editor at a Press Awards dinner; an allegation of assault against a Kensington parking officer, which never came to court). The magazine’s report concluded with one slightly sensationalized detaiclass="underline" the fire in Sir Peter’s eyes as he dismissed the two disgraced employees was described as ‘murderous’.