Something Quite Interesting about Stephen Fry

England is infected. The World Health Organisation are not working on a vaccine.  Doctors have not been alerted. Yet the infection has spread to a large proportion of the population. Why no action? Ironically, because the host feels no obvious, short-term symptoms and seldom seek treatment. Instead, this disabling condition is passed on from generation to generation, leaving the infected with a overwhelming sense of well-being, contentment and, in the worst cases, smugness.  It's a mutated strain of nostalgia and charm. I have called it Stephen Fry's Palsy.

No one embodies the two qualities better than 'national treasure' Stephen Fry. If nostalgia is the English disease, then charm is its hot toddy. Like Stephen, they are a form of collective Prozac to the more challenging truths of English culture. In a blog written before the general election Fry argued that in

'ideological wars...the first casualties are consideration, mutual respect, sense, proportion', he went on to exhort his readers to, 'vote with your heart, vote with your head, vote with your gut – no one’s else. I just hope you have courage, style and charm enough not to hate me for what I am about to say, for I assure you I will not hate you if you say the exact opposite.'

Charming isn't it? But, for me, it is the sort of charm that smacks of entitlement. The sort of charm that can only come from the confidence that you can't really lose. He doesn't say who he votes for, but his innate conservatism, with a small 'c', is evident in the fact that he regarded the last election as an ideological war. Did I miss a titanic clash of ideas between Brown, Clegg and Cameron?

Gilbert and Sullivan

Like Stephen Fry, despite their tweedy, deeply unglamorous image, nostalgia and charm have managed to ingratiate themselves into the English psyche creating an unconscious and unquestioning faith in our national mythology. They sound like a Gilbert and Sullivan refrain: they remind us that we are English, our ways have stood the test of time, we don't change anything. "He IS an Englishman!"

Fry sits comfortably in this world. He may be an IT geek and compulsive Twitterer, but his heart remains firmly planted in an England where the social order is assured, 'I am a sentimentalist, and sentimentalists will hunt for any excuse to maintain the harmless fripperies of the status quo.' Tally ho! Time and again he supports the symbols of privilege and why shouldn't he? He explains that he was raised in an environment where every child he knew went away to school. Public school, Cambridge and the BBC, it's hardly surprising that he dismisses the social inequalities inherent in our society as 'insignificant blemishes.'

As an intellectual I would hope he could bring more insight to the debate than an acceptance based on 'expectation' and 'custom'. Is this G K Chesterton's 'democracy of the dead'. The trouble with tradition is that it has a habit of not changing. Is that Fry S J's idea of progress? Wring out the charming eloquence and we are left with something utterly nostalgic and reactionary. QI is a metaphor for Fry's world view, we aren't expected to dig too deep and the result is completely irrelevant. The winner is always Stephen Fry.

Oscar Wilde

He protests that his conservatism is tempered by 'criminal tendencies, my homosexuality, my Jewishness and the loathing of the bourgeoisie, the conventional and the respectable that these seem to have inculcated in me.' Fry believes he is a rebel. I'm not convinced his great hero, Oscar Wilde, would have agreed. Wilde believed 'progress in thought is the assertion of individualism against authority.' Taking drugs and being gay do not make you a rebel, not in England in the last 30 years. Despite his brief brush with the law, Fry has simply towed the line. He might very well be on the eccentric fringe but he is very much part of the Establishment,

The depths of his rebellion are reflected in his podcast on Beauty of the Soul - he argues that aesthetics could play a valuable part in enhancing our lives.  He makes a forceful argument and, as you would expect, the piece is witty, engaging and beautifully argued, but ultimately, it is an elitist dead-end. No wonder he loathes the bourgeoisie with their drab wallpaper. My favourite story about Wilde appears in Richard Ellmann's brilliant biography and describes how Wilde not only fought off four undergraduates sent by the JCR to wreck his rooms, but he then invited 'spectators to sample one of his would-be persecutor's wine and spirits.' Can you imagine Fry having the courage to 'assert his individualism' in this way?

Charm and nostalgia are the enemies of progress. It would be so easy for England's story of imperial achievement, industrial innovation and the salvation of Europe to sound like the ramblings of a particularly egotistical candidate in The Apprentice - or, god forbid, like an Italian. The genius of our national mythology is the roll-call of understated heroes. They create the impression it was all an exercise in benevolent self-sacrifice and democratic progress. Don't be mistaken for a moment. Every small concession to the rights of the general population and even more so in the colonies was the result of a hard fought struggle. In the last 30 years Fry's Palsy has taken hold. We have basked in the cozy and reassuring glow of our 'constitutional' superiority whilst many of the political concessions, that our ancestors fought so hard for, have disappeared.

Far from being a 'democracy of the dead' it is a democracy for the privileged few and Stephen Fry is one of their weapons.