Gerald Warner: Dave’s ill-conceived bid to join PC club

‘THE Prime Minister has a great deal of sympathy with the view that exclusive memberships of this sort look more to the past than they do to the future.”

David Cameron. Picture: Neil Hanna

In those weasel words a spokesman (should that not have been “spokesperson”?) for Dave coyly intimated the view of this former Bullingdon, former White’s member – and son of a former chairman of White’s – that men-only clubs belong to the past. Aficionados of Daveguff may be interested to note that he delivered himself of this latest fatuity hours after imposing men-only marriage on the nation.

Granted that Dave has never been the brightest bulb on the chandelier, the concentrated idiocy of this statement demands some analysis. First of all, the term “exclusive memberships” is otiose: all memberships – be it of Larkhall Loyal Purple Bible and Crown Defenders – are by their nature exclusive, since membership defines itself in distinction to non-membership. Is not the membership of the House of Commons, albeit embracing many members of the criminal classes, exclusive – insofar as it defines 650 scoundrels, in distinction to 40 million members of the electorate?

What Dave is saying, of course, is that having enjoyed membership of the 
Bullingdon and of White’s, in the days before he was under PC scrutiny, he is now treacherously denouncing those clubs that welcomed him to membership, in order to gain imagined brownie points with the politically correct feminist and Guardianista lobby that he deludedly imagines will return him to power – or rather, office – in 2015. Gratitude, loyalty, friendship – those are not virtues that Dave would care to cultivate: he is, after all, a politician. And a very incompetent one, too. It should be noted, however, that his spokesman “refused to rule out the possibility of Mr Cameron joining a gentlemen’s club at some point in the future”.

So, when Dave has been ejected from the premiership and, after this apprenticeship, has progressed to a serious job in banking or the European kleptocracy, he might wish to join a club from which women are excluded in order to relax among his peers. That says it all.

This latest distraction from politics arose from the contrived fracas over Muirfield hosting the Open, which attracted criticism from Dave’s valet Nick Clegg, who condemned Muirfield’s male membership as “inexplicable” and “anachronistic”.

Inexplicable? A bear of little brain such as Clegg may require to have it explained to him that, generations ago, a group of men got together to play golf and their successors have continued to maintain standards of excellence which attract the Open to this venue.

Culture and sport secretary Maria Miller, who notoriously possesses the thinking power of a geranium, has made much of her decision to boycott the Muirfield event. So has Alex Salmond. Muirfield was always a club of which gentlemen aspired to be members; but its emergence as the one place in Britain guaranteed to be Miller and Salmond-free must by now have extended its waiting list to 300 years. Women play at Muirfield but are not formal members. The same, in reverse, applies to gentlemen at Lundin Ladies Golf Club. The majority of golf clubs have mixed-sex membership. Does that not constitute diversity? Actually, no, because “diversity” is coded PC language for uniformity.

Harriet Harridan (yes, she’s back, and this time she’s mad!) last week called for a ban (how the word excites the PC totalitarian tendency) on all-male sporting clubs. That should make the communal bath in your local rugby club a more stimulating venue. Under equality (sic) law, how can all-male clubs be banned without the simultaneous abolition of women-only sports societies? Any minister or shadow minister who wants to break the news of such a ban to the gals at Lundin, or anywhere else, would be well advised to keep the engine of the chauffeur-driven car running for a quick exit.

Behind all this Dave-led buffoonery lies a sinister implication. The cultural Marxist drive for blanket collectivisation and uniformity intends to target the principle of freedom of association. “Should all-male clubs be allowed?” is the media rhetorical question. “Allowed” by whom – the intruder state?

It was notable that all the local authority pondlife who volunteered their condemnations of single-sex clubs invoked either the formula “in this day and age” (following Nick Clegg) or “in the 21st century”. That telltale phrase is thinly coded language for “I am a cretin.” Not so long ago the cliché was “in the 20th century”.

The PC Terror, like all such reigns, has a limited shelf life. The British electorate is beginning to grasp the methodology of liberation from the consensual tyranny: destroy the Tories in 2015, Labour in 2020. For the old regime of Con/Lib/Lab it is June 1789 and they are dancing on a volcano. «

Twitter: @GeraldWarner1