Michael Wharton - Controversy

Controversy

"Fulminator", in his Daily Telegraph blog, said of Wharton:

Wharton’s political views were so far removed from the mainstream that they’re practically unclassifiable – a feudalist and a rabid reactionary, certainly (he invented the fictitious Feudal and Reactionary Herald). He hated “Progress”, loathed communism and socialism with a passion, and wasn’t keen on capitalism or money-grubbing in general.

Writing in The Independent J. W. M. Thompson suggested:

As befitted a satirist who was wounded by the changes he observed in his country, he had a profound attachment to the land and a true Tory's nostalgia for an idealised vision of its past.

Wharton consistently criticised and ridiculed what he described as the "race relations industry", and one of his most famous comic creations was the "prejudometer", an anti-racist instrument that supplied readings in prejudons, the "internationally recognised scientific unit of racial prejudice", when pointed at a suspected racist. Concerned individuals could even point the prejudometer at themselves:

At 3.6 degrees on the Alibhai-Brown scale, it sets off a shrill scream that will not stop until you’ve pulled yourself together with a well-chosen anti-racist slogan.

Wharton was accused in his Times obituary of "sometimes veer into the area of straightforward racism" and of being "prone to anti-semitic innuendo" for such passages as this:

Almost single-handed, Ariel Sharon may have ended the Jews' virtual immunity from hostile criticism that Hitler's persecution assured for more than 50 years. Anti-semitism is stirring. So far it may be only the so-called "anti-semitism" of people who think of the immense influence the Jews have in the world, and wonder whether it is always, everywhere and in every way an influence for good. First that; but later, for worse, the real thing.

However the quote occurs in a context of a passage gleefully satirising the Boycott Israel movement.

His obituary in The Guardian pursued the same thread:

In his comment paragraphs, he aired a conservatism light years to the right of most conservatives, stealing sometimes into fleeting, only half-retracted, laments for the Europe that Hitler's New Order might have created.