Harry Mount

Ian Fleming understood the attractions of an English summer. At the end of Dr No, James Bond is in Jamaica, his arch enemy dead, his knockout girlfriend, Honey Rider, about to leap into their double sleeping bag. And yet, despite being in paradise, Bond longs for ‘the douce weather of England — the soft airs, the “heat” waves, the cold spells — the only country where you can take a walk every day of the year.’ It used to be just eccentric Englishmen who acquired this peculiar taste for the changeable English summer. But no longer. Quietly, but decisively, the English summer and social calendar have been globalised and commercialised.

The United States is almost as segregated under Obama as it was in the time of Martin Luther King As I arrived in New Orleans this summer, there was a juicy racism row blazing across the airwaves and the blogosphere. Like lots of the juiciest rows, it was over a little thing. The question was, do black people use the social networking site Twitter differently from white people? According to Farhad Manjoo, Slate magazine’s technology correspondent, the answer is yes. He’d noticed that a group of black Twitter users in America were much more likely to react to particular topics. Some of them were race-based, such as ‘If Santa was black …’; answers included ‘He wouldn’t say ho-ho-ho, he would say yo-yo-yo’.

You might not have been to Freshwater West, on the remote western shores of Pembrokeshire, but you’ve probably seen it before — on the big screen. Because the bay is so untouched by man, it can stand in for pretty much any period in history. It’s just starred as the medieval beach in Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood, and as the seaside home to the shell house in the latest Harry Potter film. These days, it couldn’t stand in for much, except perhaps a Welsh version of Baywatch — Boyowatch, perhaps? Because, as of this year, between 26 June and 5 September, the beach has been destroyed by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Every day this summer, the RNLI has erected a beach hut — the only man-made structure on the beach. Every day, between 10 a.m.

Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the continental midday sun. But at least the mad dogs don’t dress in vests, belly-hugging T-shirts or those cut-off trousers that make short men shorter and fat men fatter. Why do they do it? How has it happened that you can spot Holidaymakerus britannicus in an instant, from the other side of the piazza — from the far end of the tapas bar? The romantic legend that the British provide a model of good dress still lingers on. The British invented the modern suit, so the myth goes, Savile Row stands for the best tailoring in the world, so those sartorial standards must be written into our dressing DNA. Well, it just goes to show how difficult it is to dislodge a national stereotype.

Harry Mount watches Nick Griffin try to win round the disgruntled former Labour voters of Dagenham and Barking — if he wasn’t so ridiculous, he might be dangerous As always, P.G. Wodehouse got it right. Far-right groups are unlikely to take off in Britain because, for all their nastiness, they always come across as just a little too ridiculous. That’s certainly the impression I got after spending last Saturday in Barking, east London, at the BNP campaign launch. In The Code of the Woosters (1938), Wodehouse neatly took care of Sir Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts, by casting him as Sir Roderick Spode in his black shorts; by the time Spode had set up his fascist group, there were no shirts left, according to Gussie Fink-Nottle.

Ronald Searle, who turned 90 this month, talks to Harry Mount about being captured by the Japanese, chronicling the 1950s and inventing both St Trinian’s and Molesworth High in the mountains of Provence, in a low-ceilinged studio at the top of his teetering tower house, Ronald Searle is showing me the simple child’s pen he uses. As he draws the pen down the page, the ink thickens and swerves; a few sideways strokes, a little cross-hatching, and suddenly the famous Searle line comes to life: part Gothic, part anarchic, part comic. The girls of St Trinian’s, Nigel Molesworth, Adolf Eichmann, thousands of Punch caricatures, the Goya-like pictures of dying prisoners of war... all utterly different, all enclosed by that distinctive Ronald Searle line.

If Gordon Brown really wants to start appealing to the middle-class vote, he could start by picking up my rubbish. The bin bags outside my flat in Kentish Town, north London, weren’t collected for four weeks over Christmas because of the snow. When the foxes started to rip them apart and left a trail of chicken carcasses and half-chewed bread across my front garden, I cracked. Patching up the most damaged bag and strapping it to my handlebars, I pedalled along the snowy roads — if my bike could negotiate the streets, so could a rubbish truck, by the way — to my local park. There, I poured the rubbish into a large, metal-mesh bin.

After more than 200 years, a uniquely British taste is on the way out. Shabby chic has been vacuumed, whitewashed and dry-cleaned out of existence. Frayed shirt collars, egg yolk on the tie, soup stain on the crotch, roses rambling out of control over the crumbling terrace flagstones, walls cluttered with pictures, tables covered with teetering piles of books. The quintessentially British air of decayed gentility has been destroyed by a combination of minimalism, modernism and nihilism. For the first time in history we live in a civilisation where, the richer you are, the fewer things you have, and the newer, cleaner and more stripped-down those things must be. Shabby chic meant the opposite.