No one reading AG Macdonell’s satirical novel The Autobiography of a Cad on its 1938 publication would have taken the Scottish writer’s antihero at face value. Edward Fox-Ingleby’s fictional political memoir details the rise of a man who cheats and lies and backstabs his way through life from Eton to Oxford to Westminster.
But two years later, with the world back at war, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister and an avid reader, fell for every word, writing in his diary on 8th December 1940: “I read a book… an unspeakably frivolous and cynical concoction that shows the English plutocrat without his mask. This is the face of the people whom we must overthrow.”
The people of Britain already knew and loved Archibald Gordon Macdonell for his gentler satire, England, Their England, an affectionate romp through English life that was published in 1933 to instant acclaim. Written from the viewpoint of a Scotsman adrift in a foreign land, it skewers the farcical vapidity of England’s bright young things in the manner of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930).
The timing of Cad, with patriotism back on the national menu, was a commercial disaster. Macdonell, a theatre critic and parliamentary sketch writer, was forced to abandon satire and return—briefly—to writing thrillers. He died aged 45 in January 1941, the author of 19 books including a study of Napoleon.
Today, the whereabouts of any of Macdonell’s descendants is a mystery and his papers reside abroad, with the University of Austin, Texas, which purchased them in 1963 from the bookseller Bertram Rota. If his work is remembered at all, it is for his much-anthologised depiction of a village cricket match in England, Their England. It was a favourite of my grandpa’s, and a friend recalls how his father would narrate the passage as a party piece. (“So much so that, on his 70th birthday, I adapted it, changing the characters to family members,” my friend adds.) Leslie Phillips, the Carry On actor, narrated a BBC Radio 4 adaptation in the 1990s—but I had never read it.
Of the two books, while England, Their England is the easier, more touching novel, The Autobiography of a Cad is the more contemporary, reading like an archetypal political memoir in the vein of Alan Clark, a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government, or Sir Henry “Chips” Channon, Tory MP for Southend, 1935–1958. Reviewing Clark’s diaries, Robert Harris called him a “thoroughly disagreeable character: a spoilt, devious, calculating, vindictive, boorish, vain, selfish, vulgar, faithless, pompous, whining dirty old man”. He have could been describing Fox-Ingleby.
“Cad is not unlike [Boris Johnson’s] Unleashed in tone: the self-justifying and presentation of your truth as the only thing that matters,” Ian Hislop, the Private Eye editor, tells me.
Although Hislop knew England, Their England as a “big feel-good novel” growing up, he was introduced to Cad only recently by Nick Newman, his long-term friend and writing partner. “I read it and thought, ‘This memoir just reads like all the other memoirs I read. In the cad’s case, it is very Trumpian. You tell him the exact opposite and he just says, ‘No no. It’s completely different.’”
Needless to say, Hislop loved Cad. “It’s fabulous. Really, really laugh-out-loud funny.” Hislop and Newman, who met at Ardingly College and wrote Spitting Image together in the 1980s, have turned it into a new play for the Watermill Theatre, in Newbury. Hislop is confident of striking a chord. “We are not unused to people who went to Eton and Oxford and joined the Conservative party and whose attitude to women perhaps leaves something to be desired,” he says.
Two early passages duly appal me for their apparent familiarity: Fox-Ingleby and his friends chortling over who was first to sleep with “Dear Melinda”—all three men “furiously claimed priority as deflowerers (or is the word deflorists?)”—and how, as undergraduates, Fox-Ingleby and his pals were “continually being pursued by proctors, fined and gated by the college authorities, and harried by indignant fathers,” writes the character himself, adding: “But we did not care two straws for any of them. We were young and handsome and hot-blooded, and the world was at our feet.”
After being sent down from Oxford—the ultimate disgrace, not that he cares—Fox-Ingleby shirks the Great War; profits from investing in munitions; and grossly mismanages the country estate he inherited aged 17 after his parents’ early death. (“I think that that was one of the most wonderful days of my life. At last I was my own master. And not only that, I was master of Grantly Puerorum as well,” Fox-Ingleby writes.) At one point, he bulldozes ancient woodlands on his estate to erect badly built housing. The forced evictions occurred during a cold March, before the new houses were ready, and some of his tenants died of pneumonia. “It was not true that I had said that old folk were better out of the way in any case; or at any rate if I did say it, it was not meant to be repeated. And in any case, I can hardly recall having made the remark,” Fox-Ingleby self-justifies.
With nothing better to do in 1918, he stands as a Conservative candidate for his own local seat, South-east Midhamptonshire, on three planks: hang the Kaiser; life pensions for “all us war veterans”; and “Down with Ireland”. (Once elected, all three are swiftly abandoned with no qualms because “my majority had been so large that there was nothing to fear”.)
It’s all toe-curling stuff but compulsively readable, aided by crisp dialogue, PG Wodehouse-esque humour and the vain hope that Fox-Ingleby, whose wealth is tied up in American stocks, will come a cropper in 1929. In an introduction to a 2001 edition, the journalist and broadcaster Simon Hoggart called Fox-Ingelby a “shocking modern creation, and a truly monstrous one as well”, likening Macdonell’s creation to “a blend of Jonathan Aitken, Neil Hamilton, David Mellor and a hint of Peter Mandelson”.
“Goebbels decided Cad was actual evidence that the Reich should take over Britain. Which is a pretty good review to get,” says Hislop.
Born in Pune, India, in 1895, Macdonell, who went to Winchester College, was the direct inverse of his antihero, from getting invalided out of the First World War with shellshock to standing, twice, as a Liberal candidate and failing to get elected. He is buried in Wolvercote cemetery, in Oxford, just a plot along from JRR Tolkien.
“In England, Their England, Macdonell is delighted by this mad, eccentric group of people—the English,” says Hislop. “In Cad, he focuses in on what he sees as the immoral ruling class. I think he was older, more angry and more cross with the sort of Conservative politicians whom he felt had done nothing [for Britain]. A lot of people who’d been in the war were very cross afterwards by the profiteering. We think things like PPE scandals are new, but that was sort of what people did,” he adds.
“With Cad, Macdonell started parodying political memoirs. And they are funny! They never change. Liz Truss’s memoirs are just wonderful in terms of, ‘I was right and everyone else is wrong,’ which is essentially what those books are,” says Hislop.
Or as Fox-Ingleby puts it in Cad’s opening chapter: “In a word, the moral of these thirty-eight years of my life is that if you do what you think is right, you are bound to win.” Which would be funnier, if the world wasn’t reaping the downside to politicians enacting that exact philosophy in real time.
The Autobiography of a Cad is at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury, 7th February to 22nd March
