The folly and ingratitude of Dame Hilary Mantel and Professor Mary Beard

If you had to name two Englishwomen who combine erudition, fame and fortune, you could hardly do better than to pick Dame Hilary Mantel and Professor Mary Beard. Admired by millions for their historical novels and highbrow TV programmes respectively, they practically personify what it is to be an intellectual pin-up in 21st-century Britain.

Yet it seems that neither of these female role models reciprocates the adoration of their bookish fans. Dame Hilary tells an Italian newspaper she is “ashamed to be living in the nation that elected this Government” and cannot wait to emigrate to Ireland “to become a European again”. Professor Beard tells The Times (behind a paywall) that “this country has been terribly snobbish about what education is for”, that “most of British culture is still held back by class and privilege” and “we should stop being so damned fixated on Oxford and Cambridge”.

Now, we may agree with Dame Hilary that some Brits do behave badly, notably “the people on the beaches abusing exhausted refugees even as they scramble to the shore”. (But is it fair to describe them as “the ugly face of contemporary Britain”?) And we may, like Professor Beard, deplore the Oxbridge obsession and the fact that an Etonian classicist is still more likely to become Prime Minister than practically anyone else. (But is she, having chosen to teach classics at Cambridge, entitled to complain about it?)

Yet even when we make every allowance for the possible validity of these criticisms, they still leave a bad taste in the mouth. Does Hilary Mantel really feel so alienated from the land that has honoured, fêted and enriched her, that has awarded her not one but two Booker Prizes, that she must turn her back on it? Must she insult not only Britain’s leaders but those who elected them — who may or may not be the same people who buy her books? And was the Tudor England that she celebrates in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, or even the Derbyshire of the 1950s and 1960s in which she grew up, really more “European” than the multicultural country she inhabits today? And what message does she send to young writers who have the temerity to dream of enjoying her success? Leave Brexit Britain or abandon all hope?

As for Mary Beard: to speak as she does of “carpentry and engineering” in the same breath suggests that she doesn’t spend much time at high table chatting to the engineers there, or indeed to anyone in fields outside her bubble of the arts and humanities. Perhaps she does not hear the insincerity in her voice when she declares: “I’m not going to sit here and say it’s more important for someone to study Latin and Greek rather than practical engineering.” But surely she can empathise with those who aspire to emulate her — after all, she teaches them every day. So why dismiss the culture in which classics are valued as “what clever posh kids do”? Isn’t this pulling up the ladder behind her? Especially if GCSEs (the gateway exam to academic achievement) are “past their sell-by date” and she has no time for “the mystique” of an Oxbridge First. Can’t she imagine how discouraging this sounds to an able pupil who lacks the privileges of most of her students?

So it turns out that neither the Dame nor the Don is immune from the folly that afflicts so many members of the British intelligentsia. They are so full of their own preoccupations that they lose all sense of perspective. They are self-centred but lack self-awareness. They are so eager to damn the snobbery of their compatriots that they overlook their own inverted snobbishness. They see the motes in the eyes of others, but not the beams in their own. The hypocrisy of these luminaries of the academic and arts establishment is sickening. Rather than inspire bright young people to join them, they are doing their best to discredit the country and culture that have served them so well. Let Dame Hilary move to her Irish tax haven and write novels about a less telegenic subject than the Tudors. Let Professor Beard stop being “fixated” on Cambridge and practise what she preaches by teaching classics to less fortunate students elsewhere. That great classicist Erasmus — who loved England and wrote his most famous book, In Praise of Folly, while a guest in London of his fellow humanist Thomas More — would have had a field day satirising the ungrateful elite they represent. “The chief element of happiness is this: to want to be what you are,” he wrote. Let the Dame and the Don be what they are — and be glad to be so lucky.

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