Where does Michael Rosen come into this? Every now and again the novelist pops up in the Guardian, writing "open" letters to the Education Secretary Michael Gove. His picture shows a cheery looking elderly man (a year older than Bowie, 1946 to the artist formerly known as David Jones's 1947), rumpled and casually dressed. I have always liked Rosen when I've heard him on the radio, and I expect I've read some of his books to my children, although offhand I can't remember any of them. One gathers from his articles that Rosen is not inherently sympathetic to Gove's zealous reforms of the education system. To put it mildly.
A couple of things strike me about this. The first and most obvious is, why does anyone think Gove cares what Rosen thinks? Rosen is not, after all, Nelson Mandela or Vaclav Havel. The other one is that Rosen, a teenager in the 1960s and therefore borne upwards on the tide of post-War liberalism, now looks rather old. To be fair, very few of us have worn as well as Bowie.
Private Eye does a neat line in parody letters from retired colonels living in the Tory shires, but its real-life Sir Herbert Gussets are now largely incontinent, incoherent or dead. Their opinions die with them.
It is the children of the 60s, the Bowies and Rosens, who are the old buffers now.
It is the children of the 60s, the Bowies and Rosens, who are the old buffers now.
They - we - thought their notions of personal freedom had changed the world forever. But that probably isn't true. Like the Eye's Bufton Tuftons, they are merely people who had a view, which will be (and this is the crucial point) superseded by those of younger people, formed in a different age.
Younger people, for example, formed in the age of Thatcher.
Younger people, for example, formed in the age of Thatcher.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
