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Dr. Anthony Daniels, a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple (left), writer, social commentator, retired prison psychiatrist, is pressed for time when we meet, but admittedly not so rushed as to be anything less than impeccable in a crisp shirt and the standard-issue sartorial armour of a dark, single breasted suit.

This should come as no surprise to those who’ve read Daniels’ work, in which he has regularly chronicled both his frustrations with his career in the NHS, and his belief that Western society is slowly eating its own tail. Attention to detail is important to the good doctor. Right now, he’s getting ready for his evening talk on the moral triggers of the past year’s economic crisis as guest speaker at the John Kenneth Galbraith Lecture on Public Policy at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

As we settle in for our conversation, with Daniels and I swapping jokes about the economists John Keynes and F.A. Hayek, it occurs to me that this might be the single nerdiest bit of banter I’ve ever indulged in - and I’ve been to comic book conventions. Normally I’d be a bit embarrassed, but Daniels makes it easy to laugh. He is, despite the portrayal of himself as a doom-and-gloom gadfly ready to throw the unwashed masses into Dickensian workhouses, kind of funny. It’s only about five minutes into our Q&A that I realise he has to have a sense of humour, as his source material - convicts and their victims, corrupt politicians, feckless public servants, vapid intellectuals - could drive Cromwell to drink. We talk about how this decline in culture begins: education, and more specifically, an education system that is failing miserably.

“If you have a state-run system, with a single department that oversees everything; it becomes more powerful and laden down with more and more educational bureaucrats. Then what you get, if you demand statistical data, is organised lying, a subversion of the means of measurement,” he says. “Since government congratulates itself by parading statistics, it can congratulate itself by saying that exam results are better than ever, even if the standards have gone down.”

That’s a long-held argument, and even if it is true, it doesn’t explain why exactly these standards have collapsed now and not at some other time in the past.
Daniels, however, believes it has been a slow decline.

“It’s the long march through the institutions by people like Mr. Brown, who is clearly extremely left-wing in his feelings but of course cannot be left wing particularly in his economic policies,” Daniels explains.

In addition to being well-humoured, Daniels is also impeccably polite - everyone is “Mr” or “Mrs”, even if he is going to dismiss them and their work in the unkindest manner possible.

“So what he [Brown] prefers is a society of dependents. Amongst these are bureaucrats and others who work for the government, and of course all those people who believe it is the role of government to dig them out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves.”
 
However Daniels is not some Daily Mail yes man, ready to genuflect at any altar merely because it is Tory. “In my view, Mrs. Thatcher corrupted very greatly the public service by introducing strengthened managerialism,” he says. “It was her view that the public service was inefficient - which it was - but it was also her view that no-one could act out of public interest, which is not, in my view, true. So therefore some kind of scientific management could be introduced, but she didn’t see that scientific managers could develop interests of their own. So we now have this fantastic level of legalised corruption in Britain.” He shakes his head slightly, but is smiling. “I don’t think she understood this, and I don’t think she intended it. But I would put it that she was John the Baptist to Mr. Blair’s Christ.”

Daniels, then, is a man who won’t play favourites with politicians. His distrust of anyone seeking power comes through in much of our talk. “For people who want to be in power, and God knows why anyone would want to be in power, but for those people the need to be in power is an existential necessity,” he remarks at one point, and it is obvious he thinks it’s a job not to be to be chased as a long-term career. He also takes swipes at the current crop of Westminster hopefuls, including denigrating David Cameron.
 
The problem is, of course, that to read Daniels or talk to him you could come to think almost everything is wretched. When we talk about culture and how he believes that it is the embracing of vulgarity and low-brow intellectualism that is fuelling its inexorable slide, I can’t help myself: I ask him if there’s any place in modern culture for a bit of trash.

“I like a bit of vulgarity, from time to time,” he allows. I press him a bit on this, asking what was the last lousy movie he sat through. He is genuinely stumped for a bit but finally says, “What was that one, with all the violence… it won some Oscars. No Country For Old Men?”

A lot of people liked that movie, I point out.

He is, of course, unimpressed. “I thought it was horrible,” he says.

Seamus Heffernan is a writer and researcher at the Harris Centre, a public policy research unit at Memorial University, which co-sponsored the John Kenneth Galbraith Lecture event. Heffernan lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

words: Seamus Heffernan