Not fictional was the column's presiding spirit, Colonel Sibthorp, an eccentric and reactionary Victorian Member of Parliament, about whom Wharton made a BBC radio documentary in 1954[5] and then a "centenary celebration" the following year.
[7]Writing in The Independent J. W. M. Thompson suggested: As befitted a satirist who was wounded by the changes he observed in his country, he had a profound attachment to the land and a true Tory's nostalgia for an idealised vision of its past.
[8]Wharton consistently criticised and ridiculed what he described as the "race relations industry", and one of his most famous comic creations was the "prejudometer", an anti-racist instrument that supplied readings in prejudons, the "internationally recognised scientific unit of racial prejudice", when pointed at a suspected racist.
Concerned individuals could even point the prejudometer at themselves: At 3.6 degrees on the Alibhai-Brown scale, it sets off a shrill scream that will not stop until you've pulled yourself together with a well-chosen anti-racist slogan.
[9]Wharton was accused in his Times obituary of "sometimes veer[ing] into the area of straightforward racism" and of being- despite his own Jewish ancestry- "prone to anti-semitic innuendo"[10] for such passages as this: Almost single-handed, Ariel Sharon may have ended the Jews' virtual immunity from hostile criticism that Hitler's persecution assured for more than 50 years.
[citation needed] His obituary in The Guardian pursued the same thread: In his comment paragraphs, he aired a conservatism light years to the right of most conservatives, stealing sometimes into fleeting, only half-retracted, laments for the Europe that Hitler's New Order might have created.