Rosemary McLeod: Scrutinising ourselves

Though I'm wary of nostalgia, a wistful sigh wafted through my lipstick on reading about last weekend's celebration of the chap in London.
Chaps. How one could count on them; how intrepid they were; how jolly; how gallant; how pure of heart; how ready to charge suicidally, sabre aloft, at firing cannons; how rowdily to sing hymns. You could trust a chap to hold your handbag and not scarper with it or share your bed without making unseemly overtures. Did they still exist? They surely belong with The Wind in the Willows and The House at Pooh Corner, compulsory reading in the bewildered colonies where no animals talked, ever, and we wondered why.
It's a long time since the word was in common use, but in England some still cling to it. Every year they hold The Chap Olympiad, celebrating the ideal by gathering in tweed jackets to smoke pipes and twiddle their lustrous facial hair. I gather this applies to women also, who, quite possibly, are indistinguishable.
The Chap's readers have an impressive record of demonstrating against indicators of rot in the world like contemporary art and Prada's insouciant version of the brogue. "Thou Shalt Always Wear Tweed" is the first article of their manifesto, and their observations on camping seem - well - inevitable. They pine for butlers.
Snobby Kiwis used to aspire to being a chap. A bloke I know went far with a hoarse, chappish voice he cultivated so he could pass for British - think Sam Hunt reciting through broken glass - and I bet the Kiwi who's just risen so high in the Murdoch empire, Tom Mockridge, mimics them by now. It's important to pass for a chap there, surely, even if you weren't born in a country house with yokels in smocks twiddling pitchforks and apple-cheeked dairy maids tumbling in the wallflowers. But it's hard to rustle that sort of scenario up in - say - Taranaki or Southland.
A family photograph of an ancestor of mine shows him with an un-named Maori man he must have converted to Methodism, grasping his pith helmet firmly. What a chap he was, right out of an old Chums Annual. Shipwrecked with his family, he had the presence of mind, his daughter recalled, to say something like: "On your knees, children. We shall shortly be in heaven." Instead they were rescued by Norfolk Island convicts. God must have adored his sang-froid.
There were such certainties for those fusty old chaps, so innocently confident. I envy them, especially now that we're watching the British establishment, which forged their unique eccentricity, suffer a huge ethical quake. We may think the chap generation was hypocritical, silly and blinkered; maybe it was; but it was spared our all-out cynicism. It had to take a massive shake on the Richter scale for odious Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler, to be free to declare his professional morality superior to Rupert Murdoch's and for him to have a point. The women bearing their pink bits for Flynt get paid for what they do and sell their own privacy knowingly, unlike the possible thousands of people who've allegedly had their privacy invaded, without their knowledge, for Murdoch's publications.
There'll be uneasiness in other media, despite the current orgy of schadenfreude and the thundering sermons journalists are delivering on moral integrity. How often do other newspaper executives and publishers cuddle up with politicians? Do we always respect the rights of individuals to privacy? How far are we justified in going when we pry into celebrities' private lives?
Looking back, it seems to me that the uncritical recording of powerful current affairs broadcaster Paul Holmes's first wedding's guest list, which included then Prime Minister Jim Bolger, was an indicator that some lines had become blurred. Crises like Murdoch's, which has felled two of Britain's top cops, and could yet down its prime minister, start when we fail to scrutinise ourselves, not other people.