“It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya, that caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn’t.” The author of these lines, P.G. Wodehouse, understood a thing or two about humour. Written seventy years ago, his wit sparkles on, undimmed. 

The maestro also knew a thing or two about politics. This is strange, for few of his nearly one hundred novels, short stories or plays betray more than a nodding acquaintanceship with the great upheavals of the 20th century. Enquiring deeper, the connoisseur will find that his eternal creation, Jeeves — the discreet, silent, valet-cum-butler extraordinaire — was named in honour of a popular English cricketer who died on the Somme in 1916. The subject himself, in a post-1945 volume, admitted to his employer Bertie Wooster that he had “dabbled somewhat in the Commandos” during the Second World Conflagration. 

Wodehouse thereafter lived in exile on Long Island

War and turmoil are there, lurking in the background, if successfully banished from much of his writing. Sadly, Pelham Grenville (forenames he hated, so adopted the moniker “Plum” instead) was naïve. Loafing professionally in France when the Wehrmacht knocked on his door for tea and crumpets in 1940, he and his wife were interned as enemy aliens. In 1941, Plum agreed to record five broadcasts to the USA, then neutral. Entitled How to be an Internee without previous Training, they comprised playful anecdotes about his experiences as a prisoner of the folk in field grey. I’ve read them. They are rib-tickling and harmless, and his American readers lapped them up. Alas, his British fan club took a different view. 

The devotees of Bertie Wooster, Reginald Jeeves, the Earl of Emsworth, Sir Roderick Glossop and Co. were at first stunned, then vexed and finally branded the poor author a traitor. Although a post-war MI5 investigation exonerated him, a hurt Wodehouse thereafter lived in exile on Long Island. Fortunately for us, the flow of humour continued unabated, but Plum’s hard-earned Knighthood for conjuring up the essence of Bottled Englishness was long delayed until the New Year’s Honours of 1975. He died soon after, on St Valentine’s Day, aged ninety-three.

This lapse of judgement was all the more extraordinary given his ability to spot a scoundrel at one hundred paces. Threats to the serene, ordered nature of English society in which he resided — indeed helped to create — were few. In Wodehouse’s Garden of Eden, there is a definite hierarchy of earls and aunts, bishops, baronets and young blades, stationmasters and policemen. 

The majority of his tales are set in country houses, replete with conservatories, libraries, gun rooms, stables and butler’s pantries. Letters arrive by several posts a day, telegrams by the hour. Trains run on time from village stations. Other than the pinching of policemens’ helmets, there is order and serenity. Necklaces are filched, silverware is purloined, butlers snaffle port, chums are impersonated, romances develop in rose gardens, but nothing lurks to fundamentally reorder society. 

There was one exception. The object of Wodehousian scorn was the moustachioed leader of Britain’s black-shirted Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet. A fencing champion at school, dashing war record in the Flying Corps, and a Member of Parliament, he was the recipient of an inherited title, with a family tree that stretched back to the 12th century, a country house and a Mayfair residence. In Wodehouseland, Mosley is transformed into the equally aristocratic Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup. 

Plum was intolerant of even the vaguest of threats to the established order of things. He voiced his dislike of Spode through Bertie Wooster, likening the fascist leader to one of “those pictures in the papers of dictators, with tilted chins and blazing eyes, inflaming the populace with fiery words on the occasion of the opening of a new skittle alley”. Plum focussed his gaze on the Spode/Mosley moustache, which was “like the faint discoloured smear left by a squashed black beetle on the side of a kitchen sink”, describing its owner as “one who caught the eye and arrested it”.

The proto-dictator appeared, thought Wodehouse, “as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla but had changed its mind at the last moment”. Every reader would have known it was Mosley in the crosshairs, because Spode was the leader of a fascist group called the “Saviours of Britain, also known as the Black Shorts”. The transition of attire is because, as another of Wodehouse’s masterful creations, Gussie Fink-Nottle, observed, “by the time Spode formed his Association, there were no black shirts left in the shops”. 

A different Wodehouse character warned, “Never put anything on paper … and never trust a man with a small black moustache.” Indeed, anyone “whose moustache rose and fell like seaweed on an ebb-tide” was best avoided. Plum could have been referring to Mosley or Hitler. The former, as leader of Britain’s real-life black shirts, was an unashamed admirer of the latter, and he interned in Holloway prison during the war. Afterwards, as an advocate of what we today would call Holocaust denial, he moved to Paris where he died in 1980. His political journey was interesting. Mosley started as a Conservative, drifted leftwards into the Labour Party, then further left into his own independent party, which evolved into the right-wing British Union of Fascists. 

Modelled on the Italian and German fascist movements, Mosley and his supporters came to believe that “Jewish interests commanded commerce, the Press, the cinema, dominated the City of London, and killed British industry with their sweatshops”. Fascism lurking in the upper classes troubled Plum Wodehouse so greatly that Spode and his Black Shorts appeared in five of his works between 1938–74. 

Imagine my surprise, when last week, Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup, stepped out of the fictional tomes of Wodehouse and onto the front page of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the person of the real-life Prince Heinrich Reuss of Greiz. The tweed-clad prince was among twenty-five men and women suspected of plotting a coup d’état in Germany. Yes, even in that settled country, the personification of order in central Europe, Fate had been quietly slipping lead into the boxing-gloves. 

“But wait,” I hear you say, “Germany is a republic. Didn’t they abolish all the kings and princes?” They did, in 1920. But the aristos twisted the arm of the new Weimar administration and arranged that their four grades of title, Fürst (a non-royal Prince), Graf (Count), Freiherr (Baron) and Ritter (Knight) became part of their surnames. Our Heinrich is merely a noble with no status and technically Mr Heinrich, Prince Reuss. His ill-fitting tweeds, too, have been widely criticised. Wodehouse would have described the Fürst as “loosely and comfortably clad in a creation which might have been built by Omar the Tent Maker”.

As leaders of the Reichsbürger (“Citizens of the Reich”) movement, the Prince and his pals were up to no good. They had, we are told, a cunning plan to attack the Reichstag in Berlin and declare Heinrich the new King and head of state. At first glance resembling a Schnapps, Stollen and cucumber sandwich lawn meeting of the local Brandenburg Beagles, the Reichsbürgers have problems with the legitimacy of the German state after 1918. Their intention, through their coup, was to wind back the clock and install a new Kaiser, in succession to Wilhelm II. 

The prince is from an old noble family; his House of Reuss has been going forever, with all its male heirs confusingly named Heinrich. The senior ancestral tree died out with Heinrich LXXII (72nd, I kid you not), Prince Reuss of Lobenstein and Ebersdorf, Knight of the Order of the Black Eagle. He was the last of his line when he expired in 1853, like a minor Beeching branch railway. The one currently under the microscope is regarded as a scion of the junior, or cadet, branch and is merely Prince Heinrich XIII. His heir (naturally Heinrich XIV) describes the Royal Pretender as “confused. Since childhood, he was captivated by the imperial scene and expressed antisemitic views, of how he believed a Jewish elite hold power in Germany”. Spode reincarnated.

Coups are more prevalent than you might think

In true Plum style, the Prince seems to have absent-mindedly accumulated an assemblage of country houses and a hunting lodge in Bad Lobenstein in East Thuringia, where his arsenal of pikes and crossbows for the state coup was allegedly stashed. However, Jagdschloss Waidmannsheil (a sort of warrior’s summer house, built for No. 72) is no mere shooting lodge. Conjure up in your mind a neo-Gothic miniature castle, sprouting a tower and battlements, adorned with a forest of antlers, and you’ve nailed it. A Wodehousian earl, bishop or butler would have felt quite at home there. It is also, when you think about it, just the sort of place where you would plan a putsch. However, all is for naught. Heinrich’s Reichsbürgers must be feeling, in the words of the master humourist, as “one of Tolstoy’s peasants, when after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city reservoir, he turns to the cupboard, only to find the vodka bottle empty”.

The Reichsbürger Affair (which isn’t the title of a Sherlock Holmes short story but should be) seems pure Wodehouse. Presumably his butler’s stiff upper lip may have twitched slightly at the news, and the old retainer might have “coughed that soft cough of his, the one that sounds like a sheep clearing its throat on a distant mountainside”. Meanwhile Heinrich’s redoubtable relatives, if not actually disgruntled, have gone on record as being far from gruntled. 

I am perhaps in danger of making light of Heinrich and Co., but the upper middle class miscreants of noblemen, lawyers, teachers and soldiers arrested in eleven of the sixteen German states included some pretty unsavoury, Spode-like brawlers, bent on armed skullduggery. At the mention of coups to my German friends, they (to cite another Wodehousism) “shudder from stem to stern, as do stout barques, when buffeted by strong waves”. They even have their own word for one. A putsch is Swiss-German, meaning a sudden violent blow or shock. Wodehouse might have suggested the surprise was not dissimilar to being struck across the face by a dead fish. Putsches were introduced into standard Fatherland-speak via reports of unrest in 1830s Zurich. 

They travelled into English usage with coverage of the Berlin uprising of January 1919, when a widespread strike was taken over by a bunch of armed Spartacists (particularly fanatical Communists to you and me). In response to the capture of newspaper and post office buildings, the Government, which had scuttled over to Weimar to avoid the violence, employed ex-army Freikorps troops to put down the putsch, killing over 100 Spartacists in the process. The following year, in March 1920, Herr Wolfgang Kapp and a gang of behelmeted right-wing supporters also attempted to overthrow the by-now-weary-of-armed-revolt Weimar administration. They, too, failed. 

Three years later, an Austrian former corporal attempted the same trick in Munich. It was another misfire, although the net result was that its author penned a turgid account of his beliefs whilst in jail. Let us hope Prince Heinrich XIII is not similarly moved to take up his pen. In 1944, more German aristos, led by Claus, Graf (Count) von Stauffenberg, tried again. Historians now assess this was the last of forty-two plots against Hitler. Yet, the 20 July putsch nearly succeeded. It was certainly the most important, leading to the deaths of around 5,000 opponents of the regime. 

Perhaps it is significant that there is no precise word in English for an attempted violent and illegal overthrow by a small elite. One might be smug and observe this is because “we don’t do them”. But I’ll attack that view in a moment. A coup d’état, literally a “blow of state”, originated from Continental Europe in the early 19th century. The English-speaking press revelled in using a French phrase to describe the murderous excesses of their neighbours. Yet, France’s citizen government was actually achieved by a Revolution, which is something different again. 

Legitimate governments are overthrown by a few in a coup, but by many, usually over a more protracted period, in a revolution. Modern etymology of this business of hijacking state power has further come to distinguish a failed coup as a putsch. They are more prevalent than you might think. Experts who dabble in this sort of thing have concluded that there were 457 coup attempts from 1950 to 2010, of which 227 (49.7 per cent) were successful and 230 (50.3 per cent) were not. There have been a further 58 coups and putsches in the last twelve years. Sometimes you wait for months, then two arrive on the same day. 

Such was the unusual occurrence on 8 December, when news of the German putsch broke. The excitement in the Fatherland quite overshadowed that which came from Peru. In far-off Lima, President Pedro Castillo, in the wake of many allegations of corruption and shortly before a vote of no confidence, announced he was cancelling the constitution and seized power. The army, police and Congress took a different view. After Pedro’s three-hour putsch, Castillo discovered he was an ex-president. Perhaps dreaming of becoming Pedro I, he was marched off under arrest, at roughly the same time that Heinrich XIII was being escorted into German state custody. 

These two attempts at fleeting glory are some of the eight coups mounted around the world this year. Last year there were six, including Myanmar and, of course, Washington DC. Whatever you make of the facts as we know them, the events of 6 January 2021 conform to the historical typology of a coup. It further demolishes the smug view that the English-speaking world “does not do them”. On this occasion, it did, although our German brethren might label it a putsch because it failed in its aim. 

My Berlin friends claim “this Reichsbürger business has already blown over”, probably out of sheer embarrassment. Yet, if we’re honest, it wasn’t a coup or even a putsch. It was merely the date on which a bunch of cranks with the potential to become very dangerous, whom the state had been watching for years, were arrested. It can’t be denied that “Putsch in Fatherland led by Prince” made for great news headlines, though.

Coup fever was inflamed by the Coronavirus lockdowns

As my friend the journalist Katja Hoyer has reported recently, this outbreak of coup fever was inflamed by the Coronavirus lockdowns of 2020–21. For those who believed the world was being controlled by sinister elites, the measures undertaken to restrict the spread of Covid-19 seemed to confirm the presence of an international cabal running our lives. As people were forced to isolate, many became mentally insular and their paranoias of other groups out to get them intensified. This seems to have been the case with Vladimir Putin, who did some hard thinking about the West and decided he had to act in the Motherland’s interests. In February, he launched an invasion, preceded by a coup in Kyiv. Heinrich XIII and his Reichsbürgers, too, seem to have felt compelled to translate their obsession with the German monarchy into political aspirations. 

Of course, there were more complicated reasons behind the German putsch. The Reichsbürgers are not one grouping looking back to the past, but many. Some are monied eccentrics who issue their own passports, driving licences and postage stamps. Most tend to be socially disadvantaged males aged around fifty, who live in the former East Germany. The older generations of Ossis (Easties), who have never made their peace with the Wessis (Westies), are awash with financial immigrants from further East (mostly Russians) and refugees. They are poorer, too, and uncomprehending of free market economies, claiming that Western capitalism has failed to deliver for them. The region is a happy hunting ground for Afd (Alternative für Deutschland), Germany’s fifth largest political party, with whom there is considerable overlap. 

The net result is that attempted coups, especially in the “settled” Western heartlands of Germany or the USA, are good news for Vladimir Putin. Political unrest in France and the United Kingdom falls into the same category. All these nations possess their fair share of right-wing politicians who are more pro-Putin than they should be. In the context of Ukraine, first invaded in 2014, anything that sows dissent and dilutes the Western diplomatic response, financial sanctions and military aid is good news for the Kremlin.

Plum Wodehouse attacked intolerance and extremism through his humour. He would have been horrified to have discovered a Roderick Spode in the 21st century. To borrow one of his many pen portraits, he might have “groaned slightly and winced, like Prometheus watching his vulture dropping in for lunch”. Or, to borrow another, perhaps he would have “felt like the man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg”.

At least we have his books. During these long nights, made longer and colder by the energy crisis, I am thankful I can dive into the World of Wodehouse. You should, too. With Plum’s honed poetry, it is even permitted, if not compulsory, to laugh out loud on public transport — when it is running. For I am confident that Jeeves and Wooster and the aunts and earls will remain to tickle us in dark moments, long after the Reichsbürgers and the Putins have faded like a bad dream.