Paul Thomas: Masters of vituperation - a monster and a snob

Which deceased, notoriously hard-living rogue journalist wrote of Princess Anne that "her poisonous spittle could stop a camel in its tracks at 20 paces and blind a press photographer for life at twice the distance"?

No, not Hunter S. Thompson. Luckily for the royal family, the Fear and Loathing at Buckingham Palace project was still-born. It was Auberon Waugh, son of the great novelist Evelyn and a figure usually associated with the purple-faced fulminations of reactionary conservatism.

Not one for half-measures, Waugh hailed Anne's would-be kidnapper, Ian Ball, as the bravest living Englishman for being prepared to spend several weeks cheek by jowl with the Princess while the ransom payment and handover arrangements were negotiated.

He later expressed outrage that Anne emerged from the botched kidnapping as a heroine - she was made a Dame Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order - while Ball was bunged in a lunatic asylum.

On the surface Waugh and Thompson had little in common beyond an addiction to cigarettes and alcohol. Thompson was a self-styled hillbilly and outlaw; Waugh had aristocratic connections through marriage, was a practising Catholic and on the surface an arch snob.

Though both men achieved fame/notoriety through the print media, neither was a journalist in the conventional sense of the term.

Their masterpieces - Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; the two collections of Waugh's long-running diary in the satirical magazine Private Eye - establish them as pranksters, virtuosos, spinners of comic fantasies and masters of vituperation.

Their victims would no doubt insist that vituperation is just a fancy term for vulgar abuse. In his autobiography Waugh argued that, in the right hands, "vituperation redresses some of the forces of deference which bolster the conceit of the second-rate; it also prevents the first-rate from going mad with conceit".

Many of the eulogies and memoirs which followed Thompson's suicide revelled in his hilariously incendiary denunciations of various Republican Presidents, notably Richard Nixon. In Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail he laid into Democrats Edmund Muskie (working for Muskie, he wrote, was like being "locked in a rolling boxcar with a vicious 200lb water rat") and Hubert Humphrey ("a treacherous, brain-damaged old vulture") but part of the reason they drew such heavy fire was that they were seeking to deprive his friend George McGovern of the Democratic Party nomination.

Thompson's political allegiance - for a time he was infatuated with Jimmy Carter; and Better Than Sex, his slapdash scrapbook of the 1992 presidential election, features an occasionally unctuous correspondence with the Clinton camp - permeated everything he wrote on the subject and helped to make him a hero to the Vietnam/Watergate generation.

Waugh, however, dedicated himself to baiting that generation. He described his modus operandi as "making the comment, at any given time, which people least wish to hear". The people he was referring to were the liberal intelligentsia.

A typical Waugh sally suggested that "the Yorkshire Ripper" was a tautology. Given that the northern county was so deeply mired in a yob culture characterised by destructive envy and debased attitudes, he argued, it was sufficient to refer to the serial killer of prostitutes simply as "the Yorkshire".

Both men sought public office, Thompson running for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, on the Freak Power ticket and Waugh as the sole parliamentary candidate for the Dog Lovers' Party.

The seat of North Devon was held by Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal Party, who had been acquitted of conspiring to murder a male model who claimed to be his lover. For some reason the hit-man put a bullet in the male model's great dane rather than the man himself. Waugh gained only 79 votes but Thorpe was swept away by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative landslide.

By these and other means, such as his relentless ridicule of the priggish campaigning journalist John Pilger (Waugh invented the verb "to pilger"), he made himself a hate figure to the left.

When he died, aged 61, in 2001, the Guardian's Polly Toynbee ignored the tradition that when writing about a fellow scribe while his ashes are still warm one should find something positive to say about his work and personality. Under the headline "Ghastly Man" she called Waugh effete, drunken, snobbish, sneering, racist and sexist.

Though Thompson was by many accounts something of a monster, especially in later life, Waugh generally charmed those who encountered him in the flesh.

And although the obituarists compared Waugh the writer unfavourably with his father, his brother-in-law the Earl of Onslow applied other criteria: "The difference between Auberon and Evelyn," he said, "was that Auberon was a nice man and Evelyn a shit."

* Paul Thomas is a Wellington writer.