(12) Wardi

The Cambridge Apostles is an elite quasi-secret society at the University of Cambridge—so named because it originally only had twelve members; and, indeed, it remains a small select club—though not as select as it once was. The club recruits on a discreet basis; historically, it invited potential members, embryos, to social events unconnected to the society and then confidentially assessed them for membership. The club was originally modelled on the Freemasons, as I am unsurprised to report.

Refreshment, so they say, once consisted of coffee and sardines on toast (called “whales”)—as the Russians say, the fish rots from the head down; and the whales long ago rotted away to nothing. In the 1900s, Ludwig Wittgenstein was tapped for membership—Bertrand Russell doubted he would get on in the club. At the time, “unlike in Russell’s day”, it had become the preserve of homosexuals—a situation orchestrated by Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes. When an attractive Hungarian count joined, the sexual ecstasy was so intense that several members wanted to take him right there on the proverbial rug from which Apostles spoke.

Strachey specialised in high bitchery; his most notable work, Eminent Victorians, picked apart the heroes of his parents’ generation—he was a socialist like Keynes, father of the welfare state that endures to this day, and both connected into the Bloomsbury Group; and, in many ways, Britain is still “forever Bloomsbury”—just Bloomsbury on toast forever. Two generations on, the Apostles proved influential in the recruitment of the Cambridge Spies—the elite intellectual head of British life was Marxist. The events that took place in this twelve-member society were far more important than the number of people who were Communist militants—and more important than all the student rioters in ’68. Ultimately, these were the people who provided the ideas for British society; they ran the show and set the context—and it is their context we live in today, the feminised world created by a homosexual cabal.