Love and libertines
№ 11 | 14 January 2022
Rather than dedicate this newsletter to love and eros, the disgrace of Boris Johnson has resulted in its theme being ‘love and libertines’. Please read on.
A college dining room, Oxford – photo Simon Mumenthaler (Unsplash)
de conquestu Britanniae
Claudius is a heron in the heat.
He knows the paths of coolness and yet hides
in the glare. Water is a one-way street
where he has vanished, unless he strides
the air’s currents – a chimaera of bird
and badger. The warped emperor stares
at Britain until the strike occurs.
Just when it seemed the country had been spared,
he catches it clambering on the bank
of Ocean; then he preens his car-wash quills.
Claudius was a reflection that shrank
to nothing, in sun and shade – and a bill
always poised. With that millennial beak
Britain gets fished again from sunshot creeks.
¤ Blackwells, Oxford, UK, 2 September 2019
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Predictions and reality
The sonnet ‘de conquestu Britanniae’ was written after the current British Prime Minister took office in 2019. Claudius, the emperor in the above poem, who conquered Britannia in 43 CE, is that Oxford Classics-trained incumbent. Things have come to pass for Boris Johnson just as I predicted in my New Zealand Treasury speech of 30 June 2016. He has cheated the British public over a COVID party and the Ghost of Christmas Past has returned to haunt him.
Johnson is disgraced, and the whole Brexit thing is now a bleak light-of-day choice to do and be what exactly? He has damaged the reputation of the United Kingdom. His sub-Churchillian and Karsch photo impersonations will not make him a fit leader for a period of crisis in eastern Europe.
He was never going to be helped to do ‘alright’ and go out like a light, let alone with lustre and credit. He was never going to become the 1st Viscount Johnson of Bagpuize in the county of Oxfordshire. If a New Zealander could see this, why could the British establishment not see this too? We gave him the benefit of the doubt and hoped, like Claudius, he would come into his own. But he did not.
The danger is that his performance will be taken unfairly as a bad reflection on the institutional capacity of the UK, which promoted itself during the Blair years on its intellectual product and services, and on the formation of professionals.
Through his Principal Private Secretary, Mark Reynolds, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is implicated in this disgrace. The already scandal-embroiled Metropolitan Police is under pressure to act lest it be seen to have protected the illegal event(s) and behaved without impartiality.
Oxford University has been the singular seminary of this disastrous generation for political incapacity. On the same day that the prime minister attempted an explanation in the House, Prince Andrew’s affairs reached a new low in a New York courtroom. There is a problem with moral hazard in the UK establishment.
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Envoi for wicked Lord Rochester
Germaine Greer says the myth does not add up.
Wilmot rises like a ghost in his shroud
and Wicked Lord Rochester corrupts
virgins and minors and draws in a crowd.
The original Scholar Gypsy
down West Oxfordshire lanes, Dr Bendo
in his quack mask, were either too tipsy
or shy, to get caught in delicto.
Watch though these libertine temperaments
not when they appear at love’s assizes.
Theatre may be without accident,
but politics is filled with surprises.
The same rakes who gave Dryden a wallop,
always offers us – blood sweat and bollocks.
¤ Oxford, UK, 29 August 2019
How did he get to be PM?
While Germaine Greer’s attempt to play down the myth of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–80) is the focus of the above sonnet, we live in the age of Jefferey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. It is truly surprising that the libertines have lasted into modern British public life.
Boris Johnson would never pass vetting for a good variety of jobs. He is a libertine who has tried to behave like an 18th century grand seigneur without wealth or independent standing. His family are rootless adventurers. To paraphrase Krishna Menon’s comment about Lady Edwina Mountbatten, he is a ‘vigorous and passionate socialite’. He can be a bad, and lying, although not an evil, man. His tomfoolery has put a limit on the harm he can do.
How did he get to be PM? The only surprise is that anyone is disappointed. Far from providing energetic and creatively disruptive leadership, he has delivered muddle and confusion. He is a recidivist offender like Mr Toad of Toad Hall. He never could be rehabilitated. He never could be managed into statesmanlike respectability. The system overrated its ability to manage or else assist him.
I know these people. I was young with them at Cambridge, and he is strange compared with even his public school peers. He belongs with Prince Ernst August of Hanover and his kind. We are back to the problem of media scrutiny in this country and the turbidly irresponsible culture of the City of London which backed the wrong man, gave him too many benefits of the doubt, and kept an open mind for too long on his vagaries and insolence.
This debacle has broken out at a time of chronic international crisis in eastern Europe. He has conducted himself in such a way as to compromise the British prime ministership.
Would the Queen dismiss him if the Met dare knock at the door? Cressida Dick, the Police Commissioner, has to be careful how she responds. On the one hand, she will be seen as the Nanny Slagg of the Tory Gormenghast, the House Matron of the Conservative Party. On the other hand, she may be thought to have led a soft coup.
On Westminster Bridge – photo Emrah Kara (Unsplash)
Westminster is still tenderised by the Bob Quick and Damian Green and Andrew Mitchell affairs of more than a decade ago. She is a good person who does bad policing at times. Her tactics are often disproportionate.
Yet the public would be wrong to make Downing Street a tit for tat for Dick’s hamfisted Clapham Common protest intervention in 2020 when women gathered to protest about an officer of that same force who had kidnapped, raped, killed and burned a woman. There are constitutional issues to consider, but it is disgraceful that the PM’s negligent and insolent conduct has brought things to such a pass.
No one buys his lie in the House. My wife and I have handled ministers’ diaries and clued-up ministers do know what function or meeting they are turning up at. If not, they should not hold office, especially if NATO is warning of trouble.
Maybe no harm will come of it all. Mark Reynolds looks so much like Sergei Lavrov that perhaps he is Sergei Lavrov. Just as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials has a character who is Lord Boreal in Lyra’s world and Sir Charles Latrom in ours, maybe Mr Lavrov avails himself of a subtle knife.
Perhaps Oxford University should create a Rochesterian Chair in Libertinage or award Boris Johnson an Honorary Doctorate in Persiflage. Johnson’s epitaph is already that he has been the worst prime minister and foreign secretary on record. Even Lord Rosebery, in retrospect, did no damage. Oxford has been the seminary of a bad 80s alumni generation in politics, disappointing on both the left and right.
‘Woke’ is an attempt by younger people to fill the moral vacuum. ‘Cancel culture’ bears a structural relationship to Brexit. Think about it: both are iconoclastic and anti-technocratic movements. Regardless of political affiliations, no one wants an inveterate liar in charge at this time.
Dancing for the sergeant
I conclude with Hungary, not quite on the firing line right now, but close to it. I love Bartók’s music. In his Piano Concerto No. 3 he includes the dance that young recruits to the Austrian army used to perform for the recruiting sergeants to show off their agility and fitness. It has become a folk dance that young men perform in eastern Europe to this day. In Hungary it is known as the verbunkos, or the verbunk dance in countries such as the Czech Republic.
Dancing the verbunkos – photo Magyar Chunsa (Pinterest)
These libertines began just like this: young guys displaying their agility before horizons of war and love. Some end up maimed like Rochester, whom Johnny Depp played so well in ‘The Libertine’. The veterans of war may be profoundly disabled. Some are destroyed in character and mind. Yet many find their way into satisfactory lives.
I do not believe Johnson is a psychopath. But he does have an absolutist temperament and, as Hegel argued, a government absolute and revolutionary that brooks no opposition only finds its limit in death. He was speaking of Robespierre’s Terror but the same goes for any strong-willed leader.
The proof that Johnson is not a psychopath is that he has a pair of brakes. He is an ethically-disabled clown; he and we find his limit in farce and the fig leaf of lies. He had better hope that he can reinvent himself and that the farce finds him a more appropriate course of life, because he faces misery otherwise along with permanent contempt and disgrace. He must dance all over again, and let's see who selects the rogue.
Prince Hal is such a young man in ‘Henry IV, Part I’. In Act II scene iv we watch a role play in a pub taking the parts of Hal’s father, Henry IV and Hal. When Hal plays the king he asks his ‘son’ about Falstaff:
Wherein is he good, but to taste sack and drink it?
The man has to leave the lad behind. The UK right now needs a wise, paternal hardworking Henry IV, or a watchful, wary Elizabeth I.
Circumstances permitting, the next newsletter will take its cue from Bartók and take music for its theme.
Bartók’s Piano Concerto No 3
What are they being recruited for?
Why do those young guys dance by ourselves –
bridegrooms for an impossible war?
This is the mystery the pianist delves.
I can’t help but think the night is talking
amid the keys’ protest and pain, that cloud
is shining grey for a moon-walking
wind we cannot hear. The music is vowed
to Hungary, that much I can tell.
The pond is a membrane trembling and thin,
and death is waiting in the chorale.
What was broken by the bridegroom had skimmed
life all along. The piano severs
fingers and ear. She freed joy forever.
¤ Oxford, UK, 31 March 2021
Now...
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