Former British Prime Minister John Major's admission last week of an early-90s extramarital affair with Thatcher-era Cabinet minister Edwina Currie has knocked the Iraqi matter off the political front pages in Britain. My immediate take was that it's just the latest example of a moralizing conservative politician getting a deserved comeuppance at the hands of his own hypocrisies. For an American report on the scandal, here's the New York Times: News of Liaison Recasts Bland Image of Britain's Major. For a British, here's the BBC: Politics stunned by Major affair.
And for a wholly insightful account, here's some very fine writing by a mailing-list acquaintance of mine, Ian Crisp, who lives in the bucolic environs of Good Easter, near Chelmsford, in Essex UK. With his kind permission, I quote:
There's a side to the Curried Major story that our own media haven't
made much of, perhaps out of sheer embarrassment over their own record.
They got his image totally, completely, one hundred and ten percent
wrong. Not only the serious media and the red-tops but the comics and
satirists and political biographers and, well, everybody. Major was the
grey man, the faceless personalityless man who always wanted to please
everybody and seemed to be whatever the last person he met wanted him
to be. He was the ultimate nerd, a man with no soul, no backbone, no
"bottom", and certainly no charisma. All that fitted perfectly with his
dull, characterless voice and boringly pedantic phraseology - the
impressionists all picked up his over-reliance on "not inconsiderably",
but he gave them plenty of excuse for it.
Steve Bell, the Guardian's brilliant political cartoonist who writes
about drawing Major in today's paper, gave him Aertex Y-front
underpants worn over his grey suit - a wonderful image of a would-be
superman not just failed but not even having a clue how to lift himself
above the utterly ordinary. "A metaphor for uselessness", Bell says.
Now we find that when the Conservative party and government were falling
apart with sex scandals on all sides -- David Mellor, Tim Yeo, Steve
Norris and other lesser names now forgotten -- the biggest and most
brazen adulterer of the lot was right there at the centre, pretending
incomprehending shock and bafflement at the storms raging all around.
He should have been an actor - he might have been a great one. A kind
of Alec Guinness in reverse. Guinness was an ordinary-looking and
faceless man with a gift for playing exceptional and flamboyant
characters; Major, it now turns out, is a rather colourful character
with a gift for appearing the exact opposite.
So perhaps the hidden message of the scandal is this -- we like to
believe that our investigative media now lay bare the innermost truths
of anybody in public life with surgical precision and total disregard
for any human feelings in pursuit of the truths that their victims
might prefer to keep unknown; but it is not so. Two government
ministers - one of whom would rise to become Prime Minister and the
other who never forgave her lover for failing to maintain his patronage
after the affair was over -- had a four-year and apparently very active
affair while going about their public duties, and neither the people
nor their bosses nor those whose job it is to ferret out such things
had any idea about it. Even though Major's marriage went to the very
brink of divorce, with lawyers involved. If Currie hadn't told the tale
in her diaries, in all probability they would both have gone to their
graves silent and the truth would never have come out.
So how much truth about anyone do we really know? Is all the openness of
the last few decades real at all, or are the true lives of the high and
mighty as private and well-guarded as they ever were, just hidden under
a different and more subtle kind of obfuscation? Does the "free press"
really do the job it claims? Major claimed he wanted a "classless"
society, but perhaps this story shows that we still have a huge class
divide - between those whose privacy is always open to the media if
they want to break it, and those who are able to control what is known
about them, no matter what.
What can we believe? Are Blair and Brown really best friends? Is Anne
Widecombe really anorexic? Is Yasser Arafat secretly Jewish? Does Bill
Clinton really _smoke_ cigars? Is Saddam Hussein a man of peace? After
last weekend almost anything seems possible, and it's even harder than
before to know how to know what to believe.
-- Ian Crisp
