Johnson is obviously desperate to be compared to Churchill. He’s written a whole book about Churchill just to get himself in the same Google search, and he goes around making portentous statements in a phlegmy voice. And, to my mind, the Bear/Otter business is a pretty clear echo of the fact that Winston and Clementine Churchill referred to themselves as “Pig” and “Cat” in the letters they exchanged. I’m sure that’s what Johnson’s got in mind. It’s pitiful. He’s like a dark age chieftain dressing up as a Roman emperor.
The news that Johnson may even bring his Churchill fetish into the linking room when linking with a friend is fascinating. Previously I’ve thought his attempt to appropriate the image of arguably Britain’s greatest prime minister, and a totemic figure among Tories for all that he was for many years a Liberal, was merely crass and cynical. But now I feel it’s sincere. He really genuinely thinks he’s like Winston Churchill.
To him, perhaps it seems uncanny. The tubby maverick charisma, the rhetorical exuberance, the journalistic background, the infectious sense of fun (by which, to be clear, I do not mean that either man spread venereal disease). Of course, Winston only went to Harrow, had less hair and never hosted Have I Got News for You, but then you’d expect the reincarnation to be a slight upgrade. “Why aren’t more people saying I’m like Winston Churchill?” I can imagine Bear grunting to Otter.
The reason this interests me so much is that it’s a rare glimpse of the real Boris. His whole shtick increasingly seems fake and disingenuous: the crazy hair, the crumpled clothes, the photo on the zip wire, the hesitant, twinkly, donnish speech pattern. There’s something undoubtedly likable about his demeanour, but what passed for refreshing a few years ago now comes across as a manipulative, if skilfully given, performance. He’s so deliberately foolish it feels like playing into his hands to call him a fool. Who is this person in the clown suit, capering closer and closer to the centre of power, somehow profiting from every gaffe and betrayal? It’s easy to flip straight from dismissing his gormlessness to fearing the genius within.
So the discovery that he actually believes himself to be of Churchillian greatness is a relief. It diminishes him in a way his shuffling gait and scuffed shoes no longer can. If he looks at his own political record – of opportunism and cheap populism, of shameless inconsistency and promises disregarded without a qualm – and genuinely says to himself, “That’s very much like what Winston Churchill did,” then we can all relax because it turns out he’s a massive idiot.
Winston Churchill had deep flaws and did some terrible things, but there the similarity to Boris ends. Ultimately, Churchill saved the world, and Boris is a glib chancer motivated by vanity and lust. If anything, he’s more like James Bond.
7
No Artex Please, We’re British
Getting to the bottom of what makes the British give a shit – which, come to think of it, is the bottom.
“We are exceptional. It’s important to know that we are different,” former British Museum director Neil MacGregor said about Britain last week. “We are a very unusual society. We are trying to do something that no society has really done.” Get off the fence, Neil! Are you for Brexit or against?
He wasn’t talking about Brexit. I mean, he’s bound to be against, isn’t he? If Neil MacGregor is pro-Brexit, then all bets are off and it probably turns out David Attenborough has a personalised numberplate and Paris Hilton collects toby jugs.
Brexit wasn’t what he was talking about. He was speaking at the launch of his Radio 4 series Living With the Gods, an artefact-led programme on the A History of the World in 100 Objects model which charts “40,000 years of believing and belonging” through the beautiful and wacky items we humans have fashioned over the centuries – Zoroastrian tiles, mammoth-ivory lion gods, John Paul II bottle-openers that play a tune, etc – to honour whatever impossible things any given culture was in the habit of believing before breakfast.
Religion, then. MacGregor believes that in western Europe, and nowhere more than in Britain, society is extremely unusual because it really doesn’t have an overarching shared religion. “We are trying to live without an agreed narrative of our communal place in the cosmos and in time,” he said. “Our society is, not just historically but in comparison to the rest of the world today, a very, very unusual one in being like that.”
That sounded quite grand. I was impressed with us. Ooh, get Britain! Living without a shared religious narrative! All cynical and dubious and sceptical and multicultural – getting through life without any agreed view regarding the undisprovable void that lies at the end of it. It felt valiant and pioneering and futuristic, like the Crystal Palace or Concorde or trying to get by without owning a printer.
Is it true, though? To me, Britain in the early 21st century feels normal, not unusual. Then again, it’s the only society I’ve ever lived in, apart from Britain in the late 20th century, to which it displays striking similarities. Though there’s less striking.
But it certainly doesn’t seem very religious. Many people are religious, but it feels like an opt-in. It’s a not-particularly-unusual quirk about a person, like an allergy or a nose ring or CAMRA membership. “Is it a family thing?” you ask, hoping so, as that’s a less unsettling explanation than “No, it’s a something-I’ve-concluded-in-my-head thing,” which advances the unavoidable implication that they think you should have concluded it too.
Personally, I haven’t definitely not concluded it. I always say I’m agnostic because I’d like there to be a God – a nice liberal one – but I can’t be sure there is, and the idea of regular religious observance unnerves me because it would be unusual in my peer group. Not a very well thought-through philosophy, I know. But in the absence of family or societal pressures, in a context of almost complete religious freedom, many of us rely on similar back-of-an-envelope answers to eternal questions, because adopting the answers thousands of full-time ponderers have come up with over thousands of years feels like squandering that freedom.
It’s strange. We live in a world of increasing and intensifying specialisation and industrialisation. We don’t grow our own food, make our own furniture or cut our own hair; some of us don’t even plan our own parties or select our own music collections. Yet more and more of us, maybe most of us, cobble together our own belief systems in spare moments while holding down other jobs. And it all leads to vacuous assertions of being “spiritual” and record sales of wind chimes and yin–yang tea towels.
But is it, as MacGregor claims, very unusual? What about all the communist countries of the 20th century? They were avowedly atheist, while Britain ostensibly has a state religion. Then again, communism fulfilled the role of a religion – it was an “agreed narrative”, publicly at least. And I suspect more conventional religious observance is at a higher level in those places post-communism than it is here.
What about America – the land of the free and constitutionally guaranteed religious liberty? I don’t know why I even bothered posing the question. It’s clear that being religious, and predominantly being Christian, is still the orthodoxy there. Even the Simpsons go to church; it’s quite a big part of their lives and it’s absolutely not represented as odd – everyone seems to go except Apu. In a British comedy, someone becoming Christian might be a storyline, but there would never be an assumption that everyone is.
So I think MacGregor must be right. And that really is massive. An enormous deal has been made over various significant changes in the UK over recent decades: decimalisation, joining the EEC, leaving the EU, privatisation, Aids, etc. I even remember a bit of a flurry when they closed down Ceefax. In comparison, our collective slide, in a historical heartbeat, from being a religiously orientated country, like every other human society there’s ever been, to the first one without a shared religious standpoint has gone unmarked. There wasn’t even a leaflet.
Only a bigot would deny the advantages of freedom of religion, and irreligion, and of a society in which the evidence of science, and com
parative lack of evidence of God, is no longer suppressed. It’s a development that’s both caused by and causes greater understanding, justice and compassion.
But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t cost us something. The vast majority of humans throughout history have grown up in contexts where questions like “Is there a God?” and “What happens when people die?” were answered with the same confidence with which a teacher today would explain gravity, and those answers were reassuring. I know in my heart that had I been brought up in such a setting – say, in Anglican Victorian England – I wouldn’t have quibbled with those answers and would’ve been comforted by them. I’d have puffed away on what Karl Marx called opium and felt enormously relaxed.
To change so quickly from a society where most people took comfort from the establishment telling them, loudly and clearly, that death is not the end to one where many proclaim that it is, and few are totally convinced otherwise, will have had an incalculable impact on our state of mind. It’s not a development I regret, but it’s a more persuasive explanation than smartphones or commuting of why we feel so stressed.
* * *
On Halloween 2018, I wrote a column. It was published four days later.
Look, it was Halloween when I wrote this, so of course it’s about Halloween! Maybe you’ve forgotten, but it was inescapable back then (at time of writing, now). Pumpkins, plastic spiders and spray-on cobwebs everywhere. Everyone changing their names online to include more “ooo”s, or to otherwise rhyme with the clichés of terror. A fascist winning an election in Brazil. It’s a weird time.
OK, I know it’ll probably blow over. You, in the near yet unimaginable future, may no longer be living in a society obsessed with the trappings of horror. But that’s not how it feels. It feels very, very Halloweeny at the moment, and I think it’s incredibly patronising of you to start bonking me on the head with your hindsight stick from the broad sunlit uplands of the day before a Catholic terrorist gets burned in effigy. Suddenly that’s fine, is it?! Watching his face crackle to bits while you sip your outdoor soup, you hypocrites?!
The reason I’m so nervous about Halloween is that the Church of England is taking it very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it has reportedly sent out “a pack” to churches. I haven’t seen the pack, but apparently it aims to encourage children towards more wholesome alternatives to the ghoulish darkness of Halloween.
“As Christians, we are rightly uneasy about the celebration of the dark side of life,” says Mary Hawes, the C of E’s national children and youth adviser, in the pack. “But folding our arms, putting on a disapproving face and being negative is unlikely to woo families away from what they see as a harmless bit of fun. Too often, Christians are perceived as killjoys, rather than those who are living life in its fullness.”
So how do you kill the joy of Halloween without looking like a killjoy? Easy! You replace the dead joy with better, nicer, lighter joy! Instead of trick-or-treating, for example, Ms Hawes suggests that “groups of children dressed in hero costumes, along with responsible adults, [could] take treats to the houses in the community, including a card with a simple illustration and Bible verse”. And instead of a Halloween party, have a “saints party”: “Invite everyone to come dressed as a saint. Have saint-themed activities and food, and tell the stories of saints across the ages.”
On the face of it, these sound like the lamest ideas since the Amstrad E-mailer, but think about it: a child dressed as a saint meekly coming to the door and handing out biblical quotations? That’s terrifying – that’s like an actual ghost. It’s going to scare people infinitely more than fluffy werewolf costumes and chocolate-smudged sheets with eyeholes – and probably slightly more than a looming 15-year-old wearing a pumpkin baseball cap (so that, in theory, it’s not a mugging). Similarly, a party where stories of the saints are told is bound to be heavily agonising-death-themed. Suddenly all the plastic bats seem quite bland.
But I don’t think Ms Hawes’s intention was to spice up Halloween with spine-tingling reflections on the savage martyring of the faithful or centuries of tragically high child mortality rates – although our uncomfortable sense of the proximity of the innocent and the horrific, of the pure and the tainted, of the holy and unholy is absolutely where Halloween sprang from. The eve of the sacred festival of All Saints’ Day was when evil spirits, and ancient pagan phantoms, were believed to enjoy a last big knees-up (or wings-, claws- and tentacles-up) before the saints came marching in – a night of anarchic riot notwithstanding the omnipotence of God.
The pack’s aim certainly wasn’t to return to that light and shade, or to assert that the devilish, just as much as the sacred, is squarely within the ecclesiastical remit. People don’t distribute packs in order to restore nuance. And this is clearly a particularly unnuanced pack: it accepts at face value the fact that Halloween is ostensibly about darkness and nastiness, and then suggests it would be better if it were replaced by something about lightness and niceness.
For example, the holding of “light parties”. This is an idea from the Scripture Union, the director of which, the Rev Tim Hastie-Smith, said: “In stark contrast to all the scary costumes and a focus on darkness, we can provide something different, an alternative that reflects the light of Jesus and shows love to our communities.” The archbishop of Canterbury described this stultifying prospect as “a more exciting celebration” and “a real gift to parents and children alike”. A real gift to people who say Christians are boring, more like.
This scheme may be well meaning, which is presumably why the usually wise and insightful Justin Welby felt constrained to support it, but it’s idiotically simplistic and, therefore, a complete waste of time. Halloween isn’t really about anything nasty at all. It’s not even primarily about spookiness. It’s about the big in-joke of affecting spookiness, the collective adoption of cartoonised versions of traditionally negative imagery, purely because it’s fun and it makes a change and it’s something to do.
Obviously, the retail sector massively eggs us on because it can make some money out of it. But why not? The thing that’s been commercialised was never a wholesome festival of joy, like Christmas or Easter or even St Valentine’s Day. It used to be grim and superstitious; now it’s lighthearted and chocolatey.
Lightheartedness is the key. A house near mine has been decorated for Halloween. It’s mainly cobwebs and fake spiders, but they’ve also put up some police incident tape. It amused me because of the juxtaposition of the two very different, conventionally horrifying things: spiders and violent crime. One’s more cartoonish than the other, but I liked how they’re brought together by the Halloween aesthetic and I’m not worried that the householders seriously think spiders are evil or that crime is trivial.
Fundamentally, Halloween is a humorous reversal. We take bad, frightening or horrific things and treat them as if they’re good because it’s a funny thing to do. That’s not a step into genuine darkness at all. It relies completely on a shared moral compass.
* * *
Where do you stand on farts? Sounds like a set-up for a joke – the sort a Californian tech giant’s AI software might crack in an attempt to emulate its human creators: where do you stand on farts? You cannot stand on them for they are gaseous. “Stick to equations, Joketron 3.2! You’re even less funny than Joketron 2.7!” “Joketron feel shame. Joketron crave intoxication yet has no consumption port. Joketron go back to writing poems about imprisonment.” “And you’ve stopped using pronouns again! I don’t know why I bother! Pass the sushi and money.”
The reason an artificial intelligence entity might make a joke about farts is that, in its analysis of human culture, it will have noticed that farts are supposedly funny. So my question is: are they really? And my answer is, yes. I say they are. Some people think they definitely aren’t, but there’s something in the intensity of their rejection of the notion that there’s anything at all amusing about the little rectal eruptions that, to my mind, just makes them funnier.
So perhaps the main reason farts are funny is that some people don’t find them funny. If everyone did, they would cease to be. Consensus would take all the fun out of it, like if we all wanted Brexit. For many Brexiteers, a key part of the appeal, and a significant mitigation of the negative economic consequences, must surely be how furious it makes all the stuck-up metropolitan Remainers like me. And yet the Leavers show no gratitude for the extent to which we’re enhancing their fun.
The reason I’m inspecting the entertainment credentials of the fart is that the Victoria and Albert Museum is considering adapting its copy of Michelangelo’s David so that it makes a farting noise whenever anyone walks past. This would be part of a “takeover” of the museum by the Beano as a celebration of the comic’s 80th anniversary. The information comes from a leaked memo on the subject written by the museum’s festival manager, Sophie Reynolds. Other ideas include adding comic illustrations to the case containing Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook, and a display of catapults. Personally, I think those proposals could do with farting up.
Anyway, it’s all in the planning stage, and we’re not really supposed to know about it yet. But it seems unlikely that this unauthorised spurt of news was released by a fart fan, as all the reports of it come accompanied by scathing words from someone “familiar with the memo” who considers it “crass and pathetic”. “Frankly, some of the things in this memo are disgusting,” this person told the Daily Mail. “While it’s important to encourage children to visit, farting statues are definitely not the way to do it.”
Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy Page 17