This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/29/cavaliers-roundheads-great-telly-bad-politics-nigel-farage-boris-johnson
The article has changed 2 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
Previous version
1
Next version
| Version 0 | Version 1 |
|---|---|
| Cavaliers v Roundheads is great telly but bad politics | Cavaliers v Roundheads is great telly but bad politics |
| (about 17 hours later) | |
| How quickly the leap from entertainment to deadly seriousness can be made. Whatever you think of Jeremy Clarkson, Top Gear, the BBC, or the supposed battle between petrolheads and our old friend “political correctness gone mad”, it is utterly grotesque that Tony Hall, the corporation’s director general, should have received death threats over his decision to sack the presenter. | How quickly the leap from entertainment to deadly seriousness can be made. Whatever you think of Jeremy Clarkson, Top Gear, the BBC, or the supposed battle between petrolheads and our old friend “political correctness gone mad”, it is utterly grotesque that Tony Hall, the corporation’s director general, should have received death threats over his decision to sack the presenter. |
| Hall and his wife are reported to have 24-hour security at home, and I don’t blame them. The border between the plastic emotions of television and the reality of life and death has been scorched into invisibility. How seriously people take the truly trivial. | Hall and his wife are reported to have 24-hour security at home, and I don’t blame them. The border between the plastic emotions of television and the reality of life and death has been scorched into invisibility. How seriously people take the truly trivial. |
| The toxins and passions released by this battle of wills have been extraordinary. What started as a showbusiness saga has become a national psychodrama. It also alerts us to some of the deeper fault lines and cultural stresses that are playing their part in this most geologically layered of elections. | The toxins and passions released by this battle of wills have been extraordinary. What started as a showbusiness saga has become a national psychodrama. It also alerts us to some of the deeper fault lines and cultural stresses that are playing their part in this most geologically layered of elections. |
| Related: Is George Osborne a closet Keynesian? | Related: Is George Osborne a closet Keynesian? |
| Labour is naturally delighted to have opened up a four-point lead after week one – and relieved, too, since the surveys taken immediately after last Thursday’s Sky News and Channel 4 interviews awarded the victory clearly to David Cameron. Yet the divisions in this contest are proliferating into an impenetrable latticework: nationalists versus unionists, humanity versus technocracy, fiscal hawks versus Keynesians, isolationists versus globalists. All these rifts matter, between – and within – parties. | Labour is naturally delighted to have opened up a four-point lead after week one – and relieved, too, since the surveys taken immediately after last Thursday’s Sky News and Channel 4 interviews awarded the victory clearly to David Cameron. Yet the divisions in this contest are proliferating into an impenetrable latticework: nationalists versus unionists, humanity versus technocracy, fiscal hawks versus Keynesians, isolationists versus globalists. All these rifts matter, between – and within – parties. |
| So too, and increasingly, does an ancestral battle, best expressed in the parlour game of Cavaliers and Roundheads. Fans of Sellar and Yeatman will be familiar with the passage in 1066 and All That, addressing “the central period of English history (not to be confused with the middle ages, of course) consisting in the utterly memorable struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right and Repulsive)”. | So too, and increasingly, does an ancestral battle, best expressed in the parlour game of Cavaliers and Roundheads. Fans of Sellar and Yeatman will be familiar with the passage in 1066 and All That, addressing “the central period of English history (not to be confused with the middle ages, of course) consisting in the utterly memorable struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right and Repulsive)”. |
| In most of its manifestations, the battle between Roundheads and Cavaliers has been one of taste and public morality, of aesthetics and sensuality: Roundheads are prohibitionists, Cavaliers are Epicurean; Roundheads count calories, Cavaliers count courses. You get the idea. (I was amused to see the journalist Robert Wright, in a blog on the Top Gear debacle, declare himself “proud to be a Roundhead worrywart”.) | |
| In its 21st-century iteration the battle has been supercharged by two powerful forces. First, the mightiest institutions and professions – the rulers and the rule-makers – have failed us, one after the other: the financial sector and the crash; parliament and expenses; the print media and hacking; the BBC and Savile; the European Union and the euro crisis; and so on. | In its 21st-century iteration the battle has been supercharged by two powerful forces. First, the mightiest institutions and professions – the rulers and the rule-makers – have failed us, one after the other: the financial sector and the crash; parliament and expenses; the print media and hacking; the BBC and Savile; the European Union and the euro crisis; and so on. |
| It is not good for democracy when the political class is so despised, when trust is all but drained from a system based on parliamentary representation. But this has been a fine time for the Cavalier-politician, the solo act such as Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage, to arise as court jester, mocking the system, defying its protocols and conventions, exploiting the fool’s licence to the full and to shore up his power base upon a potent brew of comedy and contempt. | It is not good for democracy when the political class is so despised, when trust is all but drained from a system based on parliamentary representation. But this has been a fine time for the Cavalier-politician, the solo act such as Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage, to arise as court jester, mocking the system, defying its protocols and conventions, exploiting the fool’s licence to the full and to shore up his power base upon a potent brew of comedy and contempt. |
| Johnson stands proxy for everyone who wishes they could get away with a similar policy on cake | Johnson stands proxy for everyone who wishes they could get away with a similar policy on cake |
| Johnson has built his career in public life on breaking rules and defying political gravity. As Cameron observed when the mayor had been stranded mid-air during the London Olympics: “If any other politician anywhere in the world was stuck on a zipwire it would be a disaster. For Boris, it’s an absolute triumph.” Just so. It is not simply that controversy slides off him like Teflon. It actually feeds his popularity. “My policy on cake,” he says, “is pro having it and pro eating it.” Just as Princess Diana incarnated beauty, glamour and empathy for millions who wished they looked and acted like that, Johnson stands proxy for everyone who wishes they could get away with a similar policy on cake. | Johnson has built his career in public life on breaking rules and defying political gravity. As Cameron observed when the mayor had been stranded mid-air during the London Olympics: “If any other politician anywhere in the world was stuck on a zipwire it would be a disaster. For Boris, it’s an absolute triumph.” Just so. It is not simply that controversy slides off him like Teflon. It actually feeds his popularity. “My policy on cake,” he says, “is pro having it and pro eating it.” Just as Princess Diana incarnated beauty, glamour and empathy for millions who wished they looked and acted like that, Johnson stands proxy for everyone who wishes they could get away with a similar policy on cake. |
| The mayor will not be one of the magnificent seven trading rhetorical barbs in ITV’s debate on Thursday. But Farage will be there, on what may be the most important night of the campaign for the Ukip leader: his only formal face-to-face encounter with the PM. | The mayor will not be one of the magnificent seven trading rhetorical barbs in ITV’s debate on Thursday. But Farage will be there, on what may be the most important night of the campaign for the Ukip leader: his only formal face-to-face encounter with the PM. |
| Cameron saw how Farage handled Nick Clegg in their two broadcast duels last year, so the PM knows that what he says will provoke a pub-ready putdown delivered by the self-styled fox in the Westminster chicken coop. Actually, I suspect that in his love of the kitchen, the country and the hearty pleasures of life, Cameron is a Cavalier at heart. He is a friend of Clarkson, with whom he recently joked that Miliband suited an old East German Trabant. But Farage’s job is to present the PM as the captive of po-faced Roundheads: Lib Dems, metropolitan modernisers, eco-miserabilists, PC “commissars”. | Cameron saw how Farage handled Nick Clegg in their two broadcast duels last year, so the PM knows that what he says will provoke a pub-ready putdown delivered by the self-styled fox in the Westminster chicken coop. Actually, I suspect that in his love of the kitchen, the country and the hearty pleasures of life, Cameron is a Cavalier at heart. He is a friend of Clarkson, with whom he recently joked that Miliband suited an old East German Trabant. But Farage’s job is to present the PM as the captive of po-faced Roundheads: Lib Dems, metropolitan modernisers, eco-miserabilists, PC “commissars”. |
| This brings me to the second force shaping the present game of Cavaliers versus Roundheads. I am unimpressed by those who blame everything on “political correctness” or “health and safety”, much of which is simply politeness and common sense. Of course, absurdity creeps into every code of regulation and bureaucratic convention. But the notion that this amounts, cumulatively, to a significant menace strikes me as a delusion. | This brings me to the second force shaping the present game of Cavaliers versus Roundheads. I am unimpressed by those who blame everything on “political correctness” or “health and safety”, much of which is simply politeness and common sense. Of course, absurdity creeps into every code of regulation and bureaucratic convention. But the notion that this amounts, cumulatively, to a significant menace strikes me as a delusion. |
| Still, I have to concede that enough people think otherwise to frame Clarkson’s fate in this context of petty tyranny, as if thumping a colleague so hard that he ends up in A&E were – hey – just one of those things. Full disclosure: I have a minor acquaintance with the presenter and always found him charming and polite. So my private hope was that it would turn out as well as it possibly could for him – tempered by a dispassionate awareness that Hall would probably have to do what he did. | Still, I have to concede that enough people think otherwise to frame Clarkson’s fate in this context of petty tyranny, as if thumping a colleague so hard that he ends up in A&E were – hey – just one of those things. Full disclosure: I have a minor acquaintance with the presenter and always found him charming and polite. So my private hope was that it would turn out as well as it possibly could for him – tempered by a dispassionate awareness that Hall would probably have to do what he did. |
| What still amazes me is that so many are affronted by this pretty obvious implementation of a pretty obvious regulation. In politics, too, there is a growing sense that some – a tiny handful – are mysteriously exempted from the normal rules and repercussions of life. Johnson is treated thus. So, much of time, is the Ukip leader, who postures as the spokesman of the saloon bar and has fused the spirit of rebellion with the manner of a gameshow host. | What still amazes me is that so many are affronted by this pretty obvious implementation of a pretty obvious regulation. In politics, too, there is a growing sense that some – a tiny handful – are mysteriously exempted from the normal rules and repercussions of life. Johnson is treated thus. So, much of time, is the Ukip leader, who postures as the spokesman of the saloon bar and has fused the spirit of rebellion with the manner of a gameshow host. |
| Cavaliers versus Roundheads would be great telly – and that is the point. Increasingly the voters are treating politicians as if they were celebrities. That sounds like good news for the stars of the show, until you grasp the contempt that underpins the change. If we truly make politics a branch of the entertainment industry, it is because we think it is good for nothing else. | Cavaliers versus Roundheads would be great telly – and that is the point. Increasingly the voters are treating politicians as if they were celebrities. That sounds like good news for the stars of the show, until you grasp the contempt that underpins the change. If we truly make politics a branch of the entertainment industry, it is because we think it is good for nothing else. |
| • This article was amended on 30 March 2015 to correct the name of the journalist Robert Wright. |
Previous version
1
Next version