Is the former ambassador a shit, a cad or a rat?
The bad behaviour of Sir Christopher Meyer, former ambassador in Washington, raises interesting questions of nomenclature. Should he be called a shit, a cad or a rat? I rather rule out rat as being tabloid-speak, and Meyer, though he has a lot to do with tabloids (as chairman of that humbugging body, the Press Complaints Commission), and actually flogged his memoirs to one, is not himself tabloid material, being dull and colourless. The Sun and the Mirror often refer to men who deceive their wives as ‘love-rats’. How do they refer to a red-haired tabloid editor who gets drunk, beats up her tough-guy actor husband and spends the night in a police cell? The answer is that they simply kill the story.
Leaving rats aside, for the time being, is Meyer a shit or a cad? I recall Evelyn Waugh debating this point in the case of Tom Driberg, who did odd jobs for MI6 and the KGB, and double-crossed both. Waugh and the Old Cottager had been at Lancing together, an academy, curiously enough, also attended by Meyer. Very high church, its principal feature is its enormous Gothic revival chapel, which I have often glimpsed on my way to Brighton, though I never attempted to inspect it more closely, the odour of Anglo-Catholic sanctity being disinfectant. Driberg was much interested in arcane theology, and gave my History of Christianity a learned review. I often saw him at Muriel’s Bar but declined his invitation to ‘come up to my flat so we can talk about the Gnostics’. When Waugh posed the question: ‘Is Driberg more of a shit or a cad?’ he answered: ‘Of course, he’s both.’ Muriel had her own term for Driberg, a ‘cuntie’, but it was Winston Churchill who had the last word on him: ‘He brought sodomy into disrepute.’ Cad is a useful term, not much employed nowadays. More’s the pity, as there are plenty around. Meyer is a cad because he betrayed the confidence placed in him, as often happens when a man is overpromoted. Tony Blair thought the world of him at one time and lived to repent at leisure, as often happens with a too-trusting PM. I don’t think cad comes from cadet, as some dictionaries claim. It is an old coaching term for an unhooked passenger who joins the stage at the last moment or mid-journey at a low fare, the coachman pocketing the cash without telling the owner. That is what happens in Way Out West, Laurel and Hardy’s best talkie, when they hail the stage three miles from Brushwood Gulch, get in and proceed to annoy a nervous lady who turns out to be the wife of the local sheriff. From its original meaning the term, by one of those inexplicable twists beloved of English, was applied to the first ticket-collectors and thence to conspicuous plebeians with a smart turn of repartee. Etonians used it for louts who tried to rough them up in the High Street, and Oxonians to townees. Thence it became a rebuking epithet for young men whose conduct was notoriously below that expected from their particular class. It is, strictly speaking, incorrect to apply it to anyone not a gentleman before his fall from grace, so perhaps it doesn’t fit people like Meyer.
Calling a man a shit also implies déclassement, but less so. The Oxford English Dictionary says ‘not now in decent use’ (when was it?) and quotes its first printed occurrence, in 1508: Thou art/ A schit but wit well.’ It implies underhand, disloyal, mean-minded or morally disgusting behaviour, not so much breaking the Ten Commandments as breaking them in a low-down way. D.H. Lawrence uses it in a letter he wrote in 1921: ‘They are both such abject shits it is a pity they can’t be flushed down a sewer.’ On inquiry the two people he referred to were Martin Seeker, whom I knew well when he was an old man and who always struck me as a person of probity and charm, though I never had dealings with him as a publisher, and a person called Heseltine — not the present one, though he certainly qualifies for his smug assertion that one way to become rich is to pay as late as possible (a disgusting practice I myself suffered from when he owned a magazine called Town). Whether Lawrence was a reliable judge of’ what constituted a shit is a matter for argument, since most people at the time would say he was one himself, in spades.
The year after Lawrence wrote this intemperate letter, E.M. Forster sent another one, containing the sentence: ‘Most Indians, like most English people, are shits.’ But to lump something like a billion people together in castigation is simply to devalue the term. Moreover, Forster implies women can be shits also, which I think wrong, though the OED disagrees, quoting a sentence from a novel by J.L.M. Stewart: ‘She was a thirdclass harlot who made up for it by being a first-class shit.’ Incidentally, this employment of first-class is a good example of antiphrasis, that is, use of a word in a sense opposite to its proper meaning: a first-class shit is more of a monster than a second-class one, though what decent fellow in his senses would relish being degraded to a third-rate shit? Some would say Forster himself was a shit, both for saying that ‘I hope I would have the courage to betray my country rather than my friends’ — this apropos of the Burgess-Maclean business, for Heaven’s sake! — and for popularising the phrase ‘Two cheers for democracy’. Actually, I think of Forster not as a shit so much as the quintessential ‘man in the dirty raincoat’, having seen him once thus arrayed, about to embark on an evening’s cruising. He was on the steps of the Reform Club but his destination, I think, was Soho.
I would welcome comment from readers about what to call Meyer, not least from Americans, since these terms do not have precisely the same meaning across the Atlantic. Thus a rat, for them (in unionspeak), is what we would call a scab. And I treasure a sentence from Sinclair Lewis’s Cass Timberlane, ‘The sort of male once described with relish as “an agreeable scoundrel” ... could now be referred to as a louse, a stinker, a rat, a twerp, a crumb or a goose.’ Makes you think, eh?
There remains the problem of how to punish a fellow like Meyer. Ideally he ought to have his knighthood removed. But I can’t see Tony Blair, who is happily without malice or vindictiveness, proposing such a step, or the Queen agreeing if he did. Her Majesty is inexplicably supine when it comes to protecting the purity of the fountain of honour. I recall a conversation with Eddie Shackleton when he was chairman of the Honours Scrutiny Committee. This was set up after the big honours scandal in the last days of the Lloyd George coalition, when Maundy Gregory was flogging knighthoods and peerages in return for cash contributions to George’s election fund. I complained to Eddie that the sale of honours, in return for payments to party coffers, was worse than in L.G.’s day. He said: ‘I quite agree, but when we protest we get precious little support from H.M., I can tell you. Not interested.’ Things have got much worse since then, and the chief honours broker, unlike Gregory, is himself a peer. But the Queen does nothing, so no hope there. When dealing with twerps like Meyer probably the best solution is to follow the advice of Lord Chesterfield: ‘Upon these delicate occasions you must practice the ministerial shrugs and persiflage.’
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