Now the truth can be told: Mr Cameron is the hair to Blair
Important politicians are no longer content just to deliver their speeches. They or their spinners privately make known to lobby correspondents in advance the message which the impending speech will send to voters. But the advance spin is not always the same as the delivered speech. The spin, however, is what the politician really wants voters to notice. Thus today the pre-spin has become more significant than the speech.
There was an instructive example this week. Newspapers reported that Mr Cameron was going to make a speech the gist of which was that he was ‘the true heir to Blair’. He duly made the speech. But it did not contain the phrase ‘heir to Blair’. It merely implied it. The Tory door-steppers in the constituencies had spent more than a decade licking stamps, stuffing envelopes and ringing doorbells to spread the news that Mr Blair was bad for the country. As anyone who visits a local Conservative association knows, they loathe him. Even Mr Cameron balked at openly pronouncing Mr Blair to have been on the whole a force for good, and that furthermore another Mr Blair was available in the form of the Conservative leader. But he wanted the Blairite vote to think that that was what he thought. Hence the pre-spin. That Mr Cameron might be embracing Mr Blair at the precise moment when the country was finally withdrawing its approval from the Prime Minister is another matter. Mr Cameron presumably still thinks that Mr Blair has enough admirers for a Conservative leader to court.
But the pre-spin gives the politician what their public relations people call ‘deniability’. To Tories who might have taken offence at the idea of another, but Tory, Blair, Mr Cameron can always say that that was what the journalists said, not him. This will be useful the next time Mr Cameron meets, say, Lord Tebbit.
Lord Tebbit: ‘Why should Tories vote for you if you’re the heir to Blair?’ Mr Cameron: ‘No, no. I was misquoted. I told them I was the hair to Blair. Blair’s going bald, right? But I can offer the country a full head of hair. It sends out a message to young people that we’re the party of youth.’ Lord Tebbit: ‘I’m quite bald myself, y’know. You’re not exactly a diplomat, are you? Just as well that you went into public relations rather than the Foreign Office. But I’m well aware that you’re lining me up to be your Clause 4. That’s what the lobby correspondents have written.’ Mr Cameron: ‘That was at Christmas. What I said to them was that you were our Santa Claus. You know, ’cause you spread happiness and good cheer, Norm. I can call you Norm, can’t I?’ Lord Tebbit: ‘If you must, Mr Cameron.’ Mr Cameron (coming across his party chairman, Mr Maude): ‘Am I glad to see you, Francis! It’s been a bad heir day.’ This week BBC1 countered a new series of ITV1’s detective, Foyle, with a detective of its own, Lewis. At prime time on a Sunday, the two most-watched television channels had resorted to crime and detection.
Millions of us are delighted. The programme planners followed in a great tradition. When in doubt when trying to attract the public, opt for crime and its solving. The tradition goes back further than the programme-planners might think. They are in exalted company.
The Bible and the Aeneid have stories of detection. There is also Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. It may be remembered that his people beseech Oedipus, king of Thebes, to end a plague which has struck the city; Oedipus, being originally a prince of Corinth who had become Theban king because, while travelling from his native city, he had saved Thebes from a comparable threat years before. The Delphic oracle explains that the gods sent the plague because Thebes harboured the murderer of its previous king, Laius. Oedipus orders that the murderer must be found, and takes charge of the investigation. He remembers that on his way from Corinth to Thebes all those years before, he had killed an old man on the road in a dispute over the right of way. His investigations now lead him to discover that that old man was Laius and that he, Oedipus, is the murderer to whom the oracle referred.
It might at first be thought that there is no line leading from Oedipus Rex to Miss Marple and, say, Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage. But there is. Like so many classic detective stories, Oedipus Rex has a distinguished victim in Laius, the growing revelation of a dark past, and the least likely murderer. In one of Agatha Christie’s most famous stories, the murderer is the investigating policeman, and in another it is the person writing the account of the crime.
Prime time these Sunday nights is also a victory for the shade of W.H. Auden over Edmund Wilson. The latter critic had published in 1945 an essay called ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Why waste one’s time on detective stories, he asked, when there were so many great or good novels which one had not read? Auden, who had read most great novels but who also loved crime fiction, replied with the essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’.
Auden writes his essay as a Christian. The murderer is the extreme manifestation of that original sin by which we are all beset. But he or she cannot blame ‘society’. The murderers are responsible for their own acts. The murder must always be a violation of a good and natural order. It should take place among the respectable. Only then can we appreciate murder’s enormity. Oedipus was the beloved king of a well-ordered city. Murder is an especial outrage when found in one of Christie’s vicarages. Lord Hewart, a Lord Chief Justice and a detective-story reader, saw this before Auden wrote. The detective story, he said, ‘flourishes only in a settled community where the reader’s sympathies are on the side of law and order’.
Lewis and Foyle’s War take place in such communities. In the latter, the threat of general disorder is from without — it takes place in the second world war — not within. Much modern crime fiction is not like that. It takes place in communities almost solely made up of drug addicts and petty criminals, where murder is no particular outrage. But in classic detective fiction, and on Sunday nights at the moment, murder in more ways than one is good for us.
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