FRANK JOHNSON
David Blunkett and knock down ginger: there are no easy answers
DAany newspaper readers might not believe it but there are still some aspects of 'Blunkett-Quinn' that have not been gone into enough. Saturday's Daily Mail under the heading 'Why Home Secretary had police sent to his lover's home' reported that: 'Mr Blunkett asked police to launch an investigation after Kimberly Quinn complained that boys from a local primary school had been playing "knock down ginger" — the practice of knocking on doors and running away — at her West End home.'
Could this be true? Not the practice of knock down ginger, but Mrs Quinn's believing that a home secretary could do anything to stop it? Mrs Quinn is American. She perhaps did not realise that knock down ginger is a tradition among horrible little British boys, which nearly all of us male British adults once were. Were it not for his disability, Mr Blunkett is the sort who would have been an enthusiastic player of knock down ginger in his Yorkshire boyhood, perhaps even was. Possibly the error which Mrs Quinn made was the error which some women make when they take up with a powerful man — the failure to realise that, especially in Britain, hardly anyone is as powerful as all that. There comes to mind what must be the only ironic or self-mocking passage of dialogue in all the work of Cecil B. De Mille. In his 1934 Cleopatra, Claudette Colbert, in the title role, huskily assures her mighty lover, played by the now forgotten Warren William: 'Oh Caesar, together we can conquer the world.' Caesar replies: 'Good of you to include me.'
Mrs Quinn: 'Oh David, together we can end the scourge of knock down ginger in all Mayfair.'
The Home Secretary: 'I'll do m'best, luv. Fixing y'nanny's visa is one thing. But there are limits to my powers, tha knows.'
The Mail reported that, nonetheless: 'The headmaster of St George's primary school in Mayfair was told by the officers that the Home Secretary had complained about the boys' behaviour on behalf of a friend.' The headmaster, Mr Lothian, must have been amazed, or impressed, that the problem was such as to need the Home Secretary's direct intervention, especially since his is a Church of England school which, like most Church of England schools, is over subscribed. The Mail quoted a 'source close to Mr Lothian' as saying that the headmaster thought it 'amusing that the Home Secretary was involved in boys pressing a door bell and running off'. Amusing, eh? The Home Secretary will see about that once the issue comes to Cabinet.
Perhaps Mrs Quinn expected Mr Blunkett also to make one of his tough statements 'cracking down' on the problem: 'I am determined to ask Parliament for new powers to enable me to confront the issue of knock down ginger which is part of the yobbo culture at Church of England schools in our inner cities, much of which is drug-related. Living in Mayfair is tough enough for young mothers. Some of them live on Caesar salad alone.'
To which the shadow home secretary, David Davis, would ritualistically reply: 'Once again Mr Blunkett has talked a big game. This time against the number of offences of knock down ginger committed against ordinary people getting dressed to attend earlyevening PR drinks parties. But the figures show that, under New Labour, the number of cases has risen in areas like Mayfair.'
Still, Mrs Quinn's now-famous Filipina nanny at the time told the Mail that after the policemen went to the school, the problem stopped. So what do Mr Davis and the Tories say about that, eh? Will they give credit to Mr Blunkett where credit is due? I doubt it.
There is one other unanswered question concerning the knock down ginger scandal. The Mail quoted a Home Office spokesman as saying that the matter involved 'shouts of racial abuse at Mrs Quinn's Filipina nanny'. This appears to be further proof that these days the best way to get the police to act is to say that racism is involved. But later in the story the nanny herself is quoted as saying: 'When I confronted the children at the front door they called me a racist. They were white and black.'
So who racially abused whom? On the face of it, the black knock down ginger player could claim to he the victim. Sir Alan Budd's inquiry could resolve all of this if only its remit were wider.
Another matter which has not received enough attention is the suggestion that a Home Office official was present when Mrs Quinn told Mr Blunkett that she was ending their affair, and wrote the appropriate minute. The facts, as with much connected with the whole subject, are disputed. In some versions the official, or officials, were not in the same room, but somehow lurking nearby.
But the precedent for literature is interesting. What if posterity had only Civil Service minutes as accounts of great partings such as, say, that of Dido and Aeneas? In Virgil's somewhat tabloid version Aeneas tells Dido he must dump her, and run the risk of being accused of being a love rat, because Apollo of Gryneum had 'commanded me to claim the great land of Italy. A good Whitehall minute would have Aeneas 'indicating that their relationship would end on his departure for a ministerial visit to Rome for the purpose, with Cabinet approval, of founding that city and its subsequent empire.' Aeneas would have preferred that to Virgil's intrusion into his private life. But guilty politicians always distrust us independent writers.
Finally, there is the light thrown on the origins of the phrase 'turbulent priest'. It is suggested that an over-zealous official, rather than Mr Blunkett, ordered the 'fast-tracking' of the nanny's visa application, in the way that over-zealous knights acted in the matter of Archbishop Thomas Becket on hearing Henry II's purely rhetorical question, "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" Andrew Marr, on the Today programme, was one of those who used the phrase in relation to Mr Blunkett and the visa.
Many of us must have wondered as to the origin. The use of it in the present case suggests that it entered our language because it was part of the official explanation for Becket's sudden end. Some Alan Budd of the day, whom Henry had appointed to look into the disputed facts of the case, reported: 'There is no evidence that his Majesty had any knowledge, still less ordered, that the Archbishop's death should be fast-tracked.' At least Blunkett-Quinn has led to the explanation of something.
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