DIARY
The Reverend Barry Shucksmith, of Cosham, Hants, in an interesting letter in the Daily Telegraph, points out that God allowed King David to remain in office, despite that monarch's having committed an adultery that led to murder and cover- up. Mr Shucksmith concludes: 'Almighty God will determine the outcome for Mr Clinton.' Most of us had assumed that Congress would do so. If it is to be God, is that good or bad for the President? God's handling of the King David scandal looks good for Mr Clinton. God is not up for re- election. He does not have to listen to focus groups. He can do the unpopular thing. But what is the unpopular thing from His point of view: to forgive Mr Clinton, influence things on earth so that the President stays in office, and appoint him to heaven in due course? Or to punish him, either by forcing him out now, or later consigning him to eternal torment in the Lower House? We just do not know enough about the power structure in heaven to say. Constitutionally, God is omnipotent. But there must be the heavenly equivalent of one of those news- paper graphics of 'top aides' or 'key play- ers' who will supposedly decide Mr Clin- ton's fate. You know the sort of thing: `hardball Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin', or 'ball-breaker Attorney General Janet Reno'. Will God seek the advice of `German-born, kick-ass reformer Martin Luther', or of 'unsmiling John Calvin, archi- tect of the hardline predestination policy'? Mr Clinton, and his top aides, must be hop- ing that someone like Mother Teresa must by now have become a key player up there. So there's all to play for, or, if I were Mr Clinton, and the author of that Daily Tele- graph letter is right, all to pray for.
Ihave never known a crisis in which the mood changes so often. One moment Mr Clinton's position looks hopeless; the next, he seems to be surviving. After Mr Clin- ton's fateful August television address, and after senators of his own party started pub- licly attacking him while he was in Ireland, we were told: he may be doing astonishing- ly well in the opinion polls, but wait till the American people read the Starr report's sordid details. Then they'll turn on him all right. The report came out just as I was going to the opera. In the interval, the friends whom I was with said that they thought the performance so awful — it was the English National Opera's new produc- tion of Verdi's Otello — that they could stand it no longer. They were going off for an early dinner, and then to watch News- night. I could join them to catch the end of the latter. I had a suspicion that, if Starr had not been the rival attraction, they would have stayed the production's gru- FRANK JOHNSON elling course. I arrived in front of the screen for Newsnight, expecting a President facing certain impeachment. One of my friends greeted me with a relieved cry of, `He's bouncing back' — relieved because she is one of .the many who believe that hardly anyone deserves to be so publicly humiliated as Mr Clinton is being. In the BBC Washington studio, a young man who was formerly a 'top aide' to vice-president Dan Quayle, and a young woman who was some sort of Republican apparatchik, were baying for the Presidential blood. But the politicians — people who have to be elect- ed by the public which had been so lenient towards Mr Clinton — were much more cautious. The reason was obvious. The instant opinion polls were showing that, contrary to what we had been told, despite the Starr report, or perhaps because of it, the public was still lenient. But by the time my words here are read, the polls may make it safer for the grave, impartial law- makers to condemn the President again. Henceforward, Congressional expressions of outrage, or forgiveness, must be regard- ed as poll-driven. In a few days, we shall know what is being said by the private focus groups run by both the President and his potential impeachers. We shall know by the tone of the latter politicians. Nowadays, whether Democrats, Republicans or Blairites, Anglo-Saxon politicians are elect- ed and re-elected by agreeing with their 7 was there, Mr. Stan; he did inhale.' electors. No Edmund Burkes they. I am therefore beginning to hope that Mr Clin- ton survives in office, though I could change.
Some years ago, there was a fashion for telling 'urban myths': stories, preferably macabre, which had a worrying plausibility but which may or may not be true. There was, it may be remembered, the one about the ashes of a loved one and a powdered soup, which were posted to the same address at the same time. The soup was lost in the post. The letter saying it was being sent was not. The recipients wrote back a letter of thanks for the delicious soup, which was of course the ashes. This week I was told of a South African incident which sounded the perfect urban myth. A Cape Town hospital became worried and baffled that so many patients on one particular life- support machine tended to die on Friday mornings. They started checking the machine on Fridays. It seemed perfect. Then it was discovered that a certain clean- er who went in on Fridays was, for purpos- es of hoovering, removing a certain plug. Perhaps it is true.
In the audience for Diana Rigg's Phedre, I pondered a question which I have asked myself ever since I became enthused about Racine by Lytton Strachey's advocacy of him in Landmarks in French Literature. Why is the line C'est Venus tout entiere a sa proie attach& considered so great? Not just the greatest line in Phedre, but in all Racine; usually the only line of his which Anglo-Saxons remember, in so far as they notice Racine at all. Phedre, it will be recalled, has a guilty love for her stepson. In the line, as I understand it, she is saying that the goddess of love has attached her- self to her as if she were the goddess's prey (proie). A vivid image, but I would not have thought one expressed with such vividness as to justify the line's fame. Miss Rigg per- forms Phedre in Ted Hughes's new version. Our Poet Laureate renders the line: 'Venus has fastened on me like a tiger.' I am not denying the Frenchman's general magnifi- cence, or his psychological truth for all time, Venus having seemed to have fas- tened on to Mr Clinton pretty tout entiere. Perhaps we have to see the line in the con- text of the rest of Phedre's speech. My question is not rhetorical. I really would like some reader to put me right. Other- wise, because of that attachee, I shall con- tinue to think of the line as the sort of thing one sees when the eye strays on to the French while reading the instructions that come with an electrical appliance — ours not being a great age of tragedy.
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