ANOTHER VOICE

Act II: the bodies return, knife in hand, to destroy their destroyer, King Tony

MATTHEW PARRIS

6 Was it Jung who said. . . ?' is the coward's way out, but the only way I know. As a student I was once assured that C.G. Jung did write the passage I am about to quote, but the claim has proved impossible to verify or correct. Nobody can point me to a text. Maybe, by mechanisms Jung would himself have understood, I have only dreamt that he wrote it, and the sentence has surfaced from my own psyche.

The words are these:

. . . that part of ourself which in youth we suppress for the attainment of any given ambition may come back many years rater, knife in hand, intent on destroying its destroyer.

The idea is intuitively persuasive. Who can claim never to have thirsted for revenge? If we can readily see why one per- son might, for decades, nurse a wish for vengeance upon another for some remem- bered act of brutality; and if we accept (as we surely must) that there can be little more brutal than the crushing of self, then the idea of revenge upon the self follows. On one reading, what else are the ravages of conscience? Conscience cannot be an entirely redeeming, constructive drive, or the guilty would never kill themselves.

Consider the driving psychological forces in so many of Shakespeare's tragedies. For him, anger against self was a potent human drive. Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking, hand- washing 'out, damned spot' is all the proof we need that Freud invented nothing. For Shakespeare, as for all who would write an arresting tragedy, the way men destroy themselves and those they love is more interesting than the way they beat their ene- mies. And always within the plot lie three leitmotifs: ambition, weakness and revenge.

In the case of individuals, then, I think revenge against self is possible. In the case of groups I am certain of it. Jung's collec- tive unconscious, like the individual uncon- scious, is capable of the will to self-harm, driven by anger against self. Groups can hate themselves.

The most striking modern example is the Conservative party. The Baroness Thatcher was assassinated by her own tribe. After the bloody deed they could not, and still can- not, forgive themselves. The violence later wreaked upon John Major, which the party is still directing at itself, was displaced guilt, emerging as self-harm. 'Europe' was never the real target, but only the totem — or why else would the Tories seem gripped by a furious determination to re-invent Lady Thatcher as the uncompromising Euroscep- tic she never was?

In any modern Macbeth, Thatcher is Dun- can, murdered in Act I. And, like Lady Mac- beth, the Conservative party, vexed, restless, still walks in its sleep, washing its hands in the night air, trying to purge the stain.

Throughout Act II various acts of self- revenge have followed. In Mr Major the party was unconsciously looking for a cipher upon which to wreak its hurt. To have selected a new warrior, a Thatcher-substi- tute, as its leader would have spoiled the play, for they wanted a fall-guy, not a hero to torture. In the very act of choosing Mr Major the party was already grooming its penitential sacrifice. For the attainment of a given ambition — the retention of power — the Conservative party had destroyed part of itself: the woman who made them. Now, knife in hand, her ghost within them was intent on destroying its destroyers.

But a play does not work without an audience. Our laughter and tears, our bated breaths and sighs of horror or relief, our understanding, spur the players on. We become part of the play. In political tragedy the audience is overwhelmingly the news media: commentators, cameras and reporters. The groundlings — ordinary vot- ers — hardly get a look in, but we suppose we clap, hiss, cheer and jeer on their behalf. We understand the plot, we share the cul- ture, half-knowing before it happens what must befall the players, willing it to happen — making it happen.

The press has connived in the self-inflict- ed agonies of the Conservative party, not because we are not (many of us) conserva- tives, but because we have a deep sense of the appropriateness of each twist to the plot. We know when to hiss. Our 'look- behind-you's' are part of the action, almost scripted. I do not pretend to know the con- tents of Act III, still to come, but have the strongest presentiment that the guilt is not yet purged.

The Tory Agony is not, however, the only show in town. A new play is winning respectful notices and box-office queues. It is also a tragedy and also involves death in Act I. But in this drama the murderer is a single individual, not a party; while the vic- tim is a whole party, not a leader. This was a massacre.

He has done well so far, King Tony. He and his entourage of courtiers have seemed to put to the sword not just a great arrn of men and women, the old Labour party, but an army of ideas and values too, and pride in 'a century of socialist achievement. Blair has killed history. Or so it seemed as the curtain fell on the end of the last century, and the dawn of Blair's New Britain. When Act I closed, the bodies, it seemed, had been swept away.

So now for Act II, when they begin to return, knife in hand, intent on destroying their destroyer.

I mentioned those leitmotifs of ambition, weakness and revenge. You know about King Tony's ambition — power — but let me tell you about his weakness, for this will prove central to Act II. His weakness has been cravenness. He overwhelmed but never really faced his victims down. He never made the argument against Labour's past, never admitted or apologised for his own complicity, never told us why. His party were marched forward and instructed not to look back on the dead or to try to understand. Victory was his only argument. But strength alone does not draw a line under history. Unconsciously, we, the media audience, sensed as the curtain fell that it fell upon unfinished business, something unresolved.

Ken Livingstone is the playwright's totem for that unburied corpse. We call Mr Liv- ingstone his own man but he is our man and we are building him up. He would have been nothing without the fascinated and adoring media audience upon which he has relied this last year. We know how we want Act II to go: we have seen King Tony's hubris, we want nemesis, and Livingstone could be our instrument of vengeance. And London's, too. Let us hope Mr Livingstone wants to play.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.