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I HAVE to admire our Prime
Minister who, in his indestructibility, has proved a combination of the
Victorian boys’ comic character, Spring-heeled Jack, James Bond and the
great escapologist, Houdini. No matter how much danger he is in of losing
high office, ethical credibility, the moral high ground and the chance of
VIP holiday freebies, with one bound he is free of blame, as pure as Snow
White and with a grin that could either represent triumphant innocence or
suggest - wrongly, of course - a banker who has just found a foolproof
embezzlement scheme.
Give Teflon Tone his due, he is not boring. His
period in office has been like a trip on a roller-coaster, full of cabinet
intrigues and counter-conspiracies, clashes of will with our revered iron
Chancellor, dossiers, dodgy or otherwise, war and regime change, not to
mention - but I will - Cherie’s house-purchasing adventures and shopping
for second-hand goods on the internet.
It has all been for this
reeling realm altogether too stressful. What this country needs, in my
breathless submission, is a period of restful boredom, its placid and
prosperous affairs guided by a prime minister, perhaps like Sir Anthony
Eden, who, although he gave us the Suez episode, was said to be not only
boring in himself but that he bored for Britain.
I was
never socially introduced to him but, at a Conservative rally in Edinburgh
in the 1950s, he graciously ignored me at the press benches as he made his
way to address the big blue battalions.
I ADMIRED him, not only
because of his sartorial elegance - "the best advertisement the Fifty
Shilling Tailors ever had," according to Labour luminary Michael Foot,
almost always dressed as the last loser in a sack-race - but also because
his speeches were often masterpieces of the mundane, carefully crafted
with clichés and honed to banal perfection with a plethora of platitudes
delivered in the over-ingratiating manner of an ex-public schoolboy trying
to sell encyclopaedias at the front door.
True, he effortlessly created
a yawning gulf between himself and the reeling realm, but he was still
regarded by the British, always suspicious of brilliance in politics, with
some affection as a man not too clever by half. Of other prime ministers,
Clement Attlee was, in conversation, terse and stilted and on the cusp of
being boring, and was once described as sitting "hunched and looking like
an elf just out of its chrysalis".
Stanley Baldwin, who, it is
said, decided to make politics dull and succeeded beyond his most sanguine
expectations, was nevertheless described as being "half Machiavelli, half
Milton", while Neville Chamberlain, who led Britain reluctantly into war,
had a flat, not to say, boring speaking style, described by Aneurin Bevan
as "like a visit to Woolworth’s - everything in its place and nothing over
sixpence".
IN ANY case, I admire skilled and irrepressible
bores. To be expertly bored is, in my grateful view, a mind-calming escape
from reality, the verbal equivalent of aromatherapy, hypnosis or
tranquillisers.
In my good-listening life, I have had the privilege
of been talked at by grandmasters of the craft who probably operate under
the rules of the Board of Boredom Control, people whose words, like the
mills of God, grind slowly and, of course, surely, and others who sweep
interruptions aside like matchsticks swirled in rain-swept gutters.
I believe
that Britain’s boring potential is underused in this high-powered,
hyper-tense world and that National Health Service clinics, staffed by
experts in boring skills, could soothe stressed patients into restful,
word-induced slumbers from which they would emerge with a new zest to face
constant nerve-wracking challenges at work, rest and play.
Pardon my
approving yawn while I recall that British and American sociologists,
leading a backlash against excitement, launched several years ago a
learned periodical called the Journal of Mundane Behaviour. Devoted to
extolling the ordinary and playing down the extreme, the journal has
included articles that examined banal and tedious conduct on a global
scale. One, on shaving, explored how "masculinity as a gender construct
and a politicised tool of identity formation is presented through facial
hair".
Marvellous. A new boring day may be dawning to
soothe this frenetic and fearful planet. The humdrums are beating out
yawnder. Ennui go - to another Eden perhaps. |
