I shall never forget a large painting that I saw in a gallery in Bruton Mews in the 1960s. A corpulent middle class personage was depicted, horizontal and in mid-air (wearing a bowler hat, was he?) while an adjacent pedestrian, crouching slightly, clapped her hand to her mouth in covert derision. The title was, I think, "Fat Gentleman Falling down in the Street." Figures, right? The artist-my daughter tells me he was Michael Andrews-had turned a pedestrian event into a symbol of the abrupt decline, if not quite yet the fall, of a bourgeois.
This week, in the Cromwell Road, on the way to Sainsbury's, I became the belated lookalike of the capsized burgher. As a constituent of Sir Nicholas Scott, I was, I suppose, honouring the style of a miglior fabbro. However, since I was wearing a thick sheepskin coat and several layers of insulation, I landed without fracture in the patch of ice which had been camouflaged as an innocent puddle during the temporary thaw. Adrenaline, and a helping hand from my unsmirking son Stephen, saw me across the road. I imagined, as one always does, that I had escaped injury. Strangely enough, I had that morning been glancing at a volume of John O'Hara short stories (don't believe them when they say he is no good) and the one I had chosen, admittedly not among his best, began with a man falling in a winter street, apparently without heavy consequence. Some 20 pages later, he is dead. I am merely prostrate, with flu en suppl?ment.
Stephen had just returned from Val d'Is?re, where he had seen a woman get out of the coach which had brought her to the resort and immediately slip on a patch of ice. She fell painfully, whereupon her ten-year-old son began to laugh hysterically. The father pointed out that the boy's mother was seriously hurt, but his son was incapable of abating his laughter, even after an advisory claque. The report of this uncontrollable whinnying gave new validity to the painting I saw 30 years ago and seemed to make its subject less the upending of dignity than the difficulty of not rejoicing in it.
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there seems as little doubt about the outcome of the general election as there was that Bill Clinton would be re-elected. It is generally assumed that the American people voted for him because the economic situation was so bullish that the incumbent president had only to survive in order to prevail. Sleaze and suggestions of sexual misconduct were, it was maintained, "insufficient" to unseat him. I should be surprised if they did not add to his majority. The electorate likes a bit of a shit, though it will never admit as much. Did not Disraeli's supporters once come to him with the news that octogenarian Palmerston had been caught in pleno flagrante with a lady while staying at Windsor Castle? They pressed Disraeli to challenge the old reprobate to an immediate general election, to which Dizzy is said to have responded, "What, and have him sweep the country?"
Regular new revelations of the late President Mitterrand's duplicities have carried his posthumous popularity to such heights that, if dead men could run, he would cruise home in 2002. No poll will ever discover what dosage of villainy an electorate prefers in a candidate, but unmitigated merit is rarely an asset. When the Athenians ostracised Aristides because they were sick of hearing him called "the Just," the earliest democrats were quick to see that too much gravitas lends popularity to banana skins. When even Tony Blair goes out of his way to say that John Major is a decent fellow, it suggests he knows that Major the Decent may be a title as fatally flattering for the prime minister as was Aristides's for the Athenian.
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the difference between a presidential election and a general election on the British model is said to have diminished almost to vanishing point. There is, it seems to me, little truth in this. In a presidential election the margin of victory is a matter of temporary interest. Nothing like the same thing will be true of the general election. The Labour party, of course, insists that it can govern equally well with a small or a large majority, but will it? When I asked that familiar figure A Prominent Frontbencher what would happen if Labour had a 200 majority, she said, with altogether too instant modesty, "We won't." But they might, might they not? In which case, despite the careful grooming, not to say castration, of the candidates, a large number of Labour MPs will have neither government office nor the prospect of it. Party history suggests that it would not be long before some neo-Aneurin gathered a group of fundamentalists and agitated for real socialism. The same thing could, of course, happen if the majority were to be very small (say less than 20), in which event Ken Livingstone, unless prudently siphoned off into penitential office (Northern Ireland might serve him right), could elect to revive the gospel according to Scargill. If you favour social democracy, do not imagine that a huge majority for Labour will provide it. Biffen's dictum about the dangers of landslides, which earned him a banana skin from The Lady, applies even more keenly to tomorrow's left than yesterday's right.
