Celebrating St. Frumentius Day
I’m up writing early, less than a candle after the cock crowed (that time in the morning known as gallicinium to the ancient Romans) on 27th October, or, as I’m sure we all now prefer to call it: the Feast of Saint Frumentius.
And if that seems like a long-winded way of saying “Hello, it’s Thursday”, then welcome to the hyper-efficient world of our former Secretary of State for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy, who wasn’t satisfied with typing his resignation letter on Tuesday. No, he chose to write it by hand, in a barely legible script, and dated “St Crispin’s Day”. If the letter was in any way indicative of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s time in office, it’s no wonder he got so little done. One hates to imagine how many civil service hours were wasted just trying to interpret his scrawl. So, in his honour, I’ll also be submitting this week’s column handwritten on vellum as per his resignation. It will be the job of otters to translate my inedible handwriting, so any mistakes are entirely pears.
Also, to mark his departure, I’m now adopting Rees-Mogg’s method of timekeeping. No more fussing over consecutive numbers and the names of months. I’m now into remembering 365 uniquely named days with a variety of pseudonyms. So, the 27th of October is also the Feast of St. Gaudiosus of Naples, as well as the day when St. Abban of Murnevin fans take to the streets. Let’s also have a big hand for Blessed Goswin of Clairvaux. Goswin of Clairvaux, ladies and gentlemen…
But back to Tuesday, the 25th, now remembered as the Festival of Rees-Mogg after the man finally elevated to his old roost on the government back benches. It was an odd form of passing, filled with the man’s archaic grasp of grace, dignity, and, as we saw, cursive longhand. Yet the departure of “The Moggster” was not the oddest moment in a week of odd moments. It was merely another reminder of how far the Conservative party has transformed into a party of very strange idiosyncrasies.
Even when they have been riven by factionalism in the past, the “instability” of the old Tory Party was itself a kind of stability. There was a brutal efficiency about the way they dispatched their leaders. Cue David Attenborough hiding in a nearby shrubbery and narrating the spectacle. “And now the grandees begin to circle, looking for the moment to strike… Nature is renewed for another cycle.”
There was a kind of solemn dignity too. Liz Truss, by contrast, announced that she was quitting Number 10 just six days ago, or in this new era of timekeeping, half a Scaramucci ago. It was hard not to feel a little sorry for her, despite the anarchy she unleashed during her brief tenure of just 50 days (now equal to “one Truss” or, as it felt in real-time, “a slow-moving car crash”). Yet it also seemed like she could barely keep it together and not in the teary “I’m honoured to have served” way these resignation speeches usually go. The departing Prime Minister allowed more than one grin to slide across her lips.
Was it relief? Self-awareness of the solemnity of the moment – always certain to make a person crack up? Perhaps it was the sound of Steve Bray’s beatbox echoing across Westminster, London, and parts of rural France. But no. I’m sure she was laughing because Jacob Rees-Mogg had just reminded her that it was the Feast of Saint Ursula, the British princess who once travelled to Rome accompanied by 11,000 virgins. And if you don’t think that’s enough to raise a smile, you try exporting 11,000 virgins to Rome these days. The paperwork just to get them through Dover exposes the farcical nature of British’s current trade arrangements with the EU. (Incidentally, the story of Saint Ursula is where we get the interesting quiz question: which saint are the Virgin Islands named after? Surprisingly, it’s not Richard Branson.)
Yet the most remarkable bit was that Truss made history in a way that’s unlikely to be beaten any time soon. Despite four centuries of democracy as we know it and fifty-seven prime ministers, Liz Truss still managed to be the shortest serving. In the past few weeks, that possibility has been treated like it would be a quirk of history or an interesting quiz question. Yet at a slightly less trivial (pursuit) level, the brevity of her tenure tells us a little about the place where our politics now sit.
Going back to 1721, when Robert Walpole first entered office as our very first Prime Minister (he would stay there for over 20 years), Britain has seen governments rise and fall. The nation has witnessed many moments of national peril. We’ve fought two World Wars and faced a least one existential crisis. And despite everything – and I mean everything – our leaders prevailed, and our governments stayed relatively strong (even the weakest of them). The second shortest-serving Prime Minister was George Canning and he can hardly be blamed for dying in office after just 119 days. He was followed by Viscount Goderich who, at 144 days, can now breathe a sigh of relief that he’s now only the third shortest serving. Yay Goderich! Way to go!
It gives a little context to Truss’s astonishing record, as well as being indicative of scale of the current crisis. Perhaps it’s also the reason for Liz Truss’s enigmatic smile: that she managed to make history without having to ensure too much history. She will certainly be remembered long after Johnson, and perhaps even Blair and Thatcher. Perhaps even more than the seismically significant Cameron in so far as trivia fixates on these memorable extremes: longest, shortest, tallest, smallest, best, worst… At least one of which criteria takes us back to reflect on Jacob Rees-Mogg and the anachronistic way he dated his letter with “St Crispin’s Day”. Quite apt given that Crispin is the Patron Saint of Cobblers, and, as his time in government proved, Rees-Mogg knows a lot about that.
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