Warning: this article contains praise of Rishi Sunak and David Cameron
Warning: the following article contains mild praise for Rishi Sunak and unnaturally kind words about David Cameron. Reader discretion is advised, especially if you are sensitive to sudden shocks.
There is a commendable difference between “having character” and “being a character”.
And, yes, I know that’s not a particularly profound observation for a Thursday when you’ll have been hoping for something meaty to chew on as you head into the weekend. Perhaps you’d prefer me to talk about the psychological flaws of key figures in the Russian military or how fluctuations in the Albanian LEK will affect the migratory labour market East of Dagenham. But sometimes it’s good to reflect on notable changes that happen on the macro level, by which I mean on a scale so big that we can all sense them.
You don’t need to carry a Westminster press pass to recognise the ways that technology has abstracted us from the real world since Steve Jobs first launched the iPhone on 9th January 2007. We are all engaged in a kind of collective forgetting, or what Nabokov once described as our tendency to “lose material contact with the past / in order to make gossip into epic”.
He meant by “gossip” the minutiae of everyday life: the complexity, the detail, and things that are inherently gnarly and sometimes difficult. The “epic” means to be reductive and see the world according to simple shapes such as the archetype. This kind of habitual forgetting was associated with time (Nabokov was anticipating the moment when Tolstoy would achieve his epic stature) but, in the modern world, the same might be said of the way we live rushed lives and think too broadly— “breadth not depth”, as one educational mantra has it.
We exist in the domain of instant reactions, the mimetic spread of ideas, and complexity reduced to the size of a photon blasted through the fibre optic network. We are too busy to stop and smile at others, too cynical to view kindness as anything other than a suspicious activity, and too engaged in the business of making money to wonder if everything does have a price. At times, too, it feels as if Britain has become more of a labour market than it is a nation of citizens held together by shared ideals about liberty, humour, art, beauty, freedom, kindness, open spaces, sunshine, and fresh air. We worry that AI is about to replace us without realising that we have already been replaced by duller versions of ourselves.
One thing I miss in all this mad rush is depth, although that’s not to say that depth isn’t there. You will yourself embody far more depth than we are individually exposed to through most of our media (after all, you have the good sense to read Reaction). But in the world of “the lowest common denominator”, simplicity is key. Depth is unfashionable. Depth can be unprofitable in a world of quick fixes, books promising simple solutions, and where we are constantly told to maximise profits even it if means sacrificing depth.
Shallowness is everything but especially within the commentariat where there’s often a pressure to write briefly, in Buzzfeed-style, one-clause paragraphs, where everything should be a list or, even better, bowdlerized for clickbait. It’s a fun but depressing sport, tracking this decline.
Most of all, we are no longer a nation governed by people of character.
The era of The Profound and Serious Nature has long since passed, along with ostentatious moustaches, slowly reasoned arguments, proper citation, and thinking before speaking. Nuance is out and unthinking contrarianism is in. Because say what you like about Victorians with abundant chin whiskers: social media influencers they were not. There’s a reason why TikTokers are not noted for their sideburns, and writers of dense multi-volume histories of European art don’t have their line of ultra-caffeinated energy drinks.
Which brings me, in an unfashionably roundabout way, to David Cameron marching along Downing Street this week.
Was I alone in feeling a surprising sense of relief when he turned up? Dare one say: a sense of long absent normality? Did it run counter to the prevailing narrative of each appointment getting progressively worse than the last?
And, believe me, that’s about the strangest thing I could confess without getting into my ongoing attraction to the Wicked Witch of the West from the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz. I would not rank myself as one of Cameron’s cheerleaders, yet, for all his many sins and lamentable failures, he is inherently better than so much of what we’ve been exposed to in the last half-decade. In fact, it’s worth breaking open a new paragraph just to say it…
Rishi Sunak might have made a good call. It felt like a moment when politics was briefly rewound so we might progress forward.
Let’s not overlook that Cameron comes with a lot of baggage, much of it the trivial puff of modern media; those scurrilous lies that last a lifetime and sadly get in the way of serious criticism. There are certainly questions to be asked (and the Leader of the Opposition began to ask them during Wednesday’s PMQs) and they will hopefully be answered in due course. Yet Cameron is a man of some character and not a man of zero depth. He is similar, in that respect, to the man he replaces at the Foreign Office. James Cleverly also appears to be another man of discernible character and not inconsiderable talents. For all the talk of a party lacking in talent, the Tories are not entirely lacking. They just have an abundance of the profoundly banal, most of whom are eventually given a crack at running a ministry.
This is where Suella Braverman enters the picture; a political player badly miscast, an actor playing a role, and a thin role at that, devoid of principle beyond the desire to get a step closer to Number 10. She was also emblematic of that strange phenomenon found in corporate culture everywhere, where the least talented are promoted upward simply because nobody could think of what the hell to do with them.
On that basis alone, Cameron’s return to politics should be welcomed and celebrated even as being atypical of the usual slow-moving tractor fire that is politics. For David Cameron, we can also read Kevin McCarthy: both serve as reminders of slightly better times before things went properly screwy. He’s a reminder that serious folk are still out there, anticipating the end of the fast talkers and facile social media warriors who embody every moronic impulse of the zeitgeist.
Anticipating the end of Donald Trump, too, the epitome of shallow ambiguities onto which people project depth. The same was true of Boris Johnson in ways that were never true of Theresa May, who remains another of the serious players. Not on the list: Jonathan Gullis (Britain’s version of Matt Gaetz), Lee Anderson (our Jim Jordan), our new Minister for Common Sense, Esther McVey, or Jacob Rees-Mogg who is the very pastiche of The Profound and Serious Nature whilst being neither profound nor serious.
Nor should we include the man currently a few thousand miles away and spreading insect repellent over his pasty knees. Nigel Farage will soon be entering “the jungle” in a flagrant attempt to prove what a character he is. A character who thinks he will be leading the Conservative Party by 2026.
It will not happen. The Conservatives still have enough people of depth to stand in his way, although it’s still to be hoped that the British public will do what the British public has consistently managed to do and that is: not vote for him.
Because, really, haven’t we just had enough of these characters?
@DavidWaywell
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