Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (24 page)

Blunkett in Love

The burning question is why it takes a year or a cheque to get a visa when you are not lucky enough to know someone who knows someone who knows a Home Secretary. Why doesn't it take nineteen days, whoever you are? Why must everything that proceeds from the dark heart of officialdom demoralise us? Are we not of the same human family? There's a backlog, they say. Try that on with your tax or VAT return. ‘Sorry, no can do for a year, I have a backlog.'

Myself, I won't give a monkey's if it does turn out that Blunkett assisted his lover's nanny. Indeed, I'll be disappointed in him if it turns out that he didn't. Isn't this what we are supposed to do if we can – lend a hand? Isn't it something the great religions of the world enjoin upon us? Help a friend in need? It would be better if he helped us all, gave the birch and then the boot to every spitefully slumberous official at the Home Office, I agree, but a start's a start. In the meantime, of those preparing to take a stand on principle, is there one who's never done a favour for a chum, never dropped a word into an ear, never shared a chauffeur for an hour, never put a lover on a spouse's ticket? God help him, in that case.

They occur in Shakespeare from time to time, the whited ones, the Angelos for whom the letter of the law is sacrosanct, and they are always revealed to be morally despicable at the last. We like a man who has a little give in him ethically. In fact we more than like him, we know that his is the only true path to virtue.

But these, anyway, are trifles light as air in a drama which grows more tragic by the day. Love is love. I know the expectation: men in high office are meant to keep their heads, however much in love they are; but as in principle so in passion, it's flexibility that makes a man fit to govern, whether what he's governing is his country or himself. Flexibility, not laxity.
Blunkett in Love
would be a good title for a light comedy of indiscretion, but what's been striking about this amour as the details of it have unfolded, and in so far as we are possessed (and entitled to be possessed) of the truth, is how little of lightness or laxity there has been in it. Forget that romping boy Boris who is cursed with looking like someone out of the
Beano
even though, for all we know to the contrary, his heart is breaking. Blunkett weighs in much heavier. For good and ill, he has always been a forbidding and astringent politician, strict in his pronouncements, rugged and even rough in battle. Not a man you would tangle with lightly. And clearly not a man you would fall in love with lightly either.

Reports in the sewer press suggest that Kimberly Quinn grew frightened of him towards the end of their relationship, pulled back from the intensity of his attentions. Cruel if correct, since there could never have been a moment when intensity was not what was on offer. By all accounts she was a vivacious socialite – Kimberly Fortier when Blunkett met her – and you can hear in the contrasting poetry of their names something of what must originally have drawn them to each other: the international effervescence of a Kimberly Fortier, the northern asperity of a David Blunkett. Think
Wuthering Heights
– ‘My love for Blunkett resembles the eternal rocks beneath . . .' Think Blunkett hammering in the Yorkshire night at Kimberly's closed window.

And then there was, there is, the blindness. The moment this story broke I found myself reaching for a sentence I half remembered from Nabokov's sadistic fable
Laughter in the Dark
. Going looking for it, even as Blunkett himself was talking about ‘dark' forces being out to get him, felt like a grim descent into an unaccustomed seriousness. The sentence itself, describing the effects of a sudden blindness, tells of precisely this descent. ‘The impenetrable black shroud in which Albinus now lived infused an element of austerity and even of nobility into his thoughts and feelings.' Though that offers to delineate the blind man's inner world, it gestures the more at the effect of blindness on those outside it. Our sense – the sense of the seeing – that there attaches to unseeing a dignity we do not customarily possess. Blindness solemnises the air around, and commands, whatever the dangers of special pleading, our reverence. It recalls us to the gravity of things. Not for nothing does mythology give the blind unusual powers of prophecy and wisdom.

That Blunkett would not thank us for our exceptional attention, I have not the slightest doubt. But we must own to what we feel. I recall hearing a radio programme some years ago about a blind woman, Judy Taylor, recapturing her sight. It is of no relevance that the producer of that programme is the person with whom I now live, except for the fact that when she recounts the making of it an austerity attaches to her too, as though it is an effect that can be passed on by association. Judy Taylor was at pains to deny any specialness, but everything she said about sight – how previously she felt that people were ‘looking in on her', how now she felt that she could take the husband she had never seen ‘captive' with her eyes – brought to mind ideas of invasiveness and power, of sensual trepidation and exchange, that we do not normally consider. By virtue of what she knew of blindness, and now of sight, she restored a sense of tremulous gravity to activities – to love especially – about which we otherwise galumph.

David Blunkett no more lost his heart for our edification than for our entertainment, but in an age of triviality it is good for us, however terrible it is for them, to regain a glimpse of something epic in our emotions.

Porn for Royals

So am I the only man in London whose baby Princess Diana did not want to have? Like one of Bateman's misfits I cower before the finger of derision – The Man Who Didn't Get The Call. A shame. I think I could have interested her in the criticism of F. R. Leavis. It might have been the saving of her. For myself, at any rate, I swallow the indignity and try looking on the bright side. At least she would not have been sending her butler off to buy my son pornography.

Ignore that last remark. I am pretending to a pudeur I do not feel. In fact my first response, on reading that one of Paul Burrell's duties was bringing home
Men Only
and the like for William, had more of surprise in it than horror. I'd always imagined that royals had their own pornography. Well-bred girls in unzipped jodhpurs falling off polo ponies. Debs curtsying in rubber wellingtons and tiaras and nothing else. And the Palace was surely full to bursting with photographs of bare-breasted Tongans and Tanganyikans, snapped by Philip on royal tours.

The point about pornography is that even at its most fantastical it must approximate to what's familiar. Readers' wives must look like readers' wives. So where would be the point in our future king getting off on commoners disporting themselves commonly? All that inelegance of limb. All that bad skin.

Unless that was Diana's plan, the people's princess peddling the people's filth to democratise the monarchy and bring it down.

No wonder they had to get rid of her.

As for the morality of it, parent to child, I am not sure. At one level it showed great emotional maturity. Not every mother is able to accept the sink of iniquity which is her son. Great consideration, too, since she understood that William couldn't be popping into WH Smith himself every time the fires of his young manhood needed stoking. And tact. She didn't involve herself, but got the butler to do it, man to man.

She seemed to learn from what she saw, Diana. And she was better placed than most women to observe how sexual reticence in the boy breeds catatonia in the man. In a trance, they seemed, those guardsmen of hers. Unawakened, like so many sleeping beauties. So in her own way she was a pioneer of mental health among the aristocracy.

But there was one aspect of the mental life of boys and men she didn't understand. The imperative to be furtive. Only think of what William missed out on by having Burrell deliver him his daily fix on the crested breakfast tray, along with the boiled eggs and soldiers, the Coco Pops, and the malted milk. No listening to the libido as it shapes its promptings, no mustering of the forces of resistance, no argument between the Jekyll and the Hyde of one's sexual nature, which argument Jekyll will always lose, but only after the libido has flooded the whole system with those chemicals to which we give the simple name of desire, but which in fact also encompass self-loathing and self-destruction and insanity. Merely to accede mentally, merely to acknowledge that you will shortly do what you know you should not do, and scarf your face, and flee the house, and scour the streets for familiar faces to avoid, and push open the door of the newsagent whose bell rings louder than the plague bell – Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead! – merely to be thus embarked, reader, on the ethical maybe-I-will, maybe-I-won't of porno purchase, all this Diana denied her boys.

And then the scrutiny. The newsagent eyeballing you, you eyeballing the newsagent. And the other customers, fellow ethical maybe-I-willers perhaps, people of weak character like yourself, who therefore know your secret (and it is no consolation whatsoever that you in turn know theirs, for your shame is unique and indivisible) and who therefore resent you because they know how long you are going to take before you actually approach the shelf you're blocking, how long you'll be pretending it's
Yachting News
or
Macworld
you're interested in, until your hand accidentally knocks
Bestiality for Boys
off the top shelf and you think, oh well, in that case, since it's found me, and I won't be yachting this weekend anyway and I don't own a Mac, oh well, all right, why not – always provided the newsagent has a padded bag with steel locks to pop it into, though not so unobtrusively as to be obtrusive, just casually, like burying a dead body, but without a priest, while looking at you and yet not looking at you, and having regard to your complete indifference to change, although it's true that the expenditure is part of the illogicality, part of the reason you do it, because it's all to prove you are somehow engaged in hostilities against your own best interests.

As for getting the stuff home, it's the identical procedure only in reverse, though you must add the fact of your parents being awake now – for the above was of course a dawn raid, while ordinary humanity slept – which immediate logistical difficulty is nothing compared to the long-term problems associated with storage. Do not ever, reader, discount storage. Once porno enters a boy's bedroom we are in Edgar Allan Poe territory, where the bloody truth will always out, where dismembered corpses announce their whereabouts to the suspicious, and lewd material beats louder, no matter where you conceal it, than a torn-out heart.

And it is degradation on such a scale that I would wish Diana to have gifted her sons? Yes, absolutely. For it is in this forge of demoralisation that our characters are hammered out. What tolerance of the weakness of others we finally possess, we owe to this. What sense of our own ridiculousness, and what affection we bear to women, in pursuit of whose distorted image we have shamed ourselves so contemptibly. Thus does mortification make a man of us at last.

Poor William, missing out on that.

Like-Mindedness

There's a moment of stillness that follows every triumph, when the history and meaning of the conflict are weighed in the balance and victory is felt to be no less bitter, no less futile even, than defeat. There is, perhaps, a reason in nature for this philosophic disappointment. Pity may be born of it. Or it may commemorate the hour when barbaric man learned finally to desist from savagery, heaven peeping through the blanket of the dark to cry ‘Hold, hold!' For it could be that that's all that ever stops us, our own dissatisfaction with bloodlust and revenge. ‘My rage is gone,' observes Aufidius, having delivered Coriolanus to the mob, ‘And I am struck with sorrow.'

A bit late for that, old sport; but then again, without the futility which accompanies remorse, how could nature ever clean the slate? I have always thought this to be the only adequate explanation of post-coital tristesse, that sudden and profound disillusionment with the means of production without which there'd be no end to the pounding of the male machine. Though I accept that that might just be masculinist wishful-thinking.

Such a moment of muted regret followed, for me at least, the final public demolition last week of David Irving's murderous scaffold of denial. Down it crashed, every beam and board and girder of it. Not a rack left behind. And I'm with those who think there aren't enough cheers in Christendom to celebrate its annihilation. But after annihilation, that cold wind of wondering. Not remorse – don't misconceive me: never has a remorseless dismantling of one man's reputation been more justified. And not pity: it is hard to imagine an instance in which pity could be more wasted, however true it is that any broken piece of humanity is a broken piece of us. In the completeness with which he has been refuted, though, in the comprehensiveness of his defeat and the comprehensive vindication of his conquerors, is there not the sort of too-muchness that makes all go cold about our hearts, because we know that meaning is forever eluding us and only in equilibrium do we find our part in the harmony of things?

The still, sad music of humanity and all that. Don't knock it in a harsh and grating world. What Wordsworth was angling for in that famous phrase was the ‘sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused'. A pregnant verb, in this context, ‘interfused'. Something mixed or permeated with something else. And while we may want to argue, in the heat of battle, that truth is never more itself than when it is not interfused with David Irving, isn't it just as important to remember that truth is not truth unless it is permeated with everything, including that which on the face of it may seem to be truth's deadliest foe.