Modelled on Jay Nordlinger’s “Impromptus” in National Review, I’ve written another ‘Reflections’ piece which is a series of paragraphs on various ideas:
Early in my career, my boss gave me some of his funds to run. Not, to be clear, out of laziness but because, as he pointed out, no-one knew whether I would be any good at the job and the sooner we learned, the better for everyone. Rachel Reeves has not had the privilege of discovering her competence in private and, although still early days, it does not look promising. It is possible to feel a twinge of sympathy for her – she has the air of a woman discovering she is in over her head and the briefing against her suggests her colleagues agree. But only a twinge – there was little in her background to suggest she should be in charge and, despite her mistakes in Opposition, she persisted. Estelle Morris resigned when she realised she was not up to being a Cabinet Minister. Reeves’ ego wrote cheques the nation will have to cash.
One can also, I think, feel a twinge of sympathy for Bridget Phillipson. She recently had a meeting with Katherine Birbalsingh which resulted in the latter releasing a public letter about how poorly she had been treated. Ms Phillipson decorously declined to comment on a private meeting. “Strength and Honour” reads the Twitter bio of the lady who calls herself “Britain’s Strictest Headmistress” (if you are a client of other ladies who lay claim to the title, well, who am I to judge?). Both she and the Secretary of State are strong women. Only one, I felt, was, in this case, behaving with honour.
I follow a priest of my old acquaintance on the site we are supposed to call “X”. Not for his theological insights, but because his mixture of Alan Bennett-esque twee and spittle-flecked rage at those to the right of Ed Davey genuinely extends my understanding of missiological best practice. Given the above, it will not surprise you to learn he recently left Musk’s playground, and it will not surprise you much more to learn that he returned a few days later. An everyday tale of internet folk. The tweet announcing his departure? It had taken up its bed and walked. Its tomb was empty. He might preach the fallibility of Man, but he was curiously unwilling to display his own.
“As soon as the guilder into the basin sinks, the soul from purgatory springs” is both one of the earliest examples of a marketing jingle, and the only bit which remains of my Mediaeval history. Indulgence-selling may no longer be the done thing, but the impulse remains. We license in ourselves behaviour we would condemn in others, when we decide it serves the greater good (as defined by us, of course) or because we are sufficiently secure in our righteousness that we can overlook a little backsliding. If we have not, like Anakin Skywalker, “become the very thing we swore to destroy”, it is down to lack of opportunity rather than will. We differ from a Mediaeval peasant only in having killed God and cut out the middleman.
Those who have left Twitter are, I think, those who protested Brexit and those who, in earlier times, would have appeared in Mark Lawson’s novella of the founding of the SDP (remember them?), The Nice People’s Party. I am not of their number – if you read these pieces and think I am a nice person, your parents should get your school fees back… Like Montaigne (in a deliciously serendipitous Facebook offering this morning), “I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly”. I have, I confess, an aversion to groups which define themselves in terms of their own rectitude, vice seeming to come easily to those steeped in their virtue. Years of scuttlebutt have taught me there are few places pettier than a parish meeting…
If self-awareness is to be desired, there can still be something almost admirable about those who appear to lack it completely. Liz Truss almost ruined an ancient institution and is uniformly hated, but give her an empty room and a microphone and she’ll make a speech no-one will hear. The Duchess of Sussex is Truss with a (borrowed) tiara. She may have brought the monarchy to the edge, and she may be universally despised but chuck her some cash and she’ll make a series no-one will watch. Both of them just keep plugging away regardless. I feel a twinge of sympathy for Mrs Sussex (another one – I must be coming down with something). Like Ms Reeves (albeit with rather less justification), she has reached that stage where everything she does is wrong, her life minutely analysed for every miniscule offence. The worst, I think, that can be said about her series – I haven’t watched it; the viewing figures suggest you haven’t either – is that her need to “prettify” everything is ineffably middle-class. Perhaps the next series will feature a “riparian supper”. Her critics are, of course, doing God’s work (since we’ve killed Him, someone has to…). Or perhaps we just need someone to hate.
A principle is often just a preference we wish to impose.
We display our interests to avoid displaying our personalities.
Self-interest looks for reasons to help those above us and excuses not to help those below us.
We recognise few greater injustices than people not doing what we want.
Before this piece reaches its (no doubt fervently desired) end, some house-keeping. Last month’s article set the challenge of identifying the paragraph written by an A.I. The correct answer was the one about Yvette Cooper (any comments about her intelligence being particularly artificial would be ungallant). Congratulations to those who got it right. Since it was an experiment to determine the technology’s current capabilities, I set the same task to three of our silicon-based friends. All failed, including the one which wrote it… For the moment, team Carbon retains its edge, then. Humans apply particular significance to what we do, machines, it appears, do not. Yet.
Burns Night is fading into the past. Having attended a couple (including one in Tokyo with an entirely Japanese pipe-band – perfectly good to the extent a pipe-band can ever be good), that is the best place for it – bad food, bad booze, worse poetry. Still, let us close with Scotland’s national bard – “To see ourselves as others see us!”
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.
This piece was first published in Country Squire Magazine, and is reproduced by kind permission.
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Sympathy for the inept does them no favours and only helps them continue to deny the obvious about themselves and their abilities.
Even as stated at the outset this piece has paragraphs for “various ideas”, it is a bit indigestible, random observations that lose sense. Maybe other readers will cull more from it.
As per NS above, there is little point in extending sympathy to mediocrity, unless it was to counter the assertion that if we think, on navigation of the paragraphs, he is a “nice person”, he has a ‘bridge to sell us’…words to that effect.