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Thursday 4 December 2008

What I should say sorry for

Boris Johnson on his penitential pilgrimage to Liverpool

Whatever its mistakes of facts and taste, for which I am sorry, last week’s leading article made a good point: about bogus sentiment, self-pity, risk, and our refusal to see that we may sometimes be the authors of our misfortunes. The idea occurred to me when I was driving a child to a football match, and listening to the England–Wales game, where it was the intention to hold a minute’s silence for Ken Bigley. I listened with mounting disbelief and disgust because instead of keeping silent the crowds started to jabber, swear, jeer and catcall. After a few seconds the referee gave up in embarrassment, and blew the whistle for the start of the match. The following day I could find nothing in the papers about this horrible event, and I brooded on the causes. How could people behave so thuggishly? The crowd’s reaction showed that there was a falseness here: the ceremony required people to show an emotion that — manifestly, alas — they did not feel.

Suppose the crowd had been asked to hold a minute’s silence for those who died in the war, or the victims of an IRA atrocity. That silence would have been interrupted by nothing more than a cough. So a large part of that crowd was in a sense rebelling against an imposed sentiment; and that made me think of an editorial on the culture of sentimentality in modern Britain, which is allied to the culture of victimhood, and I wanted a piece on it, not because I wanted to insult the people of Liverpool, but because I believe we have a serious problem in that we tend these days at every opportunity to blame the state, and to seek redress from the state, when things go wrong in our lives. Yes, it was tasteless to make this point in the context of Ken Bigley’s death, and I am sorry for any hurt this has caused his family. But when a member of the late hostage’s family said that the Prime Minister has Mr Bigley’s ‘blood on his hands’ that was nonsense. Only those who killed Ken Bigley had blood on their hands, and it should not be taboo to say so.

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