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The divine pork butcher

Ferdinand Mount

Wednesday, 25th April 2007

One would have ling’ring wars with little cost;
Another would fly swift but want the wings.
A third think, without expense at all,
By guileful fair words peace may be obtain’d.

There you have the choices in the Iraq debate: Rumsfeld’s ‘invasion-lite’, shock ’n’ awe, or UN mediation. Or take Henry V listening intently to the Archbishop of Canterbury going through the arguments for Henry’s claim to the French throne. Directors fear that the scene may bore the audience and often play it for laughs, but we ought to be thinking of Tony Blair listening to the Attorney General before the war: ‘May I with right and conscience make this claim?’ — or do I need a dodgy dossier to legitimise my invasion?

Nuttall is persuasive too when it comes to convincing us about what Aristotle called ‘plausible impossibilities’ and ‘unobvious decisions’. Would Lady Anne really have succumbed to Crookback Dick so soon after he had murdered her husband? Nuttall reminds us of David Niven confessing how sexually voracious he became in his grief after his wife’s death. As for Richard himself on the night before battle seeing all the ghosts of the people he has wronged thronging round him, Nuttall tells us that the famously ferocious Dame Helen Gardner on her deathbed was visited by the ghosts of all the pupils she had failed and colleagues whose careers she had destroyed. An experimental psychologist of Nuttall’s acquaintance is quite certain too that after the shock of having been violently blinded, Gloucester could easily be made to believe that he has fallen over Dover Cliff when he has merely toppled forward on to level ground.

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