Thus finishing his grand survey,
Disgusted Strephon stole away
Repeating in his amorous fits,
Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!
That’s Jonathan Swift, as you’ll know, charting the disappointment of Strephon, the disillusioned peeping Tom. It came to me, though, reading the Mail on Sunday last week. For, therein, I learned that David Cameron had been text-ing Rebekah Brooks. Mainly about horses. In an informal tone. It’s a bloody outrage.
Is it? Isn’t it? I think it must be, otherwise I don’t see why I’d have to know about it. But which is the outrageous part? Cameron sent Brooks a text about riding a horse which read ‘fast, unpredictable and hard to control but fun’. This is supposed to be terribly amusing, because it also sounds like it could have been about shagging.
Although it doesn’t really, does it? In fact, the only circumstances I can think of in which one might describe sex in such a manner would be if one were reviewing it, on a sex-reviewing website, a bit like -TripAdvisor. Indeed, once the bar for ‘sounding a bit like you mean shagging’ has been set so low, are there any safe ways in which to describe riding a horse? ‘Brownish, went clip-clop, smelled of horses.’ Fnarrr.
Brooks, meanwhile, was texting Cameron about his speeches. ‘I cried twice,’ she wrote, which is frankly double-edged, before adding, ‘will love “working together”.’ This bit seems to be the real scandal. ‘The working-together text offers a glimpse of a much more sinister and serious matter,’ wrote a blogger for the Guardian. It’s like he hadn’t seen that episode of Friends, where they explain to Joey that putting quote marks around something means you don’t really mean it. As if I was to say, ‘nice work, the Guardian! Well done with that “sober analysis”.’
You can go mad, though, with this kind of textual barrel-scraping. It’s as ludicrous in one direction as it is in the other. What are we supposed to be angry about here? The tone of these messages? Or the fact that they exist at all? I’d say the latter, except that obviously isn’t the case. The campaign to get these messages out into the open — these world-changing, Watergate-esque exchanges about whether or not people like horses and, perhaps in thrilling disclosures to come, whether they fancy a spot of Sunday lunch — has been driven by the Labour MP Chris Bryant. And he’s all about the tone.
On and on he goes about these messages. In the Commons, week in, week out. In print. Everywhere. Every time, he makes a point of referring to linguistic informality. ‘Salacious’ has become his favourite word. You’re left with the impression that communications conducted in Whitehall jargon would have been fine, but communication which sounds like it occurred between humans is not.
Something odd has happened here. The trappings of a scandal have themselves become the scandal. You can argue, sure, that people in power should not go about behaving like humans; because they ought to be more than humans; because they carry with them the weight of all they represent. Except, for the last 50 years or so, the trend in British public life has been towards the reverse. The establishment has been cracked open, like a coconut. We no longer want a bunch of stuffy, secretive men in bowler hats, storing their own umbrellas up their own bottoms as they decide upon affairs of state. We want humans, making human decisions, like humans.
Except, when we get what we want, we despise them for it. This is what I sense from Mr Bryant and the rest of them: people still chiselling away at the afterbirth of a scandal, for reasons they themselves may not fully understand. People still coming to terms with a shock that shouldn’t even have been a shock. That Cameron, Cameron, Cameron shits.
If I were Nadine Dorries (and yes, I know that sentence sounds like the start of a drinking game) I, too, would be heading off to I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here. Why ever not? As an MP, her public visibility is probably currently at its peak, so she might not get the chance again. And what has she got to lose? A ministerial brief for this woman? Never in a million years.
I met Dorries, I think, at the party conference the year she entered the House. It was 2005, also the year I become a gossip diarist. We were at some kind of media fringe party and neither of us quite knew what we were doing there. I think we might have shared a cigarette. Nice lady, I thought.
Thereafter, she went around telling people I’d kept a mole in her office on a retainer to provide stories about her. I’ve no idea why she thought this, particularly as I never actually ran any stories about her, but she definitely did and maybe still does. It left me thinking that, temperamentally, she might not have been quite the sort of person one really wants running the country. She’ll be ace on telly, though. They’re all nuts there.
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