‘Farage is no leader,’ said Rupert Lowe MP. ‘He is a coward and a viper.’ Cedric Hardwicke immediately came to mind. As Dr Arnold in Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1940), he exclaims to Flashman: ‘You are a bully, a coward and a liar. There is no longer any place for you at Rugby.’ But I’m not sure Nigel Farage is a Flashman.
What kind of viper did Mr Lowe mean? Presumably one in the bosom – not like Cleopatra’s asp, but one thawed out by a man who pitied it, only to be bitten when the creature warms up. It’s a fable of Aesop with which Cicero was familiar. Hence, in Tom Jones, Squire Allworthy’s denunciation of ‘that wicked Viper which I have so long nourished in my Bosom’ – Tom’s half-brother.
The viper’s big moment comes in the Gospels, when Jesus says to a group of Pharisees and Sadducees: ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?’ Do vipers come in broods, then, or perhaps nests? François Mauriac published a novel in 1932 about a family being horrible to each other called Le Nœud de vipères. It was translated in 1933 as Vipers’ Tangle and in 1951 as The Knot of Vipers. Elon Musk called USAID ‘a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America’.
Yet by a principle of opposites, vipers acquired a reputation as a wonder food, even a theriac or antidote to poison. Dr John Arbuthnot declares in his Practical Rules of Diet that ‘Viper-Broth is both anti-acid and nourishing’.
In his Brief Lives, John Aubrey wrote of Venetia Stanley, the great beauty and wife of Sir Kenelm Digby: ‘She dyed in her bed suddenly.
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