Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 13 June 2019

You would think it would be unarguable that ‘Serious times demand a serious leader’. This, with small verbal variations, is the slogan of both Michael Gove and Jeremy Hunt in the current Tory contest, so it is obvious against whom their phrase is directed. Yet there is a counter-argument. The times we live in are undoubtedly serious, and for the past three years we have had, in Mrs May, the most unrelentingly serious leader ever. It has been a disaster. The post-2008 revolts across the western world have all been against seriousness as defined by existing leaderships. Trump, Salvini, Farage, Boris etc. strike a chord because they can burlesque the pomposity and self-righteousness of the conventional politicians who have led us badly. Words like ‘serious’ and ‘grown-up’ are used mostly by politicians and commentators who regard themselves as such, yet prove by their actions and words that they are silly. It is not serious — in the good sense of the term — for any politician who believes in democracy to try to frustrate the result of the 2016 EU referendum. Nor is it serious for any leader who claims to be a negotiator to rule out a no-deal option for Brexit. Nor is it serious for anyone who believes in the principle of consent which underlines the Good Friday Agreement to advocate a permanent Northern Irish backstop and thus a change to the constitutional status of Northern Ireland without consent. Anyone who stayed in Mrs May’s cabinet right through her repeated efforts to foist her Brexit deal on parliament was not serious about how the country should be led, except in the sense of being seriously wrong.

Is one allowed to refuse to take sides about politicians who once took cocaine? The antis sound appallingly censorious of youthful error.

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