‘Evelyn Waugh,’ said my husband when I asked who came up with the analogy of carrying a Ming vase. He was, in a way, right, but wrong too.
Every political commentator, it seems, has been talking of Sir Keir Starmer’s Ming vase strategy in approaching the election. In April 2021 Decca Aitkenhead was reminded of Roy Jenkins’s observation that before the 1997 election: ‘Tony Blair took such care not to make any mistakes, he resembled “a man carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor”.’ Indeed, Ben Macintyre had cited Jenkins on 4 July 1996 – 28 years exactly before Keir Day.
Every month we’ve heard the same thing. Even in 1997, A.A. Gill wrote as though he had invented the comparison. Writing about Robin Cook, he said: ‘A royal tour for a foreign secretary is a bit like carrying a heavy Ming vase across a long marble floor in your socks.’
A cross-current is the earlier comparison of Hong Kong to that vase. In 1997 Simon Jenkins learnt from Jonathan Dimbleby’s biography of Chris Patten that ‘British diplomats and associates decided in the 1980s that the “Ming vase” of Hong Kong should be handed over to Beijing in 1997 undamaged by democracy.’
Also in 1997 the late Lord Howe, writing of Hong Kong, referred to his ‘own image of a relay race, run with a Ming vase in place of a baton. Success in this intricate manoeuvre, Patten shrewdly observed, would evoke no applause.’
Another cross-current was introduced when Boris Johnson became editor of The Spectator in 1999. The Guardian reported: ‘“Someone said it’s like putting a mentally defective monkey in charge of a Ming vase,” Johnson says, feigning hurt.’
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