The Leftie angst that permeates our culture
Two dramas are classic examples of the socialist obsession with principles versus private life
Gosh, the Left likes thinking about itself. Like a selfabsorbed bore at a dinner party, its disciples love nothing more than a loud session of self-analysis. Sometimes the results are rather funny, at other times tedious, but there is one constant: a steady drip of Leftie angst into Britain’s cultural life.
In the past week, without really meaning to, I have seen both a new play and a new film focused on the trials of the soft-left bourgeoisie as they try desperately to fit together their principles and their lifestyles.
The play, Labour of Love, is a romantic comedy following a Blairite careerist over his 27 years as MP for a post-industrial northern town as it morphs from a Labour heartland, at the end of the Thatcher era, to a Tory gain at the most recent election. Along the way, the MP argues ceaselessly with his working class constituency agent, Jean, and finds himself torn between her down-toearth, hard-left authenticity and the cosmopolitan Blairism of his glamorous London wife.
The film, The Party, screened in the London Film Festival, is a funny satire about a delightful London dinner party convened to celebrate the hostess’s promotion to Labour shadow minister for health. But this party goes rather badly wrong as a string of revelations causes the guests’ dirty human instincts to burst forth from behind their righteous, feminist personas, turning them into sobbing, violent wrecks who can be calmed only by the presence of a smiling, German aromatherapist.
There is an obsession in both dramas with political virtue, the question of whether principles can be lived or embodied by a worthy person. But whereas Labour of Love rather swallows the idea that they can, setting up a love rivalry between a single mother of five who lost her miner husband to lung disease and a horribly well-dressed corporate lawyer, it’s The Party that tells the truth.
Politics isn’t a battle between virtue and ambition. It’s a tussle between lived experiences. It’s when politicians try to subject humans to grand, perfect schemes that they run into trouble. And a world view that subjects even intimate human relations to a test of political virtue is also one where ideas matter more than people. That, unfortunately, is where the current Labour Party wants to take us.
On the topic of human indecency, Hollywood sleaze Harvey Weinstein has, we’re told, taken himself off for “treatment” for “sex addiction” in an Arizona rehabilitation centre. “I’m trying my best,” he told reporters as he left LA. “Guys, I’m not doing OK but I’m trying; I’ve got to get help.”
Mr Weinstein, it seems, has an unusual medical condition called being a horrible old perv. Most devastatingly for him, he has that rare strain of sleaziosis that involves getting caught and then being hounded by the world’s media. I was heartened to hear, however, that American doctors can apparently treat this condition in return for a ginormous outlay from a PR budget.
There are, alas, many sufferers of his disease. As a woman under a certain age, you encounter them from time to time. But though I spent half a decade reporting on the male-dominated world of finance in my twenties, I can’t ever recall seeing such a serious case as this one. In the large investment banks, the sterilising effect of vast compliance departments, an awareness of lawsuits and the small but significant presence of senior woman has somewhat reduced the contagion. This will no doubt be a surprise to those fans of progressive Hollywood who assume that no one could possibly behave worse than a banker.
It’s sad to say, but the best prognosis that can now be expected for Mr Weinstein, after a few years out in the cold, is a soul-searching outing on the Oprah sofa. We can only hope that the PR budget runs out before that.
Bring on global Britain. According to the Tory MP Andrew Mitchell, who was speaking at a recent London drinks party thrown by the government of Taiwan: “There could be no better country to sign our first trade agreement with other than Taiwan.”
Hmmm. Taiwan’s is certainly an impressive economic story, but it’s not my idea of a Brexit bonanza. A best-case Brexit scenario looks rather more like the one described by the Oxford academic Linda Yueh. Britain could become a global trading hub, she said, by striking deals with the US, the EU and China, linking together the world’s three biggest economic zones.
Unfortunately, China sees trade as a vehicle for politics, not the other way around, and it regularly freezes Taiwan out of important international forums. Once we are an independent trading national again, I fear we will find that principles are quite expensive.