Words and Stuff
When the old year was three-quarters done and the season of goodwill was approaching, the standards of public discourse in Britain seemed to hit a new low. Tory critics of Theresa May suggested she should bring her own noose to a party meeting. She was likened to a lame cockroach. She was entering a killing zone. She would be knifed – and the knife would be twisted, a remark already made, apparently, by a Labour MP about Jeremy Corbyn. How horrid, screamed the press. How feeble, I thought.
Invective simply isn’t what it used to be. Satire can still be found, on the radio, on television and in Private Eye. But it’s not invective. Invective is a verbal attack without humour: it’s meant to be vehement, not funny.
We need invective. Satire is all very well. It is fun, and we enjoy seeing those in positions of power lampooned. It is good for them, we believe, and therefore good for everyone, though in truth by making our overlords look ridiculous we may be making them seem benign, which some are not. Satire seldom changes minds.
Neither does abuse, though it too can be enjoyable. In Lars Porsena, Robert Graves tells a story ‘that once in the city an admiral’s brougham was obstructed by a coster’s barrow and that the admiral improved the occasion by a very heavy and god-damnatory flow of abuse. The coster let him have his say but, as he paused for breath, remarked cheerfully, “If you was better house-trained, Jackie, I’d take you home for a pet.” ’
These days, though, abuse is seldom funny. One of the few public figures who thinks he can raise a chuckle with an insult is Boris Johnson, but when he calls Sadiq Khan a ‘puffed up, pompous popinjay’, it’s neither witty nor apposite: Mr Khan isn’t like a parrot or a fop or a coxcomb. Likewise, Mr Corbyn in no way resembles a ‘mutton-headed, old Mugwump’ – a ‘politician who deserts his party for another’.
Is there a great inveigher in Britain today? Is there a great orator? The dearth of one may be linked to the dearth of the other. After all, Parliament once had men such as Burke and Macaulay on its benches: Burke to assail Warren Hastings; Macaulay to revile the civil disabilities of the Jews. Cobbett would fulminate against rotten boroughs and eloquently defend himself when tried for sedition. Gladstone thundered for Irish home rule, Disraeli for the Corn Laws.
More recently, Churchill, Bevan and even Robin Cook have won cross-party admiration for their speeches. The best we can hope for now is a one-liner or a soundbite – Vince Cable’s wonderment at the rapid transformation of Gordon Brown ‘from Stalin to Mr Bean’; or David Cameron’s gibe: ‘I’m sure the right honourable member enjoys a game of bingo – it’s the only time he ever gets close to No 10.’
Yet the oratory of politicians is not dead. Donald Trump may have reduced presidential utterances to a series of tweets, but Barack Obama quite recently raised the rhetorical standard to heights unknown since Jack Kennedy’s day.
Besides, invective has never been the preserve of politicians or even orators. Most of the examples included in Invective and Abuse, the anthology by Hugh Kingsmill published in 1929, are the work of poets such as Dryden, Burns, Pope and Shelley, novelists including Smollett, Dickens and Stevenson, playwrights from Shakespeare to Shaw, essayists such as Carlyle and Ruskin, and clerics including Donne, Swift and Newman, as well as Dr Johnson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, King James I, St Matthew and the authors of the books of Job and Isaiah.
What these vituperators had in common was the ability to write a diatribe with literary form. We need more such writers today. Whether they could tackle such topics as John Knox’s Monstrous Regiment of Women or T W H Crosland’s The Unspeakable Scot is another matter. Those denunciations would now almost certainly be considered hate crimes.