The Amateur

There are a number of ways to account for political mendacity - ideologue, charlatan, fool, evil and so on, but there is another familiar explanation worth adding to the mix. A good example comes from E. F. Benson’s crime mystery novel of 1908 - The Blotting Book.

In Benson’s novel, a solicitor uses money from his wealthy client’s investment fund to make amateurishly unsound investments of his own. He hopes to become modestly wealthy enough for a comfortable retirement.

The investments fail and although the solicitor is habitually honest and strongly approves of honesty in an abstract sense, it comes a distant second when his personal interests are threatened.


It is a fact nevertheless that his was a nature capable of great things, it is also a fact that he had long ago been deeply and bitterly contrite for the original dishonesty of using the money of his client. But by aid of those strange perversities of nature, he had by this time honestly and sincerely got to regard all their subsequent employments of it merely as efforts on his part to make right an original wrong.

…he wanted to repair the original wrong, to hand back to Morris his fortune unimpaired, and also to save himself. But of these two wants, the second, it must be confessed, was infinitely the stronger.

E. F. Benson - The Blotting Book (1908)

The comparison with Ed Miliband may or may not be sound politically, but it is striking. Miliband is dabbling with sustainable energy investment using other people’s money. Not for personal gain of course, but the government investments he signs off have turned out to be as unsound as less amateurish observers always knew they would.

Another significant similarity with Benson’s character is that Miliband is still signing off yet more futile government investment in the forlorn hope that some imaginary upturn will mitigate his foolishness. It is Miliband’s amateurish confidence which is so striking when compared to Benson’s solicitor. The self-preservation motive seems to be much the same too.