The stained-glass attitude

I have the integrity to be leader, says Badenoch in swipe at Jenrick

Kemi Badenoch has attacked her Tory leadership rival Robert Jenrick by pointing out that she has “never been sacked” amid a “whiff of impropriety”.

Mrs Badenoch appeared to question Mr Jenrick’s record as the two candidates aimed their fiercest attacks of the campaign so far in interviews with The Telegraph.

“Integrity matters … with me you’d have a leader where there’s no scandal. I was never sacked for anything, I didn’t have to resign in disgrace or, you know, because there was a whiff of impropriety,” she said, in an apparent reference to Mr Jenrick’s involvement in a planning dispute when he was housing secretary.

Yes integrity does matter, but we have been taught by a long series of painful lessons that the main political parties don't know how to deliver integrity, whatever their leadership claims. 

Now Labour is hammering home the same message yet again, but those who pay attention have been aware of the integrity deficit for a long time. It's a disease of UK politics, not something Kemi Badenoch can offer as to gift to weary voters.

To misquote Booth Tarkington -

Kemi entered in the stained-glass attitude of one bearing gifts.

They succeed, they get on

Erb looked moody as he closed the satchel. ‘Absorption in self isn’t thought. Children naturally have the most, and even at our age there are some odious remnants; but these people who all their lives seem just made of it — pure egoism, spontaneous self-pushery, instinct for leadership and self-dramatization — why, damn it, they succeed; they get on!

Booth Tarkington - The Show Piece (1947)


If thought is remembered language then maybe this quote works. Absorption in self isn’t thought because it is not remembered language. This may be so if we assume that egoists do not reinforce their egoism by standing before a mirror describing to themselves how special they are. Justin Trudeau may be an exception to that of course, but we can’t be sure.

In which case egoism is not a way of thinking but a self-centred attitude which permeates thinking. Not so much remembered language, but the overriding priority of self which selects what is remembered and ignores the rest. But damn it, they succeed; they get on!

A Cool Mind

In The Arena is a 1905 collection of short stories about political life written by Booth Tarkington. One story has the title Hector, depicting the political rise of a young man called Hector J. Ransom, his outstanding political abilities, power of oratory and his remorseless ambition.


“And you think Hector has only his oratory?”

“I think that's his vehicle; it's his racing sulky and he'll drive it pretty hard. We're good friends, but if you want me to be frank, I should say that he'd drive on over my dead body if it lay in the road to where he was going.” Lane rolled over in the grass with a little chuckle.


Hector’s oratory, extraordinarily powerful in its effect on an audience, is still familiar enough to us today. Rhetorical gymnastics, nonsense dressed up as political convictions which would not bear the analysis of a cool mind.


Not that what he said could bear the analysis of a cool mind: nothing that Hector ever did or said has been able to do that. But for the purpose, it was perfect. For once he began at the beginning, without rhetoric, and he made it all the more effective by beginning with himself.


But Hector did not aim his oratory at cool minds, he aimed it at politically persuadable minds.


The noise grew thunderous, and when it subsided Hector was master of the convention. Then, for the first time, I saw how far he would go—and why. I had laughed at him all my life, but now I believed there was “something in him,” as they say. The Lord knows what, but it was there; and as I looked at him and listened it seemed to me that the world was at his feet.


Tarkington doesn’t say what that something in him might be, perhaps because a cool observer cannot quite know what it is beyond observing it. Yes there are words about emotions, needs, social conformity and so on, but once said they tend to resist further analysis. Stirring rhetorical nonsense is stirring for some, but often puzzling for a cool mind.

Quotes for 2024

She had feelings that she believed to be thoughts; she had likes and dislikes that she believed to be thoughts; she had impulses she believed to be thoughts; her mind was full of shifting and flying pictures that she believed to be thoughts; it was also full of echoes of what she had heard and read, and these she usually believed to be thoughts original with her. Words were fluent upon her lips without her knowing or wondering how they got there; yet she was sure they expressed truths and she easily became angry, or grieved, if they were challenged.

Booth Tarkington - Claire Ambler (1928)


Among the items of the suite was a three-legged milking-stool in deal covered with white enamel paint heightened by salmon-tinted bows of imitation silk. Society had recently been thunderstruck by the originality of putting a milking-stool in a drawing-room; its quaintness appealed with tremendous force to nearly all hearts; nearly every house-mistress on seeing a milking-stool in a friend’s drawing-room, decided that she must have a milking-stool in her drawing-room, and took measures to get one.

Arnold Bennett - These Twain (1915)


But there can be little doubt, I think, that if some form of Collectivism is imposed upon England it will be imposed, as everything else has been, by an instructed political class upon a people partly apathetic and partly hypnotized. The aristocracy will be as ready to “administer” Collectivism as they were to administer Puritanism or Manchesterism; in some ways such a centralized political power is necessarily attractive to them.

G. K. Chesterton – What’s Wrong With The World (1910)

Somewhere everlastingly and eternally ahead

In Booth Tarkington’s 1927 novel The Plutocrat, Laurence Ogle, a young playwright, undertakes a North African tour where he keeps running across Mr Tinker, the plutocrat of the title. In spite of Tinker’s wealth and partly because of it, Ogle initially looks down on him as loud, rich, brash and shallow.

Yet eventually Ogle comes to realise that Tinker is the better man, honest, generous and far more in touch with the real world than Ogle has ever been and ever could be. Eventually Ogle asks himself –


Was this inept creature, this childishly loose, childishly tricky creature, this over-lavish, careless, bragging, noisy, money-getting and money-worshipping creature a “new Roman?”


Here, Tinker explains his homespun philosophy to John Edwards, the tour courier.

“Well, to-day we’re here and we’ve got our chance; and the one single and only thing in the universe that’s plain, John Edwards, it’s this.” Here he became solemnly emphatic, and put his heavy hand upon the courier’s shoulder. “The somewhere we’re goin’ to, and got to go to if we don’t want to get wiped out, it’s somewhere everlastingly and eternally ahead! It’s like to-morrow; when we get there we aren’t there; we got to keep goin’, and we got to everlastingly and eternally keep goin’ — and goin’ fast! If we don’t, the Almighty hasn’t got a bit o’ use for us; He turns us right into dust and scattered old bones, and nothin’s left of our whole country and our finest cities except some street paving and a few cellars with weeds in ’em. You get me, John?”

Booth Tarkington – The Plutocrat (1927)


It’s a fascinating novel because Tinker is right, we have no way of standing still, no way to settle for the here and now. Tomorrow there is another here and now then another. Ideologies and cultures are of no lasting value unless they allow us to adapt and adapt again forever.


The somewhere we’re goin’ to, and got to go to if we don’t want to get wiped out, it’s somewhere everlastingly and eternally ahead!

Ask who paints the pictures

She had feelings that she believed to be thoughts; she had likes and dislikes that she believed to be thoughts; she had impulses she believed to be thoughts; her mind was full of shifting and flying pictures that she believed to be thoughts.

Booth Tarkington - Claire Ambler (1928)


We’d all like to think we have thoughts rather than mental pictures. Yet as we know, governments, institutions and media spend a great deal of money and effort effectively depicting the world in terms of simple pictures. This includes selecting the frames – framing the scope of the pictures. A narrow scope being generally favoured.

A familiar enough analogy with a long pedigree –

Another line is the use of indignant language, whether to support your own case or to overthrow your opponent’s. We do this when we paint a highly-coloured picture of the situation without having proved the facts of it:

Aristotle - Rhetoric c. 336 - 330 B.C.

Equally familiar is an odd correlation between a good education and pictures which purport to be thoughts. Well-educated people seem prone to accept media-framed and media-painted pictures when even mild scepticism would suggest the frames are too small and the pictures little more than highly-coloured daubs.

Media organisations such as the BBC cater for it - they are in effect picture dealers. They do not even have to like the pictures they sell, nor the frames. They may like them, but it isn’t professionally essential. Ready-framed pictures are easier to place on the walls of the mind we might say, sticking with the analogy.

Do sceptics merely frame different pictures? They may frame issues in unorthodox ways, but often adopt more than one way of framing the same issue. This blog post is merely one way of framing the issue of oversimplified public narratives. There are many others.

As mentioned earlier, many educated people seem naïve in their adoption of pre-framed pictures of social and political issues. Perhaps most are no more than fashion opportunists, including those who block roads in support of a highly-coloured picture of the situation without having proved the facts of it. 

Gluing yourself to real pictures in support of fakes is essentially an old, old problem. Not even good art we might add, but maybe that's taking the analogy a little too far.

Cæsar somewhat remote

Two months earlier, in Rome, she had gone to the Palatine Hill to write a letter beginning, “Seated upon a block of marble in the banquet hall of Cæsar,” and necessarily the picture suggested to the mind of her correspondent must have had Claire in the foreground with Cæsar somewhat remote.

Booth Tarkington - Claire Ambler (1928)

We see this all the time with contrived celebrity images. We see it in wildlife TV programmes where a famous presenter in the foreground is clearly the primary subject. The lions in the background are just a few more dusty old lions. We often see something similar with documentary TV programmes.

It becomes particularly noticeable when there is a historical angle and the presenter takes care to locate himself or herself in the here and now while the purported subject of the programme is in the past. Gone, done with, no longer relevant – so just look at me.

Meghan Markle does it by effectively placing herself in the royal foreground where the effect is the same. Gone, done with, no longer relevant – so just look at me.

No longer unbelievable

Naga Munchetty hits out at weather woman Carol Kirkwood for 'abusing' her live on air by mistakenly calling her 'Nana' after BBC Breakfast producer


“It’s unbelievable,” Mr. Dodge said, huskily. “You don’t run across these extreme cases of self-satisfied asininity more than a few times in your whole life, even counting all the hundreds and thousands of people you come in contact with."

Booth Tarkington - Women (1925)

Where nothing really was happening

Elsie had long ago perceived that, of the girls she knew, those who made the loudest and most frequent noises signifying excitement and hilarity were the ones about whom the boys and, consequently, the other girls, most busily grouped themselves. Naturally, the simple males went where vivacious sound and gesture promised merriment; and of course, too, a crowd naturally gathers where something seems to be happening. So far as Elsie could see, the whole art of general social intercourse seemed to rest on an ability to make something appear to be happening where nothing really was happening.

Booth Tarkington - Women (1925)

It’s a well-known political trick this one. Edit the quote and we have –

So far as Elsie could see, the whole art of general social political intercourse seemed to rest on an ability to make something appear to be happening where nothing really was happening.

As we know, it is also a standard tactic to obscure whatever else is happening. The media use it to fill the gaps between ads and propaganda, but the approach is much the same.

Haphazard episodes

Our lives seem to be made up of apparently haphazard episodes, some meaningless, others important, and although we do live principally with our families and friends and neighbours, I find that people I hardly know have sometimes walked casually into my life, and influenced it, and then walked out of it as casually as they came in.

Booth Tarkington - Women (1925)

Walls of flimsy

Europe's record-breaking heatwave will be an 'average' summer sooner than you think

The heatwaves will kick in even if countries stick to their current climate targets, but refreezing the Arctic could curb dangerous changes, former chief scientific advisor Sir David King says.


Thus Alice built her walls of flimsy, working always gaily, or with at least the air of gaiety; and even as she rattled on, there was somewhere in her mind a constant little wonder. Everything she said seemed to be necessary to support something else she had said. How had it happened?

Booth Tarkington - Alice Adams (1921)

A little pause

Sometimes in the process of waking there is a little pause — sleep has gone, but coherent thought has not begun. It is a curious half-void, a glimpse of aphasia; and although the person experiencing it may not know for that instant his own name or age or sex, he may be acutely conscious of depression or elation. It is the moment, as we say, before we “remember”.

Booth Tarkington - The Turmoil (1915)

Proust was also interested in those preliminary moments where reality assembles itself in our waking brains. What day is it? What time is it? What am I doing today? A cascade of questions answered with little in the way of conscious effort. It raises a number of wider questions too. For example – do we really wake up? It’s an interesting question in a world where being woke is the cool thing to be.

Obviously we do wake up in a conventional sense, but we are never fully aware of our surroundings because that wouldn’t make sense either. We have to focus and in so doing we have to ignore extraneous reality. As far as extraneous reality is concerned we don’t need to wake up so perhaps we are only selectively awake.

Imagine a dull meeting on a warm day, a meeting where your personal concerns are only peripheral. You are merely one of the regulars. By mid afternoon your attention has flagged to such a degree that you no longer hear what is being said. You are not actually asleep but in a sense you are asleep in that you are only imperfectly conscious of your immediate physical surroundings. In other words you are imperfectly conscious.

We see this in a less somnolent sense when people cannot pay attention to what is being said, as if they are not fully awake. In these cases we usually say they do not understand or are not interested in what is being said. In some cases that may be so but in others it doesn’t make sense because what is being said is easy to understand.

It is as if we can simply switch off when what we hear is not to our liking. Switching off – an old and perfectly familiar idea. As if the brain selectively falls asleep. Or maybe we could reverse that. Maybe we never really wake up but we are able to wake up selectively to tackle things of real importance.

We may experience this after driving to work, something we do so often and so regularly that it becomes automatic and when we get to work we cannot recall the journey at all. Yet we carried out a range of complex physical and visual functions which must be performed with great accuracy and timing.

Maybe in a world dominated by routines we do not need to be fully awake all the time. To sleepwalk through most of the day would be a more efficient use of our brains compared to constant wakeful observation. For example, Jeremy Corbyn never seems to be fully awake and as far as we can tell Caroline Lucas is not entirely conscious of the real world.

Meanwhile –

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Plebeian trousers

All the commotion over Theresa May's decision to quit as Conservative leader has reminded me of a much more important subject - trousers.

Trousers with a crease were considered plebeian; the crease proved that the garment had lain upon a shelf, and hence was “ready-made”; these betraying trousers were called “hand-me-downs,” in allusion to the shelf. 

Booth Tarkington - The Magnificent Ambersons (1918)

I always thought hand me downs were items passed on from one person to another, usually clothes. I wasn't aware of the second meaning - ready-made and usually cheap and shoddy. Fortunately I've never been keen on trousers with a crease apart from weddings and funerals so maybe I never betrayed myself too much.

Hand me downs - it's an interesting term because one of our modern problems is the prevalence of hand me down politics - essentially what the EU peddles. Shoddy too - but not cheap. It's a thought isn't it? A UK Prime Minister brought down by hand me down politics.

Not Just William

source

Many folk of a certain age will be familiar with Richmal Crompton’s Just William books from their childhood. Maybe later too.

From Wikipedia

William is the leader of his band of friends, who call themselves the Outlaws, with his best friend Ginger and his other friends Henry and Douglas. His scruffy mongrel is called Jumble.

A William story often starts when William or the Outlaws set out to do something — put on a play, collect scrap metal for the war effort, look after Violet Elizabeth Bott for example. William always manages to get into trouble with his parents, although he can never see why. Often his well-meaning efforts result in broken windows and hysterics among Mrs. Brown's friends.

What may be less well known is that the character of William was probably inspired by and to some extent copied from an earlier book – American writer Booth Tarkington’s novel Penrod. Penrod Schofield is the hero of Tarkington’s novel and no William fan could possibly read it without recognising the similarities.

“Penrod Schofield!” Mrs. Lora Rewbush had come out into the hallway. And now, in this extremity, when all seemed lost indeed, particularly including honour, the dilating eye of the outlaw fell upon the blue overalls which the janitor had left hanging upon a peg. Inspiration and action were almost simultaneous...

Mr. Samuel Williams, aged eleven, and congenial to Penrod in years, sex, and disposition, appeared in the doorway, shaking into foam a black liquid within a pint bottle, stoppered by a thumb. “Yay, Penrod!” the visitor gave greeting. 

“Yay,” said Penrod with slight enthusiasm. “What you got?” 

“Lickrish water.”

Penrod is eleven years old, he had a mongrel dog, a nineteen year old sister, a middle class family life, frequently gets into scrapes and collides with authority and with enormous relish he drinks a concoction called liquorice water. Tarkington refers to him several times as an outlaw which as we recall is the name of William’s gang – the outlaws.

From a piece on William in Quadrant -

The boy hero he is most like is Penrod Schofield, created by Booth Tarkington (who wrote The Magnificent Ambersons) about ten years before William. Though her biographers stoutly deny it, Richmal pinched some of his plots. And why not? She made the stories better, funnier.

More importantly she pinched the character. To my mind she improved on Penrod as she adapted him for a British audience but it seems odd that she didn’t disguise this by avoiding some of the more obvious similarities. My guess, and it is a guess, is that she saw Penrod in boys that she knew and her imagination took it from there. And why not?