Can there ever have been a general election so devoid of rhetorical panache as this one? Sunak and Starmer, Reeves and Hunt make Ted Heath sound like Cicero. Even Farage’s recycled slogans, usually good for a laugh or a sneer, sound tired. Ferdinand Mount, however, may be rejoicing. He himself is not capable of deploying words badly. Whether it is a novel, a memoir (Cold Cream), a review for the London Review of Books, or the extraordinary life of his Aunt Munca, Kiss Myself Goodbye, he writes about complicated things with lucidity and elegance. He hasn’t spoilt his record with Big Caesars and Little Caesars – first published in 2023 and now issued in a timely pre-election paperback – is a splendid book. Or rather, to be fair, several books or long essays bound into one by a theme articulated with passion and expressed with powerful rhetoric. The theme is the defence of rational discussion, of careful debate and of the imperfect parliamentary and senatorial institutions which embody such debate. His motto is Lyndon Johnson’s, from Isaiah 1, verse 18: “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord.”
Another Johnson, Boris, lit the fire of the anger that burns through this book. So learned is Mount, and in so many different directions, that his anger takes him far and wide beyond the 10 Downing Street that he knew first-hand as Mrs Thatcher’s head of policy back in 1982-83. One of the books in this volume is a study of the phenomenon of glittering prizes; of life as a game with applause and honours as its sole objective. One deep root of this in Western culture lies in what ER Dodds in his great book The Greeks and the Irrational describes as the “shame culture” presented with incomparable poetic power in the Bronze Age epic of the Iliad. Achilles, who knowingly chose short life and glory over long life and obscurity, embodies this culture. The example of Achilles echoes down the ages to Julius Caesar, and then through the middle ages to Napoleon and onwards. There is a gap in Mount’s story here: we need a chapter on Alexander the Great. He was the embodiment (at least in his own eyes) of the swift-footed son of Peleus and was the hero of heroes to all his successors, and not just in Europe: Iskander’s fame reaches as far as did his armies.
Content from our partners
