Senator Syvret

06.02.2007

Dear Senator Walker

As a New York Times columnist noted: "Political insults are a traditional British sport." It seems to be that Senator Syvret's letter falls very much into that category, an outburst of invective rather too heavily laced with irony. In fact, it seems rather tame compared to insults given by major politicians of the past; it is part and parcel of the fabric of a free society that politicians should be able to speak their mind (see examples below).

It is not as if Senator Syvret has divulged information that he, as a member of the Council of Ministers, was given in private and confidence, thereby breaking collective responsibility; this letter is about matters all in the public arena. I remember sending emails to politicians such as Deputy Routier on the matter, and being assured by him that "There will be exceptions which include declared positions in manifestos, constituency matters and matters of conscience" (email, 12/10/2002). Senator Syvret's outburst is surely a matter of making clear his "declared position" to his constituency on a matter of conscience.


Everyone knows about Don Filleul as "the mastermind behind the steam clock", to quote Senator Syvret; I have in fact always rather liked that artefact; I have even spoken to Don personally many years ago expressing just that sentiment. But comments which draw upon the general dislike of many people for that, used with irony, are certainly not defamatory.

It is also clear that any form of indirect taxation such as GST will impact on poorer members of society rather than the richer, and how far this can be alleviated by redistributive mechanisms such as the revised income support remains to be seem; in a way, it is a pity that Senator Syvret's broadside is in some ways too broad, and not focused enough on possible failings of the system, and how they can be monitored and addressed.

Regarding the Jersey Evening Post, a search through the archives certainly reveals a number of occasions when Norman Le Brocq was vilified, and this is simply a matter of historical record, although given his own brand of invective (e.g. http://www.societe-jersiaise.org/geraint/russians/lebrocq.html) it was perhaps not altogether unjustified. It is, of course, a matter of general form for newspapers today to look for positive and glowing sentiments in obituaries, and downplay past disagreements, and this is of course open to criticism of the sort directed by Senator Syvret.

It would, however, be most detrimental to free speech to attempt to silence, or muzzle him, or throw him out of the council of ministers. François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire) is purported to have said: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." A public response by those in the States from those that he criticised on those lines would do much to show the statesmanlike qualities of the Council of Ministers.

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The political insult I have always found most memorable was that given by Winston Churchill to Ramsay MacDonald:

"I remember when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the program which I most desired to see was the one described as "The Boneless Wonder". My parents judged that the spectacle would be too demoralizing and revolting for my youthful eye and I have waited fifty years, to see The Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench." Not quite up to that was his remark on Attlee: "Clement Attlee is a modest man who has a good deal to be modest about."

In recent times, Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, has not been afraid to speak his mind: "For Bush and Blair to go into Iraq together was like a bunch of white vigilantes going into Brixton to stop drug dealing. This is not to deny there's a problem to be sorted, just that they are not credible people to deal with it."

Past insults or invective abound. François Mitterrand famously said of Mrs Thatcher, "She has the mouth of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Caligula". Dennis Healey spoke of Geoffrey Howe's performance in the Commons as "Like being savaged by a dead sheep."

Further back in time, Benjamin Disraeli on Lord John Russell: "If a traveller were informed that such a man was the Leader of the House of Commons, he might begin to comprehend how the Egyptians worshipped an insect." Disraeli also said that if Gladstone fell in the Thames, it would be a disaster, but a "calamity" if he were fished out.To Palmerston, he remarked: "Your lordship is like a favourite footman on easy terms with his mistress. Your dexterity seems a happy compound of the smartness of an attorney's clerk and the intrigue of a Greek of the lower empire." On Gladstone, he commented that his opponent was ""a sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself".

On the press, when Aneurin Bevan called the British press "the most prostituted" in the world, he was reminded that the metaphor had been used before and more elegantly, too, by Stanley Baldwin: "What the proprietorship of these papers (Beaverbrook's and Rothermere's) is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility - the prerogative of the harlot through the ages," he said in a byelection speech on March 18, 1931. He had borrowed the phrase from his cousin, Rudyard Kipling.