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Don't let your heart rule your head
Marriages of convenience have much to recommend them
Cynicism is much underrated, probably because it is so often misdirected. The cynical mutterings about the romances of William Hague and of Gordon Brown, for instance, are entirely misguided. It may be, as people like to suggest, that the engagement of the teenage Tory leader to a pretty and ambitious woman is not entirely the result of an overwhelming romantic passion. And it may be that Gordon Brown's association with another pretty and clever woman is not entirely driven by the spirit of St Valentine. That is no reason for so many people to make disapproving noises, as if there were something squalid about contemplating a marriage of convenience. It is very difficult in these sanctimonious times to reach high office without flaunting clear signs of heterosexuality, uxoriousness and quality parenthood. Hague and Brown would not be the first ambitious politicians of their generation to bite the bullet and reconcile themselves to matrimony as a means to an end. Nor would their girlfriends be the first good-looking and clever women to make a worldly choice about their future. I am not suggesting that I actually know anything of any of their motives. For all I know it is Antony and Cleopatra all over again. What I am suggesting is that marriages of convenience have a great deal to recommend them, and that people who condemn them very often do so out of insincerity and sentimentality. The standard respectable reason for getting married is that a man and a woman have fallen in love, whatever (as Prince Charles so stalwartly said) that means. Being in love is actually middle-class code for being in the throes of a sexual infatuation - not, one might think, the best state in which to make the decision of a lifetime, or an objective character assessment of the beloved. Sexual passion has all too short a life: a puppy is not just for Christmas, so to speak. Any marriage, no matter how romantically it began, will end up as something much less so. People lose their looks and grow old. As my mother-in-law always says, marriage is not a love affair. What remains, for the lucky, is the lasting happiness of shared interest and shared purpose, the intimacy of real companionship and a strong sense of a contractual bond - precisely those things for which people make marriages of convenience, or - to use the gentler expression - marriages of reason. I cannot see what is so shocking about approaching marriage in a spirit of reason. The Anglican prayer book positively recommends it; advisedly and soberly are the words, as far as I remember. Personally I don't think that I could ever quite get myself into an entirely reasonable frame of mind about just anybody; the wildest of political or social ambitions could not reconcile me to a lifetime of Hague or Brown, for instance. And that is my point. Reason does not necessarily exclude feeling. It directs it. As the greatest beauty of my generation at university, much feted by the sons of millionaires and shipowners, once said to me: "Of course I'm not going to marry for money. I'm simply going to make a point of marrying where money is." One might say exactly the same about political power, or upward mobility, or the prospect of a corner shop. Most people marry for something more than disinterested love; most people's motives for getting married do not bear much close inspection. But that is nothing to be cynical about. What ought to make us all feel extremely cynical, yet oddly doesn't seem to, is the way that public figures are now obliged to parade romantic feelings in public. I blame the Prime Minister. It was Tony Blair who started the perfectly ridiculous habit of displaying himself in public clutching the hand of his wife, or with Cherie hanging on his shoulder or neck. In my youth that was considered extremely vulgar. It is an infantile habit he has picked up from the Clintons, whose public hand-holding fills one with the deepest misanthropy. It is one thing to make, or stick to, a marriage of reason. It is quite another for middle-aged public figures to make distasteful public displays of bogus teenage infatuation. Now all the big hitters in British political life - if that is not a contradiction in terms - feel they must be spotted in intimate poses too, snapped exchanging significant glances and generally engaging in awkward mating rituals simply to impress the masses. It is, in its own way, a kind of political sleaze.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, July 06, 1997
