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Charity vaunteth not itself
Mr Blair draws attention to his own beneficence
The Prime Minister must know, if only from his own lip-trembling reading from the New Testament at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, that "charity vaunteth not itself". One can only wonder, then, why Tony Blair allowed Peter Mandelson's Cabinet Office so very publicly to offer parts of Admiralty House to the homeless this winter. It may have been charity or compassion - long overdue - to offer shelter to the destitute, but it was exceedingly vaunting too.
London is full of empty public buildings which could be lent quietly to the homeless, but Blair and Mandelson deliberately chose one guaranteed to draw the greatest possible attention to their own beneficence. The more the Establishment protests, the more the Government appears to stand for the ordinary man and woman - the People's Party. The more treasured the building, the more dazzling the Government's compassion.
I suppose it wouldn't matter much if this were all. Vaunting oneself in the name of charity may be wrong in a Christian, but it is quite normal in politicians. But I think this is not all. There was something more alarming underlying the choice of this building, which reveals a great deal more about the Government than mere low cunning.
Admiralty Arch is a place of great symbolic meaning. It expresses, and was specifically built to express, pride in Great Britain and in British history, especially our naval history. It is part of a monumental self-confidence, a permanent celebration of our culture through architecture, of which there is surprisingly little in London but which you see everywhere in Paris. Paris is an altar to what the French unselfconsciously call la gloire. We don't even have a word for it.
That doesn't mean we don't have a need for it, or any claim to it. I think we do, even though we now feel differently about both. To put a miscellany of drug addicts, disturbed teenagers, homeless rent boys, life-long tramps and neglected mental patients into one of the very few public buildings that still express a sense of national pride and ceremony is to make a very clear symbolic statement. I don't know whether Blair's aides consciously meant it to be so clear, or whether they were simply obsessed with more superficial popularity ratings. Either way, it is a very effective junking of the past and of national identity. Now that the Queen's Navy has been thrown out, and the last of the First Sea Lords has left, Admiralty Arch is to become an inner-city doss house.
Perhaps this is all part of New Labour's videotape vision of Britain as "the young country". It isn't really a young country, of course, and most of the electorate is not young either, but the New Cromwellians may feel there is at least something youthful in bringing down old institutions and dumping old traditions. That is a youthful approach - or, rather, an adolescent one. I used to share it, and I still have some ambivalent feelings about pomp and circumstance.
As it happens I have seen quite a lot of it, at least of the naval kind, because my uncle, the late William Staveley, was a sailor and became First Sea Lord in the 1980s. Through his kindness and hospitality I occasionally found myself being piped on to great battleships to watch the Queen's review of the fleet at Spithead; being piped into very formal dinners at Norwood, surrounded by staff at Admiralty Arch, and, to me most strangely of all, being addressed respectfully, when scarcely out of my teens, as Ma'am. When I was young, although I was very pleased to be invited and immensely proud of my handsome and affectionate uncle, all this ceremony embarrassed me. I was still in the grip of the usual adolescent egalitarianism, and unable to understand the importance of ceremony and order and the extreme self-discipline which underlies them.
Now I see more clearly how essential they all are. They are a necessary expression of tradition and self-respect, the very opposite of unselfdisciplined, anarchic feely-touchiness. It is true that some of our public ceremonies have become faintly ridiculous; there are far too many drums and pantomime horses and old men walking backwards. All these things must change and adapt. But, as any anthropologist knows, it is very dangerous to abandon all at once our myths of ourselves and pride in our traditions, and the rituals which express both; or, with all the authority of a Prime Minister, to insult them in bogus indignation, as Blair has done. It is also very adolescent - irresponsible, immature, ineffectual, iconoclastic posturing.
Though no longer a child, Mr Blair seems still to be seeing through a glass rather darkly -in his case a narcissistic public relations glass.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, November 02, 1997
