From soggy stogies to a cup of Earl Grey, we should cherish our prime ministerial legacy
Power needs symbols. Otherwise the strong and powerful have to kick the crap out of the weak and vulnerable over and over again to remind them who's boss, which is exhausting for both groups. By the time the Queen's Norman predecessor arrived on the south coast with some heavies and started stabbing the locals, the symbolism that legitimised such actions was already well-established: kings wore crowns.
If there are guys wearing huge and impractical gold hats involved, then what you're being beaten up in is not just a fight but a battle. You're part of something significant: a struggle to decide which of the metal hat-wearers' descendants will one day get to have a televised wedding (unless it turns out the Middletons can trace their line back to Harold Godwinson, in which case the last 1,000 years of English history have been a complete waste of time).
Nowadays, the crown is just a bland symbol of governmental authority, something to print at the top of forms, and those who like being in charge of things have other ways of alluding to their access to might: from a drug-dealer's diamond-encrusted knuckle-duster to Margaret Thatcher's hefty handbag ? which will be auctioned at Christie's in June and is expected to fetch at least �100,000.
This would dwarf the �4,500 that one of Winston Churchill's half-smoked cigars fetched last year and the �16,000 that was recently paid for an old set of his false teeth. But then what better symbol is there of Thatcher's government than her great handbag of state, steeped in the metaphorical blood of miners and Argentinians, with just a drop or two of the literal blood of cabinet ministers? It's an icon of her unique leadership style, comprising all the forcefulness of Gladstone or Lloyd George with all the femininity of Gladstone or Lloyd George in a dress.
In this seller's market for emblems of prime ministerial power, here are a few other mementos of our leaders which are due to pass through the world's great auction houses in the next few months.
Robert Walpole's wig
The first male prime minister was just as adept at using apparently harmless personal items to get his point across as the first female one. If a political conversation was turning against him, Walpole would fling his thick and heavy, early 18th-century wig into the face of his interlocutor, buying him crucial moments, while his opponent spluttered on horse hair and neck sweat, in which to think of an appropriate riposte.
His habit of hissing the name of the object, in an odd, aspirated way, as he threw it ? reputed at the time to be an attempt to make the opposition think he was a superhero and that accurate wig hurling was his special power ? later gave his political party its name.
A cup of Earl Grey
Not a receptacle of the tea but an American cake-baking measure of the late, reforming Whig's pickled viscera. "Keep a little of me close to your heart when I'm gone," he told his family in his last illness. Later utterances made it clear that he wasn't speaking metaphorically and wanted them to preserve "some bits of me middle. But nothing creepy like a nostril or a ball". The remains, stored in a porcelain urn, were later presented by his widow to an ungrateful nation. France.
Clement Attlee's mint imperial
Only half-sucked, Attlee was reportedly too tired to finish it. "It goes on and on," he said at the time, though some would claim he was referring to his struggle to establish the welfare state. Others went on to invent the Polo.
Ted Heath's Sylvester outfit
Ted Heath probably enjoyed greater success in his hobbies than he did as prime minister. An accomplished organist, conductor and yachtsman, he became so unpleasantly bitter about the rise of Margaret Thatcher that, in 1983, even Labour leader Michael Foot voted for her. The Heath government of the early 1970s was beset with crises and, as the prospect of electricity rationing loomed, the premier took to heading out into central London dressed as Sylvester the cat and playing the trumpet for loose change at the bottom of the escalators at Oxford Circus tube station.
In his will, he left both the costume, still stiff from prime ministerial sweat, and the �173.42 of proceeds from its use, to the people of China, in the hope, as he put it, "that it would retrospectively screw up the Hong Kong handover".
Anthony Eden's pill box
Not the second world war defensive structure but where the disgraced prime minister kept his Benzedrine tablets, which were, for a time, as potent a symbol of British pluck and defiance as Churchill's cigars. Just as the celebrated war leader steeled himself for the fight against fascism with tobacco and alcohol, so Eden, struggling with conflicting urges to emulate his predecessor and escape his shadow into the broad sunlit uplands of the post-nuclear, forward-looking 1950s, became heavily reliant on amphetamines.
Indeed, Rab Butler described Eden's approach to cabinet government as differing from Churchill's by being "a much more modern sort of sozzled". But disaster struck when, in October 1956, he accidentally took his tablets twice and ordered the invasion of Egypt.
The Earl of Derby's name badge
One of our least well-known prime ministers, the Earl of Derby presided over 27 different governments during the reign of Queen Victoria, which, due to successive parliamentary crises, added up to less than two-and-a-half hours in total duration. Consequently, most of his career in the top job was taken up collecting or returning the seals of office from a woman constitutionally incapable of suppressing her sense of his irrelevance. His decision to fashion a name badge, to be pinned on his coat in order to remind her who he was, speaks volumes about the man's fragile self-esteem.
Neville Chamberlain's chest expander
A present from Mussolini, who swore by a similar device and felt that the British leader needed to "beef up", it later emerged that Chamberlain had been using it the wrong way round, resulting in a shrinking effect, which then provoked him into greater and more desperate use of the device. After his death, his valet recalled the embarrassment in 1938 of the by then almost chestless leader: "Pigeon-chested wasn't in it ? he were wren-chested. I don't mean Wren-chested ? they have tits. But in fact almost like a tit. He were tit-chested. Like the bird, a tit. He had the chest of a bird. By which I don't mean a woman, but a bird. He were thin. When he met Hitler, we had to pad him out with napkins."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/01/david-mitchell-winston-churchill-memorabilia
Bill Clinton Rudy Giuliani Jimmy Carter Dick Cheney Barack Obama
No comments:
Post a Comment