MAJOR, SCHMAJOR!
The National Theatre's Oedipus makes
Harry Eyres think there's something similar
about Oedipus and the Prime Minister
THE cricket-loving John Major is not known to be an aficionado of the stage. The Russian general Alexander Lebed's recent remark that he was going to the theatre in order to learn how to govern the country would probably seem bizarre to our Prime Minister. But as the Standards and Privi- leges Committee in the House of Commons continues its investigation into the Hamil- ton cash-for-questions affair, Mr Major might find a surprising relevance in the Royal National Theatre's production of Sophocles' Oedipus plays. The first of these, Oedipus Tyrannus, is one of the greatest plays ever written about an investigation into state corruption. Consider the parallels. The state is sick. A stench of rot hangs in the air. The flocks, infected by the plague, are dying in the fields. The people call upon their leader to save them. This, after all, is the man who got rid of that terrifying, unanswerable creature in female form (Maggie the sphinx). Surely he will have the answer. Enter the leader; determined to clear up the matter, he sets in train the most exhaustive investigations (con- sulting the Delphic oracle: setting up the Nolan Committee).
The first lesson of Oedipus Tyrannus is that the rot is real and there is no getting away from it. Oedipus himself most clearly feels and shares the sufferings and anxi- eties of his people. Indeed, he says his grief is three times greater than theirs they suffer only individually, he for him- self, for them and for the state.
John Major, on the other hand, never seems sure whether the rot is an infection of the body politic or an invention of the media. 'This matter,' he said on Breakfast with Frost, 'is poisoning British politics because of the way it is being slanted by people.' You might need all Oedipus' famed skill in riddle-solving to untangle this piece of Majorese, but the drift is clear — it's all the fault of meddling journalists. The oracle, in the form of the Nolan Com- mittee report, does not agree. 'We do not hold the media in any way to blame for exposing genuine wrongdoing,' affirms the report. But then Mr Major will not say whether he sees anything wrong in MPs or ministers accepting cash for questions and receiving undeclared monies from Mr Greer, let alone Whips attempting to intervene in select committees.
The second and overriding lesson of Oedipus concerns responsibility — and in particular the responsibility of the leader. Oedipus himself, as we all know, not only takes personal responsibility for the inves- tigation into corruption but also, in the end, for the dark deed which has caused it.
Mr Major deploys the sophisticated investigative machinery of a mature (possi- bly overripe) parliamentary democracy. But this is no excuse either for procrastina- tion or abdication of responsibility. At first glance, his statement of intent (again on Frost), 'I want it settled, I want it settled quickly', seems decisive. But look at it again, and the use of the impersonal pas- sive participle 'settled' (yes, but by whom?) becomes, well, unsettling.
Where do the Prime Minister's respon- sibilities begin and end? The Nolan Com- mittee set up very quickly by the Prime Minister in October 1994, in response to allegations of cash for questions, gave par- ticular attention to this issue. In the sec- tion on ministers and civil servants, Nolan states that 'the public interest requires that allegations of ministerial misconduct should be promptly investigated. Normally this is a matter for the Prime Minister.' In the section on the Executive, Nolan rec- ommends a change to the first paragraph of Questions of Procedure for Ministers — the nearest thing we have in our Heath Robinson system to a code of government ethics — to read as follows: 'It will be for individual ministers to judge how best to act in order to uphold the highest stan- dards. It will be for the Prime Minister to determine whether or not they have done so in any particular circumstance.'
When Oedipus sent Creon to consult the Delphic oracle, he perhaps hoped it would `settle the matter' and free his people from the plague. In the same way Mr Major seems to feel that by setting up Nolan and, on Nolan's recommendation, appointing the new Parliamentary Commissioner for Stan- dards, Sir Gordon Downie, he has let him- self off the hook of responsibility. But oracles, like psychoanalysts, tend to return the question to the sender.
You can of course decide that oracles are wrong or malicious. That was what Oedipus's mother, Jocasta, thought. The oracle foretold, at the birth of the son (Oedipus) whom she had by Laius, that the boy would kill his father and marry his mother. She leaves the baby to die, with ankles pinioned, on Mount Cithaeron. With terrible irony, she believes she has disproved the oracle. But, of course, a shepherd finds and brings up the child. Years later, events make Oedipus suspect that he is indeed that murdering, incestu- ous son. He nonetheless orders an inquiry into who murdered Laius.
The situations of Oedipus and John Major were similar. Each ordered an inquiry which could only damage them. Oedipus, however, is a tragic hero. He does not try to stifle the inquiry.
But John Major's style (no doubt learnt at Lambeth Town Hall) is neither to defy augury nor, Oedipus-like, to accept it. Instead, he smothers it in bureaucracy. The real sickness in our polity, revealed not only by the Nolan Report but also by the Scott Report, concerns the loss of moral bearings, or, to put it another way, the evacuation of responsibility. As Professor Vernon Bogdanor put it, 'There is a need within the British system of government for some moral reference point that can help determine when the conventions have been broken.' Nolan tried to pin that point, when it comes to ministerial misconduct (remember Hamilton was a minister at the time of the original allegations), on the Prime Minister. The Government answer, in the form of the White Paper responding to Nolan, was to bat that responsibility back to Parliament — ignoring that public lack of confidence in the probity of Parlia- ment was the very issue Nolan had been called upon to examine.
We know from Oedipus that while corrup- tion in high places goes uninvestigated and unpunished the people suffer. One hardly expects Mr Major to gouge out his eyes in a sudden access of guilt — or, more soberly, to assume personal responsibility for what Professor Bogdanor has called the 'tide of sleaze which threatens to engulf him'. But while he passes the buck and refuses either to investigate or to comment upon the con- duct of his ministers, the rest of us must continue to hold our noses.
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