SHARED OPINION
What's a bad boy like him doing with a good boy like that?
FRANK JOHNSON
hike many of us males, the young Clin- ton bears all the marks of having been one of those boys whom other boys' mothers tell their sons not to hang around with: `He'll only get you into trouble.'
But some of us found that this did not do us much harm: we still found boys prepared to hang around with us. This pattern has continued into later life. People still tell others not to hang around with us, but such warnings tend to come from later life's equivalent of mums, that is, authority fig- ures, or would-be authority figures, such as employers, ex-wives, ex-girlfriends, hus- bands and boyfriends of ex-wives and girl- friends; and in my case, since most of my working life has been spent in political journalism, from the more respectable, or would-be respectable, politicians, govern- ment press officers and editors. Experi- ence, however, teaches most of us that in a free country it is possible to get on quite well without the approval of authority fig- ures.
All of which is by way of being a pream- ble to the subject of good Mr Blair hanging around this week with bad Mr Clinton. It is hard for a head of government to be more respectable than Mr Blair; it is hard for a head of government to be more disrep- utable than Mr Clinton. Yet here they are playing together. Their respective jobs mean that Mr Blair has no choice but to meet Mr Clinton from time to time. The whole point of this week's meeting in Washington, however, was that the play was depicted as more important than the work.
Mr Blair was manifestly one of those boys whose friendships would have been influenced by his mother's warnings as to the boys he should not hang around with; or, since his mother was almost certainly one of those people who think that preposi- tions should not come at the end of sen- tences, the boys with whom he should not hang around. You've been with that Clin- ton boy again, she would have admonished her son this week. I thought I told you not to have anything to do with him.
`It's all right, mum, he just asked me over to his place to help him with his homework. Mrs Albright has given Bill a hard essay to write before the weekend. He's got to say how to make Saddam Hussein stop build- ing chemical weapons — short of an Amer- ican land invasion.'
Mrs Blair: `Oh yes, and what was that Barbra Streisand doing there with the two of you, then? She's no better than she ought to be.'
(British mothers of my generation and of Mr Blair's often used that enigmatic phrase. They would use it about female neighbours of whom they disapproved, or women in low-cut dresses on television. When I was a boy, I realised that it signi- fied disapproval and that the person spo- ken of was not respectable, but I could never understand why, or what the phrase meant literally. Why should the woman in question be any better than she ought to be? How can anyone be any better than they ought to be? Does the phrase imply that respectable women are better than they ought to be? In that case, they cannot be as respectable as all that. Does the `ought' imply a behaviourist, or determinist, concept of the individual, or does it imply the traditional Judaeo-Christian, and Con- servative, idea that the individual rather than society is responsible for his or her actions? Somehow, though, I do not think my own mother was troubled by such spec- ulations about the phrase.) To return to Mr Blair: 'Don't worry, mum, Barbra was there, but so was Elton John.'
Mrs Blair: 'It's about time that boy had a girlfriend.'
What Mr Blair would not have been able to tell his mother was that he sought Mr Clinton's company, and accepted his exces- sive hospitality, not in spite of the Presi- dent's being one of us boys of whom moth- ers disapprove, but because of it. Good boys are drawn to bad boys. They are also drawn to bad girls, but that is another mat- ter. Good boys like communing with the powers of darkness, safe in the knowledge that, being good, they can always return to the light. Likewise bad boys need good boys to do their homework, or to lend them respectability by association when an 'It's amazing, there's no drawing on it.' authority figure such as a mother or a spe- cial prosecutor has a hand on their collar. It must be good for a British prime minister to feel so needed by an American presi- dent. Mr Blair would be less than human were he not to enjoy the feeling while it lasts. The dimmer Tories hope that if Mr Clinton comes to a messy end they will be able to use the partying of this week to associate Mr Blair with Mr Clinton's fall. But Mr Blair is one of nature's good boys. He knows that, in the end, and nine times out of ten, we bad boys do no harm to any- one except ourselves.
Sion Simon, whom our readers will know as our Kremlinologist and anatomist of New Labour, has become the Daily Tele- graph's Monday columnist on the strength of his work in this magazine. His first Spec- tator piece appeared as recently as last August. It was more or less his first piece anywhere. To have been given a column in a national newspaper only about eight months after one's first journalism must be a record. So I rather regret that I recently missed a chance to turn him into a figure of mystery.
Two weeks ago we published a reader's letter asking whether he was male or female. I appended a note explaining that he was the former. Had I not done so, it would have been interesting to see to what sex a majority of letter-writers thought he belonged. 'Sian' has about it the air of a raven-haired colleen. Most Anglo-Saxons probably do not know that it is a Welsh male first name. By removing all tell-tale references in his pieces to things associated with the Welsh, such as rugby, druids and hatred of A.A. Gill, we could have kept the mystery, and the correspondence, going for months. Sion could have been the new Alice von Schlieffen. Indeed, had I not ended the correspondence to do with her, `Alice von Schlieffen' might have become the new Telegraph columnist.
A long correspondence about what sex Mr Simon belonged to might have revealed what people think, if any, are male or female characteristics in political writing. Eventually, we may be sure, a militant fem- inist would have written to demand whether it mattered whether Mr or Ms Simon was male or female and to end this demeaning, sexist correspondence forth- with.
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