As Macmillan never said: that's enough quotations
As Macmillan never said: that's enough quotations - Telegraph
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Reading through the Guardian over breakfast the other day, I came across a column headlined "Events, ol' buddy, events". It was all I could do not to hurl it across the kitchen.
This was not because the column was bad, or because the Guardian's leader pages were any more irritating than usual, but simply because I knew what was coming.
And, yes, of course, there it was, down towards the bottom of the page: "All politicians know - and often quote - the response from Harold Macmillan when asked what a prime minister most feared: 'Events, dear boy, events'."
What is it about this phrase that has rendered it so infuriatingly ubiquitous? It was dull when it appeared again in the Observer this Sunday ("Harold Macmillan, asked what he most feared, replied, 'Events, dear boy, events' "), just as it was when it appeared in the Observer in March ("Newspapers . . . are written and edited against the pressure of deadlines while trying to respond to what Harold Macmillan once wearily described as 'Events, dear boy, events' "), and was no more interesting when it showed up in the Observer in April ("as Harold Macmillan put it, 'Events, dear boy, events' ").
It's not as if it's even been reliably authenticated. Some say Macmillan made it to President Kennedy, others to a journalist after dinner. Denis Healey claims it referred to foreign policy.
Alistair Horne, Macmillan's official biographer (who tells me he can't put his finger on it, either) thinks it may have been a response to the Profumo affair.
It didn't appear in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations until 1999 (where it is carefully described as "attributed") which may explain why hardly anybody used it until three years ago. Now it's as unavoidable as "a week is a long time in politics" or "it's the economy, stupid".
I'm not trying to be snooty about this. I can't remember whether I've ever actually used it myself, but I've certainly used plenty of quotations like it - aphorisms that fall into a particular category: just above the out-and-out cliche and just below the level of something genuinely apt and unfamiliar.
I always know when I'm using one, because I generally find myself introducing it with the adverb "famously", as in: "As X famously observed . . .", a formulation that serves the useful function of signalling that I know what follows is fairly hackneyed, but - what the hell? - I'm going to use it anyway, in the hope that not too many people will notice.
I've not bought a souvenir mug or planted a memorial tree, but it strikes me that one useful way of marking the Golden Jubilee might be to avoid, say, 10 historical and political quotations that are too often used by columns such as this.
Every writer and reader will no doubt have their own particular favourites that they'd be grateful never to hear again, but these are mine:
1) "All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs" - Enoch Powell on Joseph Chamberlain.
2) "There are three bodies no sensible man directly challenges: the Roman Catholic Church, the Brigade of Guards and the National Union of Mineworkers" - Harold Macmillan (also attributed to Stanley Baldwin).
3) "In the long run we are all dead" - John Maynard Keynes.
4) "I'd rather take advice from my valet than from the Conservative Party Conference" - Arthur Balfour.
5) "Socialism is what a Labour Government does" - Herbert Morrison.
6) "Not while I'm alive 'e ain't" - Ernest Bevin, on being told that Morrison was "his own worst enemy".
7) "How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?" - de Gaulle.
8) "Is it better to be loved than feared, or the reverse? The answer is that it is desirable to be both, but because it is difficult to join them together, it is much safer for a prince to be feared than loved" - Niccolo Machiavelli.
9) "Treason is a question of dates" - Talleyrand.
10) "It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder" - Anotine Boulay de la Meurthe, on hearing of the execution of the Duc d'Enghien by Napoleon.
These are all, in their different ways, excellent quotations - epigrammatic or wise or cynical. They are certainly not as cliched as "I don't know what effect these men have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me", as Wellington is usually misquoted, or Lady Thatcher's "there is no such thing as Society".
And yet, for all that, they are cliches, made slightly worse by the fact that using them is designed to convey a thin patina of learning. They are at once familiar, yet just unfamiliar enough to have a certain snob value.
I'm sure it's the Edwardian "dear boy" in Macmillan's "events, dear boy, events" that has made it appeal to a thousand hard-pressed hacks desperately looking for a touch of class.
So I hereby promise I shall try not to use them. No more "one death is a tragedy, one thousand is a statistic". No more guff about "talking softly and carrying a big stick". No more "where's the beef?" or "he would, wouldn't he?" or "crisis, what crisis?"
And while we're about it, can we also lose those other phrases and images that have no specific author, but that regularly surface in columns (including mine)?
Let no more deckchairs be rearranged on the Titanic, or Fuhrers in their bunkers order around phantom divisions, or turkeys vote for Christmas, or horses be promoted by Caligula. Let there be no more strange deaths of Liberal/Tory/ Labour England.
"You have used every cliche except 'God is love' and 'Please adjust your dress before leaving'," Churchill (famously) said. In that spirit, I curse "events, dear boy, events". As Cromwell (equally famously) declared: "Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go."
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It's an ancient article, but I just ran into it searching for something else, and I thought it made a good point.
Everyone must have some of these. My nominations would be that Jane Clarke one about sleeping with below stairs people, and bread and circuses. Not sure about the Sciences Po crest:
Every time I see it I'm half pleased by the sarky subversion of lofty ideals, and half irritated by the irksome Victorian smugness ("peccavi"). It's also a cliché isn't it? The older I get the more I think that barely anything is worth saying at all.
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