The Boathouse at Agatha Christie’s Greenway estate near Dartmouth

Agatha Christie was a hugely popular crime and thriller writer who sold millions of books during a working life extending from the 1920s to the 1970s. In 1962 a UNESCO report quoted by her biographer Charles Osborne said that Agatha Christie was the most widely read British author in the world, with Shakespeare second, a long way behind. The Guinness Book Of Records – according to Wikipedia – claims around four billion copies of Agatha Christie’s books have sold worldwide, with only The Bible selling in greater quantities.  By any measure Agatha Christie was seriously successful.

Widely read though they are, detective stories have long been dismissed as mere entertainment.  WH Auden viewed them as tobacco, an addiction which wasn’t quite proper. Now, it is not for me to spoil things by claiming detective fiction for the earnest English Literature crowd, but it is interesting how closely detective stories are related to the earliest days of novel writing. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Puritan self confession narratives began to evolve into fictional moral tracts, which became what we now know as the novel. In the popularity of detective stories, it is easy to hear echoes from the novel’s earliest days. Detective stories involve a crime, usually a murder, and the successful uncovering of a culprit. On the way the best crime writers are able to explore our conceptions of morality.

So was Agatha Christie a writer who could explore morality?  If you were to read some of her autobiographical writings, you would not think it likely.   In fact, she talks of right and wrong in terms stark enough to sit easily amidst the adherents of fringe right-wing politics. The innocent and guilty are portrayed as fundamentally different, virtually as separate beings:

“Why should we not execute him? We have taken the lives of wolves in this country; we didn’t try to teach the wolf to lie down with the lamb – I doubt really if we could. We hunted down the wild boar in the mountains before he came down and killed the children by the brook. These were our enemies and we destroyed them.” (Quoted in The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie by Charles Osborne).

Statements like this do not offer much hope for a nuance and ambiguity. Nevertheless, through the 1930s and 1940s, the Agatha Christie publishing phenomenon exploded around two detectives, a former Belgian policeman named Hercule Poirot, who first appeared in The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920; and Miss Marple, who usually solved crimes in the village of St Mary Mead, making her debut in Murder at the Vicarage in 1930. None of the many novels featuring these two characters was to sell millions by presenting dull and obvious homilies.   Murderers are frequently portrayed sympathetically, while victims are often flawed in some way.  An Appointment With Death, a Poirot novel published in 1938, is typical.  An evil old woman called Mrs Boynton takes a holiday in the Middle East with her unfortunate family, which she has terrorised for decades. The family finally snaps, murdering the old woman with an overdose of her heart medicine, hoping that the murder will be overlooked as death by natural causes. The various suspects are considered by Poirot who just happens to also be holidaying in the area. As part of his investigation, Poirot interviews a doctor, who does not want the death investigated.  He argues that the world is better off without Mrs Boynton, and that one damaged member of the family, Ginerva Boynton, might have committed murder in self-defence:

“I should say mentally she is in an extremely dangerous condition. She has already begun to display symptoms of schizophrenia. Unable to bear the suppression of her life, she is escaping into the realm of fantasy… The sufferer kills – not for the lust of killing – but in self-defence.”

Meanwhile, crusty Colonel Carbury dismisses such liberal meanderings and pushes for a proper inquiry.  He does not want this because of any moral qualms, but because as he puts it: “I’m a tidy man.” You get the feeling that Colonel Carbury is a fool, whose neat conception of the world has no room for its true complexity.  Poirot himself is similar in outlook, admitting to no gray areas:

“The victim may be one of the good God’s saints – or, on the contrary – a monster of infamy. It moves me not. The fact is the same… I don’t approve of murder.”

A letter, received by Agatha Christie, on display at Greenway House

So how to do you reconcile the novels with the autobiographical views?  Perhaps there’s a clue in the fact that Agatha Christie herself was always adamant that her stories were merely unimportant entertainment.  Perhaps by viewing her writing in this way, she was free to explore ambiguities that she was reluctant to accept in her daily life as a wealthy English woman who wanted the criminal classes shot like wolves and wild hogs.  If she came to different conclusions in her books, that didn’t matter, because her books didn’t matter, even if they did sell in their billions.

The word entertainment comes from a Latin word “tenere,” meaning “to hold”. We are held by the things that entertain us, given succor by them.  Christie novels offer a clear and comforting picture of morality where a supreme, seemingly all-seeing detective will always solve a crime. And yet alongside this reassurance there is an accurate reflection of the true complexity of human behaviour where innocent and guilty are almost interchangeable. In a Christie story, the wolf and the lamb not only lie down together, they are often the same animal. And as for Poirot, a character who Christie said she ended up hating, he sees everything, and yet seems blind to life’s gray areas.

In this respect it is not so fanciful to ultimately see a link between the world’s two top best selling collection of stories.  Perhaps they both hold people in a similar way.  In Exodus, for example, God has to ask Abraham for his help in deciding what to do with Sodom and Gomorrah. God sees everything, but in doing so, like Poirot, he is not involved. Abraham is involved, does not have a universal breadth of vision, but “understands” things in a way that an all-seeing power cannot. God has to ask Abraham for advice.  This section of Exodus is just like a Christie story. Perhaps it is a bit intimidating to feel that you might be writing a modern Exodus – so we might understand why Agatha Christie was so keen to dismiss the significance of her stories.  Nevertheless, significant is what they are.

Merton College Oxford, where Tolkien was Professor of Anglo Saxon Studies

It is often the case that practitioners of humble art forms have more freedom of expression than those working at the smarter end of the market. Until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,  pictorial art was confined to religious themes, and physically restricted to church buildings. The widening of art’s scope took place not in the painting of timeless masterpieces, but in the decoration of tapestries, storage boxes, furniture, crockery and cutlery. At the National Gallery, fifteenth century storage boxes decorated by Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo are just as important as famous paintings. It was the lack of expectation surrounding a storage box that allowed Botticelli to try different things in safety.

A similar thing often happens with writing. Take the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, for example.  A devout Roman Catholic after converting at a young age, Tolkien’s religion did not naturally admit to change, questioning and ambiguity. However, in the safe place of seemingly unimportant children’s stories, Tolkien found a new freedom to explore.

Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings opens in The Shire, an imagined rural community of hobbits, small, furry-footed folk who enjoy eating, drinking, smoking pipe weed, and pursuing an unvarying farming existence. The Shire, however, is not simply an idealisation of an older and better world. There is much small-mindedness in hobbit society. Maps of the Shire show mostly white space beyond its borders. And even within the Shire, hobbits from one area will judge hobbits a few miles down the road as strange folk. It is not surprising that some hobbits feel restless in this stultifying little community. There’s old Bilbo Baggins for example, the hero of Tolkien’s first book The Hobbit, who went on a long journey and never really settled down afterwards.

By the time The Lord of the Rings begins, Bilbo is one hundred and eleven years old. Bilbo owns a mysterious magic ring which he picked up on his travels. This ring, as it turns out, has various dark powers, one of which is to keep its owner from ageing. Bilbo is one hundred and eleven but looks much younger. While this might seem like a good thing, the endless youth provided by the ring actually presents itself as a failure to move on. Bilbo makes an important personal step when he manages to heed the advice of his wizard friend Gandalf, and hand the ring to his adopted heir, Frodo Baggins.

Ironically, the ring that kept Bilbo’s life in limbo immediatly creates a revolution in Frodo’s life. Gandalf explains to him that the ring is sought by evil forces, hoping to use its powers to enslave Middle Earth. Frodo and a few friends set off on a journey designed to keep the ring out of enemy hands. On this journey, change remains an overriding theme. One of the most telling moments comes in an argument between the good wizard Gandalf, and Saruman the White. Saruman, the wisest of wizards, has turned to the dark side. The furious row between the wizards is virtually the conflict between the outlooks of religion and science. Gandalf objects to the fact that Saruman’s once pure white cloak is now multi-coloured. With scientific sophistication, Saruman replies that white can be many things:

“White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be over written, and the white light can be broken.”

The image of breaking white light is clearly inspired by science. Isaac Newton had shown in the eighteenth century that white light is actually made up of coloured light. Passing white light through a prism has the effect of breaking white light into its constituent colours. Gandalf objects that “he that breaks a thing to find out what it is leaves the path of wisdom.” This is the philosophy of a man who instinctively shies away from the modern, scientific world.

Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire, where Issac Newton studied light, confirming that white light consists of a spectrum of colour.

We should remember that Gandalf is called the Grey, with connotations of boredom, colourlessness, and the difficulty of defining clear categories.  Steady old Gandalf does not simply represent good any more than treacherous Saruman simply represents evil. The idea of change in The Lord of the Rings is complex, there are many grey areas, which were lacking in Tolkien’s everyday life bound by rigid belief.  Tolkien claimed that his stories had nothing to do with commenting on real issues.  He tried to keep them a safe place.  The reality is, Tolkien shone the white light of his life through the prism of his books, and it emerged as many colours. Maybe that’s what always happens in great writing.

La Bete humaine reminds me of the Thomas the Tank Engine books. There are a lot more stabbings, suicides and sexual encounters in La Bete humaine, but essentially Emile Zola and the Rev W. Awdry are writing about the same thing. They both parallel human life with steam trains and the rail systems they run on.

Awdry presents his engines as having personalities of their own, who have to accept the direction of their driver if they are to find happiness and fulfillment. The Thomas story that made the biggest impact on me as a youngster was a story about Gordon, the most powerful and proudest locomotive of them all. I recall one time he had a new paint job, and was so pleased with it that he steamed into a tunnel and refused to come out, not wanting the weather to spoil his lovely blue paint. Eventually the Fat Controller walls Gordon up in his refuge, and only allows him out when confinement in the tunnel had reduced him to a stiff, grimy, rusty shell of an engine. That’s one way to punish the sin of pride.

In La Bete humain the trains are also presented as having personalities. La Lison is a good, dependable engine, who until a terrible night of overwork in a snowstorm, has a loving relationship with her driver. Engine 608 is a headstrong youngster who needs careful handling. Like Awdry, Zola draws parallels between the life of steam engines, struggling against or cooperating with their drivers, and the lives of human beings, who struggle against or cooperate with the forces shaping their destiny. The difference between Zola and Awdry lies in the nature of the driver, the controlling influence.  In the Thomas stories, we don’t really ever get to know the drivers. They are an anonymous guiding presence whose wisdom in the end has to be accepted. In Zola’s novel, the drivers can sometimes provide wise and gentle guidance. At other times, they can be maniacs and drunkards who fight over women on the footplate. Zola’s novel is much more modern and challenging in that sense. It’s Thomas the Tank Engine for grown-ups.

However, in the final analysis I still think that Zola can offer the same reassurance as Awdry, the same sense that in accepting life, things can turn out right. In the early pages, there is a short section where order somehow emerges out of chaos:

“It was all a jumble at that murky twilight hour, when it seemed as though everything should collide, and yet everything passed, and slid by, and emerged all at the same gentle crawl, vaguely, in the depths of the dusk.”

When I got to the end of the book, after Zola had pulled me through the most snarled of jumbles, I like to think the demoralised reader can at least remember those early lines where order somehow emerges out of chaos.

Mercedes Pit at the 2017 Australian Grand Prix – photo by Richard Jones

Modern writers have often exploited the drama of powerful machines. In the 1890s Emile Zola, in La Bete Humain, used steam trains to symbolise the human passions of people living on the line between Le Havre and Paris.  Steam trains fulfilled a similar purpose in Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter, roaring by in the night, making manifest powerful emotions in the souls of ordinary English men and women.

In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby drives a cream coloured Rolls Royce with a windscreen mirroring a dozen suns. This is a car conveying Gatsby’s supremacy as well as conveying him from A to B.

Aircraft play major roles in many modern thrillers, adding a sense of power and glamour to stories by the likes of Frederick Forsyth and Tom Clancy.

Scene from Brief Encounter

While these machines express drama, technical progress over time leads to greater efficiency, more power, and ironically, less drama.  People think of a steam train as romantic because it gives a visual and audible display of power. A steam engine ready to leave a station, hissing, burbling and smoking, appears to be working hard just standing still.  Modern locomotives turn all that wasted energy into efficient movement, with the result that they are not as theatrical. A step forward in power tells less of a story, because we cannot see the power.

The sport of Formula 1 motor racing is facing difficulties for just this reason. The future for car technology is clearly electrical.  Hybrid technology is already widely used, with fully electric cars ready to break into the mass market. This is a problem for motor racing, which as a form of dramatic entertainment has not only to use energy, but also demonstrate it.  Formula 1 has always been a place to push the boundaries of automotive expertise, until it reaches a point when that expertise becomes quiet and undemonstrative. It is more difficult to create a narrative of sporting drama out of efficient, silent electric engines, than from howling V10s.

A Formula E electric racing car

It will make no sense for motor racing to stand still while cars in general move forward into an electrical future.  The sport will have to follow wider trends, just as trains moved on from steam. Most people watch motor racing on television or some other electronic device, where noise doesn’t really register. Maybe a dominant electric series will find its place in a world of electronic media, using communication technology to express drama in innovative, immersive ways.

The moral of this tale is that technical development prioritises efficiency:  narrative development prioritises wasteful drama.

“From Maidstone to this place (Merryworth) is about seven miles and these are the finest seven miles I have ever seen in England or anywhere else.  The Medway is to your left with its meadows about a mile wide… From Maidstone to Merryworth I should think that there were hop gardens on one half of the way both sides of the road.  Then looking across the Medway you see orchards and hop gardens two miles deep, on the side of a gently rising ground.”

This is from the classic nineteenth century travelogue Rural Rides, written in the 1820s by MP, farmer and journalist William Cobbet. Although the hop fields Cobbett wrote about have gone, those mile wide Medway meadows are still there, now given over to pasture, orchards, gardens and parkland.

Cobbett’s route took him along what is now the A26.  Although I often think of Cobbett as we drive along the A26, this busy, modern road makes it difficult to get back to his nineteenth century idyll.  There is now, however, another option.  I would suggest taking the recently opened foot and cycle path, which starting from Aylesford continues through Maidstone riverside, and then runs below the A26 to Barming.  I might not be Cobbett, but I’m going to say that this is a fine seven miles of bike path.  The riding is easy and flowing, the Medway Valley scenery beautiful and varied.  Cobbett would have loved this rural ride.

I am working my way through the Modern Library’s Top 100 Novels in English, enjoying it, but not because these novels really are the best of all time. This is just a way of reading things I might not otherwise think of. Rather than putting books in a special box, it’s a way of getting outside the box of my own preferences. I think it is important to approach the list in this way, because efforts to create best of all time lists have always caused problems. For example, back in the Asia of 2000BC, medical progress ran up against the sanctification of ancient medical texts. Written in Asia around 2000BC, The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon of Medicine, and The Divine Husbandman’s Materia Medica, had the status of scripture.  In the face of these unchallenged medical authorities, no research or progress was possible. A similar thing happened when Renaissance scholars sanctified the medical writings of the ancient Greek world.

Another example of a “Top 100” gaining untouchable status is The Bible. For centuries, it wasn’t even possible for most people to read the stories collected in The Bible, written in Latin and protected by a possessive Church hierarchy.  The sixteenth century brought the Bible-reading enthusiasms of Protestantism, and large scale printing technology, but The Bible remained set apart, a situation that continues to this day. I remember on one of my first days at university in 1983, going into the University Bookshop to buy books for my course. Aware that The Bible was the most influential book in English literature, I added a copy to a pile of other books.

“You won’t find that on any reading list,” said an assistant with airy superiority.

He really did not want to sell it to me, seemingly offended to see this fat, brown paperback perched on top of The Iliad.  I thought this odd and said so. He was right though. My university did not include the most influential book in English literature on any literature course. The Bible was something different, something other than “normal” literature, too special for students to read in the same way.

While The Bible sat in its little box, writers got on with the business of exploring life in more lowbrow forms, such as plays performed in unfashionable parts of London, in novels or poems.  Inevitably, however, over time these literary forms themselves gained a level of sanctification. The nineteenth century poet and schools’ inspector Matthew Arnold decided in a famous essay called Culture and Anarchy that literature could work with religion as a “social cement”. With Arnold’s enthusiastic support, “English literature” really came into being as an adjunct to official religion. The poet William Blake saw The Bible as the work of poets, usurped by the Church for its own purposes. He feared a similar fate for the poetry of his own time. The influential views of Matthew Arnold, and others like him, meant that in many ways those fears were realised. A sad result of official veneration was to make literature, by definition, difficult, the opposite of “easy reading”. Hard labour was required if English was to seem a respectable academic subject, and in this way literature was taken away from the people it was written for. Literature became something different, set apart, just like The Bible.

I am enjoying the Modern Library Top 100, but in conclusion, it is worth noting that one of the books I have read so far- The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy suffered a ban when first published.  This book was clearly on someone’s “Worst Novels of All Time” list. This just goes to show that throwing up a wall around certain writing is impossible. Good writing tears down walls, mines the depths beneath them, or jumps mischievously over them. It does not build them.

I’m reading Sophie’s Choice, William Styron’s famous novel about Stingo, a struggling writer who meets a beautiful concentration camp survivor in the New York of 1947.  Stingo has learnt about Sophie’s terrible ordeal during the Second World War. Sophie has also described her experience of reaching America, where two things define a better life – plentiful food and music.  Following a doctor’s advice not to gorge herself on food, Sophie revels carefully in all the gastronomic variety that New York has to offer.  In the same spirit of heightened appreciation, she goes to hear Yehudi Menuhin play the Beethoven Violin Concerto at Lewishon Stadium in Manhattan.

The day after I read this section, I put Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, played by Yehudi Menuhin, on my phone and took it to work.  I tried to imagine what it would sound like if I hadn’t been able to listen to music for years.  Rather than existing in glorious isolation, music is also a product of the situation of the listener, a situation often engineered to increase the power of the musical experience. In the case of orchestral music, there’s the buying of an expensive ticket, the dressing up, entering a beautiful hall, the cacophony of many musicians tuning to a single reference note, the tapping of a baton on a podium to bring the orchestra to attention. This all has the effect of shutting music away behind a ritual.  Listeners have to approach carefully with a sense of reverence for the importance of what they are to experience. Other genres had their tricks, from the artful secretiveness of Prince, to the courting of controversy by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which leads to a ban serving only to boost sales.

In some instances, this wrapping of the musical experience has amounted to an art form in itself.  Take for example Miserere Mei Dues written by Gregorio Allegeri around 1640. Religious authorities literally kept this piece locked away, securing all copies of the sheet music in the Vatican vaults.  There was only one performance a year, at the Sistine Chapel, no less.  In 1770, however, a young musical genius called Amadeus Mozart heard Miserere Mei Deus, immediately memorised every note, carried them home in his head and wrote them down.  Mozart’s theft was part of a chain of events, making music ever more accessible, eventually allowing me to take Beethoven’s Violin Concerto to work on my phone. It is wonderful to have this easy access to music, but even imagining years empty of music made it sound better.

Since music streaming cannot offer unlimited access and the denial of access at the same time, I suggest attempting to imagine a world where music is hard to find.

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An early Superman story, self-published by high school students Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1933

People like to identify with a central character in a story.  Often they want to identify with someone strong and powerful.  Most people, however, are sensible enough to realise that we are not all world-conquering heroes, not every day anyway.  It then makes sense for antiheroes to shuffle out of the shadows – characters who we can identify with in their weaknesses.  There are examples going all the way back to ancient Greece.   The Iliad, dating to around 700BC, is generally peopled with gods and supermen, but there is a minor character called Thersites, lame, round shouldered and ugly, who speaks unpalatable truths and gets shouted down for it.  Aesops Fables dating to around 600BC contains many unlikely heroes, including a tortoise who wins a running race against a hare.  From the time of ancient Greece onwards, less than epic characters continued to make various apologetic, ill-mannered or clumsy appearances.  There was the delusional Don Quixote in the seventeenth century,  Lawrence Sterne’s mischieveous Tristram Shandy in the eighteenth century, and the helpless, beaten down, twentieth century protaganists of Beckett, Kafka, Camus, and Jean Paul Sartre.

So, what happened when antiheroes shambled diffidently over to America, land of winners?  Like the ancient civilisations of the Mediterranean, America following World War II, was the world’s leading power  It made sense that post-war America created modern versions of Greek and Roman heroes.  Building on the costumed adventures of the Scarlett Pimpernel (1903), Zorro (1919) and Shadow (1930) the superhero leaps into existence to save the world as Superman in 1938, with Batman coming to help in 1939.  The link with ancient heroes is made obvious in Wonder Woman.  Debuting in 1941, authors William and Elizabeth Marston conceived Wonder Woman as a demigoddess, a new Diana with powers conferred by old Greek and Roman gods.  So are these the heroes of a society considering itself so powerful that it can turn its back on failure and smallness?

The answer to this question has to be, no.  Crucially, modern superheroes have an antihero behind the costume, an ordinary alter ego.  Superman out of costume is mild mannered Clark Kent, a reporter working for the Daily Planet.  Batman is the crime fighting incarnation of eccentric and emotionally damaged billionaire Bruce Wayne.  Wonder Woman hides in the identity of Diana Prince, a United States Army nurse.  This duality would become a typical feature of superheroes, a particularly telling twist coming along in 1962 with the arrival of Spider-Man, the alter ego of orphaned adolescent Peter Parker who faces problems of rejection, inadequacy and loneliness.  These non-heroic alter egos parallel many American literary and movie antiheroes  – Dean Moriarty in On The Road, Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye,   Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause and Johnny Strabler in The Wild One.  While these characters are an inversion of Superman, they are actually exploring the same territory from the opposite direction.  Their primary identity is as ordinary people, who search for heroes hiding inside themselves.  Holden Caulfield is not so different to Peter Parker.  Johnny, the motorcycle gang leader in The Wild One, even dons a kind of superhero outfit, the black leathers which make him into a different person during his weekend road trips.

The different sides of heroism then come together with an almighty bang in the hugely successful modern tale of good and evil, Star Wars.  In Star Wars, the mystical Force gives strength to both the heroic Jedi, and to the Jedi’s dark enemies.  The Force is vague enough to encompass heroes and villains, and people like Han Solo who are neither one nor the other. Star Wars crystalises the suggestion that amidst the primary colours in Marvel comics, and the black and white of Obi Wan and Darth Vadar, there is no easy division of the world into hero, villain and ordinary person.  The endless struggle of people to see a better version of themselves, while still accepting their humble, imperfect reality, reaches a contemporary high point in the multifaceted heroes of American culture.

As writers, we can learn from this. There are two kinds of protagonist- a hero with an ordinary person inside them, or an ordinary person hiding a hero.

Sales of George Orwell’s novel 1984 are apparently increasing in response to events in the United States. Orwell’s Doublethink and Two Minute Hate readily lend themselves to parallels with “alternative facts” and the whipping up of hatred against perceived “others”. But it’s not only a writer like Orwell who we can turn to for enlightenment. Any writer with a eye to human nature could help us. I’d like to refer you, for example, to Booth Tarkington, Princeton Graduate and author of the novel The Magnificent Ambersons. Wealthy, patrician, conservative Tarkington seemingly has little in common with Orwell; but yesterday I read the section in The Magnificent Ambersons where Eugene Morgan tries to help his daughter understand the characteristic combination of arrogance and inability to accept criticism. Eugene’s observations will strike a chord with any number of contemporary American journalists:

“That’s one of the greatest puzzles of human vanity, dear, and I don’t pretend to know the answer. In all my life, the most arrogant people that I’ve known have been the most sensitive. The people who have done the most in contempt of other people’s opinion, and who consider themselves the highest above it, have been the most furious if it went against them. Arrogant and domineering people can’t stand the least, lightest, faintest breath of criticism. It just kills them.”

Since the earliest days of organised human society, people have recognised the value of a leader who does little.  One of Aesop’s Fables dating from the sixth century BC, has advice for a populace who think a strong leader is the answer to their problems.  In The Frogs Who Demanded a King, a group of frogs irritated at their disorganised manner of life, ask Zeus to provide them with a king.  In response, Zeus throws a lump of wood into the frog’s swamp.  The noise scares the frogs, who hide beneath the mud. Eventually realising the lump of wood is not actually doing anything, they emerge from their hiding places, sit on their king and complain to Zeus.  This time Zeus sends a water dragon as the frog king, who proceeds to eat all his subjects.

Many leaders, particularly in Britain, have tried to be a lump of wood rather than a water dragon.  Queen Elizabeth I, one of the country’s best-known monarchs, was famous for doing as little as she could get away with, particularly with regard to warfare.  Later in history, this policy of calm inaction would become the guiding philosophy of the British monarchy. Queen Victoria was the first officially non-active constitutional monarch.  Her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, tutored her in this policy; and Melbourne himself – as Dorothy Marshall has written – “had the capacity to do absolutely nothing unless driven, and then do as little as possible.”  Melbourne worked in a tradition set by Robert Walpole, the man often seen as Britain’s first Prime Minister, who with his “calculatedly uneventful administration,” dominated Parliament for twenty years through the 1720s and 1730s.

In the subsequent history of British prime ministers, there are many examples of wise attempts to do as little as possible.  Henry Addington, prime minister 1801 – 1803, provides one telling example.  After peace negotiations with France failed in May 1803, Addington followed the safe but unspectacular course of doing nothing.  Napoleon’s army was sitting in France ready to invade, but if it tried to do so, the Royal Navy was waiting for them.  If only Britain could continue to do nothing, then Napoleon’s army sitting around on the French coast would be defeated either by disease and indiscipline; or by lunging over the Channel in frustration, straight into the waiting guns of British ships. Waiting made perfect sense, but was not popular. Addington’s term did not last the year.

Perhaps Addington made a mistake in failing to combine his non-action with fighting words.  However, even fighting-talk prime ministers are not as active as they seem once you get passed all the words. Winston Churchill might appear to provide definitive active leadership, with his blood curdling speeches of resistance in 1940. In reality, he wisely left most of the actual running of things to others.  The occasions when he interfered did not tend to go well.  It was fortunate, for example, that Air Chief Marshall, Hugh Dowding, talked Churchill out of sending the RAF to its destruction in the Battle for France.  Only because of Dowding’s actions did Britain have the aircraft to allow Churchill to make his famous speeches during the Battle of Britain.

Wisdom coming down to us from the sixth century BC is more relevant than ever.  Political leadership is often at its best in providing a calm centre as King or Queen Log, rather than contributing to the chaos as King or Queen Water Dragon.  The frogs should be careful what they wish for.