The Right Honorable Gentleman

No. 52: April 2, 2021

Dear Friends,

We made it. Fifty-two straight weeks of The Square Inch. Again, I am truly grateful that you’ve subscribed, shared, and stuck with me over the past year. And what an eventful year it was! Pandemic, riots, looting, a couple trillion dollars, a close election, conspiracy theories, more rioting, another couple trillion dollars (really, who’s counting?)—and a million other micro-controversies I’ve completely forgotten about.

Whew.

Easter weekend is a good time to remind ourselves that we have a Risen King who holds it all in his hands. “And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” What a comforting promise.

The Right Honorable Gentleman

I’ve recently taken up something rather offbeat. I’ve discovered that if you have BritBox on Amazon Prime, you can watch all the Prime Minister’s Questions, or “PMQs.” (You can usually find them on YouTube, as well.) This is the sometimes very rowdy hour in the House of Commons when the Leader of the Opposition and other Members of Parliament verbally joust with the Prime Minister and offer their scathing criticisms.

And I’ve been reminded that British politics are in many ways much better than American politics. I mean, I’m not saying we should scrap our Republic and go for a Parliamentary system, but there is something about political culture in Britain that values and incentivizes sharp wit and superb rhetoric. I guess they’ve been at it centuries longer than we have, but that alone doesn’t explain why everyone is so well-spoken. Just watch one PMQ and then turn on C-SPAN and watch the U.S. Senate and, really, something is just wrong with America. The truth is we just don’t debate. At all. Ever. Even those things we call “debates” during Presidential Election years are just two guys ignoring the actual questions and repeating memorized talking points. In Congress, there’s no debate, just speechifying for the cameras. No one is ever cornered and forced to answer a question.

I mean, Joe Biden barely survived his mumbling and meandering slow-pitch softball press conference the other day. Boris Johnson has to brawl with MPs every single week—and, by the way, he is brilliant at it. They’re all brilliant at it. We treat our chief executive with ridiculous deference; they stand up and indignantly ask “Mr. Speaker, why does the Right Honorable Gentleman have such difficulty telling us the truth?” to the delight of the cheering and jeering back-benchers.

If you want to know what I’m talking about, here’s one the day after a Brexit vote defeat. Stick around for his go-around with Jeremy Corbyn a couple of minutes in:

It is just weird that in the country of kings and queens they treat their Prime Minister as just another MP to roast, and here in our classless society we treat our President as a King. Something’s gone wrong with the Revolution, I think.

As some of you know, over the past couple of years I’ve been working my way through Ronald Reagan’s White House diaries. Well, now I’ve picked up a marvelous companion volume: Margaret Thatcher’s The Downing Street Years. While she didn’t keep a daily diary, this is still a massively detailed memoir of her eleven years as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. I’m sure it wouldn’t interest a lot of people, but I can hardly put it down.

I quickly came across this passage:

But it is Questions to the Prime Minister every Tuesday and Thursday which are the real test of your authority in the House, your standing with your party, your grip of policy and of the facts to justify it. No head of government anywhere in the world has to face this sort of regular pressure and many go to great lengths to avoid it; no head of government, as I would sometimes remind those at summits, is as accountable as the British prime minister.

Yes, this is the very thing that struck me as I’ve watched the PMQs. There is real accountability. A once-a-week chance for the Prime Minister to make a fool of him (or her) self. Oh, of course I realize that much of it is MPs grandstanding and speechifying and doing the same sorts of things our politicians do. But they do it with such style, and in an environment that actually fosters real repartee. Oh, for just a dash of that in American politics!

At any rate, Boris Johnson is hugely entertaining. He does the Donald Trump impersonation—wild hair, boorish tone—but it is clearly an act. He’s Donald Trump with a command of facts and issues and wit, whereas Donald Trump, alas, actually just turned out to be Donald Trump. No surprising depth underneath that veneer.

In my opinion, not all is well with our cousins across the pond, though. Reading Lady Thatcher’s memoirs, I am struck with how charming and quaint and old-fashioned it is that she led such agonizing wrangling over the government actually balancing its finances. I mean, really? Who does that anymore? Who cares? Just print it up, by the trillions, if need be. That’s the way we do things now. There is almost no one who cares about government debt.

And so Prime Minister Johnson’s every answer to every criticism has been to point to the exact number of billions of pounds the government has spent on this problem or that problem. And boy does he have those numbers memorized! He may be the man now leading Margaret Thatcher’s party, but somewhere along the line the Tories have drifted from a commitment to fiscal responsibility and private sector growth. Hmm, rather reminiscent of a political party on this side of the Atlantic.

Anyway, I’m finding it a rich education to read the memoirs of the two most significant heads of state in the latter half of the 20th century and in my lifetime, those two close friends, Ronald and Margaret, who teamed up to fight back and finally bring to its knees the Soviet empire. They both refused to accept civilizational decline; they recognized that decline is a choice, and they rallied their people to the cause of freedom and self-government. Neither of them were remotely captured by the popular caricatures. They were people of extraordinary depth and strength of leadership.

I wonder if we will ever see their like again.

Miscellany

• If you don’t believe me that Boris Johnson has hidden depths, check out this impromptu recitation of The Iliad. In Greek. That, my friends, is panache.

• And here are a few highlights of the Iron Lady:

  By the way, do you know who gave her the nickname, “The Iron Lady”? The Soviet press. I always thought that was an awesome nickname, but to have your enemies come up with it? Epic stuff.

• Every Easter I try to post this presentation by N.T. Wright on the resurrection of Christ. Did it really happen? Find out why the answer is yes. It’s long, but so worth it.

• My colleague Andrew Sandlin asked me some questions on theological topics. You can read the interview here.

• I’ll close it out with this excellent rendition of the “Easter Song,” performed by a bunch of guys in last year’s quarantine.