"Chancer, n. (slang). A person who takes chances or does risky things." Thus The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary on a phenomenon which infuses political life as petrol does a carburettor. The word - which I suspect owes its origins to Hiberno-English - has been much aired in the British newspapers recently, thanks to the exploits of one Jeffrey Archer, our neighbouring isle's answer to Charles Haughey. But they were not mere "chancers" in the usual sense of the word; they were something more sinister altogether.
To be sure, there are many differences between the two men. Look at their faces. Archer's: lean, disciplined; Haughey's: debauched, raddled. Archer had a visible income and he raised money for charity; Haughey had no visible income beyond his salary, and he dipped into the charitable fund established for his friend Brian Lenihan. But was the difference Archer's virtue speaking? Was it his regard for other's people's property? And am I Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother?
Rules of society
Far more important than their differences are their similarities - and the first among equals of those similarities is that each man has as much ability to recognise the difference between right and wrong as a colour-blind bulldog in heat has to tell a Caravaggio from a Rubens. The sensory equipment simply isn't there. What sensory equipment they do possess can just about make out the reality that other people have rules, which operate through this thing called society; but the Haugheys and the Archers have absolutely no ability to detect those rules with their own cognitive skills. All they can do is in public to try to imitate the behaviour of others - like monkeys in a cage watching humans - while in private they do pretty much what they like. And the inevitable gap between private and public performances must be concealed by bullying, bluster and naked power - something both men are rather good at.
Each man came back figuratively from the dead - Archer from financial ruin, Haughey from the wasteland of his career after the Arms Trial. Each cunningly exploited his downfall to ensure future success. Each is phenomenally talented: Haughey has probably the most brilliant mind of his generation; he could read a vast and complex brief and in moments be its master.
Archer is a superb manipulator of audiences, a snake-oil salesman selling his wares to Tory committee or to travellers in an airport bookshop. Both believe in expensive champagne as a political lubricant. Both found profitable sanctuary in that greatest refuge of scoundrels: patriotism. And most of all, despite - or more probably, because of - the cess-pit smell rising from their lifestyles, both were extraordinarily popular.
Flag-waving
An interesting thing, democracy. There you have two men who reek of corruption and dishonesty, about whom much is known, and about even more is suspected; and what is known should be enough to hang a conclave of cardinals. Yet, aided by a bit of populist flag-waving, a conspicuous but questionable concern for the poor which nonetheless artfully co-existed with an equally conspicuous but thoroughly authentic love of extravagant display, the two men rose to the very top of their respective trees.
And of course ruin awaited them there. You could argue that if Ben Dunne hadn't contemplated taking flying lessons from a hotel bedroom in Florida, he would never have been overthrown by his sister, the Dunne books would have been closed for all time, and Haughey's doom would never have begun. You could declare that had Jeffrey Archer not suborned a friend to tell a wholly unnecessary lie, an alibi too far, he would never have been caught out. But to argue thus is to overlook their histories, littered as they are with countless muzzled hostages to fortune, and all pleading to have the gags removed. Sooner or later, one or more would speak out.
In other words, downfall was inevitable. And maybe the certainty of the downfall was what lured them both towards their nemesis, like a high-wire artist who takes risk upon risk with death, not just because he is addicted to risk, but more than that - because he is addicted to death itself. It is disaster he seeks, and disaster he will assuredly find.
That is what made Haughey and Archer popular with the gaping motleys below. These men diced with death. They lived outside the rules not just of society but of the lives of ordinary folk. They were paragons of myth, like Robin Hood and Jesse James and Ulysses; they did the undoable, well beyond the reach of common man and his common law with its common ways, and as their lives were spectacular, so too was the spectacular ruin which awaited each.
Democracy
The checks and balances of a democracy with a free press sooner or later ensure that gravity plucks at the reckless political adventurer as he tries an unprecedented triple somersault full-twist, quite against the laws of nature. There is no such gravity in a dictatorship; quite the reverse: society falls, not the individual debauching it. Imagine Haughey or Archer having absolute power in a totalitarian state, their imaginations and their danger-addicted egos running riot with individuals and institutions alike in mad experiments with human nature, until all around them lay in ruins.
The downfalls of such men are, to be sure, great fun: but much more important, they are vital.