John Major can at least rejoice that, whatever his suffering for themoment, he is now a bit of a boy, writes John Waters.
It goes without saying that the reasons we are interested in the John and Edwina affair are not the ones we state. We are interested in sin and sinners, because these sinners make such an improbable couple, and because of the previously undreamt of dimension this saga of the siren and the swot adds to our perception of John Major.
I had always thought Edwina Currie a dangerous woman, that danger being part of her almost boundless sexiness; but I never thought she was as dangerous as this. As she counts the folding currency John Major can at least rejoice that, whatever his suffering for the moment, he is now a bit of a boy.
But let us put to bed, so to speak, the pretence that our attention relates to principles of the public interest: the difference between John Major's public stance and private conduct, and so forth. Such fictions are merely the prophylactics behind which the rampant prurience of media commentary is protected.
The public is interested in this story because it enables the public to get off, so to speak. But there is an interesting subtext here about the altered role of what we describe as hypocrisy, which my dictionary defines as "the practice of professing standards, beliefs, etc., contrary to one's real character or actual behaviour".
It used to be that this concept was used in society - I mean in relation to sexual behaviour - to enforce compliance with a moral code based on virtues like chastity, fidelity and monogamy. Nowadays, the unacknowledged intention behind its usage is to undermine such values.
John Major stands condemned not so much for his extramarital horizontalism as for his articulation in public of values which frown on such behaviour. There was a time when to condemn someone for such behaviour would be to disapprove of the adulterer's failure to adhere to his own stated standards.
The import and intention of this, in turn, would have been to uphold the standards. But one could be forgiven for concluding that, in the view of most of those who have condemned him this past week, the greater of Mr Major's sins was not so much sexual immorality as the expression of conservative opinions, most controversially the notorious Back to Basics campaign launched during his period as British prime minister.
In the modern world, hypocrisy is a crime of which only the politically conservative can be found guilty. It is interesting that what we know of Bill Clinton's personal behaviour tells us that when it came to sexual athletics, he was top of the Premiership as against John Major's middle-of-the-table position. But the interventions from precisely the same quarters as seek to excoriate Mr Major have been almost unanimously exculpatory of Mr Clinton.
This is because Bill Clinton, although prepared to make the necessary nods towards family values to get elected, is not a conservative. In fact, there's no real contradiction between Mr Major, on the one hand, in his role as leader of a British government, expressing a view that the nuclear family provides the most solid unit of society, and on the other, as a private individual, having it off with Mrs Currie. His weakness, if it can be called such, does not dilute the validity of his views.
The survival of the nuclear family is vital to the survival of society, and it would have been irresponsible of prime minister Major to suggest otherwise, still less to hold up his private conduct as an example of a preferable norm.
The concept of hypocrisy is nowadays almost invariably invoked as a means of loosening the grip of established moral values. What Mr Major has run foul of is not, as we might like to imagine, a highly-developed public sense of personal morality, but an antipathy to prescribed standards of personal behaviour.
The intention behind condemning his indiscretions is not to restore the reservoir of morality in society to its previous presumed high level, but to ensure that those who have a mind to articulate such standards and norms will in future remain silent. The concept of hypocrisy, therefore, has been adapted by a new kind of puritanism: that which seeks to attack the articulation, rather than the breach, of moral values by pretending not to understand the essentially duplicitous nature of the human condition.
I am acquainted with a number of commentators who, if they have not joined the lynching party in pursuit of John Major, have certainly stuck the boot into such as Charles Haughey for similar sins, and undoubtedly for similar reasons.
Invariably, these are individuals who in their public pronouncements advocate the liberation from public interference of the private moral domain and also, not coincidentally, question the pre-eminence of the nuclear family in society. And yet, many of them live in quiet contentment, in the bosoms of their own family, retiring, as far as it is possible to imagine, to bed nightly at 10 p.m. with an improving library book and a mug of Horlicks.
If they are to avoid condemnation for the difference between public views and private behaviour, surely they should congregate each evening at the gates of the Phoenix Park, dressed in gymslips and carrying bags of oranges? And since they don't, are they not also hypocrites?