Betrayal

Above: extremely blurred photograph I took at Port Sunlight of the William Holman Hunt painting The Scapegoat (the museum didn’t allow you to use a flash, and the only angle I could see the whole painting was from the gallery).

Plotting against Gordon Brown by his own parliamentary colleagues is reported as feverish, although the press has yet to use the word “febrile” (an adjective seemingly reserved for mass hysteria in the House of Commons).

Newsnight yesterday led on the plotting, denials of plotting and incipient betrayal. Pictures in The Times and The Guardian show “Gordon” on holiday in Southwold, looking ill-at-ease in a casual jacket while attempting to converse with normal people, all the time aware of what is being said behind his back. If “Gordon” can be loaded with all the ills of the government (the thinking goes) and then “despatched”, the anger of the people will be assuaged.



Above: Andrew Porter writing in the Daily Telegraph about Gordon Brown’s predicament. He is a very perceptive political writer. Also able to express himself in down to earth concepts.

Sir James Frazer has written in The Golden Bough about the role of the scapegoat in primitive societies, especially those individuals marked as human scapegoats (“…so few sands in the hour glass, slipping so fast away, sufficed for one who had wasted so many precious years”). It is impossible not to feel pity for Gordon Brown, about to be betrayed by his friends. And as a cultural device the idea of the scapegoat is still with us - how many people in our post-industrial, ultra-sophisticated, intelligence-economy environments have not been made scapegoats ourselves, carrying the mistakes of others?

Betrayal is a complex phenomenon. Few people who practice it remain unmarked. A further complication is that Gordon Brown is (so far as we are allowed to see) a genuinely good person trying to do his best - only a paragon will be able to knife him and carry on unscathed.



Above: The V&A had a recent exhibition of theatre set designs - they were fascinating. This one is of Harold Pinter’s 1978 play Betrayal. On the subject of Harold Pinter, his wife Lady Antonia Fraser was featured on Desert Island Discs last week and demonstrated why she is regarded as one of our greatest historians and intellectuals.

More on the Pinter play: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayal_(play)

"Gordon" looking very uncomfortable on holiday: http://www.hellomagazine.com/photo-galleries.html?imagen=/royalty/2008/07/28/cameron-brown-hols/imgs/cameron-brown-hol2-a.jpg