I remember being greatly amused as a kid by that wonderful little book by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, 1066 and all that. It is a humorous gallop through British history, giving the kind of muddled and oversimplified account of those “key events” and “Great Men” we were all supposed to have learned about in our history lessons. The phrase “a bad king but a good thing” was typical of the kind of judgement likely to be encountered in their precis of there past. It was possible, of course, that the converse judgement might be made, and somebody might be a “good king but a bad thing”. Sadly, I have to recognise, that is about the level at which the understanding of history of many people operates.
Sellar and Yeatman’s classic phrase came into my mind this afternoon, reading in the London Review of Books a piece on the recent biography of the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke. His major claim to fame is that he was responsible for negotiating the “Dayton Accords” that finally brought an end to the Yugoslav conflict. Clearly this must qualify as having been a “good thing”. On the evidence of his biography, however, it seems that there can be little doubt that Holbrooke was a complete ratbag in almost every respect. Evidently a very “bad king”. If he did succeed in getting agreement between the warring Yugoslav factions it seems that it must have been by means of relentless bullying and blackmail, and the fact that the various Yugoslav delegates were virtually locked in the US base, subjected almost to sensory deprivation and told that they couldn’t go home until they had reached an agreement.
As I concluded reading the piece it struck me that a similar judgement might be made one day in the future about Dominic Cummings, who is the notorious special advisor to our PM, Boris Johnson. I heard him described today as “Johnson’s Rasputin”, and as Gollum. By all accounts he is a grossly unpleasant character who appears to exercise far more power than he ought. I can only hope that eventually he will turn out to have been “a good thing” despite his undoubted qualification for the epithet “a bad king.” One can but hope.