The British, that was going to be the topic of this post. I've been watching the battle of the Tory pretenders - not that I fully understand it. The party seems to operate on the survivor principle - put four or five Tory leaders who hate each other together, have them whisper about which one of them is gay, which a Jew, and which one is in the pocket of the French, and then unleash the hatred of the backbenchers, in the form of a vote, to decide who gets to lead the party into its next major defeat. Read about it in the
Spectator. The surprise defeat so far is of Michael Portillo - a loyal Thatcher-ite who got too wobbly for the grande dame. Really, Thatcher is an odious figure, one of the great disasters of modern times. But I do like the way her pronouncements always seem like they are outtakes from the movie, The Ruling Class. Apparently she has taken to calling Portillo "the Spaniard" - can't you just hear it? Which is why I was reminded of the Ruling Class - the way the Gurney paterfamilias pronounces the word "foreigner."
All of this Tory foolery, with the trial of Archer in the background, was on my mind yesterday when I started Trollope's The Prime Minister (by the way - I'm reading the book on-line, but the on-line version is badly transcribed. Usually Gutenberg, which is the version everybody steals, does a pretty good job of proofing their e-texts, but in this case they fell down on the job). So far, my acquaintance with Trollope has been with the Barsetshire novels. This summer has been so driven by my need to read and review and make money that I've had very little time to read for ... the reasons I usually read. Joy, I guess. Well, the first two chapters of the Prime Minister are as sharp as anything I've read by Trollope - and wierdly apposite, given that Trollope is presenting a character named Lopez who is mixing among bluebloods with the disadvantage of having no "ancestry." The book begins with Lopez getting a loan and having a lunch - in fact, the perfect beginning for a British scandal. And perfectly done. I'll get into that in my next post. E-mail comments to: Roger