This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the morning after the Boris Johnson signalled his intention to resign as leader of the Conservative Party (following the unprecedented resignation of 59 government ministers).
The current convulsions in Westminster offer, if nothing else, a compelling drama. I guess politics are, by definition, always dramatic. After all, they involve people, the ordering of society, uncontrollable events, convictions, emotions and other contingencies.
But, dramas involve characters, contexts, narratives, and so on. And a clear question that needs to be asked when the dramas are playing out around us is, simply: what is driving the characters? The audience needs to be able to understand what is going on not only on the stage, as it were, but also in the minds of the players.
To illustrate this we could look to Shakespeare – after all, a new Shakespeare theater opens next week in Prescot, Liverpool, and there are few dramatists who explore the complexities of human character as well as the Bard of Stratford.
Shakespeare’s imagination was fueled by a close relationship with the Bible. And he recognised that the Bible is not a handbook of doctrines, but records the narrative of a people wrestling with human nature and how to order a just and merciful society. This narrative is brutally frank about reality and how real people behave, what drives them, which values are to be seen as virtues.
And this is where the current political dramas come in. Character and virtue are both essential to leadership and the common life of a society. So are the vision and values that drive the ordering of our society. But, it is not just the actors on stage who shape the story, so does the audience by its engagement.
The episode that shapes my own mind on this comes from the Old Testament. Before the liberated people of Israel could enter a Land of Promise – after unlearning ‘Egypt’ in a desert for forty years – they had to work out what the new world might look like once they settled. Rituals were established in order that they should never forget that once they had been slaves, refugees, homeless and rootless. They were to enshrine justice and mercy in the laws and institutions of their community for the future. Compassion for the powerless was integral. And all this was to help them shape a just and virtuous society. It didn’t fully succeed.
But, when things go awry or a society faces some re-shaping, it is vital that these fundamental questions are addressed: which values will drive us? Who and what are we for? Does virtue matter in public and institutional life?
But, in these dramas no one is a mere spectator. All are responsible actors, accountable for playing their part.
